Tower tales
Roger Lewis
The Princes of Q. Virginia Moriconi (Duckworth £8.95) he adage never to trust the teller but to 1. trust the tale does not apply to The Princes of Q. It is a novel seeking to demonstrate that history is an arbitrary conflation of conjecture. Tellers try to be assiduous, but the tale assiduously eludes them. We begin in a peasant hutment and overhear Evaristo's recitation of a grisly legend. His account, translated out of a Tuscan dialect, has its origins somewhere in Mrs Radcliffe's gothick Italy. It is a dynastic fable: the house of Q. is as cursed as the house of Atreus. Sins accumulate down the generations as the baronial fami- ly dextrously protect their revenues. Prin- cess Mathilda is won by an heir, and to the palace she brings a dowry and an indomit- able will. When Amadeo is incapacitated by cerebral palsy, the beauteous virago learns to run the estate. Her husband dead, Mathilda continues to rule and becomes more of an ice-queen by the hour. Aquiline good looks harden into the lineaments of cruelty.
Upon the marriage of her son, Saverio, the chatelaine decrees she will betake herself into the recesses of the castle. The family have for generations lived in more modern annexes. Mathilda intends to re- gress into a mediaeval citadel, an aban- doned labyrinth full of spooks. Her apart- ment is refurbished, and as footmen she chooses Pompeo, a giant boor, and Tullio, a poison-dwarf. Saverio's wife Ninetta, meantime, gives birth to a son. During the vigil for the labour, Mathilda's apparent disregard for her daughter-in-law's ordeal enrages Saverio — who orders her away. To the dark tower she returns to nurse the insult and live as a reclusive crone.
Saverio is often away, and Ninetta, lonely and frightened, takes refuge in the company of Father Orlando, a saintly cleric. During another pregnancy, howev- er, she collapses into a fever. Her husband absent, Mathilda descends from her fast- ness, intending to minister at the bed- side. The patient (whom nobody is allowed to see) is reported to have expired, and with due ceremony entombment ensues. Some weeks later, Saverio returns from battle – in time for his children, playing in disused kitchens, to find an old well from which a voice seems plaintively to cry. In a bustle of horrified excitement, winches are organised, and a decomposing personage is levered into view. It is Ninetta. Mathilda is accused of effulgent hatred and is tied by her hair to Saverio's stallions, who drag her over the rocks of adjacent hills. So, the legend. Evaristo's story would seem to have wandered from The Mysteries of Udolpho: a compendium of horrors beloved by frail maidens like Jane Austen's Catherine Morland. Virginia Moriconi's narrator, having been thrilled by the rustic account, wants to verify it. He plans to ascertain how much of the legend is history and how much is histrionic. But to what extent can his researches be credited? He is self- consciously literary (`The cat curls up on the hearthstone and pins Evaristo in her apricot eye'), and Professor Treganowan, a Fellow of All Souls piecing together a chronological register of the princes of Q., chides him for the ornament which stood in for evidence in his previous writings. He is branded with Oxford's severest curse: the narrator's books are charming. Neverthe- less, a friendship is struck up, for Tregan- owan has himself been pondering the legend, and, tantalisingly, the present prince is suppressing vital evidence. Lucki- ly, other discoveries have been made which help document the period. A bundle of correspondence was located in the back of a bureau. A secret panel in the library disclosed a journal. A packet of letters was found in Madrid. The next section of the novel is a transcription of this material Treganowan magnanimously entrusting it to his confederate.
Many of the manuscripts seem entirely without interest, for they concern only gossip about conjugal wrangles. Yet here and there names familiar to us break through. What Moriconi does, in her quest to duplicate an exercise in historical verac- ity, is to show how evidence has to be accumulated from peripheral jottings and throwaway remarks. Mathilda might be central to the legend, but in the corres- pondence of her new family she is admitted only at intervals. We are being told the tale from another angle. This time, Mathilda appears not wicked and brutally aloof but as a coruscating intellectual, frightening those around her with her lofty chat. Elsewhere in the manuscripts we have such an idea confirmed: Mathilda is said to have moved into the old castle for privacy. She needed to escape the noise and pawings of Amadeo's vassals.
Another sequence of notes suggests an alternative parentage for Saverio. When Amadeo learned of this scandal, he stormed up the stairs of the tower, slipped, fell, broke his crown. Hence the brain damage that killed him. Some confidential letters penned by the priest Orlando say that Ninetta did not die of a fever but that she pretended to do so in order to escape the family she loathed. Saverio was fight- ing abroad, Mathilda was ill herself, Tullio and Pompeo were bribable: circumstances aided a wild scheme. But the ruse goes disastrously wrong. Saverio returns, de- ranged by a suppurating wound; Ninetta is trapped in the cellars, where she is left to die; Mathilda is wrongly accused, and madly executed.
Back in the present, the narrator is masterminded into meeting the latest in- cumbents of Q. Their reported conversa- tion is the last portion of the novel. It is also the weakest. Moriconi – or her narra- tor – pretends that the Italian aristocracy speak like the inmates of Oscar Wilde's plays. Utterances are impractically aphor- istic. That the family disagree with one another all the time might have a point: the book is about the impossibility of history. The past is not just centuries away, it is seconds away. A date remains punctual, but around the event it commemorates will entwine multiple, conflicting opinions. History, ultimately, is a composite of them all.
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