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Updated: June 28, 2025
Uncertainty was behind the curtain, as well as in front; but in front it was the uncertainty which is tipped with expectation, hushing the usual noisy chatter, and setting a daylight of eyes forward. Ammiani spied about the house, and caught sight of Laura Piaveni with Colonel Corte by her side. The Lenkensteins were in the Archduke's box.
It reached Vittoria at a critical moment. Two days previously, she and Laura Piaveni had talked with the king. It was an unexpected honour. Countess, d'Isorella conducted them to the palace.
"Countess Alessandra shares mine," said Laura, rather tremulously. Countess Ammiani at the same time returned and took Vittoria's hand and pressed it with force. Carlo looked at them both. "I have to ask your excuses, gentlemen. My wife, my mother, and signora Piaveni, have served the cause we worship sufficiently to claim a right I am sorry to use such phrases; you understand my meaning.
After dark on the same day antecedent to the outbreak, Vittoria, with her faithful Beppo at her heels, left her mother to run and pass one comforting hour in the society of the Signora Laura Piaveni and her children.
The larger estates of the Piaveni family, then in Giacomo's hands, were in a famous cheese-making district, producing a delicious cheese: 'white as lambkins! the count would ejaculate most dolefully; and in a rapture of admiration, 'You would say, a marble quarry when you cut into it. The theme was afflicting, for all the estates of Giacomo were for the time forfeit, and the pleasant agitation produced among his senses by the mention of the cheese reminded him at the same instant that he had to support a widow with two children.
The extreme and painful difficulty was that the Signora Piaveni made no concealment of her abhorrence of the House of Austria, and hatred of Austrian rule in Italy. The spirit of her dead husband had come to her from the grave, and warmed a frame previously indifferent to anything save his personal merits.
"What do you conceal from me?" she asked, and supplied the answer by charitably attributing it to news that the signora Piaveni was coming. When Laura came, the countess thanked her, saying, "I am a wretched companion for this boiling head." Laura soon proved to her that she had been the best, for after very few hours Vittoria was looking like the Hagar on the canvas.
Beppo's head sank. A handful of black lace and cedarwood chained him to the spot! He entreated the men in livery to take the fan upstairs and deliver it to the Signora Laura Piaveni; but they, being advised by Jacob, refused.
Laura Piaveni travelled with Countess d'Isorella and the happy Adela Sedley, from Lago Maggiore. Laura came, as she cruelly told her friend, for the purpose of making Victoria's excuses to the duchess. "Why can she not come herself?" Amalia persisted in asking, and began to be afflicted with womanly curiosity. Laura would do nothing but shrug and smile, and repeat her message.
Apart from the desperate perturbation of his soul, he thought of the Guidascarpi, whom he knew, and was allied to, and of the Lenkensteins, whom he knew likewise, or had known in the days when Giacomo Piaveni lived, and Bianca von Lenkenstein, Laura's sister, visited among the people of her country.
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