Cradling a basket piled high with firm, round loaves of bread, tender grapes, and delicately decaying cheeses, Roxanna sped merrily across the Piazza del Duomo. An overturned box of lettuce had delayed her morning’s errands—it had taken nearly fifteen minutes of apologies to soothe the withered old grocer­—but Roxanna’s step was light. Surely the Viscount and Viscountess would not mind. Look how the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore caught the mid-morning sunshine. Look at those clouds bounding through the blue. Oh, how she loved Florence!

As she left the city, passing through its old Roman gate, Roxanna mused again over the improbability of her happiness. To think that Viscount Frederick, always so devoted to his ancestral manse, would suddenly bow to his wife’s request that they go to Italy now, immediately, at once. The couple had brought along only Roxanna, Viscountess Felicity’s personal maid. Their departure had been strange. Felicity had developed a sudden fear of horses, and she refused to ride or even to be driven in a carriage. So Roxanna followed Felicity on foot to the train station. Every time a horseman passed them, Felicity had shivered uncontrollably.

Now they had spent two months already in the palatial villa which Roxanna could see rising into view up the road, the rows of tall cypresses framing bright walls. Two months, and no return date set. Roxanna wondered, blushing even at the thought, if Felicity was trying to relive her honeymoon in Florence. Certainly the Viscount and the Viscountess shared the same bed every night. Yet their room seemed oddly quiet, and when Roxanna brought Felicity her evening glass of warm milk, she thought the Viscountess lay next to her husband as if she was lying beside him in a tomb. Roxanna knew she should not have these thoughts, just as she knew she must keep her gaze downcast each evening as she slipped quietly in and out of the Viscountess’ room. She was careful not to look at Viscount Frederick, as he slumped there on the pillows next to his wife. But she couldn’t help but wonder why Frederick, so studious, so sagacious, had chosen to marry a high-strung London beauty like Felicity.

To avoid these musings, Roxanna shook her head, setting her buttercup curls a-bouncing. Why worry about anything on such a beautiful day, she told herself. She was in Florence! “Fi-ren-ze,” she exclaimed rapturously, unconscious of the adorable pout of her rosebud lips as she mouthed the syllables.

Once inside, Roxanna went directly to Frederick’s study. He liked to have the first taste of the bread directly from the market. He would hold the loaf in one hand, looking at it with reverence, and then harshly tear off a chunk of the bread and stuff it in his mouth. Roxanna’s knees always trembled at this moment. Frederick chomped the bread with such manly determination, and yet there was something tragic in his chewing and in the little crumbs of bread that dropped from his laboring jaws. Roxanna sensed he was tearing at the bread only so as to avoid tearing at himself.

As she entered the study, Frederick was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, in an armchair. A volume of Byron dangled from one hand. He was staring off at nothing in particular.

Timidly, Roxanna inquired if anything was the matter.

“The Viscountess has vomited on the terrace,” Frederick said.

“Alas!” cried Roxanna in virginal distress. “She is ill again?”

“Yes, again,” said Frederick, allowing his hair to fall across his face, creating, thought he, a brooding effect. “As are we all.”

“Surely not, sir,” said Roxanna, with a feeling heave of her rustic bosom. “The air and sunshine are so clear and fortifying here. The whole outdoors smells only of pleasant things.”

“Ah, Roxanna,” Frederick said. “It is not merely to our physical state that I refer. The mental evanescence which animates us all, the spirit; that too can become ill. Our souls are no less fragile than our bodies, their immortality notwithstanding.”

Roxanna, who believed Frederick to possess great wisdom and sensitivity in nearly everything, considered these remarks gravely. She wished she could push back the hair from Frederick’s face with a gentle hand, but the thought merely made her blush and look at the floor.

With a sigh, Frederick stood violently and exited the room. A paper fell from his Byron. Roxanna automatically picked it up. The poor man! thought our little countrymaid, gazing after him through the sunny open doorway, so different from the dark orifices and somber corners of the manor in England. But no! and Roxanna shook her golden head firmly. She wished that she were not so invested in Frederick’s happiness, were not so aware of his every sigh and glance. Yet she could not help it. She felt an inexplicable connection with him, as though the blood in their veins rushed with the same current.

And yet, Roxanna thought, the Viscount’s current sadness seemed beyond her. The last time he and his wife had had an actual conversation was upon their arrival at the ship that would take them to Italy.

“I presume that you have taken care of all household matters,” the Viscount had said, climbing the gangplank of the vessel as Roxanna huffed behind him with the Viscountess’ bags.

“I did. And I presume that you have spoken to the tenants and... other servants,” the Viscountess replied. There had been a questioning lilt to her voice.

“I did.”

“I hope that you spoke in a manner befitting your station,” Felicity continued, in the same questioning lilt.

“As much as you have acted in a manner befitting your station,” Frederick said.

“At least my faults and actions are not generational,” said Felicity, “whereas you­—you are just like your father. Crossing lines of propriety that ought not to be crossed.”

“My father never crossed any line,” Frederick said, wryly. “Indeed he never left the house at all, whereas I prefer the outdoors.”

The captain of the ship approached them, and Roxanna’s employers lapsed into an uneasy silence that had lasted to the present.

What might the quarrel be? Neither appeared to be angry. They seemed to regard each other with a kind of helpless terror, which Roxanna optimistically interpreted as worry.

She looked down at the paper in her hand:



The Stable

Felicitous, my fate, of late, is not.

I feel as though I’ve been most cruelly shot,

By heartache’s arrow, so strong, and long, and hard.

And now against whole ruin must I guard.

I dream of stables wherein my heart will die,

I cry, I cry, I cry, I cry.



Roxanna required a moment to collect herself. She daubed at her tears with a handkerchief. She could not help herself; she thrust the parchment into her bosom.

Her pangs of shame at having read her master’s private poetry were overwhelmed by a rush of feeling: So he really was what she had suspected. His wife’s fury, the brooding, the sighing, the long weeps on the rug in the study ... Frederick was an artist.

* * *

The footman coughed nervously as Felicity swept past him into the villa’s lush gardens. She didn’t bother to look at him; she knew she had seduced him already. Had he been last month or the month before?

It was so hard to keep track. She had slept with all the servants, but it hadn’t seemed to help.

Felicity collapsed wearily on the edge of an ornamental pool. The fountain in the middle sputtered weakly. Looking at that laughably small column of water, Felicity wanted to sob. Her beauty was fading; she looked pale and wan, and even the fumbling attentions of the under-gardener in the bougainvillea had failed to give her any pleasure.

Why couldn’t she forget him? Felicity asked herself. She had fled to Italy. She had replicated his caresses with dozens of eager men. She had even ordered a small bale of hay brought to her room and furiously rubbed it over her naked body, hoping to exorcise him.

But all she could hear was the sound of his scornful laughter, and every movement of her husband’s body brought back her realization with sickening force. She and Frederick were kind to each other now, almost gentle. They spoke little. What could they possibly have to say?

She was contemplating a return to the bougainvillea--it couldn’t hurt--when she saw Frederick ambling towards her. His thin body was clad in black, and he had allowed his hair to grow long and shaggy.

The look did not suit him, Felicity thought dispassionately.

“Good afternoon, dear,” Frederick began hesitantly. “I trust you are recovered?”

Felicity did not deign to reply.

“Felicity,” he said again, with more force this time, “When are we going home?”

“This is our only home,” she said with heartbreaking finality.

“Feefs,” he said, using a nickname he had dropped after the earliest days of their marriage, “Feefs, we can go back again. He’s not there any more.”

There was a brief pause. Husband and wife stared absently at the flower beds, their riot of color held back within borders.

“Where is the Stable Boy?” Frederick was thinking. And Felicity, “The Stable Boy--where is he?”

But when the moment passed Felicity simply repeated, “This is our home,” and Frederick, with a mournful toss of his limp, not-so-Byronic hair, wandered away.

Felicity stared at the pool for a while, looking at her reflection in the rippling water. At last she rose with a sigh and smoothed her hair.

She would console herself in the shrubbery again. Perhaps she didn’t need the under-gardener at all.

Editor’s Note: Lesley R. Winters is a pseudonym and not actually a Crimson writer.