Page 30 of The Seven Sisters
‘Yes.’
And so it came to pass that ten minutes later, I was back in Pietro’s car, heading slowly out of the centre of the city.
‘This house, A Casa das Orquídeas, I think I know it,’ he commented.
‘I don’t,’ I confessed.
‘Well, if it’s the one I think it is, it is most interesting. It’s very old and used to be inhabited by a rich Portuguese family,’ he said as we came to yet another grinding halt in the traffic jams he’d told me never ceased.
‘The house may have new owners,’ I mused.
‘This is true.’ He eyed me in the mirror, and I knew he sensed my tension. ‘Are you searching for a relative?’
‘Yes,’ I answered honestly, glancing up as we drove and immediately seeingChrist the Redeemerhovering above me. Never having been particularly religious, somehow at that moment I felt an extraordinary sense of comfort from His all-encompassing, outstretched arms.
‘So, we will pass the address you want in a couple of minutes,’ Pietro advised me fifteen minutes later. ‘I doubt you can see much from the road, because it is surrounded by a high hedge to give it privacy. This used to be a very exclusive neighbourhood, but now, sadly, much development has taken place around it.’
I could see that the road was indeed lined with a mixture of industrial buildings and apartment blocks.
‘The house is there, senhorita.’
I followed Pietro’s pointed finger and saw a long stretch of overgrown hedge, wild flowers poking their pretty but destructive heads through the leaves. Compared to our immaculately maintained garden in Geneva, this one looked to me as if it had not seen a tender pair of hands caring for it in a very long time.
All I could see above the hedge was a set of old-fashioned chimneys; their original brick-red colour had been covered by years of soot and had faded to blackness.
‘Maybe the house is unoccupied,’ shrugged Pietro, immediately assessing, as I had, the unkempt look of the outside.
‘Maybe,’ I agreed.
‘Shall I park here?’ he asked me, slowing down and pulling over to the side of the road a few metres past the property.
‘Yes please.’
Bringing the car to a halt, he switched off the engine and turned to face me. ‘I shall be here waiting for you. Good luck, Senhorita D’Aplièse.’
‘Thank you.’
I climbed out of the car and slammed the door with far more force than necessary, preparing myself for what might come. As I walked along the pavement, I told myself that, in fact, whatever occurred in the next few minutes of my life didn’t matter. I’d always had a loving father and de facto mother, and I’d had my sisters. And if anything, the reason I was here was less to do with whatever I might find hidden behind these hedges, and far more to do with what I’d instinctively run away from.
With this thought giving me the confidence I needed, I turned through the large, open wrought-iron gates into the drive. And for the first time, I laid eyes on the house where the coordinates had told me my story had originally begun.
It was an elegant eighteenth-century mansion, its formal square shape and white stuccoed walls, with their intricate plaster corbels and mouldings, redolent of Brazil’s colonial past. Yet as I drew nearer, I could see the stucco was shabby and cracked and the paintwork on the dozens of tall casement windows had peeled away in many places to reveal bare wood.
Garnering my courage, I walked towards it, passing around the base of a carved marble fountain, where rivulets of water must once have played. I saw that most of the shutters on the windows were tightly closed and began to wonder whether Pietro was right and that this house was no longer occupied.
Walking up the wide set of steps to the front door, I pressed the antiquated bell. But it elicited no sound from within. After trying it twice more, I knocked on the door as confidently as I dared. I waited for a response, but there was no sound of footsteps inside. I decided to knock again more loudly.
Having now stood on the doorstep for a good few minutes, I realised it was fruitless and that no one would be answering the door. Looking upwards, and again noting the closed shutters across the windows of the rooms above, I deduced the house was probably not lived in.
I descended the steps, deciding whether to walk straight back down the drive to Pietro and forget the whole idea, or whether to have a prowl around to see if I could at least see through a crack in one of the shutters. Deciding eventually on the latter, I crept around the side of the house.
I realised that it was far longer than it was wide, the side wall of the house stretching towards what I could see had once been a beautiful garden. I kept walking along its length, disappointed to find no visible peephole through which I could spy. As I reached the far end of the wall, it brought me on to a moss-covered terrace.
My eye was immediately caught by a stone sculpture of a young woman in the far corner of it, amidst some cracked terracotta plant pots. She was in a sitting position, staring straight ahead. And even though as I approached I saw the nose was chipped, the clean, simple lines of the woman were starkly beautiful.
I was about to turn to survey the back of the house when I noticed a figure sitting under a tree in the garden below the terrace.
My heart began to pound in my ears as I shrank back against the wall out of sight and peered round the corner to study the figure. From this distance, it was hard to form an exact physical description; all I could tell was that she was female and, from the way she sat in the chair, very elderly.
