Sunset ^beta

"Sara! Sara, Sara, Sara!" Sara Crewe awoke to Jessie's familiar singsong and the comfortable weight of the other girl's head being lifted from her shoulder, where it had rested throughout the night. The sun had already risen high enough to flood their compartment when Jessie drew the curtains, casting shadows that danced lurchingly with the movement of the train. Jessie, who seemed somehow even more jittery than her own silhouette, leapt to her feet, pressed a hand to the window, and glanced rapidly back and forth between Sara and the view outside as though she could not settle on which she would rather be admiring. "We are in Italy, Sara!"

"We are!" Jessie's sparkling eyes and the bouncing of her shoulder-length braid as she swung her head were so entrancing that it took Sara a moment to force her own eyes to focus on the countryside beyond the window. As she did, the peculiar emerald towers rising from the hills resolved into trees. "Are those cypress? I've never seen so many in one place, let alone outside of a garden!"

"I think so! Ah, of course cypress comes from Italy! He's one of Ovid's metamorphoses, you know. A boy beloved by Apollo, who prayed to be transformed as both an escape from and a monument to his grief!" As always when Jessie spoke of such stories, her voice grew low but impassioned, as though she were sharing a tantalizing secret.

Even having known her for years now, Sara could still not entirely understand her companion's penchant for tragedy. However, as Jessie's own fits of melancholy had decreased in frequency and severity, Sara had come to find her fascination with melancholic heroes less alarming and more oddly endearing. Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly daring, Sara even endeavored to work a drowning or an immolation into one of her own stories, just to hear Jessie gasp or laugh out in breathy astonishment.

"I never thought it strange before that cypress is a tree of mourning," Sara mused. "It always seems so solemn when it's planted in thin, straight rows and trimmed almost bare. But just look how much livelier it is when left to grow its own way!"

"Isn't everything?" Jessie exclaimed. "Oh, Sara, for a while there, I was almost worried I'd be unhappy leaving Paris! I can tell you that now that it hasn't happened, and you won't feel compelled to try to reason me out of something we both know is silly anyhow. But it truly was marvelous, even if we were there to finish our schooling first and foremost. And I'd only just perfected my French! With all the time you've had to study other languages, you'll be stuck as my interpreter all over again!"

"I'm sure you'll pick up Italian quickly enough when everyone around you is speaking it," Sara told her. "You really are clever at that kind of thing."

"Clever at it?" Jessie laughed dismissively. "Would you call a parrot 'clever'?"

"Parrots are clever!" insisted Sara, who had observed quite a number of them in India. "And you are considerably more clever than a parrot!"

"Sara! What a queer thing to say!" Jessie laughed again, this time with actual mirth. "Which is why I ought to have known that you would say it. Truly, though, does it even matter whether I am dull? I am going to be dull in Florence. Florence! Verdi's operas sung in the Teatro della Pergola! The fashion boutiques along the Arno! And the Uffizi, with Botticelli's Venus — and Titian's as well! Do you think that I will swoon when I see Titian's Venus? People do swoon in the museums of Florence. If it happens to me, you must lie to the doctors, of course — tell them it was the David!"

"Jessie, no!" Sara giggled at her companion's joke even as she pretended to reprimand her. Jessie giggled too, and broke into a giddy pirouette. Naturally, the cramped and wobbling train compartment was not an ideal dance stage, and she promptly tripped and fell — directly into Sara's lap. "Are you all right?" Sara asked, wrapping her arms around Jessie to steady her.

"Of course I am!" Jessie answered, still giggling. "This puffy gown of yours is as soft as your heart. And your skin." Her countenance grew at once both redder and more serious, though she still smiled. "And your lips. Oh, Sara, you're always there to catch me, aren't you?" She nestled in closer and pressed her mouth to Sara's.

Jessie was soft too, Sara thought as she closed her eyes and lost herself in the kiss — soft, and warm, and radiant with passion. Huddled together as they were, Sara could feel the fervent beating of Jessie's heart, and her own pulse raced to match its speed.

The spell was broken when a rap on the door announced the arrival of the breakfast cart. Jessie flung herself backward off of Sara's lap and onto the bench opposite hers, her face flushed as red as her hair and her smiling, Guerlain-tinted, almost imperceptibly smudged lips.

—

The train reached Florence in late morning, and it was already afternoon by the time they checked into their apartment. Jessie and Sara both agreed that they couldn't bear to visit the Uffizi for the first time only to have to leave it after just a few hours, but Mariette would not hear of letting them stay in while she set up the household. "You would only be underfoot," she assured them, smiling but stern. "Go! You have a whole new city to explore, not just one art gallery. Buy yourselves a nice supper, if nothing else. Perhaps you can find out how is this pizza I keep hearing of."

As neither of them were hungry just then, they agreed to simply walk the streets until they'd worked up an appetite. Inevitably, they found themselves drawn to the great red dome of Santa Maria del Fiore at the heart of the city. As they passed through bronze doors several times their height into a cavern of white-and-green marble, Jessie grasped Sara's arm and gasped out, "Oh, it's even grander than Notre Dame! Isn't it? Or have I been to Notre Dame so many times that it became smaller than it is?"

"I think this is bigger," said Sara. "It's like being inside of a mountain!"

Crossing the nave to the dome at the very back was like crossing a particularly long city block, and the walk was drawn out even more by details of the elaborately carved marble and stained glass windows that demanded attention at every step. At last, the sunlight from the oculus fell over them, and they looked up into Giorgio Vasari's vision of the last judgment, where white-winged angels and vibrantly clothed saints lounged on throne-like clouds against sky-fields of pale azure and gleaming gold.

"Ah!" was all that Jessie could say at first. Her eyes had gone wide, and she clung even tighter to Sara's arm.

"I feel as though we're being drawn up into it," Sara said.

"Are we?" Jessie asked, her voice hushed and reverent. "Do you really think we could be?"

"I think so. And look, there are stairs right there. Would you like to go up?"

"I would," said Jessie, and did not let go of Sara throughout the long climb to the catwalk at the base of the dome. "Oh, we're in Hell!" she gasped with a nervous little laugh as at last they emerged beside the images of fire and horned demons that made up the lowest ring of the fresco.

"I don't think we can go any higher," said Sara with a frown. "It seems to me that there's something wrong with a church that doesn't let you climb to Heaven."

"Is there really?" asked Jessie. "I don't mind much, as long as I'm with you."

"I love you too," said Sara, smiling. "But you're saying some awfully queer things."

"Do I ever not?"

From the catwalk, they emerged onto a balcony circling the outside of the dome, with all of Florence laid out beneath them. From ground level, the city had been all white-and-beige buildings and light grey cobbles, but looked down on from above, Florence was warm, vibrant red: the colour of every sunbaked roof in sight, stretching all the way out to the green cypress hills.

"Oh!" Jessie gasped. "Oh, it's even more beautiful out here!"

"Of course it's beautiful," said Sara. "It's Jessie-coloured."

"Sara, please," said Jessie, blushing and clearly struggling to keep her voice low. "I can't kiss you in front of all of Florence."

Before Sara could respond, the moment was broken when a small black bird darted between them with a cry that sounded more like shrieking than singing, then swooped down over the railing and soared off across the city until it was only a tiny dark speck against the red roofs.

"Oh my goodness!" Jessie exclaimed, laughing in surprise. "Was that a swallow? Do you think it was all right?"

"I think it was a swift!" said Sara. "They're the ones that the Greeks thought didn't have any feet, because they're so small and hard to see at a distance. They never touch the ground if they can help it, just fly around all day long and cling to the sides of buildings when they need to rest."

"I think I should like to be a creature like that," said Jessie with a gleam in her eye. "I should like to just spread my wings and ride the wind from city to city and never have to come down. If you were a swift too, we could fly all the way up to Heaven without any need for stairs."

"But we wouldn't have lips then," Sara teased.

"You're as bad as I am! I'm so glad." She leaned out over the railing and held out her arms. "It's absolutely magical up here. I feel like if I jumped with the right prayer on my lips, I really would be transformed into a bird, like an Ovidian heroine."

"Ovid's heroes are usually transformed when something terrible has happened to them," Sara pointed out. "Jessie, are you not happy?"

"Oh, I'm wonderfully happy right now!" Jessie assured her. "We are young and free and in love — and in Florence! I am terribly wicked, though. Here we are on top of a church, and I'm thinking of pagan magic." In one fluid motion, she pushed back from the railing and spun to face Sara. "Oh, that reminds me! I keep meaning to ask you whether Indians still worship goddesses like the Greeks and Romans did."

"The Muslims don't," said Sara. "Muslims aren't that different from Christians, really. They have some peculiar rituals, but then, so do Catholics. But you must know that, since Ram is Muslim."

"I don't know much about what Ram prays to, except that he always has to face south when he does it," Jessie said. "Since he doesn't talk about it on his own, I thought it might be rude to ask him."

"I never let that stop me when I was a child, though, looking back on it, I'm sure I was being quite rude," Sara confessed. "Our servants who were Muslim or Hindu might have gotten in trouble if someone thought they were trying to convert me, but they also might have gotten in trouble if they upset me by refusing to answer my questions. They were always careful about how much they said, but I do know that Hindus have both gods and goddesses."

Jessie rocked on her heels, gripping the railing so that she could lean at precarious angles that would otherwise send her falling onto her back. "Is it bad if that makes me happy?"

"Why would it be?"

"Well, they say that the false gods are devils in disguise. But I've always wondered why devils would want to torture the very people who'd worshiped them in life. So I sometimes think that Hell might not be so bad if you win a devil's favor. Isn't that a wicked thought?"

"I'm not sure whether it's wicked, exactly," said Sara. "But I don't find it very pleasant to think so much about Hell."

"Very well, then!" Jessie said, pulling herself back up onto the flats of her feet. "For the moment, at least, we are much closer to Heaven."

"That we are," said Sara, and the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand and watched the swifts tumble acrobatically over Florence's ruby canopy.

—

They found a pizza cart by the Arno, and nibbled on flatbread dripping with melted cheese as they crossed the Ponte Vecchio. A street performer with an accordion filled up the narrow space of the bridge with a musical ambiance so boastfully Italian, Sara had to wonder for a moment whether she was, in fact, in Italy, or merely on a theatre stage trying very hard to represent it.

"Oh, he's wonderful!" Jessie exclaimed. "Sara, show him some largesse!"

"It's not largesse," said Sara, dropping enough lire for a day's worth of hot meals into the open instrument case at the musician's feet. "Artists ought to be paid for making the world more beautiful. It's work." The musician nodded and smiled politely at her without pausing his playing, probably not yet aware of just how much she'd given.

Jewelry shops walled in the bridge, their windows displaying broaches shaped like butterflies with delicate filigreed wings or beetles with faceted gemstone eyes. "Do you ever think that your diamonds might end up in anything this artful?" Jessie asked. "Do you ever wonder about all of the places they're sold, and all of the people who buy them as gifts for each other?"

"I do," said Sara. "I like to think that there are beautiful, powerful queens who wear them."

"You have some of your own to wear," Jessie reminded her. "So there's at least one queen who does."

Across the Arno, the buildings and throngs of pedestrians both became sparser. The hills the girls climbed were dotted with cypress groves and flower gardens. "Ah," said Jessie as they paused to rest beside one of them, "there are the lilies that were missing from Vasari's Heaven!"

"I wouldn't want to be in a Heaven without flowers," Sara said, breathing in their gentle fragrance on the cool evening breeze.

"Do you want so badly to be in Heaven at all?" Jessie asked suddenly, then covered her mouth and turned away.

"Jessie?" Sara asked in alarm.

"I'm sorry," said Jessie. "I know that's not fair. I'm not fair."

"What in the world are you talking about?"

"I don't really mind, even if it's all true," Jessie babbled. "Because if it's true, there'd be no place for me there anyway. If there's a God who made me like this just so that I could prove how good and dutiful I am by choosing to be miserable, then I don't want to live with Him any more than I want to live with my parents. But you do want to see your parents again. And I might be keeping you from that. That's what I mean when I say that I'm wicked."

"You aren't keeping me from anything!" Sara took hold of Jessie's hand and gently but firmly spun her back around to face her. "I love you, Jessie. You didn't make me feel that way. It's how I am, too. And... and I wouldn't want to be separated from Mr. Carrisford or Ram either. And I'm certain that I won't be. They've been like angels to me, so surely we'll all be together in Heaven."

"You're too good." The line of Jessie's mouth twisted and rippled before finally splitting into a beautiful, uneven, utterly un-doll-like smile. "Sara Crewe, you are so good, and I am so wicked that I can't help believing you more than any priest or scholar."

"Wouldn't that make me the wicked one?" Sara asked mischievously. "Maybe I'm the one leading you away from the path of righteousness."

"And I'll follow you gladly!" declared Jessie. "Heaven is whatever direction you are."

The sun was beginning to set. Sara turned back the way they came, about to suggest the two of them return to their apartment before it got dark, but the words were struck from her mind as she looked down at the city below. "Oh!" was all that she could manage. Jessie followed her gaze and gasped as well.

Beneath them, Florence was lit up by the sunset, haloed in celestial yellow. Like Vasari's vision of God's own throne room. Like the secret treasure of the sky above Sara's old attic purgatory.

"Or maybe Heaven is that way!" Jessie exclaimed. "Look at that: those grey cobble streets were made of gold all along!"

"Our new home is that way," Sara told her, smiling at her companion's revived enthusiasm. "Our apartment. Our bed."

"You really are the wicked one," Jessie scolded her lovingly.

Just to prove her right, Sara stole a kiss from her right there on the hill, floating among the sun-gilded lilies.