Winter Tales by Tiffany Reisz

Author:Tiffany Reisz [Reisz, Tiffany]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tiffany Reisz

Now playing: “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon

Poinsettia

Poinsettia

Author’s Note: This story takes place when Søren was twenty years old and in seminary.

Rome, Italy

Magdalena sat in the window of her parlor smoking a cigarette and balancing her antique walnut writing lap desk on her thigh. She wasn’t writing, although she should have been. The letters had been piling up for weeks—invitations, assignations, a letter or two from an old friend… Tonight would be a perfect night to catch up on correspondence as she was alone and the house was closed up. Alone on purpose, of course. The notorious and exalted Signora Magdalena did not sleep alone except by choice.

And it had been her choice, she reminded herself. She could have had company if she’d wanted it. Magdalena had told her girls the same lie she told them every Christmas season: I don’t keep Christmas and never have. Run along home. I want to do nothing but sleep for the next two days. If I see you at the house before the twenty-sixth, you’re fired. Then she’d slip them two million lira each as a holiday bonus and shoo them off. She’d told Giovanni and Alessandro, her two most devoted paramours, they must leave her alone because she was tiring of them. A tiny untruth as she liked them both, but when one slept with masochists, one must be cruel as a rule. Kindness was always the exception.

Lies, lies, all lies. The truth was, Magdalena missed celebrating Christmas. But she was a madam—a notorious madam at that, if one believed the ribald verses scrawled on the sides of buildings—and a madam had to remain aloof, tough, an object of fear and respect. If her girls—loyal to a fault—knew she spent Christmas alone just so they could be with whatever friends or families they had left, they might stay with her out of pity. Or, God forbid, beg her to join them at their grandfather’s or grandmother’s or mother’s house. No. Magdalena couldn’t allow that to happen. Better to simply sleep for two days, eat dinner alone on Christmas Eve, and catch up on all the correspondence she’d been putting off since September. But this part wasn’t a lie—if any one of her girls showed up between now and the twenty-sixth, Magdalena would fire her.

It certainly sounded like someone was getting fired tonight.

Or, in the case of an intruder, murdered.

Magdalena quietly laid her writing desk aside and crushed out her cigarette in the ebony ashtray. Taking the fireplace poker in hand, she crept down the dark hall from the parlor to the sunken kitchen where she’d heard the creaking of the floorboards under what she assumed were human feet. The house was old—three centuries old—and it creaked like an old man getting out of bed in the morning. While on the outside the house appeared to be nothing but a crumbling old villa—yellow plaster, peeling green wood shutters, chipped marble door frames—inside she’d remodeled it to resemble the love child of a palazzo and a bordello.

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