Isabella; or, The Coin Purse

Abstract

Isabella; or, The Coin Purse Ben Stroud (bio) I The First Time Across the baize-topped table, Lina blushes, and Isabella doesn't understand why until she looks at her cards. She has won. A month of playing vingt-un with Lina, and not once has Isabella won. It is uncomfortable, unfortunate, but soon Isabella has a notion of what she can do. After the fifth hand she proposes, as if idly, two extra hands, and this seems to work. Once these are lost, Lina, like always, rings the silver bell, Giuseppe emerges from the apartment's back rooms with the bowl of pastilles, and over in the other half of the salon, perched on his couch, Lina's brother yawns, interrupting James in whatever subject he has alighted on today. II The Coin Purse She knows what happened. She was holding the coin purse, running her fingers over its silk and wondering: Is he as tall as her? Taller? Is his hair still so fair? Thus distracted, she failed to ask for the extra cards she needed in order to lose. The coin purse arrived a week ago. Its exterior is a paisleyed pink and blue, its interior a mortal red. In the note that accompanied the purse, her son, John, said he'd picked it out because he thought its pattern suited such a great lady as she must be, that he'd saved his sweets money for two months to buy it, and that if ever she came to Lyon, he would kiss her on the cheek and show her his favorite places. [End Page 190] III S When the coin purse arrived, Isabella and James had been in S.—a city of modest size perched upon a foothill of the Apennines—for three weeks. Now they have been here a month. James is nearing the completion of his history of the Dukes of Urbino, the long work he had in mind when, twelve years ago, he came to Cringletie and made his offer. The Prince, Lina's brother, possesses letters he wishes to see; they were written four centuries before to an ancestor of his and Lina's named Ippolito. Every day, James and Isabella go to the Prince and Lina's apartments, but as yet the Prince has not surrendered the letters. More than once, as he and Isabella walk back to their rented palazzo, James has despaired that they are to be stuck in S. for an eternity. Isabella, though, has discovered she does not mind being made to wait. In S., she has found Lina. Since marrying James—or, more correctly, since her flight from Cringletie—she has not had such an intimate, and it is supremely fortunate, finding Lina, for with the purse arriving, unsettling everything, she needs the support of an intimate. IV Lina and the Prince There is an unhealthy look to the Prince. His pallor puts Isabella in mind of dripped wax or the sort of excrescence that might be scraped from a cellar wall, and his hair, while far too thin to be a wig, seems somehow pasted on. Lina, however, is so unlike her brother: fresh, attractive, her hair neat, her liveliness apparent in her shining eyes and the pertness about her mouth. Isabella estimates Lina is a trifle older than herself, perhaps forty, but there is nothing matronly in her, and though she possesses but two dresses, one patterned with lilacs, the other with brown and blue stripes, she wears them with such confidence that one almost cannot tell. The Prince is one of those ten-a-penny princes that litter the Italian peninsula. So James has told Isabella. Lina, then, is a Princess, though [End Page 191] whenever Isabella called her such on their early visits, she shook off the title with an amused frown. "To you, I am Lina." On their first outing, to the Etruscan tomb, she gave Isabella her version of her family's history, charting, with some merriment—for she seemed to delight in mocking her brother's more solemn pretensions—its two-century decline, triggered, according to Lina, when the cardinal who marked the family's apogee died of a...