The English Girl: A Novel

photograph of Jeremy Fallon entering a small private bank in Zurich. A few hours later Lancaster again appeared alone outside the famous black door of 10 Downing Street, this time to announce the firing of his chancellor of the exchequer. A few minutes later Scotland Yard announced that Fallon was now the target of a bribery-and-fraud investigation. Once again, Fallon declared his innocence. Not a single member of the Whitehall press corps believed him.
    H e left Downing Street for the last time at sunset and returned to his empty bachelor’s apartment in Notting Hill, which was surrounded, it seemed, by every reporter and cameraman in London. The inquest would never determine how or when he eluded them, though a CCTV camera captured a clear image of his stricken face at 2:23 the next morning as he walked along a deserted stretch of Park Lane, one end of a rope already tied around his neck. Using a nautical knot taught to him by his father, he tied the other end of the rope to a lamppost at the center of the Westminster Bridge. No one happened to see Fallon hurl himself over the edge, and so he hung there through the long night, until the sun finally shone upon his slowly swaying body. Thus lending proof to an ancient and wise Corsican proverb: He who lives an immoral life dies an immoral death.

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    CORSICA
    B ut who had been the source of the damning photograph that drove Jeremy Fallon from office and over the railing of Westminster Bridge? It was a question that would dominate British political circles for months to come; but on the enchanted island where the scandal had its genesis, only a few north-looking sophisticates gave much thought to it. Occasionally, a couple would have their photograph taken at Les Palmiers, posed as Madeline Hart and Pavel Zhirov on the afternoon of their fateful lunch, but for the most part the island did its best to forget the small role it had played in the death of a senior British statesman. As the winter took hold, the Corsicans instinctively returned to the old ways. They burned the macchia for warmth. They waggled their fingers at strangers to ward off the evil eye. And in an isolated valley near the southwestern coast, they turned to Don Anton Orsati for help when they could turn to no one else.
    On a blustery afternoon in the middle of February, while seated at the oaken desk in his large office, he received an unusual telephone call. The man at the other end was not looking to have someone eliminated—hardly surprising, thought the don, for the man was more than capable of seeing to his own killing. Instead, he was looking for a villa where he might spend a few weeks alone with his wife. It had to be in a place where no one would recognize him and where he had no need of bodyguards. The don had just the place. But there was one problem. There was only one road in and out—and the road passed the three ancient olive trees where Don Casabianca’s wretched palomino goat made his encampment.
    “Is there any way it can have a tragic accident before we arrive?” asked the man on the telephone.
    “Sorry,” replied Don Orsati. “But here on Corsica some things never change.”
    T hey arrived on the island three days later, having flown from Tel Aviv to Paris and then from Paris to Ajaccio. Don Orsati had left a car at the airport, a shiny gray Peugeot sedan that Gabriel drove with Corsican abandon southward down the coast, then inland through the valleys thick with macchia . When they arrived at the three ancient olive trees, the goat rose menacingly from its resting place and blocked their path. But it quickly gave ground after Chiara spoke a few soothing words into its tattered ear.
    “What did you say to it?” asked Gabriel when they were driving again.
    “I told him you were sorry for being mean to him.”
    “But I’m not sorry. He was definitely the aggressor.”
    “He’s a goat, darling.”
    “He’s a terrorist.”
    “How can you possibly run the Office if you can’t get along with a goat?”
    “Good question,” he said glumly.
    The villa was a mile or so beyond the goat’s redoubt. It was small and simply furnished, with pale limestone floors and a granite terrace. Laricio pine shaded the terrace in the morning, but in the afternoon the sun beat brightly upon the stones. The days were cold and pleasant; at night the wind whistled in the pines. They drank Corsican red wine by the fire and watched the swaying of the trees. The fire burned blue-green from