Authors: Katherine Webb
Ettore is carried for a long time. Then there are walls around him, a place he can’t understand. He feels himself righted, feels the ground under his feet although he can take none of his own weight, and can’t even clench his hand to hang on to Pino. Only Pino’s grip on his wrist, keeping his arm looped around Pino’s neck, keeps him upright. There are voices, and the babble of them swells to a deafening crescendo in his ears, louder than summer thunder. He thinks his eyes are open but what he sees can’t be real, so he isn’t sure. He sees sparkles of light, white skin and golden hair: he thinks he sees an angel. He frowns, struggling with this, because it reminds him of some other thought he had, somewhen. Could it be Livia? Could this mass of impossible, painful brightness be Livia? He stares harder, tries harder. The sparkles of light are eyes, and they are fixed on him; they seem to blaze. He wants to stretch out a hand and know by touch what he can’t make his eyes decipher, but his arm won’t move and he feels himself sinking, and all the light is gone.
Clare
In the morning Leandro says that he and Boyd must talk business. Boyd has some preliminary drawings for the villa’s new façade to show him, completed in the days before Clare and Pip arrived, and he vanishes into Cardetta’s cavernous study with them under his arm, visibly tense at the coming judgement. A pair of sharp parallel lines appears between his brows at such times, and Clare wishes he could conceal his anxiety better – like she conceals her own. He gives too much away. Leandro catches her eye as he shuts the door, and there’s a knowing look in it that she can’t decipher. But she doesn’t trust it; she doesn’t know if this man knows how Boyd can be. How breakable.
‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ says Marcie, as Clare turns away from the study door. ‘Leandro’s a pussycat really – and I know he loves Boyd’s style. You should hear him go on about that building of his in New York.’
‘Really?’ That building of Boyd’s in New York, the one he designed half out of his mind. Clare can’t see a picture of it without a creeping feeling of dread.
‘Of course! He’s got nothing but praise for your husband’s talents. He could have had any architect in the world come and design this new front, you know. But he chose Boyd – didn’t even consider anyone else, as far as I’m aware. But that’s my Leandro, you know? He knows what he wants. Now, what say you and me and Pip go out for a bit of a walk?’
It’s mid-morning by the time Marcie has chosen an outfit, and the shoes to go with it.
‘Really,’ she says, as they leave the house for Via Garibaldi, ‘whoever would have known that New York clothes would be so unsuitable in Italy? And that there’d be nowhere – I mean,
nowhere
– to buy any others once I got here?’ She’s wearing an outfit not dissimilar to the one in which she breakfasted – the lime green of spring leaves – but with high boots laced up her shins. ‘Ready, Master Pip? You shall be our champion against the wild Italians,’ she says, flashing a smile.
‘Had you always lived in New York before you came here, Mrs Cardetta?’ says Pip.
‘It’s
Marcie
, please! Yes, born and bred. And I love it, but I jumped at the chance to move to Italy. Of course, I thought Leandro meant Rome, or Milan, or Venice. That’s how he proposed to me, you know – did Boyd tell you? He said he wanted to go home, to Italy, but he wouldn’t go unless I married him and went with him. He said I was the missing piece – isn’t that just the sweetest thing you ever heard?’
‘It sounds very romantic,’ says Clare.
‘Oh, devastatingly so. Who could say anything but yes? But then, I always did find proposals hard to resist. Got myself into a few fixes that way,’ she says. The hare-lipped man who drove them from the station opens the street door for them, to a drench of white light. He watches Clare again, just as he did before, even as he nods to Marcie in apparent deference. ‘Thank you, Federico. Whew – it’s going to be a hot one today.’
‘You were engaged before, then?’ says Clare.
‘Oh, two or three times.’ Marcie waves a hand and then pauses on the pavement, looking right and left as if she can’t decide which way to go. ‘Like I said, I was a little wild. But I always managed to escape in the nick of time!’
‘Mr Cardetta said there was a castle,’ says Pip hopefully.
‘You’d like to see it? It’s an ugly old thing. Well, then, follow me, if you’re sure. But I should warn you, it’s right in the middle of the old part of town. That’s where the peasants live and I must say, it’s not always pretty.’
The narrow brim of Clare’s hat doesn’t cast enough shade over her face, and the sun is relentless on the eyes. She can feel it smarting on the back of her neck, and she’s soon sweating. There’s the same hush on the streets as she noticed before, the same strange absence of the bustle she’d expected; there are more people around at this hour, but they keep their voices down, and they don’t seem to hurry. There are men too, leaning against walls and in doorways, or glimpsed through the door of a bar, drinking in spite of the early hour. The party of three goes at a measured pace, because of the heat and the need to keep an eye on the dirty pavements. The sky is so bright that glimpses up at the architecture must be taken quickly, judiciously, before the eyes are seared.
‘The castle’s off that way, but we’re taking the long route because I wanted to show you Piazza Plebiscito first,’ says Marcie, as they come into a large open space surrounded by the shuttered windows and symmetrical façades of houses Clare guesses to be eighteenth and nineteenth century. There are ranks of balconies looking out over the square, each with neat iron railings; a low covered market building that reeks of spoilt vegetables; a raised octagonal bandstand; a beautifully gnarled medieval church, crouched beneath a tall bell tower; and globular street lamps suspended from elegant scrolled poles. Marcie talks them through everything they see. ‘That’s the old Benedictine monastery. Isn’t it just darling? This is where the men all meet every morning to sort out who’s working where. This is really the hub of things – processions, political meetings, that kind of thing. We must go to the Chiesa Madre as well, of course.’
There are men who aren’t working in Piazza Plebiscito as well, standing with their shoulders stooped and their gazes steady; smoking, talking now and then. They have the patient, intransient look of people with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Many of them turn to watch the two blonde women walk by, with their awkward young escort and their clothes so different to the dark, enveloping attire of the Gioia women. The men all wear black or brown or charcoal, and their eyes are uniformly dark, uniformly ambiguous. They squint at the world through veils of cigarette smoke, and their scrutiny somehow makes Clare feel precarious, less real in the world. She’s not a guest there; she’s a temporary anomaly. Like water on waxed cloth, she feels that she could stay on the surface indefinitely, and never sink in. And, equally, she could be removed without consequence. It’s nothing like the other places she has been to in Italy, where foreigners are a common sight. She feels like checking over her shoulder – she does so several times. The streets of Gioia feel poised, as tense as a pent breath; like the whole town is waiting to exhale, and that exhale might be a roar. Clare thinks of the quick look that Marcie and Leandro exchanged when she first suggested going out for a walk. She checks Pip, but he’s swinging his arms and looking around, oblivious.
Only on Via Roma, which they walk down to look at the vast
palazzo
of a prestigious family called Casano, do they see any better-dressed, apparently upper-class people, invariably walking and not loitering. Marcie smiles and greets them but receives only the merest acknowledgements in return. Her smile loses its glow but she won’t let it drop. Clare walks closer to her, in solidarity.
‘It must be hard to make friends in a new place when you don’t have the language,’ she says. Marcie takes her arm gratefully.
‘They call me his American whore, you know,’ she says, in low tones so that Pip won’t hear. But he does hear – Clare can tell from the way he stiffens and looks away across the street as if the sight of the water spout, and the queue of women waiting at it, are fascinating to him.
‘Small towns breed small minds.’
‘Amen to that. Do you know, almost none of the men who actually own the land around here can be bothered to live here? And none of the nobles – well, there’s one count who has a big palace outside of town. The rest just have tenant farmers to manage their estates, while they swan around in Naples and Rome and Paris. Anyone with enough money to live elsewhere does exactly that. Except my Leandro, of course. So what’s left is a snooty bunch of not-quites, who make themselves feel better by indulging in delusions of grandeur.’ Marcie is still smiling but even she can’t say all this without sounding angry, and sad.
‘I’d never heard of Gioia del Colle before Boyd called me to say that’s where we were going,’ says Clare.
‘
Nobody’s
heard of Gioia del Colle, sugar. Give it a few days and you’ll understand why.’
To get to the castle they turn onto a narrower street that runs right through the middle of the old town. There are large houses on this street too, but they look more run-down and less fashionable than those on the peripheral streets, and off to either side are tiny alleyways, crowded in with dilapidated stone houses. Windows are clouded with filth; steps run up and down to wooden doors gone jagged and toothy with rot. The gutters are choked with rubbish and muck; there’s a stink of sewage, and they are more careful than ever where they put their feet. Clare has the growing impression of smart newer streets surrounding and curtaining off a seedier, far poorer centre.
‘Smells like the drains are a bit blocked,’ says Pip.
‘Drains? Oh, Pip, they don’t have drains,’ says Marcie.
‘Oh.’ Pip frowns, and clearly wishes he hadn’t mentioned it. ‘Don’t people get ill?’
‘Of course they do. They even get cholera now and then. You’re fine at home with us, of course – all our food comes from the
masseria
, and the water’s bought in so I know it’s clean. Here on your left we have the house that Napoleon built for his little brother when he was in charge here. And if you look up, you’ll see the castle.’
Clare and Pip do as they’re told, and see three high, square towers with broken tops; the fourth having presumably collapsed. The walls are vast, vertical, indomitable; perforated here and there by small windows and arrow slots.
‘Can’t we go in?’ says Pip. The huge doors don’t look as though they’ve opened in a decade. ‘Who owns it?’
‘Oh, some noble old
marchese
or other,’ says Marcie, with that wave of her hand that’s almost a tic. ‘I’ve never seen it open. There’s a ghost, though. Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘I don’t know, really. Probably not,’ says Pip, but Clare can hear he’s interested. ‘Who’s it supposed to be?’
‘A girl called Bianca Lancia. She was one of the wives of the king who built this place hundreds of years ago – the most beautiful of his wives – and he locked her up in a dungeon here when he heard a rumour she’d been unfaithful to him. So you know what she did to prove her love for him?’
‘Threw herself off the battlements?’
‘Close. She cut off her … well. An important part of a girl’s anatomy. Both of them.’
‘And did the king love her again?’
‘What, when she’d chopped off the things he probably liked best in the first place? Well, he rushed down here to be reconciled with her, but she died. So what was the point of that, I always wonder?’
‘Well, she regained her good name,’ says Pip pompously.
‘A good name’s no good to a corpse,’ says Marcie, with sudden feeling. ‘Stupid girl, that’s what I always think when I hear that story. She should have found another way. Or another man.’
‘Maybe she
had
been unfaithful, and she wanted to punish herself?’
‘Even stupider, then.’
Clare wants to divert them, since the subject’s not appropriate for Pip, but beneath the wall of the castle she suddenly can’t think quite clearly; she’s distracted, and feels vulnerable. She looks up at the looming fortress in case that’s where the danger lies – those crushing stone walls, threatening to fall; she looks over her shoulder again, and then turns on her heel, but there’s nobody close by. Just then a man in a hurry emerges from an alleyway opposite the castle, and Clare’s gaze lands on him, and catches there. He’s hampered by a lame leg and has a wooden pole as a crutch, but it’s just a wooden pole, with no easy means of gripping it, so he must use both hands and twist awkwardly to do so. He sets off to the south, as quickly as he may, not looking left or right but only straight ahead. He is thin, black-haired; he has knots at the corners of his jaw where his teeth are clenched. A stray dog trots across the street then lowers its head, sniffs, and turns to follow the man, and there’s something in its posture that Clare doesn’t like; she almost wants to warn him about it. He moves away along the street and disappears behind a wagon piled high with scrap metal and spools of rusty wire.
‘What is it, Clare? Who did you see?’ says Pip.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ she says. The sun is moving towards noon, and there’s no shade in the street or at the foot of the castle walls. She suddenly longs for London; for the quiet little street they live on, the green smell of the air and the predictability of everything there.
‘Well, shall we go back? I don’t know about you but I need a cold drink and a sit-down,’ says Marcie. They all have a wilted look; the kind of deflation that comes from setting out on an adventure but finding only mundane things – hot feet, thirst, and the discomfiting feeling of being unwelcome.
When they get back to the house Federico opens the door for them, and Clare, instinctively now, doesn’t meet his eye. It bothers her that he might think it’s his deformity that makes her look away, when in fact it’s his scrutiny, which is like a constant question mark; whatever it is he wants to know, Clare doesn’t want to answer. He has that look – of one trying to puzzle something out, and something about that makes her not trust him. As they come into the courtyard Leandro calls down to them from one of the upper storey verandas.
‘Come up, come up! We’re having a pre-lunch drink.’
‘Oh
goo
d
! We’re
gasping
,’ says Marcie. Boyd and Leandro are in cane chairs around a low table. There’s a square of vivid cerulean sky above the courtyard, but the terrace is in shade. Boyd reaches out for Clare’s hand as she sits by him, and squeezes it. His smile looks genuine, and she’s reassured.
‘Well, what do you think of our Gioia?’ says Leandro. He’s wearing a stone-coloured suit with a deep purple silk tie, part colonial gentleman, part dandy; he leans back in his chair and smiles, all ease.
‘There are some truly beautiful buildings here,’ says Clare. She opens her mouth to say something else, but can’t think what. There’s a pause, and Marcie shoots her a startled glance. ‘It’s charming,’ she says but her voice is rather thin and unconvincing. She has never liked to lie, and prefers silence. Leandro smiles again, and his eyes slide away from her, and she knows she’s insulted him. She daren’t look at Boyd. ‘Tell me, why do the people wear so much black? I’d have thought it would be terribly hot for them,’ she says.