The Bellini Card

51

Sometimes Maria would wake up wondering where she was and, as the truth returned, try to fend it off for a few more moments, but her swollen lip and the cord around her wrists that chafed and bit into her skin made it impossible to resist the dread reality.

More than anything, perhaps, she hated to be alone.

She got gingerly to her feet. Her leg ached where she had cracked it on something. With her back to the wall she worked her way around her cell, groping with fingers stiff with cold across the smooth walls, searching for anything she could use. She found the door, and kicked on it and shouted until her feet were bruised. It was a thick, heavy wooden door but it had a handle, too, and after many attempts she succeeded in using the handle to inch the blindfold off her face.

The darkness remained absolute.

Something that felt like a low stone table stood in the middle of the room. For a while she worked at trying to rasp the cord against the edge of the table, but it was her wrists that suffered. Eventually she gave it up and shuffled back to her original position against the wall, knees drawn up to her face, whimpering with cold, and pain, and the terrible fear of knowing nothing and expecting anything.

She would not tell them anything about Signor Brett, come what may.

But by the time they came, she could scarcely remember her own name.

She had lost track of time; she felt no pain. She moved her thick tongue in her mouth and very quietly sounded out the only word she knew: acqua!