The Night Falling

The peasants consider love, or sexual attraction, so powerful a force of nature that no amount of will-power can resist it… good intentions and chastity are of no avail… So great is the power of the god of love and so simple the impulse to obey him that there is no question of a code of sexual morals or even of social disapproval for an illicit affair.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Carlo Levi

Chapter Eight – Ettore

Ettore wakes up because he’s thirsty. His throat feels torn. When he opens his eyes things swing around his head in a giddy blur that slowly resolves itself into walls, window, ceiling, floor; all of them sunlit with extravagant brightness. He blinks and tries to sit up, and the room tilts again. He hears a soft gasp and movement, and then there are hands on his shoulders; small hands with clean, pale skin.

‘Take it easy, Ettore. Lie down. Welcome back to the land of the living, honey.’ It takes him a minute to understand – the words are in a language he must pick apart and process, not one he knows in his bones.

‘Marcie?’ he says.

‘That’s right, I’m here. You nearly weren’t, for a while there. Jesus! You scared us. Why on earth didn’t you come for help sooner? Honestly.’ He feels the mattress dip as she sits down on the edge of it, and turns to look at her. Her face has lines of concern, and faint shadows under the eyes. Ettore searches in his head for the right words to answer her. The effort wears him out.

‘Water? Please. How much time here?’

‘Here. Sip, don’t gulp.’ She hands him a glass of water and he drinks it so quickly he almost chokes. He feels like he could never have enough of it. A cough sends it shooting into his nose. ‘Like I said,’ says Marcie, shaking her head as she refills it for him. ‘That gorgeous friend of yours delivered you here three days ago. What’s his name? Penno? Your sister came too but they’ve both gone back to Gioia now – reluctantly, mind you. Only when the doctor had actually been and seen you, and they were sure you were going to live. Sorry – am I speaking too quickly? I always forget.’

‘How much time?’ Ettore tries again, when Marcie breaks her incomprehensible babble.

‘Three days.’ Marcie holds up three fingers, and Ettore nods.

‘Leandro?’

‘He’ll be here tomorrow. Tomorrow – domani. Now, please rest. Don’t be a man, and try to run before you can walk.’ She says something else but Ettore can’t hear her. With the water in his stomach he slides back senseless.

When he next wakes the room is empty but for an orange glow of late afternoon light. The room is not large but it has a high, vaulted ceiling, all painted white like the walls; there are red and white tiles on the floor and windows twice his height in two of the walls, front and back. He stands gingerly and finds that his leg hurts a lot less than it did. It hurts, but the pain is no longer the only thing he can think about. He still doesn’t want to put weight on it, however. He’s wearing a pair of loose trousers that aren’t his, and when he rolls up the left leg to look at his shin, the wound looks wider, but it’s dry, and less angry. The trenches smell of it has gone. There’s a wooden crutch, a proper one, leaning on the wall by the bed, and he grabs it. With his head spinning Ettore drinks more water, then goes to the front window and steps out onto the little balcony to look out. He knows he’s at Masseria dell’Arco, his uncle’s farmhouse. At once he feels trapped, anxious to leave. He thinks of the three days of work he has missed; he wonders what Paola and Valerio have been finding to eat. What Paola has had to do for Poete to coax some stolen milk or cheese from him. His hands curl around the balcony rail in frustration, and he stares out along the dirt road that leads away from the farm.

There’s a large, walled-in patch of ground to the front of the main buildings, called the aia. On a paved area here, threshed wheat is already piled high, drying, waiting to be shovelled into sacks. There’s a set of iron gates by which to enter and leave, guarded by a conical stone trullo hut where a man sits, night and day, to keep watch. There will be more guards on the roof, he knows, to watch the wheat. Six shaggy, creamy-white shepherd dogs are tied to lengths of chain here and there around the aia, and from his vantage point Ettore can see the precise circles they have trampled into the dust at the ends of their chains, each one with a four-metre radius. They wear collars of vicious metal spikes to protect their throats. Ettore stares into the setting sun until it makes his eyes stream. He is fifteen kilometres south-east of Gioia. His leg is better but he feels weak, his muscles wobbly, and he doesn’t think he could walk it yet.

Just then a woman walks across the aia with a lanky youth at her side; for a second Ettore thinks it’s Marcie, but this woman is shorter, slighter. Her hair is a subtler blond, braided into some kind of knot at the nape of her neck from which wavy strands have escaped to hang down below the narrow brim of her hat. The boy is taller than her, and walks with a slight stoop as if to apologise for the fact. Their footsteps make little puffs of dust rise. For no reason he can find, Ettore has the nagging feeling that he has seen this woman before. That he knows her. They approach one of the dogs and it lunges towards them, barking wildly. The woman puts a restraining hand on the boy’s arm, like a mother would, but she looks too young for that. But then, like Marcie, these pale foreigners have artifice and lives of ease that make them look younger than they are. The dog stops barking but wheels about on the end of its chain, back a few steps, around to the left then the right. The boy crouches down and holds something out to it, but the dog won’t come near enough to take it. He shuffles closer, and Ettore hears the woman say something in warning. She has her hand on the boy’s sleeve, the knuckles white. In the end the boy has to throw his offering, and the dog gulps it down in one mouthful. It paces, and it watches, and goes no closer to them, and Ettore thinks it wise not to trust them.

He finds the rest of his clothes laundered and folded in a chest by the door; he dresses, drinks more water from the pitcher and makes his way downstairs. Marcie is on the terrace over the dairy, sipping amarena, eating olives with a tiny silver fork, and making notes on a piece of writing paper.

‘Ettore! Dear boy, come and sit down! It’s so wonderful to see you up and about. Sit, sit,’ she says. Marcie is still beautiful, he thinks, but it’s a kind of desperate beauty, teetering on ruin, that’s somehow pitiful. Ettore once heard his mother say that beautiful women grow to hate themselves as they age, and he wonders if this is what’s happening. If Marcie is starting to hate herself. There’s a darker shade, and glints of silver, at the roots of her hair; her smile is a dazzle of red and white; she’s wearing silk. Ettore thinks of Paola, and Iacopo, and a wave of anger courses through him. Marcie’s smile falters. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Well. You must eat. You’re so thin! How have you gotten so thin in the summertime? I’ll call for Anna to bring you something. And of course it won’t be long till dinnertime.’ She rises and calls through a dark doorway, down stone steps into shadow. ‘Anna! Anna!’

‘I do not want to eat. I want to go Gioia,’ says Ettore, but Marcie seems, or pretends, not to hear. ‘Thank you,’ he adds, stonily. As she returns to her seat Marcie says, without looking up at him:

‘Of course you want to eat, and you need to rest. And you simply can’t leave without seeing your uncle first. You know how… upset he would be. Please, Ettore. Sit down.’ She pours him a glass of the cherry drink, and it’s the deep, deep crimson of venous blood. After a pause he takes it from her, and she smiles again.

There are footsteps behind him, on the open steps that lead up from the courtyard, and the other woman and the boy come to the table. The woman’s eyes are wide and clear, and there’s a strange nakedness to their gaze that Ettore is unsure of; like an excess of transparency. She almost looks stupid, but it’s not quite that. The boy, whose face has the nondescript look of something unfinished, studies him with unguarded curiosity.

‘Ah, there you are, you two! Come and meet the walking wounded. Clare, Pip, this is Ettore Tarano, Leandro’s nephew. Ettore, this is Clare and Philip Kingsley. Clare’s husband is the architect designing the new front for the Gioia house, and these two are brightening up my whole summer by staying as guests while he works.’ Philip shakes Ettore’s hand first, enthusiastically, and Clare follows more reluctantly. Ettore wonders if it’s the callused roughness of his hands on her soft skin that she doesn’t like.

‘Filippo. Chiara. Kingsley,’ he says, so that he will remember the names, and the boy grins even more.

‘Filippo! Well, of course – I hadn’t thought before how fabulous your name is in Italian, Pip! I shall call you that from now on,’ Marcie declares. Much of what she says is lost on Ettore, and his face turns hot with frustration. He frowns at his aunt, then looks away; tips the amarena down his throat in one gulp. It makes him cough. There’s alcohol in it, not just cherries and sugar. Then Chiara Kingsley speaks in hesitant Italian, and he turns to her, surprised.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Tarano. I did not know that Mr Cardetta had family remaining in Gioia.’

‘Oh! I forgot – how wonderful! You can speak to him in Italian, Clare. I taught him some English last winter but it was hard going for both of us, because I have almost no Italian.’ Marcie claps her hands, pleased. Anna, the kitchen girl, arrives with a basket of bread and a plate of cheese, and more olives. The sight of the food makes Ettore sway on his feet, and sweat beads along his hairline.

‘Won’t you sit?’ Chiara says evenly. ‘You have been very unwell.’ Without speaking, Ettore sinks into a chair. His hand reaches for bread of its own accord.

For a while they drink and they talk, in English, and Ettore is aware of being consciously not watched as he eats savagely, desperately. He despises their tact; he despises himself for sitting there eating when his family in Gioia might have nothing. A shard of bread crust scores his sore throat and he gags, coughing and gasping. Filippo passes him water, which he takes without thanks. Ettore is aware of Chiara leaning towards him, her forehead creased in thought. He knows the look well; she is trying to find the right words in an unfamiliar language.

‘The doctor gave you water in a line. In a… cord. To the mouth,’ she stumbles.

‘With a tube?’ he says, and she nods.

‘That’s why your throat is a hurt, I think.’ When he doesn’t answer her she continues. ‘He cleaned your leg with alcohol. He cut away some badness. He has not closed it. It must dry. He comes back to close it,’ she says, all in the same careful tone, and precisely over-enunciated. Ettore nods.

‘I will pay for the doctor. Please tell Marcie that. I will pay for the doctor and for my time here.’

‘Marcie, Mr Tarano says that he intends to reimburse you for his medical treatment, and for his board,’ she says obediently.

‘Well, rot and nonsense! He’s family, for heaven’s sake! Oh, why must the peasants be so damned proud? And how on earth does he plan to pay us, anyway, he hasn’t two dimes to rub together. Don’t translate that, will you dear?’ says Marcie. She’s had several glasses of the amarena, there are two smears of colour either side of her nose and her eyes are sparkling. Ettore understands enough of what she says. He understands her dismissal of his offer, and anger and shame come in equal measures. He stares down at his plate until they begin to talk of other things.

‘I want to go,’ he says later, quietly, almost to himself. But Chiara hears him; he can feel her half-watching, half-listening, all the time. It’s distracting, and he can’t tell if he likes it or not.

More food arrives, and he eats but it’s too rich and makes his stomach roll. The meat seems to sit in his chest like a fist, the alcohol makes him slow and stupid; he can no longer pick any one word from their rapid English, so he stops trying. The sky turns to black, and prickles with stars; the white walls of the masseria are lit yellow with torches, alive with capering shadows. With the stink from the dairy there’s the sweet smell of jasmine, growing up the wall near the table. Knives and forks squeak and clatter against the china; they all chew and cut and spoon. The extravagance of it, the abundance, is like some mad pantomime. Marcie talks and talks and talks, and laughs, tipping back her head so that her teeth shine and the ridges of her throat are exposed. Young Filippo sometimes laughs with her, self-consciously, but Chiara is quiet. She is the one restful corner of the world, absorbing sound instead of making it. When Ettore can’t take any more he lurches to his feet, tipping over his chair and shoving the table so that the drinks slop, and it’s Chiara who reaches him first, and steadies his arm.

‘Come with me,’ she says quietly, in words he can understand. She guides him up stairs, through doors, back to his bed.

Leandro does not appear early the next day. Without Paola to wake him Ettore sleeps until the sun is high in the sky, and then he rushes downstairs feeling as though he’s missed something important, that he is sleeping away all control. He can see the foreigners on the terrace, at breakfast, and it’s like they never left the table – like they’ve been eating and drinking all night, like that’s all they ever do. He goes to the kitchen in disgust, asks Anna for some bread and a glass of milk, then goes out across the aia, moving faster as he gets used to the crutch. He leaves through the iron gates and goes around to the back of the quad, where there’s a complex of large trulli, the first buildings to be built in that spot, hundreds of years before the masseria was built. They abut and blend into the back wall of the farm, looking like some strange warty growth sprouting from its skin. Here the corporals and other permanent outdoor staff sleep, on wooden platforms above the animals – the stablehand and herdsmen, the dairyman and his wife who makes the cheese.

Detached from it all, a short distance away, is another trullo with three large, interlinked cones. These are the private quarters of the overseer of the farm, who manages it day to day, and in his uncle’s absence. Ettore pauses. He could go and ask for a half-day’s work while he waits for his uncle. He could make a little money to take back to Gioia, but his arm is trembling with fatigue from taking his weight on the crutch, his head aches and his leg is throbbing. He experiments with putting his full weight on it, but the grinding feeling, the pressure, brings tears to his eyes. Just then the door of the overseer’s house opens and a man emerges, and all thought of asking for work leaves Ettore’s head. This is not the same man who was overseer during the winter, when Ettore last came to stay at the dell’Arco. That man was called Araldo, and he’d been short and fat with a mad red beard. This man is Ludo Manzo. Older, more grizzled, but instantly recognisable. The very same man who once tormented Pino and Ettore, and countless other young boys. Ettore stares, and a violent rush of hatred makes his head throb harder. Ludo sees him there, looks him over lazily, and doesn’t recognise him. Why would he? Ettore was just a boy, one of many; as indistinct and unfinished as the boy Filippo. Ludo looks away and carries on walking towards the barns, but Ettore remains motionless for quite some time, with his leg tucked up like a stork.

It’s afternoon before Leandro Cardetta appears with another man, tall and hunched, in a car driven by his servant with the deformed face. When Leandro sees Ettore waiting in a corner of the courtyard, leaning on his crutch, he smiles. The tall man must be Chiara’s husband, the architect, because he goes to her and hugs her as though he might drown otherwise, and Ettore sees how she keeps her body rigid, supporting the weight of his embrace. Either that, or rejecting it. The man’s height and the way he swoops over her make him look like a vulture, like he’s devouring her.

‘Ettore! It does me good to see you awake and walking,’ says his uncle, holding his arms wide as he approaches. They embrace briefly; his uncle’s arms have a brute strength belied by his ridiculous suits and the almost jaunty angle of his hat.

‘Uncle, thank you for your help, and your hospitality.’

‘Don’t thank me. Only promise to come to me sooner, when things are so bad. You might have died, my boy. What will my sister say, when I meet her in the next life, if I let her only son die when I could save him?’

‘She would say you do not control his destiny,’ says Ettore, and Leandro shakes his head ruefully.

‘Maria was always proud and stubborn. Too proud and too stubborn, and she passed it all to you with those blue eyes. She wouldn’t take my advice and come to New York. She wouldn’t take my advice and find a man worth a damn to marry, instead of that waster Valerio.’

‘Valerio is my father. You must not disrespect him in my hearing, uncle.’

‘Ah, you’re right.’ Leandro shakes his head, then claps Ettore on the shoulder. ‘Forgive me. No man could ever be good enough for a beloved sister. But, pride aside, you must stay until you’re fit. I know better than to insist, but at least hear sense, Ettore. You’re no good to your sister or her baby if you can’t work a day in the fields. You’re no good to them permanently crippled or dead. Stay here. Rest. Accept my help when it’s freely given.’

‘I will not take charity.’ Ettore clenches his teeth, repositions the crutch beneath his arm.

‘Don’t make yourself ridiculous, son,’ Leandro murmurs. The two men stare at one another. Leandro’s eyes are so dark that nothing can be read in them. They are like black glass, impossible to see through.

The two of them are standing next to the well, a lidded shaft that drops into one of several underground water cisterns around the masseria, into which the rain, when it comes, pours like a river. The kitchen girl, Anna, comes to draw water. She has round hips, a nipped-in waist below heavy breasts, and she blushes when she has to approach them. Leandro breaks off his scrutiny of Ettore to watch her, because the weight of the water pail makes her hips jiggle, and then he looks at his nephew and grins. But Ettore does not look at the girl. He has no interest in her, and Leandro’s smile fades away. ‘You still grieve, my boy. For that girl of yours.’

‘Livia,’ says Ettore, and with her name, as always, comes a cold, needling feeling inside him.

‘Livia, yes. It’s terrible to lose the one you love. And to lose her in such a way… You still don’t know who was responsible?’

‘If I did that man would be dead.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Leandro nods. ‘I’ve found out nothing, I’m afraid. If I do, you’ll know it at once. But the men know I am your uncle, you see. I’m sure they guard their tongues around me.’ He looks down at his feet, at the high shine on his brogues.

‘I’m sure they do. But thank you.’ Ettore frowns. ‘You have a new overseer,’ he says. Leandro’s head comes up in an instant.

‘Yes,’ he says, and there’s a warning in the word.

‘How can you give that man work, Uncle? He beat you once, did he not? I was little but I remember it. He beat you and then he pissed on you, in front of everybody, for having a handful of burnt wheat in your pocket at the end of the day. How can you look at him, and not want to kill him? How can you give him work and pay?’ he says. Leandro’s face goes blank and then tightens in anger. Ettore doesn’t know if it’s the memory or his invoking of it that causes the spasm. Then Leandro smiles, the chilly smile of a reptile. Ettore’s sure that smile has been the last thing some men ever saw.

‘Ah, Ettore. Yes, Ludo Manzo is an animal. But don’t you see? He’s my animal now. He runs the farm better than anyone else, and what better way to take revenge on a man than to come to rule him?’

‘As I would not be a slave, so I would not be an owner of slaves,’ says Ettore. ‘Your Marcie taught me that last winter. One of your presidents said it.’

‘My presidents?’

‘Her presidents. America’s presidents,’ Ettore corrects himself, quickly. He may be family, but Ettore knows better than to call his uncle an American.

‘I learnt a saying in America too, you know.’ Leandro smiles again, and some of the tension goes out of him. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ He chuckles, and shakes his head. ‘Ettore, you of all people should know that this is no place for nobility.’ Leandro takes a few steps away, out of the shade and into the hard sunlight, then he turns back. ‘Avoid him, if it upsets you to see him. Don’t make trouble. And stay, I beg you. Let me do my dear sister that service. If you will not take an easy job here, then at least stay until you can walk better.’

Leandro disappears into the house, calling for his wife, and Ettore hears the high bird-call of Marcie’s answer, echoing inside. Chiara and her stooping husband have vanished, and the boy is alone on the terrace, reading a book with one foot propped up on the opposite knee, the fingers of his free hand fiddling ceaselessly with the laces of his shoe. Ettore waits to know what to do next. The sun slides slowly across the courtyard, and the breeze that blows is furnace hot, dry as the land. The harelipped driver comes out of the kitchens, swinging his arms. He lies down in the shadow of the water trough, puts his hat over his face, and sleeps. Once he’s settled, a few tatty sparrows flutter back to perch along the chipped lip of the trough, dipping their beaks, resting.

Ettore can’t leave, and he can’t stay. He leans back against the wall. In the winter he was here for weeks because he caught the influenza. There was no work then anyway, so he didn’t miss out on any wages, but Paola threw him out of the house in case he passed the infection to Iacopo, or to her. Sometimes Paola weakens, and says he should exploit their rich uncle more; she’s too pragmatic to pass up any opportunity of wages when they’re starving. But the Taranos and the Cardettas are on opposite sides of this war now, with a gulf between them, and Ettore remembers his mother reading and rereading one of the letters that Leandro sent sporadically from America, sometimes with money in, sometimes without. That particular letter came with a lot of money, and his mother held it in her hand, clenching it tight, while she read and reread. In the end she looked up, her eyes full of sorrow in the failing light, and said:

‘My brother has forgotten who he is.’

Ettore stands up from the wall, walks under the arch where the huge gates are, goes through a small door in one wall and climbs carefully up the spiral staircase inside. The steps are steep, and he’s clumsy with his crutch. The stairwell is lit by narrow slits in the wall, slits through which once arrows, and now bullets, can be shot. He pauses beside one, and runs his fingers around its rough edge. It’s chipped and worn from centuries of use. Ettore takes a breath, shuts his eyes. He sees a bloom of smoke from just such a slot, and a fragment of a second later, hears the crack of the shot. There was a startled gasp at his side, a thump like a fist punched into sand, and a cloud of red droplets as fine as morning mist. Davide dropped like a felled tree beside him, and was dead before he hit the ground. No weapon in his hand; a puzzled expression on his face. Paola’s lover; Iacopo’s father. It’s almost exactly a year since the massacre at the Masseria Girardi. Almost exactly a year since Ettore had to sneak home across country, once dark had fallen, and tell his sister that the second man she’d dared to love was dead. Iacopo was just a smooth swelling under her blouse then, and she’d put her hands underneath it to support it while she howled. She must know how wrong it feels for him to be on the inside of walls like these. Wrong like trying to breathe underwater.

Ettore carries on up the stairs to the roof and emerges into the light. The guard had been snoozing, sitting with his back to the parapet and his knees drawn up. He struggles to his feet and swings his rifle up, then grins foolishly and waves when he recognises Ettore. He is young, and has a kind face; fair hair, a snub nose. Ettore can’t remember his name – Carlo? Pietro? He nods to him and negotiates the pitch of the roof to reach the edge, to lean over and look out. The dry rocky plain of the Murgia stretches away as far as he can see – the high plateau that rises inland and runs almost the length of Puglia, north to south, like a giant finger. High enough for the temperature to be lower than at the coast; high enough for there to be snow in the winter, sometimes. But he can see no rivers, no creeks, no lakes. He’s above the west wing of the quad, and against the wall below there’s a vegetable garden, green with care and water, looking garishly bright against the brown and grey hues of everything else. Little red tomatoes crawl along the ground on their vines; pumpkins too; zucchini; globular aubergines, not yet ripe. There’s a path lined with apricot and almond trees, leading to an ancient stone love seat beneath a bower of roses that have shed their petals in distress at the drought. The garden is centuries old; Marcie revived it when she first came, with her fast unravelling dreams of the romance of Italy. The love seat has cracked right down the middle. Slowly, slowly, the land will reclaim it. The air is clear today, as though even the dust hasn’t the energy to stir beneath such a sun, and slowly, from the direction of Gioia, a figure swathed in dark clothing walks towards the farm. Long before he can see her face Ettore recognises his sister, and the strutting way she walks with the weight of her son on her back. He hurries down to meet her.

Paola waits for him at the gates, curling her fingers around the bars like a prisoner, and when she sees him walking towards her she grins – fleetingly, but it transforms her face and sends a jolt of joy through Ettore like a kick in the back. It’s been a long time since he saw his sister’s smile. He pulls her head towards him and presses his lips to her forehead, and they come away with the salt taste of her skin on them.

‘You’re up. You’re well,’ she says, and her relief is plain.

‘Yes. Soon I won’t need this thing.’ He smiles and raps the end of the crutch against the gate.

‘Don’t rush it. Let it heal.’

‘Yes, little mother.’

‘Don’t mock, just do as I tell you,’ she says, but she can’t be stern. Ettore reaches through and turns her shoulder to see his nephew. The baby is fast asleep with his face rucked up against Paola’s spine; his cheeks are marbled red, and he mumbles to himself when Ettore brushes his forehead. ‘Don’t wake him. He screamed half the night away.’

‘Is he sick?’

‘No.’ Paola smiles again. ‘Two teeth are coming through. A few more and he’ll be better furnished than Valerio,’ she says. Ettore laughs quietly, and for that moment the simple happiness of the child thriving is enough.

Paola’s face falls first. She looks past Ettore at the implacable white walls of the masseria, and her eyes are troubled.

‘Come in. See our uncle and Marcie. You know how she loves to see Iacopo,’ says Ettore, but Paola shakes her head.

‘She loves it too much. I think she wants to eat him.’

‘Don’t be cruel.’

‘I saw her plenty when we brought you here. Me and Pino. Has Leandro offered you work?’

‘Work as soft as I’d like it,’ he says, disgusted.

‘Take it,’ she says flatly.

‘No, Paola! Must we have the same argument over and over? This is a war, and you of all people know it. Leandro has chosen his side and we-’

‘Poete got caught. They found him with a flask of milk hidden in his coat, and fired him.’

‘Damn him… Clumsy idiot.’ But even though he’s dismayed Ettore is also happy that Paola won’t have to let the man touch her any more.

‘Valerio can’t get work. He stands there coughing and spitting and shaking like a leaf, and no bastard will hire him – why should they? He’s scarce fit to lift his feet, let alone a scythe or flail. We’ve nothing, Ettore. You must take work here.’

‘I can get other work, real work-’

‘Don’t be a fool! You’ve one good leg, and if you open that wound again… I nearly lost you, Ettore. We can’t lose you. Don’t be a fool.’ Her voice is taut with fear. Ettore leans his head against the hot metal of the gate and feels it cutting into him. He says nothing. ‘You must do this, Ettore. Your scruples won’t feed my baby. They won’t. Please.’ He can’t bring himself to speak, because he knows she’s right. Suddenly the gate is like prison bars indeed, and inside he is not his own man. He has no control. She clasps her hard hands around his for a moment before she turns to go, and he takes a breath. She has iron inside her, like the gates. Nothing will bow her.

‘Wait,’ he calls, and she turns. ‘Wait and I’ll get some food for you to take back. If this is our family, let them feed us,’ he says bitterly. Paola doesn’t smile again, but she looks relieved, and she nods.

For four days Ettore does as his uncle suggested, and stews on what his sister told him. She asks of him something she would be unwilling to do herself, but then, her wages, a woman’s wages, would scarcely be worth the self-loathing. He rests his leg. He sleeps and eats and does no work, and feels like he’s marooned outside his own life. He itches to be away, to be whole and gone. He doesn’t eat at the table with his uncle and Marcie and their guests unless he’s directly requested to; he says little, letting their English rattle around him, unexamined. The amount of food they put away, the constant chewing, the way some dishes are sent back all but untouched, enrages him in a way that makes it hard to breathe. The muscles between his ribs pull the bones into a tight cage. Whenever he can he fetches his food from the kitchen instead, and takes it up to the roof to eat it, where the guards have got used to seeing him. On the fourth day his uncle returns to Gioia with the architect, and he’s left alone with the women and the boy, which makes it easier for him to keep himself away. He can see that Marcie’s wounded; he’s being an ungracious guest, he knows, but he doesn’t feel like a guest. He feels like a traitor. He goes around and around the masseria on his crutch, feeling the strength return to his arms and shoulders, the muscles burning, turning hard. The wound in his leg still pulls when he tries to use it – a wrenching feeling deep in the bone – so, since he must heal before he can leave, he doesn’t push it. He’s not dizzy any more, his body feels strong. He wakes earlier each day, with the voices of the dairy herd as it comes in for milking.

On the fifth day Ettore waits until dusk, until he sees lamplight from inside the overseer’s trullo, then he steels himself, limps over to the door and knocks before he can think twice. When Ludo Manzo opens it Ettore can’t prevent the disgust that jars through him. The overseer’s face is deeply scored by years of work outdoors, his top lip is seamed, his teeth are longer and browner than before, but his eyes are as hard and bright as they ever were. He studies Ettore for a second and then laughs out loud.

‘I see from your face that you’ve worked for me before,’ he says. His voice is deep and hoarse, like there’s grit in his throat. For a hideous moment Ettore is too cowed, too tied up with hate and fear to speak. He nods. ‘The boss told me you’d come and ask for work. I guess that’s why you’re here – not from some yearning for my company?’

‘Yes. No,’ says Ettore.

‘Well, I don’t remember you, Ettore Tarano, but I asked in town so I know you’re trouble. I guess since you’re the boss’s nephew, you’re my trouble now.’

‘I only want to work for a wage. Until my leg is whole and I can go back into the fields.’

‘Boy, you’re a damned fool. If I had a rich uncle, I’d make myself his right-hand man and get fat and drunk, and laid.’

‘I want to work for a wage.’

‘I heard you. And I said you’re a damned fool.’ Ludo stares hard at him, with his mouth twisted to one side as he thinks. Ettore fights the urge to fidget, to turn away, or to hit him. To do anything other than stand there in front of him, waiting, at his mercy again. If he did what Ludo suggested, if he used his uncle, he wouldn’t have to do this. He wouldn’t have to suffer the likes of this man. ‘All right. You can’t walk, you can’t carry. You can’t cut wheat. There’s pretty much fuck all you can do, but you can sit on your arse and you can watch, am I right? Take over from Carlo in the trullo by the gates at midnight. Keep watch. The rifle stays there – you take it from him, you hand it to the man who relieves you in the morning. Is that understood?’

‘Yes.’ The effort of staying calm, of staying still, is exhausting. When Ludo nods and shuts the door the breath rushes out of Ettore, and he droops. A guard, with a rifle. Inside pissing out, as his uncle once said to him. And if raiders come from Gioia what then? Will he shoot at them – at people he might know, people he has worked with, people he lives alongside? Ettore limps away.

Until midnight he waits in the vegetable garden, where it’s cool and there’s a good smell of green things. Out of habit he pulls a few weeds and makes a heap of them; he picks a few little tomatoes and eats them. Bats twist and turn silently along the tunnel made by the fruit trees. When it gets too dark Ettore sits down on the broken love seat and looks up at the sky, and thinks about Livia. She managed to walk some of the way home, after she was attacked. She made it to the edge of town, where she was found, and brought the rest of the way. Bruises the size and shape of a man’s fingers on her neck and breasts and thighs; little cuts from the point of a sharp knife, circling her throat like a necklace; bite marks all over her. She was mute with shock; could tell them nothing. It took her two days to die of her wounds, and it was an infection, not the severity of them, that took her. The festering of wounds inside her that her mother couldn’t see or clean. She ran a violent fever; her skin was hot, dry and burnished red. She didn’t smell right, and when her eyes were open they focused on nothing. Tell me I’m your sweetheart, she said, over and over again. Tell me I’m your sweetheart. Ettore squeezed her hand tight in his, and kissed her knuckles, and told her that he loved her and that she was his sweetheart, which made her frown slightly, as if dissatisfied. Towards the end she gave no sign of even hearing him, and only repeated her request over and over again. Tell me I’m your sweetheart. So he told her, over and over again, that she was his sweetheart, even though that was not a term they had ever used before, and it puzzled him; he told her that he loved her, that he belonged to her, and he pressed his hands to her burning skin as if he might wick the heat away from it. And then she died.

The sound of quiet footsteps jars him back to himself, and he notices that his eyes are wet and itching. He scrubs his face with one hand and then goes still, and hopes to go unnoticed by whatever corporal or servant is passing. But the footsteps turn into the garden, and silhouetted against the light from the masseria he sees Chiara Kingsley. She seems to stare right at him but doesn’t see him there, deep in shadow beneath the trees. She stops walking, drops her chin to her chest and wraps her arms around her middle, curling in on herself as if she’s in pain. He expects to hear her sob, but she makes no sound at all. He can’t even hear her breathing. She seems like a person who’s trying not to be there; or is trying not to be at all. Pale skin and pale hair, with her lightness and her quietness, and her feet bare. To Ettore she looks like thistledown, like something as ephemeral and impermanent as that. Something that the wind will blow right through, even as it carries her along with it. Something that might vanish without trace. If Paola has iron inside her then this English woman has air, or some other intangible stuff. She’s not quite real. She’s not like anyone he has seen before.

She stays in that odd huddled posture for some time then drops her arms to her sides and looks up at the sky. She seems in no hurry to leave, and Ettore can’t stay still any longer. He reaches for his crutch and stands slowly, and hears her quick, indrawn breath.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Ettore,’ he says. He makes his way over to stand in front of her, so they are both half-lit and half-shadowed. He opens his mouth to say something else, but nothing comes. Chiara watches him, and her expectation makes him want to walk away.

‘You did not dine today,’ she says eventually, in Italian.

‘I did. Just not at my uncle’s table.’

‘You prefer to be alone?’ she says, and he doesn’t answer because though this is not quite right, it’s an easy explanation. ‘Are you well?’ He shrugs, and then nods. He gestures towards the crutch. ‘You don’t like to be here,’ she adds, and it’s not a question. Ettore shakes his head, on his guard. His aunt is easy to offend, his uncle even more so.

‘I do not like to be kept.’

‘Neither do I,’ she says softly. He frowns, and doesn’t understand her because what is she, what is the wife of a wealthy man, if not kept? ‘You are an uncle yourself,’ she says. ‘I met your sister when she came here with you. I saw that she had a baby.’

‘His name is Iacopo.’

‘Do you have children?’ she asks. He shakes his head. ‘Neither have I.’

‘Filippo?’

‘He is my…’ She can’t find the word in Italian. ‘My husband’s son. The son of his first wife.’ She starts to smile but it doesn’t quite take shape. In the dark her eyes are huge and dazed, like she can’t quite see. ‘I hate this place,’ she says then. ‘Is that the right word?’ Then she says something in English that he can’t quite catch, something bitter and angry.

‘You are free,’ says Ettore, puzzled. ‘You can go.’

‘No. I’m not. I can’t.’ She takes a long breath in. ‘Mr Cardetta says the peasants do not speak Italian, only the language of this place. How is it you can understand me?’

‘Italian was spoken at school. I have an ear for languages.’

‘You went to school?’ She sounds surprised, and then looks apologetic.

‘A few years, only.’

‘And you were able to learn some English from Marcie, over the winter.’

‘I must go. I am a guard now.’ He can’t keep his lip from curling as he says this, disgusted at himself. ‘You should not be outside the walls after dark. It isn’t safe.’ Her eyes go huge again, her arms wrap back around her, shielding her.

‘I wanted to run… to fly away,’ she says.

‘Escape.’ Ettore gives her the right word, and she nods. That naked look is back – that clarity, that lack of guard. It bothers him, somehow; it snags at him. Thistledown, he thinks. ‘Go back inside. You should not be out here.’ He leaves her there, not waiting to see if she does as he says.

Carlo, the fresh-faced guard he saw on the roof before, grins when Ettore comes to relieve him at the trullo by the iron gates. He stands up with a yawn, hands the rifle over and stretches his arms above his head.

‘Vallarta had a raid again, three nights ago,’ he says, as he passes Ettore on the threshold. ‘Three steers taken, and one of the barns torched. Don’t fall asleep. The bell is there.’ He indicates a large brass handbell in a niche in the wall. ‘Make a racket if you see or hear anything, and we’ll all come running.’ He walks off towards his bed with a jaunty step. Ettore runs his hands along the rifle; the smooth patina on the wood of the butt; the cold, dead, metal barrel. He has wanted to get his hands on a gun for a long time; holding it gives him a sudden wild pang, a feeling of power and reckless violence. In the trenches he felt better with his rifle in his hands; safer and stronger, even though he knew it meant almost nothing, and would likely make no difference. It was a feeling that came from the heart, not the head. He stares out into the darkness beyond the gates, then turns to look at the farm, glowing here and there with lamplight. He doesn’t know what it is that he wants to do.

There’s no light in the trullo, though a lantern sits primed and ready with a book of matches beside it. To light the guard would make him a target, and spoil his night vision; the darkness is where a nightwatchman belongs. Ettore sits down on the stone ledge by the doorway and rests the rifle across his thighs. It presses cold through the fabric of his trousers, though everything else is warm – the stone, the ground, the air. His heart feels cold along with it because he has crossed the divide. To anyone looking on, he has turned his coat. He doesn’t know what he will do if raiders come, and he prays that they won’t. There are flickers of lightning far off along the eastern horizon. He sits, and he listens to the quiet rustle of geckos hunting, and thoughts of Chiara Kingsley come to him unbidden – the pale weightlessness of her.

He catches himself wondering what her white skin would feel like under his hands, and whether if he held her she would just dissolve, and drift away. She might taste of nothing; might be as flavourless as water. She might be as insubstantial as a breath of air, but then he thinks of the first touch of cooler air that comes in the autumn, drifting down from the north, and how it always wakes him, tingling over his skin like soft sparks of electricity. She’s transparent, like water, and he thinks of the first swallow of water after long hours of work, when there’s dust in his throat and his eyes and his nose. He would devour her too, just like her stooping husband, if he knew she would make him feel that way. Air and water; thistledown. I want to fly away, she said, wrapping her arms around herself. And she ought to. Puglia is a land of earth and fire, he thinks. A thing of air and water will not long survive.

Chapter Nine – Clare

The first and only time Clare went to New York was late in the spring of 1914, as the creeping threat of war spread across Europe like an illness. In America the rich were still building, still dancing, still inventing cocktails and laughing the way Marcie laughs now, with excitement and abandon. Clare had been married to Boyd for three years, and she was happy; serene with her own brand of quiet joy. Then Boyd came home from work one day frowning and unsettled; there was a potential new project in New York and the senior partner wanted him to submit designs for it. Clare immediately encouraged him to go, and to take her too, before she remembered that Emma was from New York – that he’d met her there, married her there, lost her there. When Boyd’s pained expression reminded her, she stumbled into shocked silence. But after pausing for thought, she hid her embarrassment by pushing on, albeit nervously. She told him it might be a good thing for him to make peace with the city; to lay its ghosts to rest; to see old friends of his and Emma’s. At this his head snapped up.

‘But I don’t want to see any of them! It would… it would be too difficult. Too awful.’

‘Well… well then, darling, it’s a big enough city. Nobody need know you’re there at all, if you don’t want,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ said Boyd. He sounded careful, hopeful, as if he hadn’t considered this, so Clare pushed on once more.

‘We don’t have to go any of the places that you… went before. I’ve never travelled, Boyd; not properly. We can make it our second honeymoon. It would be such an adventure, and, well, it can only be good for you, surely? I mean, workwise.’ The month before, Boyd had been passed over for a senior partnership for a second time. He ran his hands through his hair, stood up and paced the sitting room carpet for a while. ‘Please let’s go, Boyd. I think it would be wonderful.’

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘All right, we’ll go.’

It would be a better honeymoon this time around, Clare decided, since the first had been rife with the awkwardness of two shy people making love for the first time. They’d gone to the Isle of Wight for a week, but her memories were of all the painful little misunderstandings, odd misfires and subtle disappointments. Boyd made the journey to New York first, and had been there some weeks before Clare travelled out to join him, leaving Pip at home with a nanny. He’d started work on his design for the new bank building – not quite a grand hotel, but still something monumental. That was the word the bank used – monumental. Something that people would have to stop to look at, and tip back their heads to take in. He had a design but it wasn’t quite there – she heard those words a lot in the six weeks she stayed in the small rented apartment near Central Park. It’s not quite there. They never mentioned Emma; Clare watched her husband carefully for signs of grief or painful memory, and was relieved to see none.

She’d been a little anxious that the trip might make him worse, not better, but she began to relax. Boyd had spent the first year of their marriage jumping at shadows, and now and then they’d overwhelmed him. Like the time she’d found him holding Emma’s silk gloves, cast away in thought. He was the first to check the post every morning; he stiffened whenever the doorbell rang. Clare sometimes found him staring out of a window, or into the fire, hands in his pockets, eyes glassy. Once she saw him staring at Pip as he played with his trains on the nursery carpet, and she went in to them with a smile but paused, because Boyd was looking at his son as if he hadn’t the slightest idea who he was. But things had improved since then; the shadows had receded, and he was less distant. Clare spoke about Emma with Pip, but never with Boyd. She wanted her husband to concentrate on the future, not the past, and it seemed to her, in those first few weeks they were together in New York, that he was doing exactly that.

Boyd seemed focused, but happy. He spent long hours studying the Flatiron, and the brand new Woolworth Building, and the St Regis Hotel. He knew the bank had three firms working on preliminary drawings, and that he was the only European. He knew they expected to see something stately and Victorian in style from him, or something beaux-arts; something with all the dyed-in-the-wool grandeur of the Empire. Boyd wanted to give them something they hadn’t even considered – something they’d never seen before, but that wouldn’t shock them overly. A clock tower to break the roofline, with decorations either side after the ancient Egyptian style, and thin obelisks at each corner, like delicate, geometric rock pinnacles. He was secretive, and wouldn’t show Clare the drawings he spent so many hours hunched over. Late in the day he’d let her coax him away from them to walk beneath the brand new leaves in Central Park, where the constant city roar was a murmur, and the air smelled of living things as well as food and sweat and burning. The owner of the bank was hosting a party to mark the submission and unveiling of the three designs. The mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, would be attending, and with that news Clare realised, finally, the significance of what her husband was working on. And the day after that announcement came something happened, and Boyd was never the same again.

Clare returned to the apartment from lunch with the wives of two of Boyd’s colleagues, and found him at the window in a posture of such unnatural stiffness that she thought at once he’d had terrible news of some kind. Her stomach dropped; she thought immediately of Pip.

‘Boyd, darling, what is it? What’s happened?’ she said, but he didn’t move. She went to stand beside him and saw the glass in his hand, and the brandy bottle on the ottoman, and noticed the stink of it all around. ‘Boyd?’ she whispered, but she might as well have been mute, invisible. He looked dead. His face was grey and had a shine to it; unpleasant-looking, like something was trying to ooze out from inside him. If he was breathing it didn’t move his chest and it made no sound. His eyes looked dull and empty. If she’d found him lying down in that state she would have screamed. She tried to take his hand but it was clenched tightly around something, and then she noticed a few white spots against the green carpet. She frowned at them until she realised what they were. Frantically, she prised open Boyd’s hand and found his little jar of barbiturate pills, which he took to soothe his nerves and help him sleep. The jar was empty.

At her touch Boyd turned his head slowly towards her and, just as slowly, his face collapsed; his mouth melting open, misshapen, trembling. Clare caught her breath. ‘Boyd, tell me! Tell me! Is it Pip? Has something happened to Pip?’

‘They were here. They came here,’ he said. ‘They knew… knew where I was.’ The words were so slurred and distorted she could hardly make them out.

‘Who knew? Who came here? Boyd, I don’t understand.’ Boyd swayed, took a staggering step, fell to his knees. Clare went down with him and put her arms around him, tried to soothe him. He was heavy, and threatened to topple all the way; she struggled to hold him, and then, with a spasm that felt strange against her body, he vomited. She felt the heat of it spatter her calves, and the stink of the brandy got stronger, and as she tugged and cajoled him towards the bathroom she saw more white pills in what he’d brought up. Many more. He was sick again, and a third time before she managed to get him any distance at all. Everything about him was unfamiliar; his long body was a dead weight, his loose face and rolling eyes had no trace of his personality, or the melancholy dignity of the man she’d married. She left him lying on his side while she called the doctor, so panicked that at first she couldn’t remember how to use the telephone, even to reach the concierge.

The doctor was with him for a long time. He gave Boyd an emetic that brought up everything else inside him, until his convulsions resulted in nothing but strands of spittle and horrible choking sounds. Clare went back and forth to the bathroom, emptying the doctor’s bowl, trying to clean the worst of the sick from the carpet. The smell of it was inescapable. Outside the window, the sun moved below the rooftops and the sky turned dove grey. Clare watched pigeons bolt across it and noticed how the twilight took the colour out of everything. She felt that these were things that were happening to another person, someone quite other than her. She was detached from them; she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to think too much about it. She only knew her own fear for what it was when the doctor emerged, and sent her heart jolting madly.

‘How many pills did he take?’ the doctor asked her, brusquely.

‘I… I don’t know. There were around fifty in the bottle, I believe, and… and a handful were on the carpet. And then, when he was sick…’ She swallowed nervously.

‘It’s very lucky he began to purge when he did. Very lucky indeed. Mrs Kingsley, has your husband attempted to harm himself in this way before?’

‘To harm himself? Oh, I don’t think… I mean, I’m sure he didn’t intend…’ Clare fell silent. The doctor watched her steadily. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t that. He takes the pills for his nerves. Sometimes he… he can’t sleep.’ Her voice was jittery.

‘It does no good to ignore these things, Mrs Kingsley. I believe he’s out of any danger. Let him rest, give him plenty of fluids, and I’ll be back in a few hours to check up on him.’

It was a long time after the doctor left that Clare found the courage to go in to her husband. She dreaded to find that grey-faced, boneless stranger; and if he was Boyd again, she dreaded that too. She had no idea what to say to him, no idea what to do. She crept in as quietly as she could; the glass of water she carried shook so badly it threatened to spill. She hoped to find him sleeping but he was awake, sitting up against several pillows with no hint of colour in his face.

‘How are you now?’ she said, as though he’d had a slight cold. Boyd’s eyes glimmered with tears at the sight of her; he squeezed them tight shut, like he couldn’t bear it. Clare put the water down beside him and took his hand, gathering her nerve. ‘Will you tell me what this is about, darling? Will you please tell me?’ she said, as gently as she could. Boyd looked up at her, and took a breath. But after a moment of thought he shook his head.

‘I can’t, Clare. You of all people… I can’t. Forgive me. Forgive me.’ His throat sounded raw. You of all people. She dwelt on the meaning of that for a moment.

‘You said before that “they” had come here. Who did you mean, darling? Was it… was it some old acquaintances of yours? Friends of Emma’s?’ This was all she could think of that might have upset him so – something to revive his grief, and bring it the surface. She’d often felt, since they wed, that he kept too quiet about it. That he kept it from her, so as to never crowd his second wife with the shadow of his first. Perhaps such a storing up of feeling was unhealthy – perhaps this sudden eruption was its only possible outcome. She should have known that sooner or later it would flare up, like a sickness, and knock him down. And she had persuaded him to come to the one place on Earth where that was most likely to happen. Guilt seized her. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, and kissed his hand. ‘I should have let you speak of her more. I should have encouraged it, in fact. You must, if you think it would help; you needn’t fear that I’ll resent her. I won’t, I promise.’ Boyd said nothing.

Carefully, uncertainly, life carried on. Clare drew the curtains against the evening, switched on lamps and brewed tea. She tried to ignore the feeling that the ground was fragile beneath her feet. Over the following few days she tried to catch her husband’s eye, tried a small smile now and then, but he barely seemed to see her and she felt a little chill in her heart, knowing then that he could never love her as much as he’d loved Emma. But she resolved to love him enough, him and his son, for that not to matter. And he did love her, she was sure of that; even if it was only with the love he had left over after loving Emma. It would be enough. It was three days later, at bedtime, when Boyd finally volunteered to speak, and in the darkness his voice sounded different, and strange.

‘I… I would die without you, Clare. You’re an angel. I would die without you.’ Clare smiled automatically, though he couldn’t see it. He’d never been as frank before, never expressed such devotion. She smiled and waited to feel happy, and couldn’t work out why happiness didn’t come. Perhaps because he sounded so sure, so adamant, and she didn’t want it to be true – not literally, because anything might happen to her, just like it had to Emma. Sudden sickness, sudden death. She was awake for a long time, too troubled to sleep. She thought and thought, and though her guilt made her replay the events, over and over – what if she hadn’t persuaded him to come to New York, what if she hadn’t gone out to lunch that day, what if she had coaxed him to express his grief before then – she nevertheless suspected that this crisis had been waiting inside Boyd all along. She suspected that it was waiting there still.

For the rest of their time in New York Boyd was jumpy and distant, worse even than when Clare first knew him. She found herself watching him, and being careful not to let him notice that she was. She watched, and she saw the tiny blisters of sweat along his hairline, and on his upper lip. She saw the way his fingers fumbled at things, like they were numb. She saw his eyes slide away when people spoke to him, and the way their words drifted past him, unregistered. She saw him sit for hours in front of his drawings and not change a single line. As the day of the deadline and the night of the reception approached, she caught him just standing again, staring. She could think of no way to break the spell, no way to distract him. She felt as though she were on a cliff top, leaning out; her heart careered along whenever she spoke to him. She was no longer sure of anything. She was no longer sure of him.

‘We could just go home. Couldn’t we?’ she said, softly, over breakfast. ‘If the drawings are done, couldn’t we just go? We needn’t stay a moment longer. We needn’t go to the party…’ As she spoke she was assaulted by a homesickness so powerful it actually ached. She wanted their terraced house in Hampstead with its little square of garden, and Pip home from school, smelling of socks and pencil shavings, asking to be held. She wanted things she understood. Whatever their trip to New York had been, it had been no honeymoon.

‘Go? I can’t go!’ said Boyd, almost shouting. He shook his head manically. ‘I can’t go home. I have to be there.’

‘All right,’ she murmured, and in that moment, again, she didn’t know him at all. There was something underneath, something inside him she didn’t recognise. ‘May I see your drawings?’ she said. He took a breath and looked away.

‘Yes. If you’d like. They’re risible,’ he said. But they weren’t risible. Boyd had designed a building both grand and graceful; simple yet striking. What it was not was innovative. It was a perfect piece of stone-built, European beaux-arts, and wouldn’t have looked at all out of place on the Champs-Élysées. There was no Egyptian clock tower, no pinnacles; nothing of the exotic. Clare swallowed her confusion, and something that was almost disappointment. He seemed to neither want nor need her opinion, but she gave it anyway, as robustly as she could.

‘I think it’s wonderful, Boyd. I think it’s just wonderful.’

‘Do you?’ he said, but he didn’t want reassurance. The question sounded scornful, and an affirmation died on her lips.

As they entered the foyer of the Hotel Astor on the night of the party Clare felt tremors running through Boyd; insistent little shivers, as if he was freezing on the inside that warm May night. She didn’t care that she wore the least jewellery of any woman there, or that her dress was the least fashionable. She didn’t care about being patronised, and called quaint. She no longer even cared whether or not the bank chose Boyd’s design. She only cared about getting away, getting out of New York, going home, with the hope that he would then go back to being the man she’d married. That man had sorrow inside him, but at least sorrow was a thing she could recognise. This nameless terror, this crack in his soul that seemed to be widening, was nothing she knew. He spoke to nobody; he drank with grim determination and his eyes darted from face to face, and into the corners of the room, as though he felt watched.

The young mayor made a speech about their ever-developing great city, and about clearing out corruption. Boyd paled as he listened. He radiated tension, and as the evening grew old he crossed the room to talk to the mayor, who was conversing with two other men. And then it was over. They went back to the apartment, and caught the boat home the next day, and a week later heard that Boyd’s building had been chosen, and would be built. He squeezed Clare tightly then, and for a long time.

‘Thank you, Clare. My angel, thank you,’ he whispered. ‘I wouldn’t have survived it without you.’ By that time, Clare was too exhausted and too bewildered to guess, or to ask what it was he’d survived.

Now she thinks she knows, at least in part, because it can’t be a coincidence that they have been called to Italy by a New York acquaintance Clare hadn’t known existed, and that Boyd is showing some of the same symptoms of stress that he had in New York. For the first time ever she’s angry with her husband for hiding things from her. For leaving her to guess at so many things that he won’t talk about. I won’t allow it, Cardetta said, and there had been no doubting that without his consent, she and Pip could not leave. The anger is as unfamiliar to Clare as the new wakefulness she’s felt since Ettore Tarano was brought to the masseria. She examines the feeling, noting the way it makes her move abruptly and create more noise than she normally would.

Everything that was muted is loud and obvious now. She’s fascinated by the feel of things. She runs her hands over the powdery plaster walls of the bedroom, the smooth dark wood of the bed frame, the rough stone blocks in the stairwell, the hard linen table napkins, shiny from pressing. She rolls splinters of bread crust into powder between finger and thumb; pulls her hands through long lengths of her own hair. The lines of grout between the white and red floor tiles press hard into the soles of her feet; grit gets into her shoes and grinds against the leather insoles as she walks; she hears the changing percussion of her heels on tile, stone, and dusty ground. Before, she could only smell the mess of the dairy cows, the cloying scent of their milk and the jasmine flowers. Now she can smell the stone itself, limey and hard; she can smell the guards’ sweat, built up over years in the fabric of their shirts. She can smell her own sweat, and Pip’s hair that needs washing again. She can smell Marcie’s face powder. She can smell the dust in the tasselled curtains.

Pip is determined to make a pet of one of the guard dogs. He spends two days studying and assessing them, decides which seems the most receptive and names it Bobby.

‘Bobby?’ Marcie echoes, when he tells them over lunch. ‘Shouldn’t he have an Italian name, though? It’ll be hard enough to tame him if he can’t understand you.’

‘It’s short for Roberto,’ says Pip, with a grin, and Marcie laughs.

‘You must be careful, Pip,’ says Clare. ‘Mr Cardetta warned you that they’re not the kind of dogs you’re used to.’

‘I know, but Bobby’s different. Come and see, will you? Can I take him the bones from my chops?’

‘Oh, sure, whatever you want,’ says Marcie. ‘Only don’t ask me to go and stroke the thing. I’ve never liked dogs.’

‘Bobby’s not a thing! Come on, Clare.’ The dogs start barking as soon as they appear through the front door of the masseria. Their feet churn the dust as they pace at the ends of their chains; their voices are deep and hoarse. Clare had expected lean, sparse, desert dogs to cope with the Puglian climate, like the dogs from the hieroglyphs on an ancient tomb; not these heavy, shaggy, white things. The fur under their bellies is filthy and knotted. Pip leads her to one, which she assumes is Bobby. It cowers and bares its teeth; it snarls even as it wags its tail; runs at them then sidles back. The animal has been driven half-mad by its tethered life and has no idea who or what it is, or how to behave towards a stranger offering food, and Clare both pities and fears it. Its confusion is dangerous; Pip can’t know what the dog will do next if it doesn’t know itself. She takes his arm, stops him getting too close.

‘Careful, darling. Please – I know you like him but it will take him a while to trust you, and if he’s frightened he might bite.’

‘He won’t bite me,’ says Pip, but Clare’s relieved to see he keeps himself at a prudent distance. Bobby refuses to come and take the pork bones, and in the end Pip has to throw them. The dog stinks; Clare can smell its breath when it barks. Its bewilderment pierces her heart. ‘He could be a good dog, don’t you think?’ says Pip.

‘He already is – he has a job to do here, and perhaps it’s not very fair to try and interfere with that,’ she says.

‘I’m not interfering,’ says Pip, hurt. ‘I’m only making friends.’

‘I know, darling. Come on – fancy a walk?’

Later, when Ettore joins them for dinner, Clare’s distracted by nerves. She can’t concentrate on the food or on Marcie’s chatter. She can sense Pip’s curiosity, and their hostess’s slight mania; she guesses that there is some family drama concerning Leandro’s nephew, yet to play out. Most of all she can sense Ettore’s indecision, his desperation. She sits forward, ready, not sure what she’s ready for. He gives her the same feeling as Bobby does – that she has no idea what he will do next; that he also has no idea. He eats like he hasn’t in a week and she wants to steady him in case he chokes. He is whip-thin, the muscles on his arms and shoulders are lean and hard; there’s nothing spare. Below his ribs his stomach is concave. When she speaks to him she hopes she is understood. Their rapid English, which they allow to pass him by, seems like an insult, and she hates it. She thinks hard, searching out the right words in Italian, and when she says them there’s the slightest easing of his tension, and she’s glad. She wants to know about his unusual eyes, but what can she ask? These things happen; the commingled blood of a thousand ancestors produces strange anomalies, now and then. She wants to tell him he is beautiful, but he wouldn’t want to hear it. He’s living through a crisis, she can feel it, and she couldn’t bear to make herself ridiculous to him.

Ettore keeps himself apart from them. The next day, Marcie and Pip start their acting lessons in the unused room high in the south-west corner of the masseria, which has windows looking out across the aia, and to the horizon where the sun will set. Clare goes up to watch, for something to do, because her mind is too full and there are no books to read, nothing to distract her, or to keep her eyes from searching him out constantly. The room is empty of furniture apart from a dusty old couch – sagging, dishevelled – which they drag in from a neighbouring room and position facing the dais where a bed would once have been, which will be the stage. On the wall above this platform are the faded remains of a large mural, painted into a shallow, half-moon alcove. There are traces of blue and red robes, the feet of a dog, faces blurred by time and the chalking of the plaster. One perfect brown eye remains, floating in strange clarity in the obliterated remains of a face. It’s wide and benign, but still it gives Clare an uneasy feeling, a sense of being transparent.

Marcie and Pip’s voices echo back at them from the lofty ceiling; the curtains have been taken down, the rest of the walls are bare. In the corner where the roof leaks there’s bat shit on the tiles and a swathe of algae and water stain creeping down the wall.

‘So it must rain here, sooner or later,’ says Clare.

‘Oh, yes. It’s long overdue. Mind you, last year was a disaster – such a drought! And all the men muttering darkly about the harvest, all the time. Oh, it was grim. This year’s been positively soggy in comparison,’ says Marcie. ‘We had one rainstorm – well, you would have had to see it to believe it. You see the way the ground goes into that shallow gully out front there?’ She points out of the window, and Clare nods. ‘Full of water. Running like a river. It was amazing! I went a little bit nuts at the sight of it – I’d have paddled in it if Leandro hadn’t stopped me. They all just stood there and stared at it – all the farm boys. Like they’d never seen such a thing, and I suppose maybe they never had. It was all gone by the next morning, of course.’

‘Oh, look at the bats!’ says Pip, pointing up. Along one ceiling beam are a clustered line of dark bodies, silent and unmoving.

‘Ugh! Don’t!’ Marcie shudders. ‘It’ll be far, far better if I just pretend they aren’t there. Now, first things first. Some exercises to loosen us up and make us breathe and project properly. Filippo, if you’ll join me.’ She steps up onto the dais and shakes out her arms.

For almost an hour Clare watches Pip and Marcie inhaling and do-re-me-ing; rolling their heads, shaking their hands, expanding their ribcages. They each recite a favourite poem and then some lines from a play, and Marcie gives tips in the same breath as she praises, and Clare thinks that she would have made an excellent teacher if she hadn’t ended up on a remote farm in the remotest part of Italy. The smell of the guano makes her head ache; dust from the sofa makes her itch. It’s all she can do to sit still, not get up and run somewhere; she doesn’t know where. Then the dogs all start barking at once, the metal gates squeal and they hear a motor pulling in. Marcie pauses, then beams and claps her hands.

‘That’s a wrap, Pip – here’s your pop and my Leandro!’ She ushers them out, biting her lips and patting her hair into its neat wave. Clare’s hair is unravelling from its knot, as usual; she knows her face is shiny from the heat, and she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care if Boyd sees her that way, and can’t decide if she envies or pities Marcie for her devotion to beauty, and her obvious devotion to her husband. Clare wouldn’t want Ettore Tarano to see her wearing make-up. She wouldn’t want to accentuate the obvious – that their two lives, their two worlds, could not be further apart. It troubles her, as they go down to the courtyard, to realise that it’s his eyes she’s trying to see herself through, not Boyd’s.

After he’s spoken with his nephew, and they’ve eaten lunch, Leandro insists on taking them on a tour of the farm, and the four of them follow obediently as he shows them around the barns and the dairy and the dusty olive grove that stretches over several acres to the front of the masseria. Marcie ties a diaphanous scarf over her hat and loosely under her chin, and flaps her hand constantly at the flies.

‘This damned dust gets into everything – you’ll soon see, Clare. Just you wait, when you get ready for bed later you’ll find it in your chemise,’ she says.

‘My Marcie is a city girl,’ says Leandro, with a smile. ‘This is honest dirt, honey. Not like the soot and corruption of New York.’

‘I knew where I was with soot and corruption,’ says Marcie. ‘And there weren’t all these bugs.’

‘My friend John is obsessed with insects,’ says Pip, walking ahead of Boyd and Clare, alongside Leandro and Marcie. ‘He catches them and puts them in jars to study them. Then when they die he pins them to pieces of card and keeps them. Even little tiny gnats and thunderbugs. Although, he has to use glue for the thunderbugs because they’re too small to pin.’

‘Ugh.’ Marcie gives a shudder. ‘And you’re friends with this kid, Filippo?’

‘Better an odd interest than no interests at all,’ says Leandro. ‘I’m an oddity, myself. Just ask anyone around here. Many men who leave Puglia for America never come back. And those that do buy a patch of land, and only then remember what farming down here is like, and are broke again in a matter of months.’

At the far side of the olive field is a trullo built into a section of field wall, sitting empty with weeds growing all around and inside it. Pip ducks inside the small building straight away, picking his way through fallen stones.

‘There’s not much in here,’ he calls out. ‘Lizards and thistles.’

‘Watch out for snakes,’ says Leandro, and laughs when Pip goes still. Clare gives him an anxious look. ‘You should be fine. But mind where you put your feet.’

‘They’re kind of like igloos, aren’t they?’ says Marcie. Boyd is walking slowly around the structure, studying the way the stones are laid.

‘In the sense that the shape of the blocks and of the cone allows for the entire structure to be stabilised without the need for mortar or separate roof supports? Yes, very similar,’ he says.

‘Well, sure.’ Marcie smiles, flustered. ‘That’s exactly what I meant.’

‘There’s a proper chimney,’ says Pip, his voice echoing. Clare peers in; he has his head in the hearth.

‘They’re hovels,’ says Leandro, with a dismissive grunt. ‘Let’s carry on. Much more to see.’

As they walk, Clare finds curiosity overcoming her distrust of Leandro. He is so relaxed, so benign, she can hardly credit her own memory of the way he spoke to her in Gioia.

‘How is farming here, then, Mr Cardetta? You said the men who come back from America try to farm but mostly fail,’ she says.

‘I’m a novelty, Mrs Kingsley, in that I live on the land I own, and run it myself. Most of Puglia is latifundia – huge estates owned by rich, ancient families, some of whom haven’t actually been here in decades. They let the farms out on short leases to tenants who often aren’t even farmers, and have no experience of it at all. They’re speculators, with no incentive to make improvements to the land whatsoever. They make what profit they can and then they leave.’ He shrugs. ‘They use antique ways of farming that exhaust the soil. There’s no irrigation, no effective fertilisation, no proper crop rotation. We’re on the edge of failure, every year. So a drought like last year? Total disaster. Men starving to death in the streets, in some places. The tenants are working with tiny margins – there’s no room for error. They’re on the brink of ruin themselves a lot of the time, and the only thing they can control is how much or little they pay the workers. I hope to break this cycle. This is my land, and I want to see it fruitful and stable. I want to pass it down to my sons thriving.’ He sweeps his arm across the wide view of dry, rocky ground. ‘In whatever limited way it can thrive,’ he amends. Marcie loops her arm through his and squeezes it.

‘My visionary husband,’ she says.

‘Most Puglian landlords hate the place and can’t wait to leave, but not me. The government posts disgraced officials down here as a punishment,’ he says proudly. ‘But I can take whatever Puglia throws at me.’

They have come around in a large loop, and are approaching the masseria buildings from the back. As they get nearer they see two or three men standing around a tethered mule, one of them working bellows into a portable furnace, sweat running down his face. The mule’s mouth has been wedged open with wooden blocks secured with ropes around its head; its top lip is clamped viciously between the metal bars of a device that looks like a giant nutcracker. Each time the animal attempts to move, a hard-faced man gives a jerk of the clamp, and the animal holds still, rolling its eyes, its ears laid flat back against its head.

‘What are they doing to that poor mule?’ says Pip, as they draw nearer.

‘The animals here get a thing called lampas,’ says Leandro. ‘The roof of the mouth swells up and hardens, right behind the front teeth. It’s because of the rough food they get – straw and coarse stuff like that. It can get to the point where the beast can’t eat properly. The twitch, that device Ludo has hold of – that’s my overseer, Ludo Manzo – isn’t as bad as it looks. It actually helps the animal to relax.’

‘It looks evil,’ says Boyd. The man who had the bellows has taken a long, ridged iron tool from the coals, glowing red hot at its tip.

‘Let’s not watch,’ says Marcie. ‘Come on, Pip, Clare. Let’s go inside.’ The keen way she says it makes Clare only too happy to follow her, but Pip lags behind, turning his head to see.

Leandro and Boyd turn and start to follow the women, and then the mule starts to scream. There’s a smell of burning flesh, and Pip goes pale.

‘Make them stop it,’ he says, in a stunned voice.

‘Come away, Pip,’ says Clare, when she finds her voice. But Pip is frozen in horror and can’t seem to look away.

‘Cardetta – isn’t that dreadfully cruel?’ says Boyd. He too looks shocked; his face has paled. ‘There must be a better way to treat the poor creature.’

‘This is how it’s done.’ Leandro shrugs.

‘Pip, come on,’ says Clare. The mule’s screams are making her wince; she has the urge to put her hands over her ears, to run from it.

‘It’s horrible!’ Pip cries. There are tears in his eyes and he looks panicked. Swallowing hard Clare puts her arm around his shoulders and turns him forcibly. Leandro glances over with an inscrutable expression.

‘It is horrible, Pip, but it’s also necessary. Like a lot of things in life. It does no good to look the other way. That changes nothing.’

‘Really, Cardetta, he’s just a boy. And this isn’t how things are in our life – he’s not used to such things, and he needn’t become so,’ says Boyd frostily. Leandro smiles slightly at Boyd, and for some reason it chills Clare – or perhaps it’s the way Boyd recoils from it.

‘Really? In my experience there’s ugliness and violence in every life. It’s only a question of how well concealed they are,’ he says neutrally. ‘Down here, we don’t draw a veil over them.’ Clare looks at Boyd but he says nothing more. He turns his back on Leandro and marches towards the farm buildings with his head down, frowning. Pip shrugs Clare’s arm off gently and wipes at the tears on his cheeks.

‘I’m really fine, Clare,’ he says.

‘Made of sterner stuff, aren’t you, boy?’ says Leandro, catching up with them and clapping Pip on the shoulder. Pip manages to nod, though his face is still slack with horror.

For a while they can still hear the mule screaming from inside the masseria, and Clare’s head starts to throb with faint, imagined echoes of its torture. Pip has gone silent and morose, she suspects partly from shame at his own reaction to the scene, and she wants to tell him that he was right to be horrified, that he was right to cry. It’s the nature of boys to want to be like the men around them, but she never wants him to be as callously habituated to such things as Leandro is. She wishes Boyd would go to him and share his disgust, but Boyd has gone just as quiet as his son; he withdraws to a private room, muttering about the need to work. Clare wants to hug Pip and talk to him about it like she would at home, but things have changed subtly here, and with Marcie and Leandro watching she daren’t. When he pushed her encircling arm away, as they walked away from the mule, it was the first time he had ever rejected her touch.

In their room after dinner she’s unresponsive when Boyd hugs her. The anger, which lay still while they were in company, now rises again. They undress gradually and hang up their clothes, and the lamp conjures deep shadows in every corner. Clare finds lines of dirt under the straps of her bra, just as Marcie said she would. In his vest, shorts and socks, Boyd peers into the foxed mirror on the wardrobe door and combs his pale hair, frowning at it as if displeased. It looks just the same after he’s combed it – soft, wispy thin, close to his skull. Like a baby’s hair. Satisfied with it he comes across to her and kisses her, and she allows him to for just a moment before she drops her chin and turns her face away. He gives her a quizzical look, and when she doesn’t smile he moves away and pulls off his socks with a cautious air. He clears his throat.

‘Are you all right, Clare?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, truthfully enough.

‘Is it… what you saw in Gioia? Is it still troubling you?’

‘What I saw in Gioia will trouble me for the rest of my life.’ She watches him, and keeps her eyes on him, and he skits about in front of her as if he can’t bear her gaze – from the nightstand to the cupboard to the window and back.

‘Yes, of course.’ He steps into his pyjama trousers, buttons up the jacket, sits down on the edge of the mattress. ‘Will you come to bed? I’ve missed you so much these past few days.’ He looks down at his feet as he says this. His toes are long, bony and white, like the rest of him; his stomach is a soft rise behind the jacket, more noticeable than usual. Leandro has been feeding him well these past few weeks.

‘I feel wide awake,’ she says, and goes over to the window. Their room looks east; nothing to see but a swathe of dark ground, and in the distance the paler shade of a field of wheat stubble, lit by the moon.

‘Is it… is it something I’ve done, Clare? You’re being very cold,’ he says, sounding miserable. At once she feels the familiar guilt, and at the same time the new anger, all of it together, but she refuses to be paralysed by it. She won’t be gagged any more.

‘I want to know who Leandro Cardetta is. I want to know why we must do everything he says.’

‘Clare-’

‘Please… show me the respect I deserve as your wife, and as someone who has been with you through several… crises,’ she says, turning to him on the word ‘crises’, so that he knows exactly what she means. She means Christina Havers. The wife of a London client; the woman Boyd bedded for a time. He flinches and drops his gaze. She has such power to hurt him, power she doesn’t want. ‘Please tell me truthfully. Who is he?’ For a long time Boyd doesn’t answer. He swallows, and laces his fingers together, but she won’t let him off; she waits.

‘Leandro Cardetta,’ Boyd says eventually. He pauses, flutters one hand across his eyes. ‘Leandro Cardetta is a very dangerous man.’

A shiver runs over Clare’s skin; the hairs stand up along her arms. Boyd shoots her a wretched little glance, and she blinks.

‘In what way is he dangerous?’ she says.

‘In every way you can think of, Clare,’ he whispers, as though afraid of being overheard. From somewhere else in the house comes the sudden, distant peal of Marcie’s laughter, and Clare has a powerful feeling of unreality again, when she knows that this is all too real.

‘Is he… is he a criminal?’

‘He… yes. He was, when I first knew him. Now… I’m not sure. I don’t think so. He seems to want to be… respectable. He seems to want the farm to work.’

‘My God, Boyd… my God, what kind of criminal?’ Clare whispers.

‘What kind?’ Boyd echoes, as if bewildered by the question. ‘I suppose… I suppose you’d call him a mobster.’

‘A mobster? What do you mean?’

‘Organised crime… In New York. I… I don’t know. Theft… extortion… I’m not sure. It’s a world I don’t know, but it’s a dark world, and a violent one. I can’t say what he’s done, or what he hasn’t.’ As Boyd says this he pinches his eyes shut with the forefinger and thumb of one hand, curls his other arm around his middle. Hiding. Clare stares and thinks and can’t speak. ‘I’m sorry, Clare. I’m sorry that… you’re under the same roof as him…’

‘Is he a killer?’ she says. The question appals her.

‘I don’t know. He could be.’

‘Does Marcie know?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘How… how ever did you come to know him?’

‘I… he…’ Boyd murmurs these two words and then goes silent. He shakes his head, and there are tears in his eyes.

Clare doesn’t know how to feel, but he looks so dejected that she goes to sit beside him, and leans her face against his shoulder.

‘These people… once they’ve got your name, you see… once they know who you are, and how they can make use of you, then they’ll use any means to do so. They threaten what’s dear to you…’

‘He’s threatened you?’ she says, and Boyd nods. ‘That’s why when he wanted Pip and me to come out, for Marcie, you agreed?’

‘Yes. I did everything I could to dissuade him, and I said several times that I wouldn’t take the commission. I didn’t want anything more to do with him, but… he insisted.’ Boyd shakes his head, perplexed. ‘He insisted, and I’m a coward, Clare. He swears that this will be the last time, and I… I’ve seen what he can do. He knows where I work, so he could find out where we live, I’m sure of it. I just couldn’t risk alienating him. I’m so sorry. You must believe how sorry I am.’

‘Jesus Christ, Boyd!’ For a moment Clare almost laughs at the absurdity of it – avuncular Leandro, with his skittish, ebullient wife. ‘She can’t know – Marcie can’t know. I can’t believe it.’

‘Perhaps you’re right. She doesn’t seem… the type.’

‘So then, perhaps he has left it all behind him?’ Clare suggests. ‘Now that he has Marcie, and now that he’s come home to Gioia… Perhaps whatever he did in New York made him rich enough.’

‘I never met a rich man who didn’t want to be richer still,’ says Boyd, and shakes his head. ‘Please, please do nothing to test him, Clare. Promise me!’ He takes her hand and squeezes it hard, and she winces.

‘I promise.’ She takes a deep breath in and smells that sharp, sour scent, and realises now that it’s the smell of her husband’s fear. ‘But how does he even know you, Boyd? Why would he want you, of all people, to come to Italy and design his wretched new façade?’

‘I think…’ Boyd shakes his head and looks across at her with his eyes still swimming. ‘Christ, Clare, I think he just really liked the building I designed in New York.’

They look at one another and then laugh, just for a second. An incredulous laugh, brought on by nerves and adrenalin. It soon passes, and Boyd shakes his head again. ‘It’s really not funny at all, is it?’ he says.

‘Not one bit,’ Clare agrees.

‘What should I have done differently? Tell me. What would you have done?’ he says. Clare stands up, feeling light, alert, ready for violence. The feeling is alien to her, and it’s troubling but electric too; she feels very alive. She goes over to the window and looks out at the flat ground, silver in the moonlight, and feels so far from everything she knows that she could be on Mars. Just days ago she would have reassured him, even if the words had felt like cotton wool in her mouth. Now, that urge is gone.

‘What would I have done?’ She folds her arms, running her fingers over the rough gooseflesh of them. ‘I’ve have told him to hang from his damned façade,’ she says. ‘I would. But you didn’t say that. And here we are, you and I and Pip, stuck in a place where some kind of civil war is breaking out, in the house of a mobster and a show girl, and entirely at their disposal. What could possibly be wrong?’ She says it lightly but there’s no more laughter, no more smiles.

‘You’re different, Clare… what’s happened? What’s changed?’ says Boyd.

‘I woke up,’ she says softly.

After a long pause she turns to the bed, and climbs in on her side. ‘We’d better hope he likes your designs, or perhaps it’ll be curtains for us.’ Boyd frowns at this and lies down beside her, not trying to touch her. He leaves the light on as if they might talk more, but for a long time they are silent. Clare rolls onto her side, turning her back to him.

‘You’re so strong, Clare. So much stronger than I am. I’m so lucky to have you… I know I am. I couldn’t be without you, darling,’ says Boyd. ‘I don’t know what I’d do, if I ever lost you.’ Clare lies very still and doesn’t answer him. None of it is a question, but all of it begs for acknowledgement. She feels hot, and hard, and tightly wound; she doesn’t trust herself to speak. She stares at the heavy door to their room; the vast iron lock, the archaic key that sits in it, ready to be turned. But she is trapped with Boyd already, of course. She has been for years.

Next morning there’s a hush at the breakfast table, as if they’re all waiting for something; even Marcie seems to feel it because though she smiles a great deal, words are few. After a while Clare realises that she isn’t the only one waiting for Ettore to appear – her hosts are too. The longer he doesn’t show, the more strained Marcie seems, and the darker Leandro’s expression becomes.

‘Perhaps your nephew wasn’t feeling very well again when he woke up. Do you think I should go and check on him?’ says Pip. All eyes turn to him, and he blushes, and Clare wonders at his intuition. For a second Leandro’s hard, black gaze settles on Pip, and Clare’s heart lurches, but then his face softens and he shrugs a little.

‘I saw him out first thing this morning. Loping along on that crutch he’s found. He’s fine, Pip, he just doesn’t want to sit down and eat like a gentleman.’

‘Why not?’ says Pip.

‘Philip, it’s rude to pry,’ says Boyd, keeping his eyes on the slice of bread in front of him, the puddle of honey where a fly is trying to land. He is sitting in a shaft of morning sun, squinting; the women have their backs to it.

‘Well, my nephew thinks I’ve sold out,’ says Leandro, ignoring Boyd.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he thinks I’ve betrayed my people – my class – by getting rich, and becoming the owner of this place instead of one of the peasants who simply work on it.’

‘I should’ve thought he’d be happy about it,’ says Pip. ‘Like now, when he’s sick, and he can come here to recover. Isn’t he happy about that?’

‘Oh, Pip, dear, it’s very complicated,’ says Marcie. ‘The peasants here, they’re… well, it’s like they’re from a different country altogether. Like they’re a different kind of people, you know? They have their own rules and codes and…’ She waves a hand, doesn’t finish.

‘Am I a different kind of person to the rest of you?’ says Leandro. His voice is smooth and even, but the words jolt Marcie.

‘No, of course not, sugar. I was only trying to explain…’

‘Perhaps explanations are better left to those who understand,’ he says. Marcie smiles and nods, and turns all her attention to her cup of coffee. Pip’s cheeks blaze on her behalf, and Leandro smiles when he sees.

‘Ettore is happy for me. That is, he was. He doesn’t resent my wealth – it’s not that. So many men went to America from here, and so few came back. His sister’s husband went, and he vanished. They’ve had no word from him in five years now. I tried to find him over there; I tried constantly, but I never did. The last anybody heard, he was digging tunnels for the subway. Now he could be dead, alive…’ Leandro shrugs. ‘And as I said before, those that do come back usually spend what little money they saved and are soon back to where they started.

‘These are hard times; even the rich aren’t rich. The peasants look at a farm like this and they think the man who owns it must be rich. But we’re not – not by any measure outside of Puglia. The yields are poor, petrol is hard to come by, the government took most of the machinery and good animals during the war, it never damn well rains, the soil is ruined from generations of bad farming… We can’t afford to pay as many workers as want work. We leave some land fallow, because we can’t afford to pay the men to work it, and what do they do? They go and work it anyway – their Chambers of Labour tell them they have the right to work, so they go and they work it, and then they come to the proprietor and demand to be paid for their labour! So, at first my nephew was happy to see me, and he thought that because I know what life is like for these men, I would give them work – plentiful work, for good pay, all the year round. But I can’t do that, so he tells me I am one of them now, and he hates me.’ Leandro spreads his hands and shakes his head. ‘I’m wrong to say he hates me,’ he adds quietly. ‘He’s only angry. Angry that I couldn’t find Paola’s husband in New York. Angry that I can’t change the world for him. Angry about what happened at the Girardi place last year. Angry that his woman is dead.’

Clare starts at this, she can’t help it. Boyd covers her hand with his but she doesn’t look at him. His woman is dead. A dry breeze moves through the courtyard, reaches into the buildings and slams a door. The tablecloth flutters. Nobody speaks; they all wait for Leandro’s lead, and keep their eyes down, and suddenly Clare hates herself, and all of them, for their cowardice. She looks across at Leandro.

‘A serious subject for the breakfast table,’ she says.

‘The world is a serious place, Mrs Kingsley,’ says Leandro. She notices how rarely he blinks. But then he smiles. ‘But you’re right. These are not matters to be solved over morning coffee. At least the boy is healing; I’ve no wish to see him ruined. I offer him work here on the masseria – I offer it every time. But the annaroli are as bad as the proprietors, as far as the giornatari are concerned.’

‘What’s an annaroli? And what happened at the Girardi place?’ says Pip.

‘Annarolo means a man who works here all year round, in a permanent job – the overseer and the herdsman, the corporals. And never mind Girardi. Come – let’s talk of other things. I’ll speak to my nephew again today, and what’s between us is for us to untangle. Tell me instead about this play you’re devising.’

Clare wants to ask him about the woman who is dead, the woman who belonged to Ettore, but she doesn’t dare. Suddenly, it’s more important than Leandro’s past, more important than his hold over Boyd and the lies she’s been told. She concentrates on breathing; she can smell the cattle on the breeze, and a woody, fungus aroma she can’t place. She can smell the greasy dogs on their rusty chains. She gets to her feet, knocks the table and causes cutlery to chime against porcelain.

‘Clare, are you all right?’ says Boyd. She looks down at him, and it feels as though she’s looking at him from a long way away.

‘I’m fine. I think I’ll go for a walk; I need some fresh air.’ She knows this sounds absurd, since they’re sitting outside, but she doesn’t care.

‘I’ll go with you,’ says Pip, also standing and snatching up the last piece of bread from his plate. Nobody else offers and Clare is relieved. Pip is the only one she can be with just then.

‘Rehearsals when you get back, Filippo,’ Marcie calls as they go. She turns to Boyd and adds: ‘I’ve been wracking my brains, but I honestly don’t think that there is an Italian version of Boyd, I’m afraid.’ Clare doesn’t hear Boyd’s murmured reply.

Once Pip has stopped to greet Bobby, who barks slightly less but still fidgets at the end of his tether, they walk out through the main gates and around the back, past the trulli where some of the men sleep. One or two loiter there, simply standing, smoking. Clare feels their eyes following her and Pip. She looks over defiantly but one of them is Federico, and she looks away again quickly, but not before she catches that same questioning look in his eye, and perhaps Pip notices it too, because he scowls even as he gives them a small wave. The mule that was treated for lampas is standing in the stockade with its head down, a picture of misery. Clare says nothing, hoping Pip won’t notice it there.

In the distance the milking herd are grazing in a walled field, so they walk in that direction, glad for something to aim for, something to look at. Aside from the dusty road that leads away from the gates, there are no discernible paths. The road curves away and vanishes behind the shallow hill; Clare has no idea if Gioia lies to the north, south, east or west. She can’t exactly picture where she is within Italy, other than south; far south. This realisation frightens her – she is completely lost. Completely dependent on Boyd and Leandro.

‘You don’t like Mr Cardetta very much, do you?’ says Pip, with studied casualness. He picks up a stick from beneath an olive tree and starts to peel away the bark. Mr Cardetta, he says, not Leandro – just as she instructed. Clare wonders how stern she must look for him to suddenly do as she’s asked. She tries to soften her face but it’s not quite in her control.

‘I don’t feel I know him well enough to decide yet,’ she says, and this seems to trouble him.

‘But you like Marcie, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course. It would be hard not to like someone like Marcie.’

‘That’s a reason to like Mr Cardetta, isn’t it? I mean, if somebody nice has married a person, I usually take it as a good sign about them. Don’t you?’

‘I suppose so. Sometimes. But people do change,’ says Clare. ‘He obviously loves her a great deal.’

‘Are you going to watch our rehearsal today?’

‘Would you like me to?’

‘Yes, of course. Only it might ruin the play if you watch all the rehearsals. I mean, we’re planning a surprise ending.’

‘Well, I’ll watch until you come to something you want to keep secret, how about that?’

‘All right.’ He swishes the olive stick, makes it whoop through the air. ‘Have you seen any other ch-’ He cuts himself off, caught in the act of calling himself a child. ‘Young people here? At the masseria, I mean?’

‘No. I’m afraid I haven’t,’ says Clare, knowing how lonely and quiet it must be for him.

‘Good job I’ve got Bobby,’ he says stoutly. She puts her arm around his shoulders for a moment, and gives them a squeeze.

‘Do you know, my aunt’s old dog used to go bananas for toast crusts? Especially if there was a bit of jam on them. He’d do anything – turn circles, play dead, shake hands. Maybe toast crusts will be the key to Bobby’s heart,’ she says.

They stop at the edge of the cattle field and sit down on the wall for a while. Lizards scatter from their feet, darting out of sight; flies appear at once to buzz around their heads. The cows are browsing the wheat stubble and the dark, dirty weeds in amongst it. The herd leader’s bell has a sad chime, flat and in a minor key, and they all whisk their tails continually at the flies. A few of them have small calves at their feet, and the calves try repeatedly to suckle from their mothers. From a distance it’s hard to work out why they can’t seem to manage it, but as the herd gradually comes closer Clare sees the collars the calves are wearing – collars of long metal spikes, even longer than those that the guard dogs wear. Every time the calf gets close enough to reach for the udders, its mother gets jabbed, kicks out and moves away from it. The calves are bony and forlorn, they pick at the stubble while their mothers’ udders swell.

‘Why aren’t they allowed to drink?’ says Pip, and in an instant Clare knows the answer.

‘So we can.’

‘Oh. That’s so cruel, though,’ he says, and he looks across at them, scowling. Clare wants to get up and walk away from the pitiful spectacle, and try to distract Pip from this realisation, but something stops her. They both drank the milk at breakfast, and ate the fresh mozzarella the night before.

‘A lot of what people do to animals is cruel. A lot of what people do to people is cruel,’ she says, surprising herself. She wouldn’t normally say such a thing to Pip, especially not after the brutal spectacle of the mule the day before. Not every cow has a calf, and she thinks of the veal they ate back at the house in Gioia. Pip stands up and turns his back to them.

‘Well, I think it’s completely unacceptable. They’re only babies! I’m going to ask Marcie – I bet she could get them to take the collars off.’

‘I don’t think you should, Pip. This is how the farm is run… It’s not up to you. It’s probably not up to Marcie.’

‘You always used to say I should stand up against injustice however I could,’ he challenges her.

‘Yes.’

‘Well then.’ He shrugs.

‘Pip-’

‘You said we were going to go home.’ He sounds petulant, younger than his age, so she knows how unhappy he is, and she’s hit by a wave of guilt; she puts her hand out to him.

‘I’m sorry. It’s… it’s not up to me.’ For a moment they’re silent. Pip ignores her hand, kicking at a rock the size of his fist, knocking it to and fro. ‘You do understand that, don’t you? Your father wants us to stay,’ Clare says.

‘How long for?’

‘I don’t know. Until he’s finished his work, I suppose. Mr Cardetta wants us to stay too, to keep Marcie company.’

‘Marcie told me we’re the first guests that have come to stay with them here – the first ones ever. Can you believe that?’

‘Well, it’s no wonder they want us to stay then, is it?’ she says. Pip shrugs, and nods. He kicks at the rock and lashes the olive stick to and fro, full of frustration. Clare looks to the horizon, across the vast stretch of land, dry as old bones, beneath a sky like hot metal. She thinks it no wonder that the Cardettas’ first guests have been compelled to come, and must be compelled to stay.

After that Clare walks a lot. She walks in the morning and late in the afternoon, when the heat is not as fierce. Even so, her face and arms begin to tan, and freckles appear across the bridge of her nose. Marcie exclaims in dismay at them, and loans Clare a white scarf to drape over the brim of her hat, but it’s too hot and Clare can’t stand it obscuring her vision, so she carries it but doesn’t use it. Boyd insists on accompanying her on one occasion, but after his attempts at conversation founder they walk in a silence that he clearly finds excruciating. Clare doesn’t mind it. Suddenly she has nothing to say to her husband, and there’s nothing she needs to hear from him. When he holds her hand sweat slides between their palms. After that he lets her walk by herself. Leandro suggests she takes Federico with her and she declines at once.

‘It’s really not necessary.’

‘I’m not sure you’re best placed to say if it is or it isn’t,’ he says.

‘I’d far rather walk alone.’

‘Then stay within the bounds of this farm. Please, Mrs Kingsley.’ He holds her hand in his two as he speaks, and squeezes it, and Clare catches her breath. His hands are large and there’s no give in them, like they’re made of wood.

‘Very well,’ she says.

But it’s hard to know where Cardetta’s land ends and the next farm begins. There are only fields, caught between stone walls, one after the other, on and on and on. Here and there are stunted orchards; here and there isolated trulli, some in ruins, some with smoke curling up from squat chimney stacks. Clare avoids them. She changes direction when she sees men working up ahead, ashamed to spy on their labours. Once she stumbles across a group of mounted men, their horses in a loose circle, their eyes down. There’s movement on the ground, at the horses’ feet, and Clare glimpses the shocking, incongruous flash of pale bare flesh. She stares. A man is on his hands and knees, pulling at the short stubble of wheat stalks with his teeth. He’s naked, and has lash marks on his back; he’s not young, he could be forty or fifty years old; his ribs have dark shadows between each bone. Shocked, Clare recognises Ludo Manzo, the overseer, as one of the mounted men; he has a long whip in his hand, hanging down like a snake. When they notice her they all look up – the mounted men, Ludo, the naked man on the ground. Clare expects them to stop, to scatter, to be ashamed and try to explain or apologise somehow, but Ludo only grins. He points to the man on the ground and says something Clare can’t understand, which makes the other guards chuckle. She looks down at their victim, and his expression of anger and humiliation is a mask over bare bones of despair. There’s a churned slick of dust and drool around his mouth, down over his chin. Clare can’t stand his gaze, she’s almost relieved when Ludo flicks the whip and the man resumes his slow grazing. Then she hurries away, sickened by them and by herself, and tells nobody of the scene. She has no words to describe it.

Returning from one walk as the sun is setting, Clare finds Federico in the courtyard; he’s rubbing the red car with a rag, and where he’s taken off the dust the sunlight roars on the paintwork. When he sees her he grins, and again she notices the way his mouth flattens itself out of its unusual shape when he does. The divide in his top lip is still there, his front teeth are twisted, but the smile is foremost. Clare smiles politely in reply and makes to walk past him but he reaches out and stops her with the tips of his fingers on her arm.

‘Signora, prego,’ he says. Clare looks down at something he’s holding out to her. Flowers – a small posy of spiked thistle flowers, pretty and pale blue amidst their thorns. She stares at them. ‘For you,’ he says, in heavily accented English. He makes her a small bow, still smiling, and Clare’s hand rises even as she feels a rush of unease. That look of his, the one he gives her. She still can’t decide if her aversion to him is wise or unfair. She lets her hand fall again.

‘Thank you,’ she says, in Italian. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t take them. I’m a married woman.’ At this he grins even wider.

‘I won’t tell him,’ he says. She looks closely at him, trying to read him. Then she shakes her head.

‘Thank you, but find a different girl to give them to.’ She turns away and goes inside, and doesn’t look back even when she thinks she hears him chuckle.

Before Boyd leaves for Gioia again he hugs Clare tight, and presses kisses onto her forehead.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ he says, sounding hopeful rather than sure. Just then his lost look, his uncertainty, pricks at her. She thinks of Francesco Molino, dragged out and beaten in public, and reaches up to touch Boyd’s face. The hard, vulnerable ridge of his eye socket.

‘Get those designs finished so we can go home. And be careful, Boyd,’ she says quietly. ‘Do be careful.’

‘I will,’ he says.

‘I mean it.’

‘So do I – and the same goes for you. Why not let the servant walk with you? He can walk behind if you don’t want to talk to him.’

‘No, no. It would feel like being stalked. There’s no danger here – how can there be when I almost never see a living soul?’ Clare waits with Pip and Marcie as the two men climb into the back of the car and Federico drives them away. And she’s relieved – in one way or another, she is relieved to see the back of all three of them. When they’re gone and before the doors close behind them, Clare runs her eyes around the aia. She returns to the courtyard, looks up at the upstairs windows, the terrace. There has been no sign of Ettore Tarano that day.

‘He might come out of hiding now Leandro’s gone,’ says Marcie. Clare stops looking, glances questioningly at Marcie. ‘Our Ettore, I mean. I think he was just trying to make a point by keeping away. Men! Their pride is their own worst enemy, don’t you think?’

‘Pride is better than some other things I could think of,’ says Clare. Marcie gives her a quizzical look, but doesn’t ask.

Before dinner Clare goes and lies down in the still and quiet of the bedroom. She leaves the windows open, though flies buzz in incessantly. She stares at the shadowed ceiling and wonders how long she will be able to stand it – being trapped, being lost, being so awake, and having the maddening presence of Ettore nearby. Outside the dogs bark a few times, like a scattered reflex reaction rather than a real alarm. A door closes sharply; not long afterwards she hears footsteps rushing towards her room.

‘Clare!’ Marcie shouts, her voice muffled by the door. Clare sits bolt upright, heart racing. ‘Clare!’ Marcie calls again, rapping on the bedroom door even as she opens it. ‘Oh, do come, Clare! It’s Pip!’

‘What is it? What’s happened?’ says Clare, grabbing at Marcie’s fluttering hands. The blonde woman’s eyes are frantic and there is a smear of blood on the front of her shirt. They rush out together. ‘What’s happened, Marcie?’

‘That damned dog! I should never have let him go near it,’ says Marcie, and Clare’s stomach clenches.

‘Has Bobby – has the dog attacked him?’

‘It was bound to happen – bound to! I should have put a stop to it! I’m so sorry, Clare!’ Clare can’t speak any more. She runs into Pip’s room with dread clutching at her chest, to find him sitting up on the bed watching the kitchen maid, Anna, bathe his hand in a basin of water. The hand is shaking visibly, even though his arm is resting on a pillow. There are two deep puncture wounds in the heel of it, dark and constantly welling blood.

‘Oh, Pip!’ says Clare, and rushes over to him. ‘Darling – are you all right? Oh, your hand!’ she cries.

‘I’m all right, Clare – really. It wasn’t Bobby’s fault…’ Clare sits down alongside him, and feels the way he’s shaking, just like she herself shook after the beating in Gioia. His face is sickly white.

‘Pip-’

‘I took him some crusts and jam – just like you suggested – and he loved them! He came to take them right from my hand. But then one of the other dogs barked suddenly, and he got scared…’

‘Oh, Filippo! You’re being altogether too brave – look at your poor hand!’ says Marcie. ‘Ought I call the doctor, Clare? Should they be stitched?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Clare watches as Anna dribbles water into the two deep holes. The water in the bowl is a merry red, berry bright. The sight makes her dizzy – that it’s Pip’s blood, and there’s so much of it. ‘I don’t think so. I think… just a tight bandage.’ She swallows, fights to keep her voice even. She holds Pip’s head close to her, and kisses his hair.

‘Clare, I’m really all right,’ he says, embarrassed, but there’s a catch in his voice. He might cry from the shock, if it weren’t for Anna and Marcie watching. It’s only pride that stops him, this new need to be manly.

‘You have to stay away from the dogs, Pip,’ she says.

‘But it wasn’t Bobby’s fault, Clare, it was-’

‘No, Pip, I’m sorry. He bit you – whatever the reason was! You must keep away. Promise me,’ she says. She pictures the heavy dog – the muscles beneath the shaggy fur, the mad, bewildered look in its eyes. If it got a proper hold of Pip it could tear him like paper.

‘But, Clare-’

‘No, Pip! Just do as I say!’ Pip turns away from her, glowers at his hand. At the foot of the bed Marcie hovers and wrings her hands. She can’t look at the wound.

‘Well, thank God you’re all right, Pip, that’s all I can say. How about a brandy to soothe your nerves, hm?’ She smiles anxiously at him, and turns to go, and Clare hasn’t the heart to object even though Pip is far too young for spirits. When Marcie brings the drink he sips it in a dignified manner, and staunchly refuses to cough when his throat objects.

Clare stays until Pip is asleep, with his fat, bandaged hand resting on his chest. She turns the knob on the gas lamp until it stops hissing and darkness rolls into the light’s wake. The floor is warm beneath her bare feet; she crushes a mosquito against her forearm, and rolls it through the tiny hairs there. She can still smell Pip’s blood. Anna has taken the gory water away but its metal tang lingers at the back of her throat. There’s a red spot on Pip’s bandage, and as she watches it gets bigger by tiny increments. She thinks of the naked man, being forced to graze like an animal; remembers the raw look in his eyes when he glanced up at her. She has such a sudden strong sense of the violence all around, the possible and the actual, that she has to grind her teeth together. It’s like an electric charge in the air; the hum before a lightning strike. She feels that everything is breakable, and will break; that anything could happen, and will. She wants more than anything to be somewhere else, anywhere else.

With steady, silent steps, Clare goes across the courtyard, from shadow to shadow between the pooling light of the lamps. From the kitchens, where the house staff are eating, come voices in the dialect, loud and mocking. She has to insist before the guard will unlock the front door for her, and in the aia the nearest dog growls with gut-deep menace. The aia is in darkness, a deep black for the dogs to hide in. Clare pictures teeth sinking into Pip’s flesh, cutting easily through the soft, elastic skin and the delicate red underneath. She thinks of Boyd leaving her naked in the library in Gioia, as shame washed out her arousal, and how now when they touch she can’t feel a single thread of a bond between them. Not since she saw Francesco Molino beaten near to death; not since she saw Ettore Tarano.

She’s running now, along the front of the masseria because she doesn’t dare cross the aia past the dogs. Her feet are almost silent without shoes. She feels the dust flying up between her toes, the prickle of stalks and stones. For a wild instant she thinks she could run away altogether – disappear into the night and never see her husband or Leandro Cardetta again. Back to Gioia and onto a train, to Bari, Naples, Rome, home. She turns blindly to begin this escape, taking the first few steps away from the masseria, but at once she’s surrounded by darkness so profound she can’t even be sure there’s ground at her feet. Everything vanishes. When she looks up there are no stars, and no moon. The light coming from the building behind her can’t penetrate it; the night is like a wall. She stops. A few paces – that’s what her flight has amounted to. A few paces, and she’s given up already. She hangs her head, defeated, and every nerve in her body feels as sharp as glass shards, so that when she hears movement in front of her, she gasps. Even as she asks who it is she realises that she knows, and there’s a subtle change in the way she feels – a change in the tension, which neither lessens nor increases but takes on a different tone: reaching out rather than coiling inward. She strains her eyes to see him but he’s merely a wraith until he’s standing right in front of her, with the weak light from the walls describing shoulders, hair, drawn-down brows. Ettore’s eyes look clouded and sore. Clare wants to tell him everything, and in the next moment finds she’s got nothing to tell.

Only when it seems like he will walk away can she speak and ask him how he is, ask about his sister’s baby, about his English. She sounds like a fool to her own ears, but she wants him to stay there in the vegetable garden so that she can work out what she’s feeling, and what it means. Why her eyes seek him everywhere, why the impossible vibrancy of everything she sees and smells and tastes is causing her to panic. She tells him that she hates it there, and that she wants to run away. The words are out before she can stop them, and though they’re honest she regrets them. She can’t find the right word and he provides it for her.

‘Escape.’ He says it in a low voice, and for a second she thinks he will ask her to explain, that he wants to know more. But then he tells her to go back inside, and he sounds impatient, and Clare is dismayed. She sees herself through his eyes then, truly, and sees that she’s ridiculous. She’s nothing, and could never understand him. It’s torture, and it gets worse when he leaves her there, limping past her on his crutch. He smells faintly of sweat, and of clean linen. She holds her breath to hear every last sound he makes, further and further away, until all she can hear are crickets in the foliage, faint sounds from within the masseria, and her own pulse, loud in her ears. She does not do as he tells her; she stays outside for a long time, in the dark, trying to know her own thoughts.

Ettore comes to breakfast the next morning; he’s already at the table, waiting, when Clare and Pip come down. His eyes look bruised, the whites all bloodshot, and Clare, who has not slept, recognises the fatigue in the slow drag of his gaze. Marcie beams when she sees him.

‘Well, good morning, Ettore. Dear boy, you look shattered! What on earth have you been up to? Are you ill?’

‘He’s working as a guard now – I think he was on the night shift,’ says Clare, remembering something he said the night before. The urge to look at him is so strong that she’s careful not to give in to it. She’s worried she might not be able to look away again. The skin of her cheeks is tingling, and threatening to colour.

‘He’s working? Oh, that’s wonderful! Fantastic, Ettore! I’m so pleased you’ve come around,’ says Marcie, so loudly that Ettore winces. He looks questioningly at Clare, and she takes a quick breath.

‘She’s happy you have agreed to work,’ she tells him in Italian. Ettore frowns, and looks down at the table. He nods once.

‘Oh dear – he doesn’t seem too happy about it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything – me and my big mouth! Well, let’s change the subject. How’s the hand, Filippo?’

‘Oh it’s fine, really. Thank you for asking. Just a bit sore,’ says Pip, but it’s his right hand that’s bandaged, and he’s struggling to eat breakfast with his left.

‘Shall I spread that jam for you?’ says Clare, reaching for his plate, but he shakes his head vehemently.

‘I can do it, Clare.’

‘All right.’ She sits back, stung.

‘What happened to his hand?’ asks Ettore, nodding at Pip. The sun makes him squint until his eyes are the narrowest slits, the skin around them scored with lines; his irises are a glimpse of iridescence between his black lashes. When he speaks he has the same slow intonation as Clare, each word considered and chosen. She has to remind herself that Italian is not his first language any more than it’s hers.

‘He was playing with the dog and it bit him,’ she says.

‘With what dog? With the dogs here in the aia?’ He shakes his head when she nods. ‘Lucky it did not kill him. I have seen one kill a boy before. It took him by the throat,’ he says, and grasps his neck to demonstrate. His hands are nut brown, rough with scars and calluses; the nails are wide and broken off. Clare’s own hand goes to her throat, mirroring him involuntarily.

‘These dogs here? It happened here?’ she says, breathlessly. Ettore nods.

‘He was coming to ask for a mattock to use. The mattock he had was broken. He didn’t know… where to walk.’

‘I simply must know what you’re saying,’ says Marcie brightly.

‘He says… he says that the dogs have attacked somebody before – somebody who went too close by mistake. That a boy was… killed.’ She looks at Pip as she says this, not sure if she should translate it. He fiddles with the frayed ends of his bandage, tucking them in, and there are knots in the corners of his jaw.

‘What! Oh, I’m sure he’s mistaken – I never heard of anything like that happening here! Wouldn’t I have heard about it? He must mean on some other farm,’ says Marcie.

‘He says this one,’ says Clare.

‘You’re only making it up to scare me, and stop me going near them,’ says Pip.

‘I am not,’ Clare says quietly, shocked. ‘Pip, please-’

‘All right! I get the message!’ He struggles up from the table, hampered by his injured hand, and stalks away towards the stairs.

‘Oh, Filippo, honey,’ Marcie calls after him, but he carries on out of sight with his head down and his right arm tucked in to his midriff.

‘He is scared now?’ says Ettore. Clare shakes her head.

‘No. He is angry with me. It’s my fault we are here – he thinks so. He was trying to make the dog his friend.’

‘He must choose friends more carefully.’

‘He hasn’t many to choose from, here.’

‘Why are you here?’ he asks, and she can’t tell if he’s curious, or if he resents their presence. She wants to explain but doesn’t have the right words. She doesn’t know the Italian word for hostage.

‘I do not know,’ is all she can say. ‘Only your uncle can say.’ At this Ettore nods slowly and looks at her steadily.

‘You are honest,’ he says, and Clare has nothing to reply.

‘Now, what we need is to lighten the mood around here a little,’ says Marcie. ‘Ettore, do you think Paola would come for tea, and bring her little boy? I’m afraid I can’t ask your father – Leandro would hit the roof.’ She doesn’t wait for Clare to translate or Ettore to answer before she carries on. ‘Music, that’s what we need. An evening of music and a bit of fun, to cheer up poor Pip and stop you worrying so, dear Clare. I’m going to find a gramophone if it kills me. Where shall I find one? There must be one in Gioia we could borrow, or buy. And we could make the doctor bring his wife and daughter, and have dinner with us. What do you think, Clare? How old is Pip? I think their daughter is sixteen, or is she older than that now? Anyway, far closer to Pip’s age than any of us. They could dance together! Do you think his hand would be up to it? Perhaps in a couple of weeks when it’s had more of a chance to heal. Music! I haven’t heard any for the longest time. I used to sing as well, you know; as well as acting. I could sing us some show tunes if only there was a piano or something to accompany me…’

Marcie talks on while Ettore drinks his coffee cut almost half and half with hot milk, and eats slices of fresh white cheese on crusty bread. He eats more slowly now, without the panic and fixation of when he first arrived. Clare is suddenly reminded of something.

‘Marcie, has Pip said anything to you about the collars that the calves wear?’ she says, interrupting the vocal march of Marcie’s train of thought.

‘About their collars? Oh, aren’t they just vicious? I do hate the sight of them. Of course, they get taken off sometimes during the day, so they can drink, but not within three hours of milking or something like that. Poor little darlings! But no, Pip never said anything. Why?’

‘He said he might, that’s all. I told him it wouldn’t be up to you, necessarily.’

‘Oh, it isn’t up to me at all. Ludo is the man with the power, and he reports right to Leandro. Tell Pip not to look – that’s my advice. If you can’t bear to see it, don’t look. Ludo, Ludo – I do love the sound of that name, don’t you? Tell Pip not to go near the cattle, if it upsets him. I’ll tell him.’ She waves a hand. When she says the name Ludo, Ettore’s gaze hits her in an instant. Marcie looks over at him and smiles, but neither she nor Clare understands the black expression that fills Ettore’s face. He looks so bitter and so hard that nobody speaks for a long time afterwards.

Later on in the day, after Pip has had his acting lesson, or rehearsal – Clare isn’t sure which it is – with Marcie, Clare goes to find him in his room. He’s lying on the bed, on his side, reading. She sits down on the mattress near the small of his back, and knows he’s still angry when he doesn’t roll over or sit up, or turn his head to look at her. She isn’t sure what to say to him, so for a long time she says nothing. From outside the window comes the clanking of the cow bell, and the muted clatter of cloven hooves as the herd come in for the afternoon milking. Eventually Pip lowers his book and sighs.

‘It’s hard to concentrate with you sitting there,’ he says, making a play for an offhand tone of voice.

‘Sorry, Pip,’ she says. After a moment he turns his head and looks at her, and then props himself up on his elbows.

‘Are you all right, Clare?’

‘Yes. I… I just wanted to see whether you were. Are you angry with me about the dogs?’

‘It wasn’t your fault. You told me to stay away from them and I didn’t. You don’t have to keep checking up on me, you know. I’m not a little boy.’

‘I know you’re not, but… you’re not the only one who’s lonely here, you know. I wanted to come and see you,’ she says. At this, Pip frowns in thought.

‘Marcie was talking about having a music evening, and inviting some other people,’ he says.

‘Yes. That could be fun, couldn’t it?’ says Clare. Pip shrugs.

‘James has gone camping in the Alps with all his cousins, and with Benjamin Walby from school. That would have been fun.’

‘I know. There might still be time for you to go and do something like that with your friends when we get back. I think your dad has nearly finished the designs for Mr Cardetta.’

‘I bet he hasn’t. I bet there isn’t.’ They’re both silent for a while, and Pip fiddles with his bandage again.

‘Do you think Emma would have liked it here? What do you think she would have said about the poor calves, with those awful collars?’ says Clare. Pip sighs and rolls away from her, opening his book again.

‘My mother’s dead, Clare. I have no idea what she would have said.’

The next day, Clare is far from the masseria when the sky begins to curdle. Clouds fill the sky from the north and west; indigo blue and deep, deep grey, the colour of fresh bruises. Lightning flickers in amongst them, and the breeze is suddenly cooler, so much so that after two weeks of the constant heat, Clare shivers. The change is so dramatic that she climbs onto a low stone wall and stares up at the spectacle, letting the air stream through her fingers and the full brooding power of the storm steal up on her. Her feet are sore, the skin rubbed raw from walking in her sandals, which let in the dust and grit. There’s an ache between her shoulder blades, a hard knot of tension that has turned the muscles hot with exhaustion. When thunder rolls, echoing along the empty ground, Clare remembers what Marcie said about the water running like a river when the rain finally came. She’s tempted to stay out in it, and see it, but the growing darkness is alarming, and she turns her back on the storm, turns towards the masseria. Without the hard Puglian sun everything suddenly looks dead, flat, unreal. Her eyes have got so used to the onslaught of light that she blinks repeatedly, and can’t focus. She can feel the storm rearing up behind her, and now she almost wants to run from it. It’s only weather, you fool. There’s another roll of thunder, louder, closer. She walks faster.

The olive orchard is the only other place for her to shelter before the farmhouse, but though she hesitates, she carries on through it, thinking she can make it. When the first drops of rain land on her arms they are surprisingly cold – she’d imagined a tropical rain like bathwater; imagined tipping her head back to let it run into her eyes and sluice the dust out of her hair. But the rain feels like splinters, and the next bolt of lightning is so bright it seems to bypass her eyes and sear the inside of her head, and it makes the air smell burnt; the thunderclap comes almost at once, and goes deep into her bones. With a gasp, Clare grabs at her shoulder as something hits her, hard. Hail is falling – hailstones the size of walnuts. One lands square on her head, and the pain is a shock. Clare runs. Head down, heedless, she runs for the nearest shelter as more nuggets of ice hit the ground all around her, and one catches her face, on her jaw to one side of her mouth, making her cry out in alarm. She sees the gates, held open for her, and an open doorway beyond, and she aims for it, careering inside to stand, gasping, in sudden darkness. Her hair is hanging in wet rats’ tails around her shoulders, her legs are spattered with mud, her shoes are ruined. She wipes her hands across her face and winces – there’s a small cut on her jaw where the last hailstone hit her. Then she realises she’s not alone in the hut and turns to find Ettore grinning at her, and she laughs, slightly hysterical with relief.

He takes off his hat and flaps ice from it onto the floor. For a minute they stand side by side, looking out at the storm. She has run into the guard hut by the main gates, and the roar of the hail on the stone roof drowns out thought, and any possibility of speaking. The ground is turning white with ice, the air is a grey blur and it’s dark, dark as though the sun has set, and darker still inside the hut. The storm is the only thing in the sky – clouds like vast sculptures carved into it, filling it. Then Clare feels Ettore watching her and her heart seems to convulse in her chest. She turns to him; he puts his thumb to the cut on her chin, and she feels salt from his skin stinging in the wound. It’s a small gesture, but it breaks her. It erases the last doubt she has about what she feels, and any possibility that they will not be lovers. She knows herself at last, and whoever she believed she was before, she was wrong. That woman seems like a stranger. She wants Ettore in her bloodstream. His gaze is intent but she can see that he’s waiting, and it makes her throat tighten. She takes his hand and lifts it to her mouth, and tastes her own blood on his thumb. Ettore leans forward and puts his mouth over the graze, pressing his tongue into it, and the heat of it is incredible. The sensation sinks through her like a stone through water, to settle low down in her body. Her heartbeat there, between her thighs, is louder and harder than in her chest. She throws her arms around his shoulders, her legs around his hips, and kisses him. The kiss is hard, bruising. Not loving but something visceral, an embodiment of need and want. Her weight throws him off balance on his lame leg; he stumbles and turns, jarring her back against the wall so hard that the breath rushes out of her chest, and he’s inside her so quickly that there’s pain before the rush of pleasure, felt in her bones like the thunder, like the hail. She can’t help shouting out, but the sound is lost in the roar of the hailstorm, and she can only tell from the rumble of Ettore’s chest, from the vibration where his mouth is locked on hers, that he is shouting too.

The quiet when the hail stops is so profound it rings in their ears. Clare straightens her clothes and waits to feel ashamed, or guilty. She waits to feel afraid of what she’s done, but she feels only happiness. She feels safe. She knows that Marcie and Pip will be worried about her being caught out in the storm; Marcie might even send men out to look for her now that the onslaught has stopped. Ettore stands close to her, facing her with his head resting on her shoulder, the bridge of his nose tucked into her neck. She isn’t sure if his posture is one of tenderness, or if he doesn’t want to look at her. The smell of him is instantly familiar, instantly beguiling and desperately dear to her. The parts of her he’s touching are warm, the parts he isn’t are chilly.

‘I didn’t know it could be like that. It’s never been like that,’ she says. Ettore says nothing. Gently, reluctantly, she pushes him back. ‘I should go inside. They will want to know where I am.’

‘No. Stay,’ he says, in English. He takes her hand and holds it, and she smiles.

‘I must go. I’m sorry.’ And she is. She wants to stay with him. ‘Ettore,’ she says, just for the feel of his name on her tongue.

‘Chiara,’ he says, and it seems fitting that he should give her this new name, since she is not Clare any more, not the person she thought she was at all. It sounds almost like a sigh as he says it: kee-ahra. She presses her cheek to his, just for the feel of its contours, the roughness where he hasn’t shaved, the hard bones beneath. ‘Will you come again?’ he says.

‘Yes. Soon.’ Clare’s hand is the last thing to leave the trullo, held in his, reaching out behind her. He only lets go in the last instant before his own hand might be seen.

Clare walks across ice towards the white walls of the masseria; it splinters under her feet. When she enters the sitting room Marcie leaps up to greet her.

‘Oh! Thank goodness! You found shelter? That was a real humdinger. But look at you – you’re soaked! And cut!’

‘I’m completely fine, Marcie, really – just this one nick where a hailstone caught me,’ says Clare, when really her body is a secret map of bruises and aches and tender places.

‘But how did you avoid being cut to ribbons? Where on earth were you hiding?’ says Marcie, and a sudden sparkle of warning makes Clare hesitate.

‘I… In a… what do you call it.’ She waves her hand, buying time. ‘In a trullo. One of the old, empty ones.’

‘Oh, good thinking – how lucky you were near one! I’ll get Anna to run you a bath. Anna! And then come and sit with us and have a cool drink to restore you – look! Look how we do it in Puglia!’ And Marcie laughs delightedly as she drops a smooth, round hailstone into her amarena.

Chapter Ten – Ettore

When Ettore’s shift ends he goes to watch the men shovelling the hailstones in the neviera, the snow cave; a stone-lined chamber sunk into the ground behind the masseria, where in wintertime snow is packed in thick layers, with straw in between, and will stay frozen for weeks, even months, to be used to keep meat and milk fresh as the weather warms. The hail won’t last anything like as long – it doesn’t pack down in the same way, and now, in the height of summer, the air is too warm – but for a few days Anna will be able to churn ice cream for Marcie and her guests.

At the thought of them, at the thought of Chiara, Ettore feels the watching eyes of the windows behind him. He feels everything watching him, from the evening sky, clearing now, to the low trees and the men, the dogs and the sparrows washing themselves with manic abandon in the puddles of meltwater. It’s like hands pressing down on him, and he knows that really it’s Livia he can feel watching; she’s the one scrutinising his guilty face and his every guilty move. And the thing that shames him is not that he made love to another woman, but that for a short while he surrendered to her completely; and for that short while he was happy. She was just as she had seemed she might be – a drink of water in a drought; a relief. A complete relief. And he had promised Livia that he would not rest until the man who had raped her to death was dead himself. His anger with himself grows until it includes Chiara as well, and when she doesn’t come to find him later that night, he is angrier still. Angry that she hasn’t come, and angry at how badly he wants her to.

Ettore can’t sleep during the day, even when he’s been awake all night, in the trullo by the gates. His shifts rotate with Carlo and one other man, so that one night shift is followed by two day shifts, and he can’t find a rhythm to it, so that by the end of a night shift he has been awake for twenty-four hours. He lies up on the roof, in the shade of the parapet, or else in his room with the sunlight streaming in through the curtains and the angry buzz of flies, and the slamming of doors and the footsteps and shouts of the household all making it impossible to think, or stop thinking. His anger simmers, and doesn’t cool, and his thoughts are sludgy with sleeplessness. He doesn’t eat with them again – he can’t stand the thought, the pretence. He only went at breakfast, that morning after his first night shift, to see her. To see Chiara Kingsley, and look at her more closely; and now he doesn’t think he could look at her without hitting her. Or kissing her again.

The second day afterwards he emerges from the trullo, crosses the aia and goes under the archway to find the annaroli milling about near the kitchen steps, pestering Anna and demanding food from the cook, Ilaria. He can hear Ilaria’s boisterous protests from within.

‘If one more of you deadbeats comes into my kitchen to ask me what is for lunch and when you will have it, you won’t have it at all! It’s that simple!’

‘What’s going on?’ Ettore asks one of the corporals, a man he doesn’t know, who has an apron of fat hanging over the front of his trousers. The man shrugs, then spits.

‘The shit-eating peasants are on strike again – they want some communist bastard or other let loose from jail. So we’ve nothing to do but cool our heels till it’s sorted out. Or till the starving starts.’ He has a marina accent – he’s not from Gioia – and he clearly has no idea who Ettore is. In an instant Ettore has him by the front of his shirt; his crutch clatters to the ground, and there’s laughter from the onlookers.

‘You’d do better to keep hold of that stick, boy, and use it to batter the man,’ says Ludo Manzo, standing up from a shady spot against the wall. He speaks without taking a thin cigarette out from between his teeth, and squints at Ettore. ‘You’ll have no luck trying to knock that fat pig down with only one leg on the ground.’ The fat man bridles but knows better than to say anything. Ettore releases his shirt, hops back and bends to pick up the crutch. ‘Watch your temper, Ettore Tarano. I don’t care if you’re the boss’s nephew; if you make trouble I’ll whip you myself, same as any other one of these men.’

‘Try it,’ says Ettore, through clenched teeth. ‘Go on and try it.’ Ludo grins at him and chuckles. He puts one hand on Ettore’s chest and shoves him, quick and hard. Ettore stumbles back, fighting for balance. But he doesn’t fall.

‘You see that, men? That’s the goddamned peasant urge to protest, and not to know they’re beaten. That’s what we’re up against here. But sooner or later they’ll learn. They’ll learn or they’ll die. One or the other.’ He keeps a steady, hard eye on Ettore, who doesn’t look away or move. ‘Change is coming, Mr Tarano, and that little shindig at the Girardi place last year was just the start. Soon if you and your friends want work you’ll know to be grateful for the work that’s offered, on whatever terms.’

‘You’re right about one thing,’ says Ettore. He stands straighter; the violence in him makes his jaw ache. ‘Change is coming. Maybe not the kind you’re hoping for, Manzo, but change, all the same.’ He spits and turns his back on them. There’s a chorus of whistles and curse words and jeering.

He’d expected Paola to come back to the masseria to collect money from him, or more food, and when she didn’t he’d assumed Valerio had found a wage from somewhere. Now he knows there’s a strike, most likely for the release of Capozzi, he worries more. There will be demonstrations in Gioia for the duration of the strike, rallying calls, a dangerous air of rebellion that could boil over into rioting as easily as a dropped match could start a grass fire, and Paola would be in the thick of it, like as not with Iacopo strapped to her back. Not knowing what’s going on is intolerable. Once he’s out of sight, up on the roof, Ettore puts his left foot down on the ground, gingerly. The ache is intense, the pulling feeling still there, but it’s bearable now. Keeping hold of the crutch but not using it, he takes a few small steps. If he shortens his stride to minimise the movement of muscles in that leg, he can manage it, and it gives him a flash of triumph.

‘Bravo, bravo!’ calls Carlo, from his watch place at the parapet. He grins good-naturedly at Ettore, and Ettore smiles back at him. ‘See how fast the body heals with rest and food in the belly?’

‘The sooner the better,’ says Ettore. ‘I have a home to go to.’ But before very long his calf muscle is trembling, and then cramp knifes through it and Ettore must stop and sit abruptly, screwing up his eyes at the pain. He rolls up his trouser leg and sees a string of red beads forming along the stitches of the wound. He smears them with his thumb but they grow again at once. His heart sinks.

‘Easy does it, though,’ says Carlo, and Ettore nods. If he tried to walk back to Gioia now he would ruin it. He wonders if he could manage fifteen kilometres with the crutch yet. He wonders if he could borrow a horse – Marcie would let him, Ludo would not. Of those two he knows who would win. Marcie would flap her hand in distress, and take Ludo’s word as law. He wonders about taking one without asking, but knows at once that if he was seen he would be shot first and questioned later. He wonders whether, if he left the masseria, he would be able to forget about Chiara Kingsley.

In the night Ettore skirts sleep, and his leg throbs with pain where he disturbed it. He watches the shadows the lamp casts on the ceiling; he leaves the shutters open so the dawn light will wake him, and moths come in to circle the light, hitting the glass, leaving little puffs of dust from their wings. Her knock is as soft as the sound the moths make; he isn’t sure he’s heard it until she sidles in through the door, closing it silently behind her. Her face is alive with some emotion, something pitched halfway between fear and happiness. When she sees that the shutters are open she gasps and turns, reaching for the doorknob again.

‘Wait!’ he says, louder than he should. He winces as he struggles up from the bed.

‘I can’t be seen here! Please close the shutters,’ she says, in rapid English that he can barely understand. She keeps her face turned to the door, as though with her back turned she might be mistaken for somebody else. Ettore almost smiles.

‘There’s nobody awake to see you,’ he says. The guards on the roof will all be facing outwards, not in through a courtyard window. But he limps across to close the shutters, barely touching the floor with the toe of his bad leg. Looking out, he thinks he actually does see movement in one of the other windows – a quick, furtive blur high up in an unlit room – but he can’t be sure, and though he stares at the spot there’s nothing more. He latches the shutters then pauses, realising that his heart is thudding far too fast. Fast enough to make his fingers shake. His own weakness infuriates him, and when he turns to Chiara he sees her flinch at his expression.

She takes one step away from the door and then hesitates, her face falling. She conceals nothing; her every thought marches openly across her face. Ettore doesn’t know how she can survive in this world, being so visible, so transparent. He wants to warn her.

‘Do you want me to go?’ she says uncertainly, remembering to speak in Italian now. He doesn’t go to her. He sits back down on the bed and he tries to remember his anger, but though he can recall the feeling, he can’t actually feel it. Not with her standing there. The twisted length of her fair hair hangs over one shoulder; she’s wearing a long white slip which must be her nightdress. He pictures her darting silently along dark corridors to his room, in fits and starts, just like a moth. He shakes his head. For a moment neither one of them moves, but then he raises his hand and holds it out to her, and she walks over to take it without hesitation.

‘Why did you not come sooner than this?’ he says. He can’t help asking even if the question shames him. A spark of the anger returns. He will not be her plaything, to pick up and put down.

‘I… I couldn’t. The guards will see me if I go to the trullo in the night, or in the day. The dogs will… cry… shout?’

‘Bark.’

‘Bark. They will bark. I came to your room before, but you weren’t here.’

‘The boy must not know? He would tell his father?’

‘Pip must not know! He must not,’ she says vehemently. ‘It would… He would not understand.’ She looks stricken as she says this, and Ettore nods. He understands her feeling of guilt, of being watched.

‘But you want me,’ he says.

‘Yes I do. I want you,’ she says.

‘Why?’

‘I…’ She has no answer right away, and suddenly what she says next is very important. He will not be a tool to shame her husband; he will not be a distraction, a cure for boredom. ‘I don’t know exactly. Only… nothing here seems real. Only you do. Nothing here seems…’ She searches for words. ‘When I saw you, I woke up. For the first time.’ She stares at him, to see if he understands. ‘There’s so much danger here, so much ugliness… I’ve felt afraid ever since I arrived. Except when I’m with you. Then I feel safe.’ A thread of tension in him snaps, and its loose ends unravel. He puts the back of his hand up to her cheek and she turns her face into it, and the sweetness of it is almost unbearable. He hardly dares to feel for her. ‘Your uncle said… Leandro said you lost somebody. Your sweetheart,’ she says, so quietly that he hardly hears. Ettore drops his hand and nods.

‘Livia,’ he says roughly.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She was killed. She was violated. She was taken from me,’ he says, and can’t look at Chiara. His sorrow settles onto him almost as strongly as when she first died; a wave of heat surges through him, the caustic taste of hate is in his mouth. He can hear Chiara breathing, fast and shallow. The rise and fall of her ribs behind the thin silk looks so vulnerable, so breakable. He knows too much of the ways women can be broken.

‘When?’

‘At the year’s head.’

‘And the one who did it?’

‘I will find him, and I will kill him.’ He sees her assimilate this, and not dismiss it as an idle threat, but she does not fear or despise him for it. She nods carefully.

‘I know I am not her. I know about… being second. I know I am not Livia, and I know you love her,’ she says, and because she knows it Ettore feels her take half the guilt from him, half the responsibility for what they will do, and he’s grateful to her.

As he lays her down he studies her, as he did not have time to do before. The whiteness of her skin is astonishing, and it’s flawless – no scars, no bruises, no blemishes. He has never seen anything like it, and such perfection brings the temptation to destroy – he’s torn between wanting to preserve her as she is and wanting to mark her in some way. Mark her as his. She’s thinner than he likes; her breasts are small, soft circles against her ribs; her hips curve only slightly more; her bush is the same golden blond as her eyebrows. Three small moles march diagonally across her stomach, in perfect alignment, like the constellation in the south-western sky. She smells clean, neutral, just like water, and he’s startled by how quickly he loses himself in her again; how healing and compulsive the feeling of being inside her is. He can’t be slow or gentle, however much he tries. When he makes the mistake of looking into her eyes he climaxes too soon, and uses his mouth and his hands on her instead, and she turns her face into the pillow to stay silent. Afterwards he falls asleep with her long hair in his face; it’s too hot and it tickles him but he doesn’t want to brush it away. He knows he shouldn’t like her too much; that he shouldn’t like lying in a bed, curled around her, with an ache in his balls that tells him he’ll want to make love to her again by morning. He knows it can’t last, this sudden feeling of safety and calm.

Ettore doesn’t wake when Chiara leaves, and in the morning when he sits up and puts his head in his hands, he can smell her on his own skin. He holds his head over the washstand basin and pours the whole contents of the jug over himself, gasping at the coldness of the water. He can’t pin his thoughts to any one thing, to any one need or wish or action. He feels stupid, vacant; hollowed out by her and frustrated with lust. He shaves messily, cutting himself, then dresses in trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and goes to find Marcie. He tries the sitting room first, and then goes to knock at the series of private rooms she shares with Leandro. After a pause she opens the door rather than calling him in, and he remembers something his mother once said, about never trusting a person who did that. About the multitude of things that could be hidden in the interim.

Marcie smiles when she sees him, and then laughs lightly.

‘Ettore – did you shave with a scythe, honey? You’re all chopped to hell!’ She touches her fingers briefly to the dried blood on his chin, so that he understands what she’s laughing at. He shrugs and follows her into the room. She’s dressed and made-up but hasn’t done her hair yet – it’s messy, not set in its perfect wave, and somehow the disarray makes her look both older and younger at once. There are blue damask curtains, lifting gently in the breeze, and a matching counterpane on the bed. Marcie has made a dressing table out of an old carved console – there’s a folding mirror on top, and all her make-up, perfumes and hairpins scattered over it on silver trays; her jewellery too. The huge diamond in the engagement ring Leandro bought her sends little rainbows flickering up the wall. She has gold chains too, and earrings that sparkle like the ring. He steps on something slippery and looks down to find his cracked boots dirtying a glossy, buff-coloured cowhide. He thinks of the room in Gioia he shares with Paola and Valerio. He thinks of Livia and her family, sleeping under an archway for weeks, months. His heart ices over.

‘What’s eating you?’ says Marcie. She sits down at her dressing table, facing towards him. He can see her long back in the mirror behind her.

‘I am going,’ he says.

‘Going?’ Her eyes widen. ‘You can’t mean going going?’

‘To Gioia. I take the money to Paola. So they eat.’ He stares hard at her, until a little shame comes into her face.

‘If they’d just come here, if they’d just be a bit sweet to Leandro, he’d take you all in – you know he would! Then they’d eat.’

‘And Valerio?’ he says brusquely. Marcie looks down at her hands, examines the nails, pushes at a cuticle.

‘But you can’t walk properly yet – you can hardly do a day’s work, can you?’ she says. ‘In fact, how will you even get there? We’ve no car here.’ From this Ettore can pick enough of the salient words.

‘I walk. I come back tomorrow.’

‘Oh, good!’ says Marcie. ‘It’s just a visit then – I understand! Listen – don’t try to walk, for heaven’s sake. I’ll send Anna on some errand in town – go with her in the trap. And Leandro will be back tomorrow with Boyd Kingsley, so you can come with them in the car. Do you understand? Oh, where’s Clare when I need her? Go with Anna, Ettore. Don’t try to walk.’

‘Yes,’ he says at last, thinking of the blisters on his hand that the crutch would give him during the fifteen-kilometre journey.

‘And, here,’ she says. ‘Wait a moment.’

Marcie takes something from a trinket box, gets up and goes to the wardrobe. She’s wearing a tubular dress of fine white linen that almost reaches her ankles, and shortens her steps; it rests on her hips with a belt stitched all over with turquoise beads. Ettore wonders what she sees when she looks out at the dry ground and the starving animals; the filthy, starving people. He’s not at all sure. She kneels to unlock a metal strongbox in the wardrobe, and Ettore glimpses what’s inside it. He stares. The box is piled high with money; tightly wadded stacks of notes. Thousands and thousands of lire. The sight gives him a strange fluttering in his gut; he has never seen anything like it. Marcie looks back over her shoulder.

‘Ridiculous, isn’t it? Leandro says he doesn’t trust the man who owns the bank – that Fiorentino fellow. And why not? I said. He still uses the bank in New York, after all, for all his business dealings there. But he only shrugs, and I think I know the answer – he doesn’t trust rich men. He is a rich man but he still doesn’t trust them. In his heart, he’s still the poor peasant he was born. And if you let on that I let you see this, he’ll skin me. You understand?’ She smiles, and Ettore says nothing. He swallows; he can’t tell what he feels. Marcie peels off several notes and presses them into his hands. ‘Don’t tell Leandro I’ve given you this – let me, it would be better. Take this for Paola and the baby. I know how worried you are. Take it.’ She pushes his hands away when he tries to give it back. ‘Just take it! Damn it, Ettore, don’t be so proud! Take it.’ He knows the word proud; she often uses it to describe him, to berate him. She can’t grasp that pride is all he has, sometimes. But he takes the money, even though it makes a mockery of him. It’s ten times what he’s earned as a guard in the past week, and she hands it over like it’s nothing, and smiles at his obedience.

Anna waits for him in the courtyard, sitting decorously in the little trap with a rein in each hand and her hair tied down beneath a scarf. She eyes him warily as he climbs up beside her. The mule’s knobbed hip bones and scarred knees speak of years of hard labour. It stands with its ears back and its eyes diffuse, entirely disengaged from its surroundings, not even flicking its tail at the biting flies that crowd it. Marcie waves down from the terrace as they move away, and on the far side of the archway, Chiara stands with Filippo beside her, holding her hat by its brim, coming back from a walk with dust up to her knees. She stares up at him and he can read her incomprehension and her hurt. If he could he would tell her he’s coming back but there’s no time and no way to, so he sets his expression and lets his eyes linger on her for just a second. Filippo waves with his non-bandaged hand and Ettore waves back at him. The dogs chorus them out of the gates, straining at their chains to get at the mule; the mule ignores them completely. All trace of the hail and its meltwater are gone, the only signs of the deluge are subtle: a greener colour to the fig tree leaves; a clarity to the air which will soon be taken back by the heat and dust and the sun’s flat glare, which will build and build until the next storm.

Ettore feels better as soon as they are clear of the masseria, and the road to Gioia is laid out in front of them; he’s on edge, but for different reasons. He looks around him for signs of workers in the fields they pass, but it seems that the strike is holding. The mule slopes along with flat strides that cover the ground, and before long they’re in the outskirts of Gioia del Colle. Ettore’s mood lifts further. He knows where he is in these streets; he knows who he is, and what he should do. He knows his place.

‘Let me down here,’ he says to Anna before they reach the centre, and she tugs on the mule’s mouth to halt it. Leandro’s buggy is modest enough but he still doesn’t want his neighbours to see him arriving in it.

‘You’re coming back with me later? How long will you be?’ says Anna.

‘No. I won’t go back today; don’t wait for me.’

‘All right.’ She nods and flicks the reins, and moves away. Ettore takes a deep breath and notices, in a way he normally doesn’t, the stink of Gioia. Sewage and rotting vegetables; sickness, unwashed bodies, horse shit and cigarette smoke. It’s familiar enough to be almost comforting, but at the same time it sticks in his throat. He heads towards Piazza Plebiscito, moving almost as quickly on the crutch as he could have walked normally. The square is crowded with people – all the workers, not working; a throng of black dotted here and there with the paler blouses of women. Some young men have climbed the lamp-posts to see better, and the bandstand is hung with socialist banners. At the edges of the square are groups of men who stand tight together and talk to each other rather than listening. They have the tense, watchful air of men who are waiting, and they give Ettore a warning prickle of unease. Some are in police uniform, some in the remains of army officer uniform; some wear black shirts, with insignia stitched or pinned onto them. Ettore stares into the crowd but there’s little hope of finding Paola in amongst it.

He makes his way around the outside, looking, just in case. The speaker is an old solider himself, but an infantry man, like Ettore was. Like all the peasants were. His voice comes through a loudhailer, with a metallic echo.

‘We asked them, why should we fight for Italy when we may not own even the smallest part of it? Why should we fight for Italy when we have no rights within it? When we are treated worse than the cattle? When we are reviled? Why should we go and die on the orders of men who despise us?’ the speaker shouts. His voice resounds in every corner of the square, and causes a stir of outrage in the listeners. When they are on strike, when they are not working, the men are restless to begin with; now they are hard, wound tight with stress. They are the dry grass into which a match might fall. Ettore can feel it coming, like a loud noise far away but getting closer, and closer. He moves faster, searches harder. ‘But Cadorna still sent us forward at Isonzo, again and again; still he watched us die in misery. Still he lined up entire regiments and shot each tenth man if we dared to disobey. My brother was one of those men – and he was the bravest of his unit. Shot like a dog. Like a dog!’

The crowd mutters in outrage, and the mention of Isonzo halts Ettore. He waits for a wave of horror to subside, as the word crowds his mind with a remembered terror so great it almost drove him mad. Twelve battles were fought at the Isonzo front, against the Austro-Hungarian army. Twelve battles over two hellish winters, that left three-quarters of a million soldiers dead in the frozen mud, and yet the lines did not move an inch. Ettore was drunk almost all the time. To be sober was to be too terrified to breathe, too hungry to live. To be sober was to risk madness; to risk opening a permanent crack in the mind. Drunkenness was the only way to survive those trenches, and Valerio isn’t the only one who’s tried hard to stay drunk ever since. Ettore thinks briefly of Leandro, safe in New York all that time; rich and dirty enough to buy his way out of the draft.

He takes a deep breath and carries on around the square. The speaker’s voice is laden with bitterness and anger. ‘And all the while the gentlemen shirkers stayed here at home, safe and protected on their farms. Why should we fight? We asked them, and they answered. You will have land, they said! You will have the respect and love of your country! You will be able to feed your families, plant your own crops, and work for the future! You will not be hungry any more! You will not be crippled by the winter’s debt, or robbed for the rent on an infested basement room a year in advance! I ask you, my brothers, have we got any of the things they said we would be given? Have we?’ Almost as one, the crowd roars out: No! ‘In Russia, they have taken what they were promised. Brothers, the time has come for us to take what we were promised!’ In the cacophony, Ettore hears his name called.

‘Ettore! Ettore!’ He spins about, searching, and sees Pino pushing towards him through the throng.

‘Pino! My friend, it’s good to see you. Are you well?’ They hug roughly, pounding each other’s backs.

‘Well enough, but how are you? It does me good to see you home, and walking! Are you back? Are you fit?’ Pino eyes the crutch doubtfully.

‘Not fit enough yet, but soon. I’ve come back to see Paola; I have money for her. Have you seen her?’

‘She was here but she went back – she didn’t want to bring the baby, and she didn’t want to leave him for long. Come, I’ll go with you.’

‘How long will the strike last?’

‘I don’t know. It’s been forty-eight hours… the men are hungry, and angry, and nobody dares patrol the farms for blacklegs any more, because of the squads. More squads all the time, Ettore. But if the proprietors want the harvest in and threshed, they must capitulate… and they must be getting frantic. But Capozzi and Santoiemma are still in jail, so…’ he says, with a shrug.

‘This meeting could go bad. Can you feel it?’ says Ettore, and Pino nods.

‘Best you get away before it does, with your leg still weak.’

They go into the small, ancient alleyways that lead to Vico Iovia, and the speaker’s ringing words and the answering roar quieten behind them. A mishmash of houses, built and rebuilt and patched and added on, crowd in on either side, close enough to touch; stairways and downspouts and crooked shutters, and here and there the stone flowers that let air into the rooms within, napped with age. The shadows are deep and there’s filth in the gutters.

‘Pino, I must thank you,’ says Ettore.

‘Must you?’ Pino grins at him.

‘If you hadn’t taken me to Masseria dell’Arco when you did, I might have lost this leg. Or died. Thank you.’

‘I didn’t do it for you, brother,’ says Pino seriously. Ettore glances over at him. ‘It was the smell – Mother of God, the smell! I couldn’t stand it a second longer. I had to get rid of you,’ he says, and Ettore chuckles.

‘Well, thank you, Pino,’ he says, and Pino gives him a slight shove that nearly knocks him off balance.

‘Stop thanking me for something you would do for me, just the same. In fact, just stop thanking me. It makes me nervous. So, how is it there? Is your aunt still living like a queen?’

‘Yes. It’s… incredible. It’s like she can’t see what’s around her. Like she looks out and still sees New York, and so she lives just as she must have done there.’

‘Maybe not quite as she must have done. Perhaps she doesn’t want to see. After all, what can she do to change it?’

‘Nothing. But she could at least acknowledge it… It insults us all, her deliberate obtuseness. I can’t work out if she’s stupid or just…’ He shrugs.

‘What?’

‘Crazy, I guess.’ He pauses, releases the crutch and stretches out his fingers to ease the ache in the heel of his hand. ‘She’s got her jewels out on display, for anyone to see – gold and diamonds. And there’s a strongbox of money in the wardrobe – more money than you or I have ever seen, Pino! She says my uncle doesn’t trust the bank. So it just sits there. She gave me this from it.’ He takes the folded notes from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Handed it over like she was giving me pocket money. Pino, I think she’s crazy.’

‘Jesus!’ Pino swears, his eyes going wide. ‘Still crazy about you, perhaps. Don’t flash that around, for God’s sake. Someone might carve out your liver for that money.’

‘I know.’

‘Maybe she’s not so crazy. She lives in a house with walls fifteen metres high, surrounded by dogs and guards. Why shouldn’t she wear diamonds? What good would it do us if she hid them away?’

‘She could sell them. Then perhaps Leandro could pay better wages, or hire more of us,’ says Ettore bitterly. ‘All through this harvest he’s sung the same tune as the others, Pino. “I am on the edge of ruin, I am making no money from this harvest, it costs me more to hire you than I will make selling the wheat.” ’ He shakes his head. ‘Yet he sits there with enough cash to buy Gioia and everyone in it. And Marcie said he still has money in New York – business interests. I suppose his sons are working for him there.’

‘A rich man has a different idea of what being poor is than those of us who are really poor.’

‘But this is Uncle Leandro, Pino! He knows!’

‘He knows, but he’s a rich man now, Ettore. It changes a man. Perhaps we would be the same if we became rich.’

‘No. Never. I could never forget, as he has forgotten, where I came from and what I have seen. Or how it feels to eat nothing for four days in a row…’

‘Calm down, Ettore!’ Pino smiles. ‘What should he do, give away all his money and be poor again himself? What would that accomplish?’

‘Perhaps he would get his soul back.’

‘Are you a man of God, now?’ says Pino, and Ettore smiles sheepishly. ‘One step at a time, and don’t walk uphill unless you have to. Today, you have money. Today, those you love will eat. Be pleased about that.’

‘Take this,’ says Ettore, thumbing two notes from the roll and handing them to Pino.

‘No, you keep it. You have more mouths to feed.’

‘I have more than enough. Take it for you and Luna, and don’t argue.’

‘Thank you, Ettore,’ says Pino humbly.

‘Don’t thank me for something you would do for me, just the same,’ says Ettore.

Just then shots are fired, cracking across the sky and along the alleyway to the two men; they crouch down immediately, covering their heads with the instinct of old soldiers, and in the silence afterwards they look back the way they’ve come as if they might see the bullets, or the enemy. Ettore sees his own instinctive fear mirrored in Pino’s eyes. We’re not soldiers, he thinks. We never were. We wanted to be farmers.

‘It’s starting,’ says Pino. Ettore stands up, grabs his crutch and sets off down the alley.

‘It started a long time ago. Come on, move!’ Behind them more shots are fired, in quick succession, like a fistful of gravel thrown hard against glass. There are shouts, a rising roar of voices and pounding feet, coming closer. Ettore and Pino rush further into the tangle of alleys, and then into the dead end of the tiny courtyard where Ettore lives.

‘I should go home. Luna is alone,’ says Pino, breathless.

‘Yes, go! I’ll see you afterwards, before I go back,’ says Ettore. Pino claps him on the shoulder and then jogs away down the alley.

Ettore struggles up the steps to his own door, bursts through it and pulls up short. The tip of a blade hovers a hair’s breadth from his throat; he blinks in the darkness and sees his sister’s eyes boring into his.

‘Paola!’ he says, in a strangled voice, and with the rushed release of a pent-up breath Paola lowers the knife, her shoulders sagging.

‘Madonna! I almost cut your throat, Ettore!’ she says, putting her spare hand over her eyes.

‘I noticed.’

‘I heard the shots – I thought you were a looter! Or one of those blackshirt bastards.’ She hugs him briefly, not letting go of the knife, and Ettore feels the hardness of her bones beneath her clothes. She smells sharp with anxiety and baby sick.

‘Is Iacopo well? Are you?’

‘Yes, he’s fine. He threw up all over me this morning, but then he laughed about it.’ She shrugs, her eyes going automatically to the wooden box where her son sleeps. Ettore looks around his home. After the light and space of the masseria, it’s like a hole in the ground. In the darkness across the room, on his habitual stone shelf, Valerio coughs weakly.

‘And our father?’ says Ettore quietly. Paola shrugs again, her face pinched with worry.

‘Weaker and weaker. He hardly eats, not that there has been much to give him. He has a fever, I think. Just slightly, but for several days now.’

‘You two, stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here,’ Valerio grumbles. Ettore goes to stand over him, and Valerio looks up blearily. There’s grey stubble in the cavernous hollows of his cheeks, brown rings around his eyes.

‘Should I fetch the doctor to see you, Father? I have money – from Uncle Leandro.’

‘Him!’ Valerio’s eyes blaze. ‘He gives us charity now, that arrogant son of a bitch?’ The effort of anger makes him cough again.

‘I worked for it. Well, for some of it,’ says Ettore. ‘So, shall I fetch the doctor?’

‘What’s the point? He’ll do nothing but send you to his brother to buy drugs that don’t work. Leave me in peace, if you want to do something for me. Or better still, go and buy me some wine with that money of his. But I know you won’t do me that kindness, will you?’ Valerio stares listlessly into the shadows. His breathing is a shallow whistle that barely moves his ribs. Ettore grits his teeth.

‘You’ll just give up and die then, will you? When I am away from home, and there’s no one to help your only daughter and your grandson, no one to earn money to feed them? No one to protect them?’ he says. Valerio’s gaze goes to Paola, who stands with the knife still gripped in her fist.

‘My daughter has always done better for herself than I could ever do for her,’ he whispers, and though there’s pride in the words, there’s self-pity too. With a sigh, Valerio shuts his eyes.

Paola flinches a little, and says nothing for a while. She puts the knife down at last, goes to Iacopo and touches his cheek.

‘You have money, you said?’ she says.

‘Yes, plenty. I-’ Ettore breaks off at the sound of a shot close at hand, and running feet. There’s an angry shout, and the wrenching of a door against its hinges.

‘They’re close!’ Paola hisses. She rushes to the door and peers out through a crack in the wood.

‘Should I go? Would you be safer?’ Ettore’s heart thumps hard in his chest, in fear, in anger.

‘Perhaps… perhaps.’ Paola turns to him and her face is the same as his – full of fear and fury. ‘You picked a ripe time to come home, Ettore! If they come in here I will cut their throats, by God I will!’

‘No, Paola! Not unless you have to. Not unless it’s you or them, or they’ll kill you for sure. I’ll go – I’m going.’

‘You mustn’t be out on the streets! Go down to the stable and hide there. Go, go! Be quick. And don’t be tempted to come out and fight. Promise me! They’ll shoot you as soon as look at you.’

‘Who are these men?’ says Ettore, as he reaches for the door.

‘Who they’ve always been, brother, and they want what they’ve always wanted – to trample us, because they hate us. Now go.’

Ettore rushes into their neighbour’s stable, below the room he and Paola live in, and pulls the rickety gates shut behind. The reek of ammonia is almost too much to breathe. The bony nanny goat who lives there eyes him, turning her head this way and that on her stiff neck, weaving anxiously. Her eyes are alien and without sympathy, and she bleats low in her throat, coming towards him in case he has food. Ettore crouches down, looking out through the split planks of the doors. For a few minutes nothing happens. His breathing returns to normal, the goat nibbles at his shirt, and he feels foolish. Then a knot of men, six or seven of them, march into the little courtyard with orderly purpose; led by a man who has twin ammunition belts criss-crossing his chest, a pistol on each hip, and a silver badge in the shape of an axe in a bundle of sticks at the throat of his shirt. There’s something familiar about him, his black curling hair and soft outline, but viewed through a crack and from the side, Ettore can’t place him. Not until he raises his fist to halt the men behind him and turns to go up the stairs, and Ettore sees his handsome face marred by a cleft palate and an expression of ugly excitement. Federico Manzo; Ludo’s son, and Leandro’s servant. Sudden rage grips Ettore; he feels it squeezing him, crushing out the breath and the thought and the reason. His fingers curl around the edge of the door and only at the last instant does he stop himself pulling it open and rushing out to confront the man. He forces himself to remain still; it takes every bit of his will.

Federico Manzo bangs hard on the door.

‘Ettore Tarano!’ he says loudly. Ettore holds his breath; the goat rumbles in its throat again.

He hears the door squeak as it opens, and Paola says, ‘What do you-’ before she is pulled down the steps by her arm, and shoved towards the waiting men.

‘Hold her, and watch out for this one – she’s a whore and a mean bitch,’ says Federico, grinning at Paola’s furious expression. ‘She’s probably got a knife in her cunny, and from what I hear, she’ll use it. Where’s your brother, whore?’

‘At his uncle’s farm, where he’s been for the last two weeks. As you know,’ she says coldly.

‘I think you’re lying.’ Federico smiles, and carries on into the room.

‘There’s nobody in there but my baby and my sick father! Leave them alone!’

‘Shut your mouth,’ says one of the men darkly. ‘Unless you want to cause trouble? We’ll be gone once he’s checked. You needn’t fear for your virtue – if you have any. I like my women to have breasts,’ he says, grinning at her, and his fellows laugh. One of them puts out his hand and grabs at Paola’s chest, making her wince.

‘I have bigger tits myself!’ he declares, to more laughter. Inside the room there’s a thump, and a muffled exclamation, and then Iacopo howls. Paola rushes forwards but is grabbed, held back.

‘Iacopo! If you touch him I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’ she shouts. Ettore can’t keep his breathing even, his whole body shakes with adrenalin; he silently begs Paola to be still. He hears, but can’t see, Federico speak from the top of the steps, and from the sudden clarity of Iacopo’s cries, it’s obvious he’s brought the baby out with him. A new thrill of fear goes through Ettore.

‘What a shithole. No wonder your brother likes it at the masseria so much. Tell me where he is,’ says Federico.

‘Don’t hurt him! Don’t hurt my baby, you son of a whore!’

‘Tell me where your brother is, or I’ll drop him off these steps.’

‘He’s at the masseria! If he’s not, I don’t know where he is! I haven’t seen him since he went there. Give me my baby! Give him to me!’

Slowly, Federico walks down the steps and Ettore sees that he has Iacopo cradled in one arm, jouncing him gently enough as he crosses to where Paola is held, a man on each of her arms. Federico smiles at the expression of mixed terror and hope on her face. ‘Give him to me,’ she says again. Federico looks at her with his head on one side.

‘He’s a beautiful baby. You must be proud of him,’ he says, in a conversational tone. Then he sighs, pulls one of his pistols and puts it to Iacopo’s head.

‘No!’ Paola cries. ‘No! No!’ Ettore can’t move; he can’t breathe. Get up. Get up, he orders his body, but it won’t obey him. These men mean to kill him, that much is clear. No man would put a gun to a child’s head merely to make an arrest, or give a beating. He won’t do it, Paola, he sends her the silent reassurance. He won’t do it – Iacopo is Leandro’s blood.

‘Where is he, Paola? I know he came to Gioia today,’ says Federico. Paola stares in mute horror at her son, and the gun pointing at him. She shakes her head.

‘I… I don’t know,’ she says, barely a whisper. Ettore shuts his eyes in sudden agony. He knows then that there’s no one in the world braver than his sister. Federico watches her for a moment longer, then shrugs and holsters the gun.

‘Perhaps you don’t, after all. Perhaps he stayed at the farm – he will if he has any sense. We can’t get at him there. Not yet, anyway.’ He nods at his men and they release her. She grabs Iacopo from Federico’s careless hold, and cradles him as they march out of the courtyard.

‘Bye for now, whore,’ says the one who grabbed her breasts as he passes. ‘I might come back to see you later.’ But Paola cradles her son, pressing her lips to his head, and ignores the man. For a while the only sound is Iacopo howling, and Ettore wonders if he will ever have the nerve to leave the shit and piss reek of the goat stall. If he will be able to stand the shame.

Eventually, Paola goes back inside without looking at the doors to the stable. Ettore doesn’t move until he hears her call for help, and then he goes in, stinking, silent with hatred, to help her pick Valerio up off the floor.

‘Paola…’ he says, but he’s got nothing to say.

‘Go back to the masseria, Ettore. You heard him – you’re safe there,’ she says, tucking the blanket back around their father, pressing her hand to his gleaming forehead.

‘I can’t go back tonight – I’ve no means to. Anna will have left when trouble started. Paola, listen, he… he can’t hurt Iacopo. Leandro is his boss…’

‘I know. I knew it – that’s why I kept quiet.’ Her voice is leaden with exhaustion. ‘What does it mean, Ettore? What does it mean when our own uncle’s servants may come here and threaten us? He would have killed you. Why? Have you done something to anger them? What does it mean?’ Suddenly there are tears in her eyes, the first Ettore has seen since Davide, Iacopo’s father, was killed. He can’t bear to see them; he folds his sister into his arms, rests his chin on the top of her head, and she lets him, for once. A tremor goes through her.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what it means. But I will find out.’ Paola pulls away, wipes at her eyes.

‘You can’t stay here. They might be watching; they might come back to look again. Go to Pino and Luna.’

‘They know Pino’s my friend.’ Ettore shakes his head.

‘Go to Gianni and Benedetto then; go to Livia’s family. But don’t stay here.’

‘All right.’ He gives her all the money he has and she takes it without a word. ‘Paola,’ he says, squeezing her hand with the money in it. He finds it hard to speak. ‘You have the heart of a lion. You have twice the heart of me.’

Everywhere in town are sounds of trouble, clashes. There are several fascist squads on the streets, and many groups of Gioia’s working men, greater in numbers but weaker, and unarmed. The squads attack unionist buildings, and the homes of known agitators; the workers attack the police headquarters, the town hall and the new fascist party offices. Livia’s mother, Bianca, opens the door to Ettore with her face full of fear, and her eyes pinch when she sees him. He can’t tell how she feels about him, but she has been cold towards him, distant, since Livia died. He thinks perhaps she blames him for not protecting her daughter, and he accepts that blame. He blames himself, after all, and now he has more guilt – the guilt of a new lover. He wonders if Bianca can sense it on him – the traces of another woman. Perhaps since Livia was killed by a man who wanted to take pleasure from her, she now hates all men who ever thought of her that way. All men who ever wanted to make love to her.

‘Can I come in? Men are looking for me,’ he says.

Bianca hesitates for a second before she nods and steps aside to let him into their room, which is every bit as cramped and dank as the Taranos’. She returns to her place on a three-legged stool in front of the stove. She looks twice her age.

‘You weren’t followed?’ says Gianni, a watchful presence in a shadowed corner.

‘No. I would not trouble you but they have been to my house once already, and they mean business.’

‘They are attacking anyone who’s ever been a spokesman, or led a strike, or been at a rally,’ says Benedetto, Livia’s oldest brother, a bear of man with gnarled shoulders and a mass of black beard. ‘Anyone whose name they know. Come in, of course. I heard you were at your uncle’s.’ Space is made for Ettore, though there’s nowhere for him to sit but on a straw-filled mattress on the floor in the far corner of the room. He winces as he sinks onto it, noticing the pain in his leg from all the movement of the afternoon.

‘We’ve only a little black pasta for dinner, with some anchovies,’ says Bianca, poking at the contents of an iron pot on the stove.

‘I’m grateful…’ says Ettore. Then he hesitates. His stomach is rumbling and hot with hunger, though he ate a hearty breakfast at the masseria, and he realises with shame that he has got used to being full. ‘But in fact I’ve already eaten, earlier. I would not take from you what I do not need.’ Gianni nods and the atmosphere lightens just slightly.

‘All right,’ says Bianca, sounding relieved. Hospitality dictates that guests be fed, but nobody welcomes an extra mouth to feed.

Far into the night there are sporadic gunshots and shouts of anger, defiance, amusement, scorn. Ettore can’t sleep, because when he shuts his eyes he sees Federico Manzo holding a gun to Iacopo’s head, and the naked terror on Paola’s face. At one point he gets up and looks out through a crack in the shutters, and the sky is orange with burning, and full of smoke. Gioia is built of stone and fire rarely spreads, but equally there is scant water to extinguish it. When a building catches fire, it usually burns itself out. Ettore watches the shifting orange glow for a long time, as sparks spiral up through it, twisting, quick with inhuman life. It strikes him as peculiar that destruction should be beautiful like this.

His mother, Maria, had believed in the three angels that appeared at sunset to guard every home – angels like sprites, like fairies, unrelated to God. She would never leave rubbish right outside the house at night, in case it offended the angel that guarded the door; she made a small bow to the one that sat at the table before each meal; she thanked the one that watched over the bed every night before she slept. Come morning these spirits would dissolve into the sunrise, but Maria Tarano slept soundly in the knowledge that no evil spirits or curses could come upon them in the darkness. For a while, as Ettore watches the burning, he wonders what happens to these angels when a house is ablaze. Do they take fright and vanish, or slink away in shame from their failure, or do they stay and try to fight the flames? Is it their anguish he can see in the swirling sparks, the tortuous coils of smoke? The night is long, and Ettore is glad, for once, that his mother isn’t around to have seen today. He feels so lonely just then that it’s like an ache in his bones, and he wishes he was back at Masseria dell’Arco, curled tight around Chiara Kingsley with her hair in his face and the warmth of her skin on his, and the soft bump of her heart against the arm he would wrap around her.

In the morning Ettore waits for Gianni or Benedetto to bring news, and it’s Gianni who returns first, his hawkish face heavy with care.

‘We’re going back to work tomorrow. Capozzi and Santoiemma will be released today, but… the Labour Exchange is gone.’

‘Gone?’ says Ettore. Gianni nods.

‘Gone up in smoke, and three men dead trying to defend it. All the registers, all the rosters, all the contracts the proprietors signed – gone. We’re back to where we were right after the war.’ Ettore’s heart sinks wearily.

‘New offices can be found, new rosters drawn up. Di Vagno will see to it,’ he says, and hopes that he’s right, and that Gianni will agree with him. Di Vagno is their deputy, their member of parliament, and a socialist. Gianni eyes him with some disgust.

‘Keep your dreams, if they comfort you,’ he says gruffly. ‘Any fool can see which way the wind is blowing here in Gioia. In Puglia.’

‘Would you lie down and let them march over you, Gianni?’ says Ettore quietly. Gianni’s expression blackens.

‘We fight and we fight but we always lose, and I’m tired of pretending it can be otherwise. It doesn’t matter how many speeches Di Vittorio makes, or how many deputies like Di Vagno we manage to elect. None of it matters. I want to work, and I want to eat. That’s all.’ He goes to lie down on the mattress. Ettore thanks them, and gets up to leave. Their hopelessness is infectious; he can feel it seeping into him like the numbness of a January day, and he doesn’t want it. He wants to get his hands on Federico Manzo, and his father Ludo. He wants to punish them. He can’t let them win.

This desire for violence charges him, sharpens him, as he makes his way to Leandro’s house on Via Garibaldi. He has to pause before knocking at the street door, to breathe, to contain himself. The peasants have long known better than to take their troubles to the police, and the police are more partisan now than they’ve ever been; if he attacks Federico, Ettore will be the one prosecuted, and nothing that went on before will count in mitigation. So when Federico opens the door to his knock, and grins at him like they’re old friends, Ettore must let the anger wash through him and stifle it. It’s like eating ashes.

‘Mr Tarano. What a pleasure,’ says Federico, and makes him a small bow, the perfect servant. ‘Your uncle will be pleased to see you.’ Ettore walks past him into the shade of the archway, keeping his eyes fixed on him. He’s dressed in dark trousers, a grey shirt and a faded but serviceable waistcoat; no sign of the gun belts or insignia. ‘It was a troubled night here in Gioia. I think he was worried for you, when he heard you’d come back to town.’

‘Perhaps he has more cause to worry than he knows,’ says Ettore. Federico smiles again.

‘Perhaps so. But you’re safe within his walls. Your uncle is a powerful man, after all.’

‘That he is.’ Just then he hears Leandro’s voice from one of the upper terraces.

‘Is that my nephew, back safe?’ he calls.

‘Yes, sir,’ Federico calls, and as he turns to go back into his little room by the door, Ettore stops him.

‘If you go near my sister again I swear I will cut out your tripes,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t doubt my word.’ Federico’s smile vanishes; his face writhes in anger.

‘We’ll see,’ he says. Then he steps past Ettore and vanishes inside.

‘Ettore! Come on up, talk to me,’ Leandro calls. ‘Why on earth did you come back to town at such a time? Anything you want taken to Paola, I can have taken. I can send one of the servants.’

‘We have no word at the masseria of what is happening here in Gioia, and I wanted to see them myself, Uncle.’ Ettore climbs the stairs to the terrace. ‘My father is very ill, Paola has no help.’

‘Ah,’ says Leandro, nodding regretfully. ‘She was always a wilful and resourceful girl, mind you. If any woman could take care of herself…’ He spreads his hands.

‘That she can doesn’t mean she should have to.’

‘Then let her come here and work in the kitchens, since she will not be kept as family.’ Leandro says this lightly, because he knows Paola won’t agree to it.

‘Perhaps she might, if Valerio…’ Ettore feels disloyal even as he says this; treacherous for envisaging the time after his father’s death. Then he thinks that the first thing Paola would do if she came within these walls would be to slit Federico’s throat in the night. He shakes his head. ‘For now, I’m all she has.’

The sky is flat white as Federico drives them back out to the masseria; there’s a thick blanket of cloud that traps all the heat, and it’s so still and so stifling the air seems to have clotted. Seven magpies perch in the contorted branches of a dead olive tree, and they watch the car pass with eyes like lead shot, not even crouching to take wing. They have no fear, but also no energy, no animation. They look dead, and Ettore, still thinking of his mother, takes them as a warning of some kind. He’d been thinking how he would approach his uncle regarding the Manzos, how he would ask about Federico’s role in the squads, and whether Leandro is aware that Ettore, his own nephew, is on their hit list. Whether he knows that the well-fed young man driving them that day had, the day before, put a gun to his great-nephew’s head. If the magpies are a warning, they’re warning him against saying anything, but he’s not sure if he can heed it. Mustn’t his uncle choose blood over politics? Mustn’t he choose his own people over those who have persecuted them for countless generations? My brother has forgotten who he is; so said Ettore’s mother. Ettore holds his tongue and looks at Chiara’s husband instead.

Boyd Kingsley sits hunched in the front passenger seat, with his knees folded sharply and his head ducked down. He has a flat leather case cradled on his lap, and his fingers fiddle constantly with its buckles. He looks profoundly uncomfortable, but then, that seems to be how he always looks. Ettore can only see the side of his face – one slightly pendulous ear, a thin neck with rough skin like a plucked bird, wisps of colourless hair as fine as a child’s. He must be fifteen years older than his wife, at least. Ettore thinks of the way he engulfed Chiara in his arms when he first came to the farm, as if he hadn’t seen her for weeks, and it makes him slightly queasy. She’s his wife; of course he’s screwed her. He has every right, and Ettore has none. But once the thought of it is in his head he can’t get rid of it, and by the time they turn into the gates at dell’Arco, Ettore despises both men sitting in the front of the car equally; one rightly so, the other unfairly. He wonders if Chiara will come to see him with her husband in residence, and then curses his own stupidity. Of course she won’t. Perhaps she only used him in her husband’s absence, to flatter her, to fulfil her. Picked up and put down, like a toy. Whatever empathy he thought he sensed from her, whatever resonance there seemed to be between them, he might only have conjured out of grief and loneliness. Ettore’s jaw goes tight. The Masseria dell’Arco is not the real world, and neither is Chiara Kingsley.

Because he can’t say any of the things he wants to say, he says nothing. He walks inside with Leandro because he doesn’t want to be out on the farm where he might run into Ludo or Federico; he doesn’t know what he would do. The three men, Leandro, Boyd Kingsley and himself, go into the long sitting room on the ground floor of the masseria, where the high ceiling helps to keep it cool, and white voile curtains go some way to keeping out the flies. They sit down on an overstuffed sofa, decades old, and Ettore doesn’t listen as the others talk in English. When the women appear in the doorway he watches Chiara carefully, though it’s Marcie who makes all the noise, fussing him about his leg, and for news of Iacopo. He wants to see which of them Chiara will look at first – her lover or her husband; which of them she will look at the longest. He can tell himself that he doesn’t care, but it’s not true. She keeps her eyes carefully away from him, and as if she can feel him watching her, and his anger, she blushes. She greets her husband with the trace of a smile, and he clasps both of her hands to stoop and kiss her. She offers him her cheek. As they sit back down she glances up at Ettore and meets his eyes for a broken second. A darted glance like the sudden startling of a bird, but in it he reads desperation, and something else. Could it be joy he sees? Joy at his return? Something inside him unclenches. She picks a thread from her sand-coloured skirt, sweeps her hands along her thighs to smooth the fabric, and keeps her eyes down from then on.

Anna brings in a tray of cold drinks, with salvaged hailstones tapping at the glasses. As she puts it down she looks at Ettore with such a stiff, nervous expression that he immediately starts to wonder, and then guesses that this girl is how Federico Manzo knew he’d gone back to Gioia. Federico seems to have a way with women, even if he’s disfigured; he flatters them with extravagant words and gestures. Or perhaps he’s simply paying her. Ettore takes note not to trust the girl. He watches his uncle saying something in English that he punctuates with expansive hand gestures. Hard to believe that this man, in his new light blue suit with the waistcoat buttoned up in spite of the heat, this man with his chauffeur and his wife gleaming and laughing and dripping jewels, is the brother of his mother, Maria Tarano, who believed in curses and angels, and fought her poverty every day, and taught her children that money you didn’t need was a poison. By increments, Ettore feels less and less as though this man is his blood. My brother has forgotten who he is.

Ettore leans forwards abruptly, interrupting the conversation he has not been following.

‘Uncle, do you know what happened in Gioia yesterday? What actually happened?’ He speaks in the dialect; there’s incomprehension on all faces but Leandro’s. ‘Do you know that these squads are attacking ordinary people in their homes now? Do you know who is commanding them?’

‘Ah, Ettore.’ Leandro shakes his head and sighs in apparent regret, but his eyes are stony. ‘It’s a nasty business. You should remain here, out of it.’

‘Are the proprietors paying for their weapons, and the food in their bellies?’

‘I have made it my business not to enquire.’

‘I don’t believe you, Uncle,’ he says, and Leandro thumps his fist onto the low table in front of him – so hard that the glasses jump, so quickly that his arm barely seems to move. The others fall silent; Ettore feels their nervous eyes on him.

‘This is my house, Ettore,’ says Leandro, softly. He points one finger at his nephew for a moment. ‘You will not be a guest here, so you are an employee. If that’s the way you want it, so be it. But you will be respectful, or you will leave. Those are your choices. I didn’t drag my ass out of the New York gutter to come back here and be insulted by you. Do you understand me?’

‘Your driver put a gun to Iacopo’s head. Federico Manzo – he leads one of the squads. Have you chosen not to enquire about that as well? He was looking for me, and he put a gun to the baby’s head,’ says Ettore, through gritted teeth. Leandro says nothing for a moment. He sits back, sips his drink. His hands are completely steady; Ettore clenches his own to hide how they shake.

‘I knew he’d joined the fascists – most of the corporals have. But I didn’t know they’d marked you.’ His tone is soft now, dangerous. ‘I will speak to the Manzo boys.’

‘But you will not dismiss them?’

‘What good would that do? What control would I have over them then?’

‘I can’t work for that man, or near his son. I can’t be around them.’

‘Then leave.’ Leandro is composed again, his black gaze steady and implacable. ‘It’s my duty as your uncle to offer you what help I can, what help you will accept. But I will not be told what to do by you, Ettore. Do not insult me.’

Ettore rubs one hand across his mouth, grips his jaw hard between his fingers. There is so much he wants to say, so much he wants to shout. He wants to stand and kick the table over, and break every glass. He wants to roar. But he doesn’t. Marcie titters nervously, and they all begin to talk again; the stilted, self-conscious conversation of people who sense something grim in the room but can’t acknowledge it.

‘Why do you have these people here, Uncle? These English. Why do you keep them here at such a time? It’s not safe for anybody,’ says Ettore.

‘I have my reasons,’ says Leandro. ‘What makes you think they’re kept here?’

‘The woman speaks Italian.’

‘Ah! So she does.’ Leandro nods. ‘And she told you as much? I didn’t think the English spoke so openly. That’s not their reputation. Least of all this one, brave as a rabbit.’

‘Does her husband owe you something?’ says Ettore.

‘Owe me? Well, perhaps. Not in the usual way, maybe, but… Let’s just say there is something I need to find out from him, before I can let them go home. But don’t worry – they are quite safe here, I’m sure. My guards are loyal, and I keep their guns loaded; and if you like the money then stay on here as one of them. It’s that simple. But don’t make trouble, Ettore. And don’t make me tell you again,’ says Leandro. Ettore scrapes his hands through his hair, and feels the dust of Gioia on his scalp. He mutters a vague apology and leaves the room.

He goes to find Ludo Manzo; he has no choice, if he wants to start work again. Federico will stay at the masseria as long as Leandro does, ready to drive him, and Ettore hopes he won’t find the two of them side by side. He couldn’t stand their gloating unassailability. In the end he has to ask where to find the overseer, and then sets off on a long walk to one of the furthest fields, where the last of the wheat still waits to be cut. He goes part of the way without the crutch, only using it again when his leg starts to cramp from the uneven, hobbling way he has to walk. The dust swirls in his wake then resettles slowly. He sees the corporals on their horses, and the small work crew labouring under their bored gaze; the rhythmic swing of scythes, the bent backs of the men tying the sheaves. This is the last of this work; soon the men will spend days and days feeding the threshing machines – on those farms that have them, on those farms that have fuel for the machines. Otherwise it will be done by flail, as it has been done for hundreds of years. By the end of July, the grain should be stored, or sold; the straw baled for animal feed. August is the ploughing month; blades dragged through the rocky soil behind mules, oxen, work horses, rare tractors. Then there’s sowing, weeding, rock-breaking, the repair of damaged walls. Then by the winter there is nothing at all; no way for the men to earn a wage. The hands of this timeless clock turn inexorably, and Gianni is right – they have fought and fought, and made only fleeting changes.

Ettore pauses when he sees how closely Ludo is watching a pair of young lads at work, one hand on the bullwhip coiled at his hip. It’s like no time has passed since those two lads were Pino and Ettore, checking the broken stones for ancient shells, with this same man nearby, a figure from a nightmare, trailing fear into the world when there was hardship enough already. He walks over to him.

‘Tarano. You’re back safely then,’ says Ludo, with his sharp twist of a smile.

‘Why wouldn’t I be safe?’

‘These are troubled times. But here you are, tucked back beneath your uncle’s wing.’

‘And in your care, Manzo,’ says Ettore sarcastically. The overseer laughs.

‘I’ve never been accused of caring for my workers before. Ask these feeble wretches.’ He nods at the toiling men. Ettore looks over them; thin and bent and dirty. He frowns, and studies each face. Not one is familiar, and there are subtle differences in their clothes and the shapes of their hats.

‘These aren’t Gioia men!’ he says. Ludo glances down at him.

‘You can tell that by looking at them? Jesus, you all look the same to me. We hired these in Basilicata. What’s a man to do, if the local men don’t want to work? The harvest can’t wait.’

‘You broke the strike? These are blacklegs?’

‘Was there a strike?’ says Ludo, all innocence. ‘I just thought you Gioia scum had taken a holiday.’

‘You… you can’t! The treaty… Leandro signed – all the landlords signed. The Chamber of Labour…’

‘Last I heard there was no Chamber of Labour any more.’ Ludo can’t hide his amusement. He rests his forearms on the pommel of the saddle, leaning forward to the comfortable creak of leather.

‘You may have the police with you, but Di Vagno will see the agreements honoured! You can’t run roughshod over the law-’

‘There’s only one kind of law here in Puglia, same kind there’s always been. The sooner you lot realise you’re beaten, the better.’ For a moment Ettore can’t speak, and because he can’t unleash his anger it threatens to choke him.

‘I want guard duty again,’ he manages to grind out.

‘Then fuck off back to the trullo and take the night shift. And keep out of my way.’ Ludo straightens up, turns away, dismisses him.

As Ettore approaches the archway of the masseria the red car slithers past him, too fast, billowing dust from its wheels as it skids into the bend. He squints through the clouds and sees young Filippo at the wheel, concentrating hard but grinning, and Leandro in the passenger seat, laughing, holding tight. They roar away towards the gates, which Carlo scrambles to open in time. Ettore is left with dust in his eyes and on his lips. He wipes his face, spits. Clare is alone on the terrace when he reaches the inner courtyard; just sitting, not reading or drinking. Ettore stands in the middle of the empty space, not caring who sees him, who wonders; he stands there in silence, alight with rage, until she sees him. Her mouth opens slightly in surprise, she leans forwards as though she might get up, but then she hesitates. Ettore lifts one arm and points up and behind him, to the window of his room. He waits until he sees her understand, then he turns away and goes indoors. He stays on his feet inside his room; he stands and faces the door and waits, and has no idea if she will come or not. But if she does not, he decides right then, he will never look at her again. Moments later, she slips in through the door without knocking and carries on towards him, not pausing until she is close enough for him to feel her nervous breath on his mouth. She’s so bold, so sure; her certainty surprises him, and it’s he who falters.

‘Where is your husband?’ he says. She puts her fingers on his cheek, low down, near his mouth, as if she wants to feel it move when he speaks.

‘I don’t care,’ she says.

After they have made love the things he must think about, the problems he must solve, drop back into Ettore’s mind like stones into water, each one sinking fast, each one ruining the perfect calm, the perfect clarity, the perfectly empty head that sleeping with this woman leaves him with. He doesn’t want to let them back in. He opens his eyes and stares at her white skin, and runs his stained fingers over it; he breathes in the smell of her sweat and her hair, the human smell under the fragrance of soap. Chiara is awake; he can tell from the way she’s breathing. He lies with his face resting on her chest, breathing in time with the rise and fall of her ribs, but when his thoughts get too much and he can’t stay still, he props himself up on one elbow and looks away, and feels her watching him. A breeze from the open window caresses his back; outside, the white light is softening to grey. The dairy cows are calling out to be milked, making their way nearer to the milking parlour, and then there’s the sound of an engine. It gets louder and louder, comes thundering into the courtyard below, and dies. Leandro and Filippo’s voices echo up to Ettore’s room, happy and relaxed, and he realises again that this is not the real world.

At the sound of the car and their voices, Chiara tenses.

‘I should go. Pip might come looking for me,’ she says.

‘I didn’t think you would still come to me when your husband was here,’ say Ettore. Mention of him makes her restless, and she draws in a long breath, fidgeting.

‘Yes, I will still come. I will still come. My… lie? My traitorness…?’

‘Betrayal.’

‘My betrayal does not feel like a betrayal. To be married to him… to Boyd, feels like the betrayal.’

‘But you are married to him. This is the betrayal.’ For some reason he wants her to acknowledge it. He wants her to feel guilty, because he does – now that the peace has gone, and thought has returned. But he likes what she says. He likes that he has the greater claim. ‘My uncle takes the boy driving?’

‘Yes, he’s teaching Pip how to drive. And Marcie is teaching him now to act. Between them he is kept quite busy. He doesn’t need me any more; not like he did.’

‘You’re sad about that?’

‘Yes, I…’ She draws up her knees, wraps her hands around them and rests her chin, turning to look at him. ‘When I am not with you I am alone. When you go… Now, even with Pip I feel alone. That makes me sad.’ Her gaze has barbs and he recoils, gets up and moves away, reaching for his shirt.

‘I won’t be here for long. I will go when I can. And you will go when my uncle lets you. With your husband and your boy, back to…’ He realises he has no idea where she lives, no picture in his head of what it might look like. What her life might look like. Not like his, that much is certain. ‘Back to your real world.’

Ettore goes to the courtyard window. Federico is sitting on the water trough, smoking idly, watching Anna as she draws water. The sight of him causes a hard jolt of violence. Ettore grips the window ledge, stepping back when Anna goes inside and it seems like Federico might look up. Just then, Filippo appears on the terrace across the courtyard and pauses. Looking for Chiara. Ettore turns back to her and she has not moved, or dressed. She looks closed in, shrunken, and he knows he’s hurt her.

‘My uncle told me he needs to find out something from your husband before you can go. Do you know what that could be? You could go sooner if you told him.’ There’s nothing but silence from the room. ‘The boy is looking for you,’ he says.

‘Yes. I’ll go. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to go back to my real world, with my husband. I don’t love him.’

‘Why did you marry him?’

‘I was just a girl. I was eighteen when we met, nineteen when we married. I’d just finished school… and my parents introduced us. He seemed… he seemed the right person to marry.’

‘For money?’

‘No, no. Not for money. For… safety, I suppose. For a life that was the way life was supposed to be. The way I had been brought up to think it should be. And for Pip. I also married him for Pip.’

‘Because you loved the boy?’

‘Yes. He was so little, and so lost without his mother. And I loved Boyd… That is, I thought I loved him. Now I think… I think perhaps I had no idea what love was. No idea how things could be between a man and a woman.’ She looks up at him quickly, uncertainly, like she’s said too much. Ettore stays quiet. ‘But how could I have known? I was so young…’ She shakes her head, seems to want him to absolve her of her mistake. ‘I was a schoolgirl, and then I was Mrs Boyd Kingsley. That’s all I knew how to be, until now.’

‘You’re still Mrs Kingsley. You still have your life to go back to – the one you chose. The one that is how it should be; the one you will go back to. This is life. Full of things we must do whether we want to or not,’ he says harshly, and wants to feel angry with her and her naivety, but can’t. She takes a quick breath, like a gasp, and then hurries to her feet and starts to dress, but her hands are shaking and she can’t manage her buttons, the clasp of her brassiere, her hairpins. Ettore finds he can’t bear it; it’s like a little knife in his own heart, the ease with which he can hurt her. He goes to stand behind her, puts his arms around her, tucks his face into the crook of her neck. For a second he wants to tell her that she is like a cool drink at the end of a hot day, but he doesn’t.

‘You’re not going yet,’ she says, the words blurred. ‘Your leg is still not strong enough. You’re not going yet.’

‘Not yet,’ he agrees, but in his head he’s already back in Gioia, in the small room where his father is determined to die and his sister nurses her son with a knife in her spare hand. He is in the fields with the men he has always worked alongside; he is in the piazza, he is in the ashes of the Chamber of Labour; he has Livia’s murderer beneath him, and rocks in his fists; he is a blaze of outrage.

For a week he works. He uses his leg whenever he can and the wound no longer opens when he does so, and he can no longer feel it pull in the bone. The ache of it is manageable, and no worse than the fire in his back after a day with the mattock or scythe. The Gioia men return to work and threshing starts; the thump of the machine out away from the house is a constant background noise, like a giant, restless heartbeat. Leandro Cardetta, it seems, has no trouble procuring fuel. Ettore waits for Chiara; when he is not on duty he goes away from the masseria and waits. They meet in ruined trulli, the abandoned homes of poor men, peasant men, dead men. He avoids company inside the masseria; he still itches with impatience, but when he sees her coming towards him with that rapid, light, marching way she walks, he finds himself smiling. They learn each other’s bodies, and how they like to be touched; the pattern of their love-making is like a dance, learnt and instinctive at the same time. And he finds that his mind returns to it, to her, more and more; at times when he should be thinking of leaving, when he should be thinking of finding Livia’s killer, when he should be thinking of Paola, and home, and the war they are so clearly losing. One more time, he thinks, each time she goes. Just one more time.

One stuffy night he’s on duty in the trullo by the gates. The dogs whine and mutter to themselves as they settle down for the night; geckos cheep at one another as they wriggle across the warm stones, pausing to mark Ettore with the black spheres of their eyes. He sits with the rifle on his knees and lets his mind wander. There has been no sign of raiders or thieves since he arrived at dell’Arco, and the mood of the guards is relaxed. Twice Ettore has been to the roof and found Carlo fast asleep; once he castigated the young man mildly, and only afterwards realised what he was doing – warning him to be ready to attack Ettore’s own people. Then he was so appalled with himself that he almost laughed. One by one the lights go off inside the masseria until the darkness is complete, and Ettore’s eyes stretch and strain as they adjust. A soft sound gives his skin a prickle of warning; he’s on his feet in an instant, his finger on the trigger, heart lurching. The nearest dog growls with quiet menace but then there’s silence and he thinks he’s imagined the sound, until a face appears at the gates, not two feet away from him. With a gasp Ettore swings the gun up, knocks the barrel against the metal with a clang that makes the dog yip in excitement. Then he lowers it again, shutting his eyes in relief.

‘Paola, Mother of God! Don’t sneak up like that!’ he whispers, and sees her fleeting smile.

‘I stayed downwind of the dogs,’ she says, pleased. ‘Quiet when I want to be, aren’t I?’

‘Quieter than a shadow. Why are you here?’

‘I wanted to tell you something, and ask you something. When are you coming back?’

‘Soon.’ He puts the gun down, glances back at the farm. ‘Soon. What’s going on – is it Valerio?’

‘No, he actually seems a little better. I wanted to tell you… there’s a plan.’

‘A plan?’

‘Yes. A plan to fight back, but properly this time. No more strikes that they simply break with blacklegs. No more political debate. If this is a war then let it be an open one.’ In the near dark her eyes are huge and they shine. He can read nothing in them but conviction, and it makes him uneasy.

‘What is this plan?’

‘Well,’ she hesitates, choosing her words. ‘Well, brother, you’re not going to like it.’