“Holy Mary Queen of Virgins.” I knew she must have known, but it was still a shock to me to hear those words from her lips. “Yes, they sent her there. She was about four, I think.”
“Why send her away — why to Italy, for God’s sake?”
“Remember I was only a kid myself, George … Take a guess. The simplest reason of all.”
“Money?”
“Damn right. Remember, I was about ten when you were born. It had been a long gap. Mum and Dad had taken a long time trying to decide if they could raise another kid. You know how cautious Dad was. Well, along you came, but they hadn’t banked on twins — you and Rosa.”
“We were twins?” Shit, I hadn’t known that. Another kick in the head.
“And then, just after you two were born, they ran into trouble; Dad lost his job, I think. The timing of it all was one of God’s little jokes. They didn’t tell me much, but it was going to be a struggle: I remember they talked about selling the house. They wrote to relatives, asking for help and advice. And then this offer came in, from the Order. They’d take in Rosa, school her, care for her. Suddenly, with just you, they were back to the position they’d bargained for when they decided to have a second kid.”
I felt a complex melange of emotions — relief, envy. “Why her, not me?”
“The Order only takes girls.”
“Why didn’t she come back?”
She said, “Maybe the Order has rules. I don’t know. I wasn’t privy to the discussions.”
I wondered briefly why, if my parents had always been as hard up as they claimed, my dad had continued to send money to the Order, long after Rosa must have completed her education.
“They never told me about Rosa,” I said. “Not a word.”
“What good would it have done? … I swore it would never happen to me,” Gina said suddenly.
“What?”
“Being so poor you have to send your kid away. Et cetera.” She was staring at the wall.
For once I thought I could read her. I’d only been seeing this from my point of view. But Gina had been old enough to understand what was happening, though of course she’d only been a helpless kid herself. When Rosa was sent away, she must have been afraid it would be her next.
Impulsively I put a hand on her arm. She flinched away.
She said, “Look, Mum and Dad believed they were doing the best for Rosa. I’m sure of that.”
I shook my head. “I’m no parent. But I don’t see how any mother could send her little kid away to a religious order full of strangers.”
She frowned. “But they didn’t. How much do you know about the Order?”
“The name. Rome.” Apart from a request that I keep up Dad’s payments, which I’d refused, the Order hadn’t responded to my emailed requests for information. “Oh, the genealogy business.”
“George, that’s not even the half of it. The Order are family. Our family. That’s how Uncle Lou made contact with them in the first place.”
“Lou?” He was actually our mother’s uncle, my great-uncle.
“He was in the forces — the American forces — during the war. He was in Italy at the end, and somehow found them. The Order. And he found out they saw us as a kind of long-lost branch of the family.”
“How so?”
“Because of Regina.”
“Who? … Not the Roman girl. That’s just a family legend.”
“Not a legend. History, George.”
“It can’t be. Nobody can trace their family tree that far back. Not even the queen, for God’s sake.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Anyhow Lou always kept the contact to the Order, and later when Mum and Dad got into trouble—”
I eyed her. “Dad sent money to this damn Order. Do you?”
“Hell, no,” she snapped back. “Look, George, don’t cross-examine me. I don’t even want to talk about this.”
“No, you never did, did you?” I asked coldly. “You left it all behind, when you came here—”
“Yes, away from that cramped little island with its stifling history. And away from our murky family bullshit. I wanted my kids to grow up here, in the light and the space. Can you blame me? But now it’s all chased me here …” She became aware she was raising her voice. Only a screen separated this part of the kitchen from the dining area.
“Gina, do you think all families are like ours?”
“One way or another,” she said. “Like huge bombs, and we all spend the rest of our lives picking our way through the rubble.”
“I’m going after her.” I was making the decision as I spoke. “I’m going to find Rosa.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s my sister. My twin.”
“If you think that will help you sort out your screwed-up head, be my guest. But whatever happens, whatever you find, don’t tell me about it. I mean it.” She actually shut her eyes and mouth, as if to exclude me.
“All right,” I said gently. I thought fast. “What about Uncle Lou? Is he still alive? Where does he live?”
He was alive, and lived, it turned out, not far from Gina. “Florida is heaven for the elderly,” she said dryly.
“You have his address? And you must have a contact for the Order. An address — maybe an intermediary … Dad gave you a damn grandfather clock. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have given you a contact for your sister. Come on, Gina.”
“All right,” she said dismissively. “Yes, there’s a contact. A Jesuit priest in Rome.”
“Have you checked it out?”
“What do you think?”
“But you’ll give me the addresses.”
“I’ll give you the fucking addresses. Now,” in flat, brutal Mancunian, “piss off out of my kitchen.”
The boys hadn’t heard what we said, but they had picked up the tone of our voices. We ate our summer puddings in awkward silence. Dan just looked at me, evaluating.
Chapter 11
“… The notion that man has been innately flawed since the Creation is nothing but an artifact of our own difficult times. Just as the wise farmer gathers his harvest and sets aside his store for the winter, so a just man will, through good works, love and the joy of Christ, earn his passage to God’s eternal kingdom …”
The voice of the Christian philosopher was thin and high, and only fragments of what he had to say carried to Regina on the soft breeze that swept over the hilltop. The crowd pressing around her did their best to listen to what was said, and to the replies of the rival thinkers who rejected this “heresy of Pelagius,” preferring the depressing notion that humans were born into the world with ugly, flawed souls.
She suppressed a sigh, her attention drifting. It had come to something, she thought, when the most exciting event in her life was a debate between two splinter sects of the followers of the Christ. She didn’t actually like the Christians; she found their intensity, and their habit of praying with arms spread, hands raised, and faces lifted, disturbing and off-putting. But at least they knew how to put on a show.
And at least the little Christian community, here on the hill, was flourishing. It was outside Verulamium itself, close to the gaudy shrine that had been constructed over the presumed grave of Alban, the town’s first martyr — indeed, it was said, the first Christian martyr in all of Britain. A group of wooden roundhouses, rectangular huts and even a little area set aside as a marketplace had gathered around the focal point of the shrine. You could see how marble from one of the old town’s arches had been cut up and reused to build the shrine itself, the only stone building here; inscriptions in Latin, a language that few spoke anymore, had been sliced through unceremoniously and then scratched over with the chi-rho, the symbol of the Christians.