He hunched a shoulder.
“You’re from what abbey? Not in Sicily, I take it.” Something familiar about him. He wore crusty boots instead of sandals. She sniffed the air. Unusual odors assaulted her nose-a little seaweed, salt, the dung of foreign animals. Hadn’t washed in a month or two.
“Your centesimi will help many of the poor, dear lady. Grateful thanks to you. May your family prosper. Don Roberto’s my name. Remember me in your prayers.” He brushed dust from his sleeve and turned to go, but was wedged between another cart and a woman carrying a basket of vegetables.
Serafina persisted. “Where’s your monastery?”
His eyes were ancient coins. “In one of God’s neighborhoods far to the north of Naples, lady. But the people are too poor to buy our bread, so a number of us travel to raise funds. And now, good day to you.”
She pursed her lips. Begging from Sicilians? — like squeezing wine from a stone. Took her centesimi, but didn’t answer her questions. And what sort of monk wore boots instead of sandals? Shadows in his face she didn’t trust.
The Ride to Rosa’s
The Duomo’s bells clanged the angelus as she as she climbed back into the trap and flicked the reins. She waved to the baker whose fifth son she delivered last month, passed the expensive shops, the straw market, the open fields on the edge of town.
But in her mind, she was with Giorgio. They rode in a coach and four, the air heavy with the scent of lavender. ‘I’d give anything for a carriage this fine,’ he said. She drifted to childhood, watched men clip trees, plant geraniums in great pots, scythe the grasses and wild broom. It was a time when her family kept a full complement of servants. Those days had disappeared.
Giorgio worked hard. As an apothecary, there was no one more respected. His shop, run now by her son, Vicenzu, was busy. But more and more, the townspeople paid for their potions and medicinals with wheat or fish instead of with coins. Because of crippling taxes, Carlo’s school expenses, and maintaining a home for her family of eight, she had trouble making ends meet.
Tilting her head she turned into Villa Rosa and signaled the guard to unlock the gate. Serafina remembered their hotel on the Via Sistina which had a similar grill and a merry footman who doffed his cap, and beckoned to them with white gloves. Mustn’t let the head wander, Giorgio warned her. In a blink, something might happen. Her eyes moistened at the memory. Oh, she knew his words by heart, pictured him, tall, spangled, scratching one ear, his finest frock coat stretched across his chest. ‘And you’re a woman traveling the streets alone. Even driving a trap in broad daylight, you must be wary. Keep the eyes fixed on your surroundings. Dreaming, bad for the bones.’
Rosa’s front lawn was packed with men pruning palms, tending to her flowers and pools and conservatories. A high-class house on the outskirts of Oltramari, Villa Rosa backed onto the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was shielded by cypress trees from its neighbors, the estates of British merchants who came to Sicily in the eighteenth century for a vacation and wound up staying for good. Inherited from her ancestors, Rosa’s business had remained untouched for centuries by war and economic blight.
Like her mother and grandmother, Rosa had an eye for the main chance. During the war she devised a scheme to remain open, charging Garibaldi’s soldiers a special fee-five minutes, five grani. After the war, she redecorated, hung paintings, raised fees. Velvet draped the windows. When the town installed gaslights around the train station and the promenade, Rosa had lines run into the villa and the nasty-smelling jets fastened to the walls in every room. Water ran in closets discreetly situated on all four floors. Unconventional, Rosa. She didn’t keep a full complement of servants, but she had upstairs maids, downstairs maids, a cook, a laundress, a driver, stable hands, gardeners, and now, guards.
The wheels of the trap whirred on the drive leading to the main house. Largo’s ears pricked. “Rosa’s stableboy spoils you,” Serafina said. “Apples and sea grass, is that what moves you?” When she flicked the reins this time, he trotted.
“La Signura, not down yet,” the maid told her.
“Then I’ll walk around the grounds. I haven’t seen the new conservatory she talks so much about.”
“In the back, dear lady, toward the sea. I’ll tell her you’re here.”
Serafina took the path around to the rear of the villa. The salty air prickled her skin. Fat gulls flew in the distance, circling the shore. Ahead was an octagonal glass structure filled with plants and exotic birds. Serafina opened the door, sniffed the air. Stuffy. She decided she’d had enough, shut the door, and left.
A sloping lawn led to large rocks surrounding a narrow path to the shore. As Serafina got closer to the water, the wind blew sand in her face. It whipped her skirts, and she punched them down, expelling the trapped air. She squared her shoulders and stood for a moment, her face to the gale.
Plunging ahead, she tripped, catching herself in time to avoid an ungainly fall and, looking down, noticed her laces were untied. As she bent to fix them, she saw something, a cloth object peeking out of the tall grass on one side of the wooden stairs. A nest or a purse? She reached out and grabbed it: Bella’s hat.
• • •
Rosa sat behind her mahogany desk counting her coins and writing numbers in a book. Her office was in the back of the villa, dark-paneled with a stone hearth and a domed ceiling around which frescoed cupids flew. Hanging from its center was a crystal chandelier with over a hundred candles. She knew: Serafina had counted them once, waiting for the madam to appear.
One wall was lined with bookcases holding ledgers going back at least a hundred years, all of them fat with black ink. A marble bust of the Magdalene sat on her desk, head mantled, neck S-curved, lips parted in earthly delight. And on the outer wall, lead-glass windows faced the sea. This afternoon, bright sun played on the cliffs sloping down to the shore.
Rosa pointed to a chair inviting Serafina to sit. Colonna paid her a visit yesterday, the madam told her. He asked Rosa how long Bella had worked here, when was the last time anyone saw her, that sort of thing. “Not what you’d ask.”
“How so?”
“Nasty barbs, your questions are. Make me furrow the brow, lip a reply.”
“Did he ask for a list of customers?”
“Don’t keep lists, you know that.” The madam’s face darkened.
“Bella was dressed for traveling, not for entertaining,” Serafina said. “Did he ask where she’d been?”
Rosa shook her head. “And I couldn’t tell him if he had. Different, Bella. She comes and goes as she pleases. All my girls do, come to that. Trust them, I do, or they don’t work here.”
“She came and went as she pleased, you mean,” Serafina said, regretting the words even as she spoke them. Why must she always correct?
“The inspector, he squirmed his ample behind in my chair, flung his questions at me like an absent-minded butcher slicing a pig. And I could tell he wasn’t listening to my replies. Poured him a grappa. He drank. He departed.” She wiped her palms back and forth. “He sees nothing, does nothing.”
“I found this.” Serafina held up the velvet hat, spilling sand on the madam’s desk. Same color as the trim on Bella’s suit, diamond shaped, with grosgrain ties and a feather. “Bella’s?”
Rosa nodded, wiped her eyes.
The feather had a black oval design, an oculus, near its base. There was a smugness about it, as if it saw everything on the earth, in the heavens, under the sea. Like the eye of God.
“Where was it?” Rosa asked, then answered her own question. “Outside somewhere. What does it matter?” Water spilled from her lids.
Not dressed yet, the madam. Attired in her black negligee and robe, the one with the crimson silk tassels and matching slippers. She didn’t deserve to lose her business like that, one woman at a time.