‘It must be hard to make friends in a new place when you don’t have the language,’ she says. Marcie takes her arm gratefully.
‘They call me his American whore, you know,’ she says, in low tones so that Pip won’t hear. But he does hear – Clare can tell from the way he stiffens and looks away across the street as if the sight of the water spout, and the queue of women waiting at it, are fascinating to him.
‘Small towns breed small minds.’
‘Amen to that. Do you know, almost none of the men who actually own the land around here can be bothered to live here? And none of the nobles – well, there’s one count who has a big palace outside of town. The rest just have tenant farmers to manage their estates, while they swan around in Naples and Rome and Paris. Anyone with enough money to live elsewhere does exactly that. Except my Leandro, of course. So what’s left is a snooty bunch of not-quites, who make themselves feel better by indulging in delusions of grandeur.’ Marcie is still smiling but even she can’t say all this without sounding angry, and sad.
‘I’d never heard of Gioia del Colle before Boyd called me to say that’s where we were going,’ says Clare.
‘Nobody’s heard of Gioia del Colle, sugar. Give it a few days and you’ll understand why.’
To get to the castle they turn onto a narrower street that runs right through the middle of the old town. There are large houses on this street too, but they look more run-down and less fashionable than those on the peripheral streets, and off to either side are tiny alleyways, crowded in with dilapidated stone houses. Windows are clouded with filth; steps run up and down to wooden doors gone jagged and toothy with rot. The gutters are choked with rubbish and muck; there’s a stink of sewage, and they are more careful than ever where they put their feet. Clare has the growing impression of smart newer streets surrounding and curtaining off a seedier, far poorer centre.
‘Smells like the drains are a bit blocked,’ says Pip.
‘Drains? Oh, Pip, they don’t have drains,’ says Marcie.
‘Oh.’ Pip frowns, and clearly wishes he hadn’t mentioned it. ‘Don’t people get ill?’
‘Of course they do. They even get cholera now and then. You’re fine at home with us, of course – all our food comes from the masseria, and the water’s bought in so I know it’s clean. Here on your left we have the house that Napoleon built for his little brother when he was in charge here. And if you look up, you’ll see the castle.’
Clare and Pip do as they’re told, and see three high, square towers with broken tops; the fourth having presumably collapsed. The walls are vast, vertical, indomitable; perforated here and there by small windows and arrow slots.
‘Can’t we go in?’ says Pip. The huge doors don’t look as though they’ve opened in a decade. ‘Who owns it?’
‘Oh, some noble old marchese or other,’ says Marcie, with that wave of her hand that’s almost a tic. ‘I’ve never seen it open. There’s a ghost, though. Do you believe in ghosts?’
‘I don’t know, really. Probably not,’ says Pip, but Clare can hear he’s interested. ‘Who’s it supposed to be?’
‘A girl called Bianca Lancia. She was one of the wives of the king who built this place hundreds of years ago – the most beautiful of his wives – and he locked her up in a dungeon here when he heard a rumour she’d been unfaithful to him. So you know what she did to prove her love for him?’
‘Threw herself off the battlements?’
‘Close. She cut off her… well. An important part of a girl’s anatomy. Both of them.’
‘And did the king love her again?’
‘What, when she’d chopped off the things he probably liked best in the first place? Well, he rushed down here to be reconciled with her, but she died. So what was the point of that, I always wonder?’
‘Well, she regained her good name,’ says Pip pompously.
‘A good name’s no good to a corpse,’ says Marcie, with sudden feeling. ‘Stupid girl, that’s what I always think when I hear that story. She should have found another way. Or another man.’
‘Maybe she had been unfaithful, and she wanted to punish herself?’
‘Even stupider, then.’
Clare wants to divert them, since the subject’s not appropriate for Pip, but beneath the wall of the castle she suddenly can’t think quite clearly; she’s distracted, and feels vulnerable. She looks up at the looming fortress in case that’s where the danger lies – those crushing stone walls, threatening to fall; she looks over her shoulder again, and then turns on her heel, but there’s nobody close by. Just then a man in a hurry emerges from an alleyway opposite the castle, and Clare’s gaze lands on him, and catches there. He’s hampered by a lame leg and has a wooden pole as a crutch, but it’s just a wooden pole, with no easy means of gripping it, so he must use both hands and twist awkwardly to do so. He sets off to the south, as quickly as he may, not looking left or right but only straight ahead. He is thin, black-haired; he has knots at the corners of his jaw where his teeth are clenched. A stray dog trots across the street then lowers its head, sniffs, and turns to follow the man, and there’s something in its posture that Clare doesn’t like; she almost wants to warn him about it. He moves away along the street and disappears behind a wagon piled high with scrap metal and spools of rusty wire.
‘What is it, Clare? Who did you see?’ says Pip.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ she says. The sun is moving towards noon, and there’s no shade in the street or at the foot of the castle walls. She suddenly longs for London; for the quiet little street they live on, the green smell of the air and the predictability of everything there.
‘Well, shall we go back? I don’t know about you but I need a cold drink and a sit-down,’ says Marcie. They all have a wilted look; the kind of deflation that comes from setting out on an adventure but finding only mundane things – hot feet, thirst, and the discomfiting feeling of being unwelcome.
When they get back to the house Federico opens the door for them, and Clare, instinctively now, doesn’t meet his eye. It bothers her that he might think it’s his deformity that makes her look away, when in fact it’s his scrutiny, which is like a constant question mark; whatever it is he wants to know, Clare doesn’t want to answer. He has that look – of one trying to puzzle something out, and something about that makes her not trust him. As they come into the courtyard Leandro calls down to them from one of the upper storey verandas.
‘Come up, come up! We’re having a pre-lunch drink.’
‘Oh good! We’re gasping,’ says Marcie. Boyd and Leandro are in cane chairs around a low table. There’s a square of vivid cerulean sky above the courtyard, but the terrace is in shade. Boyd reaches out for Clare’s hand as she sits by him, and squeezes it. His smile looks genuine, and she’s reassured.
‘Well, what do you think of our Gioia?’ says Leandro. He’s wearing a stone-coloured suit with a deep purple silk tie, part colonial gentleman, part dandy; he leans back in his chair and smiles, all ease.
‘There are some truly beautiful buildings here,’ says Clare. She opens her mouth to say something else, but can’t think what. There’s a pause, and Marcie shoots her a startled glance. ‘It’s charming,’ she says but her voice is rather thin and unconvincing. She has never liked to lie, and prefers silence. Leandro smiles again, and his eyes slide away from her, and she knows she’s insulted him. She daren’t look at Boyd. ‘Tell me, why do the people wear so much black? I’d have thought it would be terribly hot for them,’ she says.