‘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…’