‘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.