Once Chiara has left Ettore goes to tell Paola that she’s agreed to help them, but his sister’s not at home; Valerio is alone on his shelf, sleeping soundly. Dogged by restless impatience he walks a convoluted route back to the church, and as he’s going in a strange figure comes hurrying towards him, moving in a crabbed way, keeping to the deep shade on one side of the street. Ettore braces himself for trouble, for a fight, but the figure is Pino, and Ettore relaxes for a second before he sees why his friend is walking so peculiarly. He has Chiara in his arms. Ettore stares stupidly, making no sense of this, as Pino barrels past him into the church.
‘Ettore! Shut the damn door!’ he says, sitting Chiara down on a pew. She curls forwards, her face almost on her knees. Her blouse is torn, her skirt too. There’s blood from somewhere, smudged on her cheek and her collar, and Ettore’s mouth goes dry. He slams the door, slides the bolt across.
‘What’s happened?’ He goes over to Chiara, puts a hand on her shoulder and feels her shaking. ‘Pino! What’s happened?’ Pino looks away, catching his breath; he seems reluctant to speak, like he’s almost afraid.
‘She was attacked,’ he says at last. He sucks in a deep breath. ‘It was blind luck I was passing. Work stopped early – there was nothing left to thresh. Or I wouldn’t have been back. I wouldn’t have been there to stop it…’
‘Chiara?’ Ettore crouches down and looks into her ashy face. Her pupils are huge, black, focused on nothing. Her lower lip is split, and blood is smeared over her chin; her hands are bruised, the nails broken. ‘Who did this?’ he says. She shows no sign of having heard him. Ettore looks up at Pino. ‘Was she raped?’ The ugly word rasps in his throat, turning his stomach. Pino shakes his head.
‘I got there in time. But I think it was his intention,’ he says guardedly.
‘Whose intention? You saw who it was?’ says Ettore. His own hands are shaking now; pressure’s building behind his eyes, and in a tight band around his ribs. Just then Chiara takes a ragged breath in and shudders. She says something quiet that Ettore can’t hear. He crouches in front of her again.
‘Ettore…’ says Pino; a note of warning.
‘Chiara… you’re safe here. I’m here,’ says Ettore.
‘Tell me…’ she says indistinctly. She blinks slowly, drunkenly; slides her eyes to look at him. ‘Tell me I’m your sweetheart,’ she murmurs. Ettore can’t breathe. He reels back from her, loses his balance, sits down with a bump.
‘Ettore, I saw who it was. It was Federico Manzo. He must have followed her here,’ says Pino.
‘That’s what he said. What he kept saying.’ Chiara’s voice is hoarse, whispery dry. ‘He kept saying, “Tell me I’m your sweetheart.” ’
Chapter Thirteen – Clare
Pino and Ettore start to clean her face and brush at the dirt on her clothes, but in the end they realise there’s no point. After a curt exchange in the dialect they lead her back to Via Garibaldi, and she goes with clumsy steps, dazed, and at some point realises that the only hand on her elbow is Pino’s – Ettore has gone. Pointlessly, she turns to look over her shoulder. When they’re at the door to Leandro’s house she pulls back. If you speak of this, Federico said, I will tell them where you have been. Where you have been many times. Anyway, you like Puglian men, don’t you? This said with triumphant levity, with one grimy hand clamped over her nose and mouth so she could hardly breathe; a knife in the other, its tip pressed casually into the hollow above her collarbone. No screaming, he said, as he took his hand away, reached down for his belt. Now, tell me I’m your sweetheart. A lingering kiss, a hideous mockery of tenderness. Tell me I’m your sweetheart; more insistently, when she didn’t speak. And then, miraculously, Pino was there, and Federico was running away, and the relief was so overwhelming that for a moment Clare forgot how to stand, how to speak or think or move.
Federico Manzo, mending the bicycle for Pip. Federico Manzo, offering her flowers and then hisses – from stately courtship to gleeful menace in a day, when he realised she was no Madonna. Clare looks at the door to Leandro’s house. Will Federico open it to let them in? He’s had time to get back, to compose himself, but Pino gave him a kick in the stomach that sent him scuttling off, doubled over, so perhaps he won’t be back yet. The thought of coming face to face with him brings on waves of clammy dread. If you speak of this, I will tell them where you have been. She puts her arms around Pino’s waist for a moment, presses the side of her face to his shirt. He smells of sweat and labour, of earth and straw.
‘Grazie, Pino,’ she says. When she steps back he looks pleased, abashed, and she believes everything Ettore has ever told her about this man’s good heart. He frowns in thought, searching for a word he can give her in Italian.
‘Coraggio,’ he says, and she nods. Courage.
Clare has never seen the man who opens the door before; he’s a different servant, older, stooped. She uncurls her sweaty fists. The house is quiet, could be empty. Faint echoes of her footsteps drift around the shadowy colonnades. She goes upstairs to the room she had before, but none of her things are there, of course, so she can’t change. Some of Boyd’s clothes are in the wardrobe; his shaving brush and soap are on the washstand, and there’s an inch or two of water left in the jug. Clare uses his comb on her hair, and redresses it; washes as best she can and changes out of her torn, bloodied blouse, putting on one of Boyd’s clean shirts instead. It hangs low and shapeless on her, like a bad imitation of one of Marcie’s tunics, but it covers the tear in the waistband of her skirt, the dirt on the seat. In front of the mirror she stops to stare into her own eyes – they have swollen lids and an odd emptiness that even she can’t reach into. She tries to think back to when it was that Ettore left her – at what point on the walk from Sant’Andrea to Via Garibaldi. She can’t remember. I’m here, he said, but then he seemed to vanish, and he’d had a look in his eyes she’d never seen before, hard and hungry. Pino had fidgeted nervously, moving diffidently around his friend as though Ettore was ill, or dangerous. The sunlit hour in the church, before all this, seems to have happened in another age, to another person. And she’d been fool enough to think, for that short while, that she’d never been happier.
A knock at the door and the breath squeezes out of her lungs. Boyd comes in and straight over to her; a hand on her shoulder, a wide, appraising gaze, full of concern.
‘Darling, the servant just came and told me you’d arrived. But Anna was here hours ago… where have you been? Are you all right? What’s happened – your lip!’
‘I’m all right, Boyd.’ But her voice wobbles treacherously. She doesn’t know how to be with him any more; she doesn’t know how to act.
‘Did somebody do this? Have you been attacked?’ His voice has gone high in outrage, in disbelief. Clare shakes her head.
‘I… I went for a walk around town and I… fell down some steps. Silly of me. I just lost my footing.’
‘Some steps?’ He furrows his brow, not quite believing her. She claws through her memories of Gioia. The town is level, the only steps lead to the doors of upper level apartments. Like Ettore’s.