A short while later Leandro draws her to one side again, and walks her to the far end of the terrace from which the aia and the main gates are just visible. He points, and in the wash of light from the farm a figure is visible, walking stiffly and fast, as if propelled. Clare recognises Federico at once.
‘Dismissed. From my service and both of my households. His father will have words with me; perhaps he’ll leave as well. But some things are rightly done, even if they make waves.’ He pats her shoulder gently. ‘You won’t see him again. I’m sorry that harm has come to you here.’
‘Thank you,’ Clare whispers. Leandro gives a weary grunt.
‘Don’t thank me. I brought you here.’
‘But you are kind. When you told me of your… old life, I thought that you couldn’t really have left it behind. I thought you must still be that way, and ruthless, and a… bad man. But you’re a good man, Mr Cardetta.’
‘Good?’ He shakes his head, almost angrily. ‘No, you mustn’t say that. You mustn’t think that. I don’t deserve to be thought of as good.’
‘Well, you’ve been kind to me. You knew of my… bad behaviour, and you didn’t inform my husband. And now you’ve dismissed a loyal servant, without question, on my behalf. I will always think well of you.’
‘Your bad behaviour?’ He smiles. ‘When I saw Marcie for the first time, up on stage in her sequins and feathers, she cracked open my chest and stole my heart right out of it. I was married at the time – I’d made promises I ought to have kept. But there are things we can’t foresee, and things we can’t help but do, where the heart is involved.’ He taps two fingers lightly on her chest, against the bone. ‘How can love be a sin? Hate is a sin, but love – never.’ Clare’s eyes are hot with tears. She looks down, struggles to hold them.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she says.
‘Ah,’ says Leandro. ‘I can’t help you there, I’m afraid.’
‘Please don’t send us away yet. Don’t send me away with my husband.’
‘Sooner or later it’ll have to happen.’
‘But not yet. I need… some more time. I need a few more days.’
‘Very well. But listen to me, Chiara. Nothing is set in stone. If you don’t love your husband, then don’t stay with him. It could be even more dangerous to do so than to leave him.’
‘Dangerous? You said that before – will you tell me what you mean?’ she says, but Leandro shakes his head.
‘Now is not the time – look, they’re bringing out the supper dishes. Try not to be afraid. Of any of it, Chiara.’
Anna and another of the kitchen girls have brought out platters of meat and vegetables, cheeses, bread and wine, and the table gleams with oil and silverware. A confusing mixture of Italian and English is spoken, and the red wine dulls their teeth as it brightens their eyes, and Clare feels a million miles from it. She hears herself answer questions directed at her, but minutes later can’t remember what she’s said. She’s aware of quizzical looks aimed at her, as though the guests aren’t sure if they’re misunderstanding her English, or her Italian, or simply her.
She never questioned, for a second, the rightness of the coming raid. She accepted it as part of the war, and that Ettore would choose to make war on his own uncle didn’t really register. But now she must question how well she’s repaying Leandro’s kindness by aiding the attack; by not warning him. But the choice is simple: she must betray Ettore, or betray Leandro – so it’s no choice at all. She thinks of the massacre at the Girardi place; she thinks of the unarmed peasants, shot down by men hidden safe behind high stone walls. Picturing Ettore in such danger makes her knees ache, her stomach swoop with fear. He is here in Gioia, Ettore had said, meaning his uncle. It will go easier. But Leandro was at the masseria, and still would be on Sunday. The raid would not go easy. When she realises this Clare jolts upright in her seat, wanting to run to Gioia, to warn Ettore, to make him call it off.
After dinner they go down to the sitting room. The music starts and Marcie dances with each of her guests, and with her husband, time and again. She laughs, and flirts, and smiles, smiles, smiles. Such total abandon that Clare finds it bewildering, as though Marcie is a language she can’t pick up. More and more, it bothers her. He’s a dirty peasant. Pip watches Marcie with a cautious kind of smile, and takes his turn dancing with her, and also dances with the doctor’s daughter. She’s a year older and a head taller than him, but it’s the daughter who blushes, and Clare tries to see Pip through her eyes – a handsome young man, not a boy; least of all a child. Surely he wouldn’t disappear from her life if she disappeared from Boyd’s? Not now, when he is so grown. Not unless Clare stayed in Puglia with Ettore. She has to remind herself that Ettore has made no such invitation, and then she thinks that perhaps he might, when he hears about the child. Her thoughts pace around in this circle, again and again; she’s like the aia dogs at the ends of their chains, dizzy and tired. The party is a kind of madness; they’re laughing as the ceiling cracks, dancing as the ground falls out beneath their feet. Madness. Clare declines several invitations to dance until one comes from Pip – a wordless, almost shy extension of his hand, a declaration of peace.
The dance is an old-fashioned waltz, and though Marcie and Leandro are spinning, filling the floor, Pip leads Clare cautiously, holding her as if she might break. His face is flushed from the heat, the dancing and the wine; a stubborn lock of hair has escaped the oil he’s combed through it. Clare tips her head back to see him clearly, and then smiles slightly.
‘You’ve got taller this summer, you know. You’re growing so fast I can almost see it happening.’ Once he would have been pleased, but now he frowns a little. Clare needs to weed out the things she said to him when he was a child, and find a new way to talk to him. ‘You made the doctor’s daughter blush,’ she says, and at this he looks pleased.
‘I don’t know why, it was only a dance.’
‘I think she’d like another,’ she says, and smiles again. Leandro turns Marcie too close to the gramophone; she shrieks in dismay as her heel bumps the table leg and jolts the needle from the groove. There’s a loud, awful tearing sound, and laughter. Clare flinches from the noise, and then the sudden silence.
‘Clare, what’s wrong? I mean… there’s something really wrong, isn’t there?’ says Pip.
‘Oh, Pip…’ She shakes her head.
‘You have to tell me what it is – you promised.’ He sets his jaw when he’s said this, and for a few moments Clare says nothing. The music restarts and the dancing with it. Beneath her hand Clare feels Pip’s shoulder sag as the tension, the fake belligerence, leaves him. He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he says helplessly. ‘Please, Clare. I can’t stand you not saying… don’t you trust me?’
‘Darling, of course I trust you. You’re… you’re my best friend. I want you to know you’ll be safe. Whatever happens, you’ll be safe.’
‘What do you mean, whatever happens? What’s going to happen?’
In that moment Clare has another choice – to keep her word to Ettore, and say nothing of the raid, or to win back Pip’s trust and keep him safe when the trouble begins. She hesitates, but she has to warn him. The thought of him hearing strange sounds on Sunday night and blundering down into danger is too dreadful.
‘Swear to me you won’t repeat what I’m about to tell you to anybody. Swear it,’ she whispers. Shocked, wide-eyed, Pip nods. ‘Swear it, Pip?’