Montelaguardia, Italy, AD 1756
Working as quickly as his nervous limbs would allow, Mario Terageste wrapped his journal in an old cloth and placed the bundle in a small wooden box. He took two iron nails in hand and secured the lid with a few blows of his workman’s hammer.
How quickly things came to a head.
Talano had already been taken, the officers sweeping into his home two nights before. They had been predictably merciless, beating his wife before him without so much as a second’s hesitation. She had fled to Mario’s small shopfront as soon as the officers had left with her husband in tow. Collapsed on the wooden floor of his apothecary’s shop, she had relayed the brutality and horror of Talano’s capture.
By now he would be in prison. If a trial ever came, it would be purely for show. The man’s fate had been sealed the moment he was arrested, and Mario knew the two brethren would never see each other again in this life.
‘And I shall fare little better,’ he reminded himself. He was not so deluded as to pretend that his future was not as certain as Talano’s.
Taking the wooden box in hand, Mario exited his shop by the rear door and did an about-face. To the side of the door frame was a wooden panel which he removed gingerly, knowing its contours and supports. The board granted access to the foundations of the small building, and over the course of the previous hours Mario had dug out a deep pit directly beneath its centre.
Crawling towards it on his belly, he dropped the box into its new resting place and began to shovel the displaced dirt over the top of it.
‘My little book is secure,’ he muttered once the hole had been refilled, scooting himself backwards and out of the crawl space. The work Talano and he had done would outlive them both.