“What are our options?” I said.
Florindo sighed and ran a hand through his shock of uncombed and unpomaded hair. The early morning light did nothing to lighten the darkness under his eyes, and he still had mud splattered over his tunic. I daren’t imagine what I might look like.
“We don’t have many.” He gazed down at the ledger on the table in front of him. There were figures circled and scratched out, numbers written with hands that had shaken with so much grief they were nearly illegible. “We need to pay the investor back, either in the promised flour or in scudi, neither of which we have. That’s before even worrying about the bank loan.”
“And we don’t have enough to purchase the wheat, either.”
He shook his head.
Two loans on our shoulders and our only means of paying them off underwater. I was too tired even to weep.
I sat back, my eyes snagging on the frieze I’d had made depicting the twelve labors of Ercole. Had he ever had to make gold out of cold autumn air?
I bit my lip, tracing the intricate plaster carvings.
Perhaps we’d not need to make it entirely out of air.
“Could we get another loan? A smaller one?” I said. “Just enough to buy the wheat we need.”
“We don’t have collateral, Maddalena, and we already have two large debts. No bank will take that risk.”
“We do have collateral.” I motioned around us. “This beautiful new villa, the mill, the land. They have to be worth something. And we don’t have to turn to a bank, we could approach a private lender.”
He frowned. “It’s dangerous.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “You’d lose your entire dowry.”
“It’s already at risk, sposo. What do you think will happen when we can’t pay the investor back?”
“Yes, but private loans are even less regulated, with higher interest rates. If we forfeited, we could lose everything.”
I met his eyes. “I don’t see what other option we have. There’s jewelry and clothing that we can sell to start paying off the first loan but none of it will be enough for the investor. We need the wheat.”
“But how will we pay off that new loan, then?” He tapped the ledger in front of him and lowered his voice. “We don’t have much left for our everyday expenses. We’ll have to dismiss servants in a few weeks if nothing gets resolved.”
“We’ll sell one of the fields. Some hectares of land or . . .”
And then it came to me, and I felt like a simpleminded child not to have remembered it sooner. “The oak trees, Florindo. We have that.”
His eyes began to widen. The smallest point of hope, like the tip of a needle, gleamed within them.
“The chancellor said we have hectares of them up on the mountain.”
“That they grow like the heads of the Hydra,” Florindo said, a smile rising to his lips.
For the first time since I’d seen the flooded fields, I felt I could breathe again. I glanced up at Ercole once more, high above us, and smiled. This might just work.
I reached for Florindo’s hand and gripped it as tightly as he gripped mine.
We could do this.
A door slammed in the courtyard, making both of us flinch.
Loud voices erupted, and the rhythm of racing footsteps accompanied them. Florindo frowned and rose, starting for the door.
“No, you cannot go in there!”
A dull thud and the door swung open to reveal a crowd of people, soaked with rain, dragging mud and leaves through the corridor and into the room.
“What is the meaning of this?” I said, leaping to my feet. “Who are you? And what possessed you to enter our home, uninvited?”
“It’s your fault!” a man yelled, shoving himself forward, until he stood at the head of the crowd.
It took me a couple of seconds to recognize him through the film of rain and mud and rage: it was the man we’d bought the plow horses from.
“You’ve done this!” He thrust a finger at us “You’ve destroyed us! My barley field is gone, my house is underwater. And so are all of theirs!”
The crowd began screaming again.
Florindo lifted a hand in an effort to silence them. “I am sorry to hear of your misfortunes, but we’ve lost our fields, as well. We cannot help you.”
“It’s your fault!”
That was quite enough. I walked to the fireplace and took hold of the velvet bellpull, giving it a number of sharp tugs.
“Why did you do it?” a young woman said. Neither her voice nor her body held the anger of the others, just a slumping resignation.
It was the only reason I paid her real mind and did not leave the room. For I was not as kindhearted and patient as my husband. I did not acknowledge rabble behavior, and especially not when displayed in my own home.
“Do what?” I said.
“Dismantle parts of the dam. With all the rain that we’ve had, why do something like that? You had to know the dam wouldn’t hold if it wasn’t complete.”
I shook my head, a frown cutting into my face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve not dismantled anything.” I stopped her next words with a hand. “On the contrary,” I continued, “my husband reinforced it the very day we arrived. There is no one at fault here but the deluge.”
The servant I’d summoned stepped up to the doorway and halted, his eyes widening as he took in the scene.
“We saw the dam, we walked right up to it,” the young woman said and clutched at her hands. “There are entire sections of it resting on the bank, neatly piled. Bags of sand, too, sitting there, useless. Why remove them?”
That was preposterous. “You are mistaken.”
“She is not mistaken, you foolish woman,” another man spat out. “We all saw it.”
That was entirely the wrong thing to say.
Like a great flustered bird, Florindo drew to his full and considerable size and strode to stand in front of the man, blocking his view of me.
“You do not address my wife in such a manner,” he said, his voice tight enough to snap, “not ever, but certainly not after barging into her home. You will leave her presence.”
The man scoffed. “No, I won’t.”
“You will, and if I ever see you near our home again, or trespassing in such a brazen way, I’ll have the massaro pay you a visit.”
The man’s lips lifted into a leer. “I’d like to see that.”
He was about to say more, but one of his companions halted him with a sharp look. That brief silent exchange made my pulse speed up, though I couldn’t have said exactly why.
“Remove him,” Florindo said, motioning to the steward and the other servant.
The man tried to shift away from their reach, easing backward, but he bumped into the barley farmer. The steward grabbed his arm and dragged him forward.
“You’ve ruined us all,” he said, bucking against the grip of the two servants, to no avail. “We have nowhere to go!”
Florindo turned away. He didn’t see the man spit in our direction.
“We have nothing left for winter!” he shouted as they shoved him out of the room.
As if he had been the knot holding the rest together, the moment he disappeared from view, his companions started shifting apart, shuffling their feet, exchanging swift glances before lowering their eyes to the floor. The group collapsed.
“I suggest you all leave,” I said. “And take my husband’s words to heart. Do not step foot on our property again.”
“Madonna, what are we supposed to do?” the young woman said. She held her hands out, open in supplication, like she expected my answer alone would solve it all.
I swallowed. “I don’t know.”
“But the dam was your responsibility.”
“And we took it as such, I assure you.”
She shook her head, lips pinched. “You’ve doomed us all, and now you won’t even help us.”
The realization of what she and the rest of them wanted struck me, then. Scudi. Enough to compensate them for what they’d lost.
I almost laughed. If they only knew the condition of our finances!
No, I’d not be bullied in this manner. We’d given them and their disrespect enough of our time.
With a curt motion to the door, I turned away to join Florindo by the table. There was scattered muttering from the group, but I heard the shift of clothing and then their footsteps as they started down the corridor. The voices of puzzled servants followed them.
I waited until the last of the sounds faded.
“We have to go inspect the dam. They surely misinterpreted what they saw, but I’d like to be certain.”
Florindo nodded. “I can go alone. No need for you to get soaked again.”
“No, sposo. I’ll join you.”
After the night we’d had, the last thing either one of us needed was to be alone.
He offered me his arm and I took it, the two of us walking quickly down the hall, through the courtyard, and out the front door.
The land that greeted us was a swamp. Wild black locust saplings lay on their sides, roots like fine tangled hair shifting in the wind and not even the stalwart ivy had been safe. Wreaths of it floated in puddles or lay suffocating in mud. They gasped at me, asking for help I couldn’t give.
And still the rain fell in the same insistent beat of all the previous days and nights, showing no signs of weakening.
This time, I did shake off Florindo’s offer to carry me across puddles, for he looked all of his forty years in the morning light, and we made it, shivering and dripping, but without injury, to the narrow passage to the dam.
The first sight of the silent and empty tributary brought the tears I’d thought exhausted to my eyes again. Stones that sheets of river water had covered for decades now gleamed, exposed, and thrashed by the wind. A few small fish rested at the bottom, the raindrops sliding down their scales as if attempting to comfort them. It was too late, of course. No amount of water could save them.
In silence, we walked on and rounded the slight turn to the dam.
There were jagged pieces of wood everywhere. The force of the crashing water had split entire planks down the middle, flinging splinters as thick as my wrist in every direction, spitting bent iron nails even into the trunks of nearby trees.
I narrowed my eyes against the rain and looked across the river. I gripped Florindo’s arm.
“Sposo,” I murmured, because I couldn’t find the rest of my voice.
He followed my gaze up to the opposite bank and I heard his breath catch. I clutched at my horned silver hand until I felt its raised digits digging into my palm.
The young woman had been right.
Piles of planks were carefully stacked on the grass, whole and undamaged, together with coarse bags of sawdust and sand. At least a dozen of them, still wet but full. All of it set far from the edge of the bank and in clear order. Like one of the men had paused in the midst of work.
Someone had done this on purpose. Someone had sabotaged the dam.
“Who would do such a thing?”
My hands trembled with as much fear as anger. The culprit had planned all of this with care, with precision and purpose. The hate in their actions blared like a clarion call.
Whoever had done this didn’t just want us ruined, they wanted us blamed, the whole region turned against us. And if this morning was any indication, they had succeeded.
The memory of those trespassing men in the forest returned, the malice I’d sensed that afternoon. Could they have done it, all of it? Were they connected in some way to the women from the cena, who’d perhaps decided they were not satisfied with destroying my grandmother’s tablecloth or ruining of the Embertide stew? Because I was certain this was all related.
It had all started that night. It would even explain why the massaro had ignored our call of help.
Did my words and actions that evening cause this kind of brutal retaliation?
I didn’t know. And what made it all the more frightening was that I couldn’t begin to guess when, or if, someone filled with this much hate would ever be satisfied.