“All right, bring that beam over here,” Giovanni said.
Two of the workers did as he said and pulled at the rope wrapped around both ends of a thick piece of wood that could easily have been a ridge for a roof. They dragged it through the muddy bank of the torrent toward the wide mouth of what was left of the original dam.
It wasn’t much. Just a few beams that were not too ravaged by the water and the years, and a structure on which they leaned that looked like the crates of sugar that came to the sweets shop every other day, one stacked on top of the other. Giovanni and the workers had spent most of the morning replacing these with new ones. The river still roared down the wrong tributary, though, leaving the mill’s wheel untouched.
“Hold it there!” Giovanni said, climbing over the planks they’d laid down across the banks to be able to work safely.
I dug my nails into my nearly raw palms. No matter how many planks they laid down, this was not safe.
He helped shift the beam against the others, pulling until he was able to tighten the rope around the wood already in place. He motioned to one of the men, who leaped up to the space next to him, hammer and iron nails thicker than my wrist in his hand.
Rushing water foamed at their ankles now that the weight of two bodies bore down on the wooden board. I turned away and started walking downriver, toward the villa. I should have stayed inside, washing floors, listening to the chatter of the men festooning the four rooms we’d chosen for our current use with the stiff garlands of electric cables instead of coming out here to suffocate on my own fear. I was no good in these situations.
A sudden scream shattered the morning.
Its piercing violence froze every muscle in my body, bringing me to a stop with a gasp.
It seemed to come from the sky itself, and it tore across the valley, swiping at the treetops, a sound that had to have ripped open the throat it’d burst from. A gust of frozen air pushed me back a step.
A snap and a rough male yell chased after it, this time coming from behind me, and I whipped around in time to see the wood splintering and cracking, water and rocks smashing through the morning’s work.
The torrent roiled wild.
Giovanni jumped off the plank in an instant, but the worker was slower and the water ripped the wood from under his feet. It took him with it. The rocks slammed into him, knocking him backward and dragging him under the fierce current.
The other men ran down the bank, shouting.
“No!” Giovanni said to two of them who were gauging the distance to the protruding rocks near the center of the river. “It’s too far!”
The fallen worker shot up from the water with a gasp, already far downriver, hands scrabbling for purchase, before disappearing again under its coils.
“A rope, grab a rope!” a voice said. “He’s right there!”
A young woman was racing toward the torrent from up by the villa. Her feet slid in the wet earth, but she kept moving down the incline, dragging piles of drenched leaves and twigs down in her wake. She motioned in my direction toward a coil of rope just a few meters from me.
With a gasp, I took one end and hurried downstream while attempting not to lose my own footing. But I didn’t know where the man was. I couldn’t see more than froth from this angle.
In a moment, the young woman had ripped the rope from my hands and had run ahead. She didn’t hesitate to step into the water despite the way it shoved at her legs, drenching her oversized trousers, wading in up to her calves even as she tossed the rope into the current.
The man came up gasping again and lurched for the rope, releasing his hold on the rock he seemed to have been clutching. Trembling hands gripped the cord.
“Help me!” he yelled, his voice full of water.
“What do you think we’re doing?” the young woman said. “Playing a hand of Scopa?”
The men careened into us an instant later and pushed us aside, Giovanni directing them as they wrapped the rope around their forearms and began to retrieve their fellow worker from the river’s jaws, one pull at a time.
Stepping back, I pressed my hands to my midsection, heart still racing, and watched as the danger passed. Only then did I notice a strange ringing in my ears, like I’d heard something terribly loud and—
The scream. That first one that seemed to come from the sky.
What could possibly have screamed so loudly? Had it been one of the men? Or perhaps the young woman calling a warning? But no, it hadn’t felt like that. There’d been pure terror in that sound.
“You don’t feel any cramping, right?”
I blinked and turned to the young woman, or girl, really, since she had to be no more than seventeen. “Pardon?”
She nodded to my stomach. “Any sharp pains? Sudden backache?”
“No.”
“Then you can stop fussing, the child is fine. A little bit of exercise won’t hurt it. My mother worked in the fields until the day she birthed me and I was as hale as a farm beast.”
I frowned.
She smacked at the dirt on her trousers and wiped a hand across her forehead before fixing her brown eyes on me. “I’m not much, I know, but I’m here.”
“Yes, and you’re late,” Giovanni said, rolling his sleeves down as he walked toward us. “I said dawn.”
“And I’ve been walking since before dawn but I couldn’t find the property. I don’t know this area.” She glanced past us. “But I do know a troublesome river when I see one, and that one won’t grant you any favors.”
I followed her eyes to the group of workers, the unfortunate man in the middle, soaked and shivering in the nip of the September morning.
“Yes, well, that is not your concern,” Giovanni said. “Your tasks will have nothing to do with the torrent.”
I turned to look at him, not daring to hope but hoping.
“Yes, she’s your new maid,” Giovanni said.
“Really?”
He nodded, a smile tucked into the corner of his lips.
“Oh, thank you!”
“She’s not served in a proper house a day in her life, so perhaps thanking me is premature.”
“No, I’m sure she’ll be wonderful.” I found myself bouncing on the tips of my toes like a child and stopped at once. No signora with a villa would do such a thing. I looked at her. “What’s your name?”
“Buona.”
“Buona, Signora Fenoglio,” Giovanni said. “And I’m Ingegnere Fenoglio. You will address us correctly.”
The girl’s lips twitched but she nodded.
“All right. As you can see, I have plenty to keep me occupied here,” he said, motioning to the dam, which looked worse now than when we’d first arrived. “Go on to the house.”
“And that poor man?” I said.
“We’ll get him inside and warm.”
With a nod, I looked at Buona. “Come, then; we have plenty to do as well.”
We picked our way through the sludge of leaves, or rather I did, for the girl was as sure-footed as if she possessed hooves. She was small, all knobs and angles, and dirt clung to her like a second skin.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen, signora.”
I’d been about right, then. “And you do not live around here?”
“On the other side of Ovada, beyond the old bridge, signora. Neighbors told me your husband was looking for a maid, and here I am.”
I didn’t know the area well, not enough to know what bridge she meant, but I did remember the trail we’d taken from the town to the mill. Most of it was through the woods. “You walked all this way on your own?”
She flicked her eyes to me and for a second, I thought I caught the glint of something sharp in them. “Yes, signora. Why?”
“You weren’t afraid? I would have been if I’d had to walk alone in the near dark and through the forest.”
Buona shrugged. “What would I need to be afraid of? I know how to scare off wolves, and the rest is just trees, signora.”
“Oh, you don’t need to keep calling me that when we’re on our own.” It would drive me mad to have that word wedging its formality into every sentence. “Just remember to do it when my husband is in the room.”
“What should I call you, then?”
“Sibilla will be fine.”
We left the mud and took what held traces of having been a pebbled path up to the villa.
I’d hurried from room to room this morning, hand on the mound, flinging open the windows and doors not covered in ivy to drive out the worst of the chill, and the house gaped open now, as if in surprise.
Buona bent to grab a patched-up sack from the ground, swinging it over her shoulder. She must have dropped it when she heard the commotion coming from the dam.
Which reminded me.
“Was it you who screamed?” I said, starting up the stairs to the colonnade.
“When do you mean?”
“As the man fell in the water.” No, that wasn’t right. “Actually, I think it happened right before the dam broke and he fell.”
“I only called for the rope.”
I paused on the stairs. “But you did hear it? Was that what brought you to the dam?”
“It was the men shouting that did it.”
I frowned. “You really heard no other scream, earlier?”
She shook her head.
I searched her face for a lie, though I couldn’t imagine why she would lie about that. Perhaps the scream hadn’t reached up here despite its fierceness. Or maybe it’d been a distortion of some other sound, something giving way in the dam that I’d misheard.
But it had seemed so very much like a scream.
I led the way inside, through the vestibule, and pointed to one of the branches leading off the courtyard. “What used to be the servants’ quarters is through there, but since it’s just you for now it might be too much work to clear up an entire wing. We can put you in one of the rooms near us.”
Buona readjusted the bag. “I’ll sleep anywhere, dirty, clean, wet, dry, outdoors, indoors. It’s all the same to me.”
“Well, it’ll certainly be indoors,” I said and tapped the tip of my shoe into a puddle, “but I can’t promise it’ll be dry.”
She smiled for the first time and I did the same, oddly at ease already with this sure-footed, angular girl.
* * *
I nudged the radio again, coaxing it out of its crackle. Throughout the entire morning we’d not been able to get a single tune out of it that wasn’t riddled with static. Perhaps once the men finished the puzzle of electricity and we managed to plug it into the wall and get all the antennas in place, we’d have better luck with the reception.
With a sigh, I sat back on my heels and wiped my hands on the apron that had been white when I’d put in on this morning. It was tinged gray and black with ashes and soot now.
The kitchen hearth looked a bit better, though, the stones and bricks visible once again after centuries of caked-on dirt. We’d not really have much use for it once the gas kitchen stove was in place, but it could help with the worst of the cold if the radiators hadn’t been installed yet by the time winter came.
It was a shame that the pile of ashes in the wooden bucket next to me was too old to use in the garden plot behind the kitchen. Not that anything but weeds and stinging nettle was growing there at the moment, but I would like to clear a patch of soil and try my hand at tomatoes, perhaps peppers, and a few herbs. Giovanni hadn’t taken to the idea of plants in the house, and with no garden, I’d never been able to grow anything in Torino, so I didn’t know if I had the aptitude for it or if I’d wilt everything I so much as looked at. But I was willing to try.
With a swing of a hip, Buona pushed open the door leading out into the garden, a bucket of water in each hand.
“They used to keep birds,” she said. “There’s a dovecote out back.”
“That must have been nice, to hear the cooing through the day.”
Buona eased the buckets down. “I don’t know, birds are messy things. Besides, they likely just kept them for food.”
She was probably right.
I’d seen a chicken coop past the well, too, so perhaps I could convince Giovanni to let me have a few. I doubted the signora of the Caparalia household would have considered fetching the eggs herself, but it’d be pleasant to get up each morning and gather them with my son.
“When will the baby be born?” Buona said.
I frowned at her words until I realized my hands were pressed yet again against my stomach.
“Oh, in five months.”
“A winter’s child, then.” She plunged a rag into the water. “My mother always said that they were the most pleasant, that the darkness of the days soothed them.”
She tossed the rag to the floor and knelt beside it. Her hands were a bright pink from the cold well water.
“Your mother’s gone, then?” I said.
“Yes. She’s not dead, mind, she just left us years ago.” A quick flick of her eyes. “My father and me.”
I felt my cheeks warm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“I’ve made my peace with it. I was a summer child, see, full of fire, so maybe that was the problem.”
She said it simply, as if the words were part of a well-worn prayer.
The radio yodeled between two stations, and I tapped it back to coherence.
“You live with your father?”
She nodded. “But he hires himself off to farms throughout the region most of the year, so I hardly see him.” She scrubbed fiercely at a blotch covering half a stone tile. “And you won’t find me complaining. You know how difficult everything is with a man in the house. Things must be done just so, but see if he isn’t the first to leave the room when it needs doing.”
She surprised a laugh out of me.
It’d been so long since I’d had female company that I’d forgotten this kind of banter. I’d heard plenty of it from my mother’s friends, even from the woman my father wed after her death, but once I married and had to stop working at the sweets shop, I’d not had much opportunity for chatting. At least not this sort of chatting. For the past year, most of what I’d heard around our dining table was about Giovanni’s invention.
“It’s a good thing, too, that he isn’t around,” she said, “because my father wouldn’t have let me come work here.”
I frowned. “Why not?”
“Well, see, both my grandfather and uncle died in these parts. A hunting accident.”
“How terrible!”
“It was before I was born, but my father has unpleasant ideas about the place.” She shrugged. “All nonsense. It might mean, though, that when he returns in late December, I’ll have to absent myself for a few days. Just until he leaves again.”
It didn’t seem like the kindest thing to do, to lie to a parent in that manner, but it wasn’t my right to lecture her.
“This blasted mark is stubborn,” she hissed, dropping the rag back in the water.
“I think there’s a wirehaired brush in the pantry.” I grabbed hold of the kitchen table and stood. “I’ll get it.”
But Buona had already leaped up and was halfway to the door.
I winced at a twinge and pressed a hand to my lower back. The girl was practically a bundle of bones in shirt and trousers, but she had enough energy for the both of us.
The room felt too close around me all at once, probably from all the dust and ash we’d whipped up, so I opened the kitchen door and stepped outside.
The chill of the early fall air swiped at me, bringing with it the chirpings and rustlings of the small creatures that went about their lives, unseen. I passed the well and saw the leaning dovecote, twisting ivy a leafed serpent holding it captive.
“Sibilla,” Buona called from behind me. “Someone is knocking at the door.”
I turned and made to head back before realizing that this was not my cramped house in Torino anymore and I didn’t have to do everything myself. This was a proper villa, even if it was a bit sodden, and I had a proper maid to help me. The thought sent a shiver of delight through me.
“You can answer, Buona,” I said.
The girl’s eyes went round as almond pignoli.
“Really?”
“Yes, go on. And if it’s someone calling on me, lead them to one of the sale.” I waved a hand in the boneless manner of the silk-clad, pearl-draped ladies who came to the sweets shop.
“The one black with mold, or the one with water that reaches your ankles?” Buona said, smiling.
“Either one is perfectly suitable.”
Chuckling, she hurried to do as I said. I had no doubt she could manage whatever the knock involved, including shoving guests into crumbling rooms.
I tilted my head back and breathed in the pine-scented air. It was even colder here, at the edge between garden and forest, the trees having extended their branches in a tangle of limbs over the stone wall that divided the tame from the wild—had divided, at least, for sections of the wall had collapsed. Nettle and elderflower patches had spilled through those gaps into the darkness of the woods. A darkness that looked enticing.
Well, why not? Buona’s father might fear this land, but I didn’t have to.
Stepping over all that green, I walked into the wild.
It was a forest dense with pines, a carpet of their cones making my progress less calming and more of a balancing act than I’d imagined. Needles brushed my cheeks as I ducked under heavy branches. The sun did what it could to weave through the latticed canopy, but the ground was damp with darkness. A few early mushrooms had already raised their umbrella heads.
I’d only made it a few steps when a snort stopped me.
The tusks of the cinghiale flashed through my mind, accelerating my pulse, but only for an instant because no, this had been the sound of an animal even larger than a boar. But what? A deer, perhaps? Did bears roam this side of the Alps?
With no clue as to what I’d do if it was a bear, I remained as still as I could and listened.
Another snort. This one a bit closer.
My heart thudded in my temples.
The high neigh a beat later made me exhale with relief. I rolled my eyes at myself because, truly, what a goose I was. It was a horse, of course. Whoever had come to the villa had likely done so on a horse and buggy, not a car, and its sound had echoed back here.
“Mystery solved,” I murmured, “by a woman with a mostly functioning brain.” I was only thankful that Giovanni hadn’t been here to catch me in another exemplary instance of weak-mindedness.
“A bear, indeed.”
I turned to start back for the house.
The sudden thunder of racing hoofbeats filled the woods, rooting me in place. Branches snapped as another neigh swept like a gust through the trees behind me.
There was someone in the forest on horseback, then, not a buggy, there had to be, one of the workers or someone from nearby who didn’t know we’d bought the—
I yelped at the screeching whinny that came from just a few meters away this time, and I leaped out of the way of the charging, crashing animal. I felt it speed by me, its momentum lifting the hem of my housedress. Panting, I spun around, hands blocking the soft mound of my stomach.
But there was nothing. Just the afternoon shadows draped around trees and needle-heavy branches shifting in the breeze.
“What are you doing all the way back here?”
“Santissima Madre,” I hissed. Giovanni really had to stop stealing up on me like this. I swallowed the dry fear in my throat. “Did you see it?”
“See what?”
“The horse.”
Giovanni frowned. “Sibilla, what are you talking about?”
“There was a horse, right here. It came galloping at me.”
He looked past me, deeper into the forest. “You saw it?”
I hesitated. “No. I-I just heard it.”
He sighed, his thin lips becoming thinner as he pressed them together. He motioned me forward with his arm. “Come on, let’s go back to the house.”
“I did hear it, Giovanni.”
“It was probably a deer. The forest is packed with them.”
Perhaps he was right. It could have been a deer, couldn’t it? I’d never heard one whinny in that manner, but it wasn’t as if I had had many encounters with them. My presence could have frightened it, and it could have taken off in the wrong direction, toward instead of away from me. They were notoriously foolish animals.
Like me.
Yes, it was possible. More likely than a horse racing through the middle of the forest, in any case.
I followed Giovanni.
“I came to tell you that we have the dam mostly fixed,” he said, pushing aside a branch and ushering me into the garden. “The water still doesn’t flow into the millrace because—I think—there’s an obstruction of some kind, but at least it is going into the right tributary.”
“That’s wonderful.” See, now here was sense. Logic. Order. “Can I go see it?”
“If you’d like.”
Buona shoved open the kitchen door and started toward us. “Ingegnere,” she called out, and I could have sworn she leaned into the word a bit more than she needed to.
“Is the yelling necessary?” Giovanni said.
“Scusatemi, ingegnere, but I ran to the dam and back looking for you. This letter came.”
A letter, already?
If it surprised Giovanni, he didn’t show it. He snatched it from her hand and slid it into one of his pockets without a glance.
“Do you know who it’s from?” I said.
“I’m sure it’s not important.”
That made little sense. How could he know it wasn’t important if he’d not so much as looked at it? But the slight pursing of his lips told me not to ask again. Perhaps it was just my impression, or the vestiges of a long day’s labors, but I thought a slight flush had come into his face.
“I’ll leave you two to your work,” he said, sweeping past me as he started for the house.
“But I thought you were going to show me the repairs to the dam.”
“I don’t have time right now.” He waved my presence off like he would a bothersome child. “Find something else to amuse yourself with.”
In a moment he had disappeared into the house.
It was my turn now to feel a flush rising to my cheeks. It was one thing to dismiss me when we were alone, which, though unpleasant, was something I could shoulder and most of the time even understand, for I knew I possessed no scintillating genius. It was quite another to do so in front of someone who was supposed to respect and obey me.
I looked at Buona, but she had her gaze fixed on her hands.
No matter how much I pretended to be a signora, nothing would ever make any difference when my own husband still treated me like I was a child.
Buona sniffed. “The postman said the letter was marked as urgent.” She glanced up at me, that sharpness I’d seen earlier turning her eyes into hard caramel.
For the length of a heartbeat, I hesitated. But no more than that. “You didn’t happen to see whom it was from.”
“I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at. I don’t know how to read.”
No, of course not. I should have realized it before making her admit it.
“I did, however,” she said, lowering her voice to a murmur, “see a strange marking on the envelope. Like a large stamp. Fancy.”
I met her gaze and held it, waiting.
“It had a wolf on it.”
Dottore Lupponi. The urgent letter was from Giovanni’s lawyer.