The sound of my own name pulled me up from layers and layers of hot sleep. I gasped awake.
The sun was already the yolk yellow of late morning as it poured into my bedroom and slipped into my bed, letting me know with one glance that I’d overslept. Substantially.
“Sibilla,” Buona said, tugging on the bedcovers. “You should get up.”
Sweat pressed my slip to my back as I sat up, blinking. Everything ached. Every movement as heavy as if I were trying to make it underwater. It’d been this way for days now, the pregnancy feeling as if it’d deepened, the child seeming to triple in size overnight, which I knew was not possible but which still sent me looking at my profile in the mirror every few hours.
I wiped at my forehead. “What time is it?”
“Past eleven,” she said.
I winced. Giovanni had eaten his breakfast alone then. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep that long, Buona.”
“I didn’t want to, but your husband told me to leave you be.”
I smiled, quick relief dissolving the tightness that had already come into my shoulders. That had been kind of him. I knew how much he frowned on lounging in bed.
Buona offered her hands to help me up and I took them, though I should not have needed the assistance yet. If this was how I felt now, at not quite five months, what would I do at nine? I’d need a wheelchair.
“Where is Giovanni?”
“That’s why I woke you. He’s with the lawyer, that Dottore Lupponi.”
I blinked, trying to make sense of what she’d said with a mind still slippery with sleep. “He’s here?”
“Yes.” The girl fixed her eyes on mine. “He arrived a bit over an hour ago. I think that’s why your husband didn’t mind you sleeping longer than usual.”
I looked away. “That’s nonsense, Buona.”
“The moment the man stepped into the house, I made to wake you and your husband told me not to. He then immediately sent me to town for flour, milk, and eggs, knowing it would take me a while to return. Today’s Tuesday, Sibilla. The grocer is making his delivery this afternoon, like always.” She pulled open my armoire. “Your husband didn’t want me to come and let you know.”
The words of rebuke that had come to my lips crumbled under the first bite of doubt.
Because we still had plenty of eggs. I’d checked on that myself last night before preparing the list for the grocer to take with him. And when had Giovanni ever paid any real mind to the contents of our pantry?
“I’ve only just returned,” she continued, “and they are still in the study with the door closed.”
I allowed her to slide one of my two oversized woolen dresses over my head.
Had he really gotten her out of the way so she wouldn’t wake me? But why would—
Oh, but all of this intrigue and plotting was tiresome. My mind was not made for suspicion. There was surely a reasonable explanation for the letter and the visit, and it was likely so dull Giovanni had not mentioned it for fear of boring me to pieces. I’d go down there and greet Dottore Lupponi before he left, chat with him for a bit, and see what all this was about, and that would be enough to settle this entire mystery Buona kept insisting existed.
I motioned for her to help me into the heels I’d been forgoing most of these days as I pulled the bedcap from my head and reached for my brush to see what I could manage with my fuzzy curls. I didn’t even know if I had any molding gel left.
But all I saw of Dottore Lupponi when we headed toward the courtyard a few minutes later was his tweed-clad back and his leather case as he stomped out of the villa. The door’s slam resounded throughout the otherwise silent house.
I stopped walking.
His car’s engine rumbled to life.
I’d had many an occasion to be in the man’s presence, and I’d never seen him like that. He was the kind of person who always had a smile pressing against his rather full cheeks, a clever quip, or sometimes even a riddle at the ready to lighten the seriousness of any room. If he could think of nothing else, a dance hall tune was enough. It made him an oddity in his profession. Until now, I wouldn’t have guessed he could ever be in a disagreeable enough mood to slam doors.
What could have happened to put him in such a state? And why was Giovanni allowing him to leave like that, when they’d known each other for years?
I glanced up at Buona who was watching me, eyebrows lifted. There was no helping it, then. Taking a deep breath, I turned and started for the room Giovanni had set up as his study. The girl followed.
The door was wide open and no sounds came from inside. I couldn’t help hesitating, my already trembling hands going to my midsection, as I tried to think of how to ask what I wanted to know. But my mind was a swath of white nerves.
I forced myself into the room before I gave in to the urge to retreat.
The desk was strewn with papers, like someone had raked their arm across its width. The famed black Bakelite telephone had its handset hanging half off its perch. The lamp my father had gifted Giovanni after our engagement was announced was askew, and the desk chair had been flung back against the wall with enough force that it had brought down a sprinkling of plaster. My husband stood by the window to the left of the desk with his back to me, his hands fists at his sides. I swallowed.
“What happened?” I said. “Why did Dottore Lupponi leave so angry?”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“But Giovanni, why did he come all this way? What did he want?”
His back twitched. “Later, I said.”
I almost asked him if it was about the letter before remembering I wasn’t supposed to know whom it was from. Pressing my lips together, I stepped closer to the desk. If I could at least see what they’d talked about I might be able to offer Giovanni a few soothing words. He had a tendency to work himself up into a froth of anger and irritation over things that had, at least to me, simple solutions.
Most of the papers that I could see from where I stood had my husband’s tight scrawl on them, but others bore what looked to be official stamps. One was written with Dottore Lupponi’s letterhead and had a number of signatures on it, including Giovanni’s. Frowning, I reached for it.
“What are you doing?”
I flinched and made to move back, but he crossed the room in two strides and wrapped his hand around my wrist. He yanked me away from the desk, squeezing until it felt as if I’d have an imprint of his fingers burned into my skin forever.
“Ingegnere!” Buona called from the doorway.
Giovanni turned his head, meeting and holding her gaze. The room hummed with tension and a sudden crackle of electricity, all of it filling my mouth with the bitter taste of something burning.
With a scoff, he released me. “I don’t have time for this, Sibilla. Get out and take the girl with you. Go back to bed or . . . just go.”
Wrapping my arms around myself, I hurried out of the room. The need to get as far from him as I could took control of my limbs. Buona’s footsteps rang after me, down corridor after corridor, into the kitchen. My hand had gripped the doorknob before I realized I was doing so.
The sputtering, hissing of the radio clicked into pure transmission as if someone had adjusted the dial.
I stopped.
Music poured out of it now, strings of some kind playing a lilting chamber piece. But it was the noise around the music that really locked me in place, the halo of chatter, the silver ringing of cutlery, the laughter that seemed to sink into me. And one voice, a woman’s, like singing crystal rising above the rest.
“There is no danger in me allowing the children to play about the property, then?”
The surging string melody swallowed the answer.
The skin on my arms puckered and it took me only a moment to realize that I was shaking with cold, the kitchen air itself having grown frigid enough to see it as I exhaled. The music rose and I held my breath, the sounds growing louder and louder until I expected the radio to start twitching in place under the force of its own vibrations.
“You need to get out of here.”
I jerked back.
“Girl, you have to leave.”
My shoulder hit the door as the woman’s words scraped against me, so near they seemed to be coming from my own mouth.
“What is this?” I said through clenched, chattering teeth.
But with the wheeze of an exhausted machine, the sound began to falter. The music grew weaker and the background voices muddled, all of it fading, bleaching down into the white emptiness of static.
In a moment, there was nothing left but the crackle of a mistuned radio.
* * *
I dipped the stockings in the vinegar and water mixture one more time to remove the rest of the soap from their folds. My wrist gave a twinge at the movement, and the feel of Giovanni’s hand as it had wrapped around it returned, the force of the squeeze. Each individual finger digging into my skin.
But no, enough. No point in reliving that, of laying blame when we had both been at fault. After all of these years of marriage, I really should have known better than to interfere.
“Do you iron them?” Buona said.
I blinked. “What?”
“The stockings.” She carefully shifted the decanter of fresh elderflower and lemon water into the ice box.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Though I haven’t done it before, so I can’t speak to how complicated it may be.”
“They look as flimsy as suds.” She gathered the remnants of the lemons into her apron and walked to the waste basket. “I can’t imagine they’re comfortable.”
“They’re not, really. But they are the rage.”
From the way she glanced at the beige webbing I was trying to keep safe from the edges of my fingernails, she wasn’t entirely convinced even of that.
“Do you mind if I turn the radio on?”
I hesitated, the tightness forming in my stomach again just as it had through all of yesterday. The woman’s voice had prodded at me for hours, the intimacy of her words urging me to pick them apart, to roll them about my mind. Until I’d come to my senses and had given my mind the same kind of good shaking I gave it now.
Of course, her words had not been directed at me. How self-important I was, thinking that a woman on a radio program could have meant her words for Sibilla Fenoglio listening in her crumbling villa. What a goose.
And yet, I’d not managed the courage to turn the radio on this morning.
That would be remedied this very instant. “Please do, Buona. We need a bit of music if we are to make any dent in the pile of chores ahead of us.”
The girl nodded and reached to turn the dial, and I couldn’t help but hold my breath.
I exhaled at the cheery baritone voice advertising the latest automatic washing machine design that promised to make my days more fruitful. Perfectly normal words said in a perfectly normal manner.
Buona hissed and tugged her hand back, shaking it.
“Are you all right?”
“I think something is off about all of the wiring. Electricity is not supposed to shock you like this, is it? It’s happened twice today already, with the ice box and that light fixture there.”
I frowned. “Giovanni is going to have to call—”
A shout cut my words off.
“What was that?” Buona said.
It only took another call to help me recognize what I was hearing. I wiped my hands on my apron, heart already racing. “That’s Giovanni.”
I crossed the kitchen to the door leading out to the garden, my hand flinching back from the handle as a pinch of static surged through it and onto my skin. With a grunt, I pulled my sleeve’s cuff down and used it as a barrier, tugging the door open.
“Grab on to it!” Giovanni said, his voice cutting through the distance.
It was the edge of bright panic in it that got me running before I’d realized I’d done so. I took the side path out of the garden, my legs finding more speed as workers’ voices rose to join my husband’s.
My house shoes skidded in the mud and I gasped, my arms shooting out for balance, but I didn’t fall. And I didn’t stop either.
I reached the mill door and plunged through it. It was like walking into a winter’s day, the cold seeping into my very teeth.
It wasn’t the cold, though, that froze my steps.
A black form stood behind my husband. It was tall, thicker and darker than a shadow, as if someone had gouged at the air where it stood and left nothing behind but emptiness.
The workers’ shouts lost their pull on me as I watched that blackness expand and contract, like it was breathing. It bent forward, toward Giovanni, its movements as stilted as if centuries of pain made each shift an agony.
I sucked in a breath and the shape jerked. The black form had nothing that could be thought of as a face, but I didn’t need that to know it had seen me see it.
It gave another jerk and disappeared into the shadows of the mill.
“No!” Giovanni yelled, tugging my gaze back to him. He lunged for the rope in front of him.
But it snapped, lashing like a whip at his face, and the wooden axle, the gigantic part that had arrived only yesterday and that hung suspended from a pulley, plummeted.
It hit the side of the new scaffold and shattered it, the strike changing the direction of the fall.
My eyes widened as I saw what was about to happen.
With a splintering crash, the axle slammed into the two men on the ground still holding on to the slack rope. An explosion of screams tore through the day like a pistol shot.
The impulse to run back out of the mill, to let Giovanni deal with the chaos and pain, with what I just saw, was powerful enough to make me retreat a step. My blood seemed to have bubbles in it.
I shook my head. I had to be of some use to my husband.
I ran to the nearest man as Buona raced past me to the other one, who lay immobile on the mill floor, the remnants of the wooden part pressed against him. His leg had too many angles.
“We need a doctor, Giovanni!” I said, kneeling as the man in front of me coughed, wheezing and gasping as blood flecked his lips.
I heard my husband hurrying down the ladder, his own soft groan of pain bringing my eyes up to his face. A large cut bloomed red on his left cheek, touching his lips and his eye. Blood had already run down to pool at his shirt collar and he was having trouble keeping the eye open under the swelling that appeared to grow by the second.
“I’ll phone the ambulance,” I said and made to get to my feet again.
“I’ll do it,” Giovanni said. “Stay here with the men.”
He ran out before I could tell him to sit still and let me at least press my apron to his face and all I could do was kneel beside the worker coughing globs of blood while Buona monitored the breathing of the worker with the mangled leg. From the lack of screams, it seemed he had lost consciousness.
Even when the ambulance arrived in a blare of horns and the injured men were loaded onto the vehicle, Giovanni waved off the offer of care for his own injury. I followed him back into the mill the moment the men were gone, watching him in silence as he kicked away the broken axle sections, his whole body a knot of tension, as he pulled down the rope that had given way, as he started to sweep bloodstained sawdust from the area of the accident.
The memory of the form I’d seen made me shiver. No, but that couldn’t have been real. I’d likely seen a cloud of that same sawdust, shadows thickened by my own fear and nerves. I was always doing that kind of thing, creating mysteries out of nothing. I’d not annoy my husband with nonsense, today of all days.
So I remained quiet because didn’t know how to break the silence.
Until I saw him waver, his hand reaching out to grasp part of the wooden structure left standing.
“Giovanni,” I said softly. “This can all wait.”
He started to shake his head but paused, the tension in his body making his shoulders tremble.
I walked to him and touched his arm. “Will you come to the house? Please. For me?”
He breathed out and his shoulders slumped.
My wrist ached as I shifted to take his hand in mine, pulling on it to get him walking, following me to the villa. Out of this wooden disaster.
The way he clutched at my hand, as if expecting someone to come and rip us apart, made my heart beat a bit faster.
“Please get me the alcohol and some cotton gauze,” I said to Buona as we passed the courtyard. “Scissors and tape, too, if you can find them.”
The girl nodded and I led us to his study, where he seemed to feel most at ease. I couldn’t help glancing at the papers on the desk, but I forced my eyes away before he could follow my gaze. This was not the time to pester him about Dottore Lupponi.
I tugged my hand from his now and made to start unbuttoning his bloodstained shirt, the collar beyond salvaging, but he shook his head and stepped back, wincing as every moment seemed to pull on his injury.
“That’s two men lost,” he said, sinking into his chair. “Neither of them will return.”
“Well, not for a while, at least.” One had a punctured lung and the other had a leg that had shattered like porcelain. They would need substantial recovery time, that was certain.
Giovanni shook his head again. “They won’t come back at all. Would you, when all the work you do seems to be in vain?”
I frowned, feeling my pulse speed, and dragged the other chair to his side of the desk. “What happened today was an accident.”
He sighed. “Can you really think so?”
Buona stepped into the room with the items I’d asked for, and I nodded for her to leave them on the desk.
I popped the cork out of the rubbing alcohol bottle. “I don’t understand.”
“Sibilla, I checked the pulley rope last night before doing this. I had the men buy it brand new and it didn’t have so much as a snag. Did you see the end of the broken pieces?”
I pressed a cotton ball soaked in alcohol to the ridge running down his face. His jaw tightened under the sting. “No, I didn’t.”
He closed his eyes against the worst of the burn and held his silence for a moment. The blood continued to flow as I washed the cut, revealing how much deeper it was than I’d thought. If he’d had a doctor tend to him, he might have saved himself most of the scar, but with just my inexperience at hand, the memory of this day would remain on his face.
“The rope,” he started again. “It’d been burned black. Like someone held an open flame to it.” He swallowed, shaking his head and shifting the cotton. “This wasn’t an accident. It was the same people who destroyed the other parts.”
My temples throbbed as I met his eyes. “I— Are you sure?”
“Who else could it be?”
Not who, but what.
Nonsense. Mere fantasies of a tired, silly mind.
I drew the scissors under the tape and snipped off a piece. “Then we have to call the carabinieri. We have to alert them and let them know what is happening.”
“No, we can’t do that. I’ve already told you.” He moved away from my hands. “I know you don’t trust what I’m doing, but you have—”
“Wait a minute, what?” Something in my chest tightened at his words. “Why would you think that? I’ve always trusted you, Giovanni. Always.” I leaned forward, forcing him to look at me. “I am always on your side; you have to know that. Nothing could ever change that.”
He did look at me then, with a sheen of tears in his eyes I hadn’t seen since the days after the loss of our last child.
“Oh, Giovanni,” I said and drew closer. I wrapped my hands around his. “Things will be all right, I’m certain of it. We’re just in a difficult transition, and we always knew getting the mill to work would be stressful, but you’re so clever! Look at everything you’ve done, creating the patent, buying us this beautiful home, getting us here, all on your own.”
He nodded, but his lips tightened, as if he were holding back words. I smoothed back a lock of his hair.
“You do know that you can tell me anything, right? I may not be able to help, simple creature I am, but I can listen, and sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed.”
He held my gaze, and for an instant I was certain there was something he wanted to say. I could see it, like a door creaking open.
He frowned.
“This is about yesterday, isn’t it? You want to know about Dottore Lupponi’s visit.”
And just as easily, the door slammed shut again.
“No, that’s not it at all,” I said.
He scoffed. “Always the same, Sibilla, always interfering, meddling.”
I blinked, trying to shake the words off before they landed their blows. He was tired and in pain, anxious from the loss of the new part and the worry over the injured men. He always said things he didn’t really mean when under this kind of stress.
I pressed the last piece of tape to the bandage covering half his cheek and stood. “I’ll bring you an aspirin.”
He said nothing as I left the room, though I could feel him watching me, probably already thinking of a few neutral words to balance out the cruel ones. It was his way.
I was almost at the kitchen when I remembered he’d not eaten anything since this morning. Buona had likely put something together, but when he was in this state it was better if I cooked what he liked in the way he liked—eggs or perhaps a cut of the meat we had in the ice box, with potatoes. Yes, I’d ask.
I hurried back to the study.
What I saw as I made to pull at the half-opened door stopped me.
Giovanni was slumped over the desk, hands shaking as they clenched a piece of paper so tightly I could see his knuckles.
“What am I going to do?” he whispered.
Holding my breath, I slipped out of sight before he could look up, my back pressed against the wall.
Buona had been right all along.
There was something important he was keeping from me. If it could cause him that much distress, shouldn’t he have told me? Why go through that kind of worry alone?
Well, if he didn’t want to tell me, I would find out on my own. Then I would be able to offer him the help he needed while skipping over the part that seemed the most difficult for him: the asking of it.
* * *
I gasped awake, the neighing of a horse following me into consciousness for an instant before receding.
I placed a hand on my stomach and felt my pulse beating in each of my fingertips, the muscles in my arms clenched so tightly they ached. I realized I was still waiting to hear that sound again.
But it didn’t come. Well, naturally, since it’d just been a dream.
I exhaled. Because of course I’d fallen asleep when it was the opposite of what I’d told myself I’d do. Dio, how frustrating even I found myself sometimes.
I took care to make as little noise as possible as I turned to look at Giovanni. I could just about see that the bandage on his face still glowed white. It couldn’t have been that long since we’d gone to bed, then, for the wound had still been bleeding with enthusiasm when we’d lain down.
His breathing was deep and steady though.
Am I really going to do this? If he catches me, after—
Yes, I had to. If I wanted to learn the truth, I had to try.
I pulled the covers gently away from me, my eyes on my husband, and sat up. I winced at the creak of the bed, which joined in duet with the floorboards as I shifted my legs and stood. Holding my breath, I waited for movement or for a change in his breathing.
He remained as he was.
The floor was cold as I tapped my foot in search of my bedroom slippers, without success. My mother would have been horrified to hear of me walking about barefoot in my condition, but I couldn’t risk making more noise. I’d have to manage.
I pulled my bed jacket over my slip and started toward the door. I moved with care, only just seeing the silhouette of the footstool at the far end of the bed, holding my arms out in front of me to avoid crashing nose-first into the wood.
When I felt the grain of the door against my fingers, I took as steadying a breath as I could manage. For this would be the most difficult part. Giovanni insisted on locking the room each night, and the lock and key were just as rusted as could be expected after so many years of disuse.
My hand closed around the skeleton key and, with a quick appeal to the Santissima Madre, I turned it.
The clank of it would have woken the long-buried. And Giovanni was very much alive.
“Sibilla?”
I swallowed. “I’m here.”
“What are you doing?”
“I-I wanted some water. I’m sorry I woke you; go back to sleep.”
Only silence from the bed.
“Have the girl fetch it for you,” he finally said, his voice losing its focus as sleep drew him down again.
“Yes, of course. I’ll just go wake her,” I said, pulling the key from the lock and opening the door in one sharp movement. I’d have to be quick now.
There was more light out here in the corridor, so I walked as close to a run as I dared, past Buona’s bedroom, and to the study. I tried the handle but it was locked, too, as I’d assumed.
In an instant, the skeleton key fixed that predicament and I was inside the room, the door clicking closed behind me.
I bit the inside of my cheek at the memory of Giovanni’s hand tightening on my wrist. It would be so much worse than that if he saw me in here now . . . no, I couldn’t let that overwhelm me. I had to know the truth.
But a quick glance was enough to see that Giovanni had taken more precautions than locking the door. The pale moonlight streaming past the curtains he’d forgotten to close revealed a desk empty of everything but the telephone and the lamp. All of the scattered papers I’d seen just this afternoon were gone.
I walked around the desk and began pulling open the drawers, one by one, wincing at every screech of parched wood. There wasn’t much. A set of ink pens in their velvet pouches, blank papers, a few newspapers from Torino, but none of the documents I’d seen yesterday.
Well, they couldn’t just have disappeared. Perhaps he’d placed them—
I frowned. There was a pile of ashes in the fireplace, which wouldn’t have been unusual except that Buona and I had left it spotless a few days ago, ready for the winter in case we couldn’t manage the expense of radiators yet.
No wood had been cut, no pinecones gathered nor coal ordered, yet there were ashes.
I closed the last drawer and went to the fireplace, kneeling by the hearthstone. I took the iron poker from its stand and began shifting the ashes about.
Had he really done this?
A corner of blackened paper shifting from under that pile of gray was my answer.
And it carried a fierce sting.
None of this was an attempt to spare me from worry, as I’d first thought. No, this was concealment. Lies. If these papers were important enough to burn so that I wouldn’t read them, they were important enough for me to know what they’d said. Wasn’t my life tied to my husband’s, after all? What affected him was bound to affect me.
Did he not realize that, or did he just not care?
I blinked back tears and forced myself to stand because I had to try and get something more than pain out of all of this. Even if it was just a kernel of truth.
Taking the bit of singed paper to the window, I lifted it up to the moonlight, for I dared not turn the lamp on.
The fire had eaten away at most of the writing, warping all legibility from the rest. Except for two words. A name, it seemed.
Squinting, I brought it closer. Yes, it was a name and . . . it was one I knew. Leonardo Pisani, the assistant engineer in the sawmill Giovanni had worked at. What did he have to do with anything? It’d been at least half a year since Giovanni had seen or spoken with him.
A creak made me flinch.
I’d been too long. Giovanni had woken again.
I stuffed the burned paper into the pocket of my bed jacket and darted to the door, taking the skeleton key before opening it and slipping out.
There were footsteps in the corridor, drawing nearer.
My heart pounding in my throat, I tucked myself into the darkest corner I could find, pressed against a wall dusted with black mold. But there was no helping it. If he continued down to the study, he would see me.
I felt a splash of frozen fear. I’d forgotten to lock the door.
It wasn’t Giovanni that the moonlight revealed, though. It was Buona, fully dressed, the hem of her trousers dark with mud. She clutched something in her hands, but the light’s angle was wrong and I couldn’t quite see what it was.
With her head turned toward the corridor leading to our bedroom, her body poised to dart away, she slowly opened her door. She paused and listened.
I was certain she would hear my heart beating like birds’ wings in all that silence, but she just slipped into her room, readjusting her grip on what she held as she made to close the door behind her.
A pale beam of light fell upon it now.
How strange. She had a bouquet of plants in her arms, the haze of moonglow settling on greens and purples and blues and whites.
What could she possibly need flowers for in the middle of the night?