The announcer’s voice dissolved into static.
I allowed my eyes to close, my head aching in a hollow way, as if the skull itself throbbed. I was too tired to fuss with the radio.
I would have liked to ask the local doctor if a mild sedative would be harmful to the child in the sixth month, but Giovanni had never gotten around to calling him, not even to look after his own injury. I wanted nothing too strong, of course, just enough to tamp down the horse’s cries so I could sleep.
After the morning up in the oak forest, I seemed to have carried them back with me just as I had the pain from the invisible blows, because I’d heard those cries every night for the past two weeks.
Sometimes the noises would start after midnight and other times not until two or three in the morning. Sometimes they were shrieks and other times they were whinnies. And they went on for hours. I’d woken Giovanni the first two nights, but he’d not heard anything. He’d been so irritable the following days, claiming exhaustion, that I’d not done it again. If there had been more damage in the mill I’d have insisted, but whatever the sounds were, they’d not come nearer.
Not that there were new parts to sabotage. The last order Giovanni had made to Alessandria was taking almost a month longer than it should have. Another source of frustration for him. He’d even dismissed most of the workers for the moment because there was nothing for them to do.
I shifted in the mustard armchair and groaned at the throbbing in my temples.
If I could just manage at least half a night’s sleep, I was certain I’d feel more like myself again. It was true that I did take short rests through the day, but none of them seemed to chip away at this coating of fatigue. Buona even refused to give me coffee, plying me instead with teas that she said were better for the child. She was likely right, but a cup of coffee now would have helped my head.
I took the light blanket folded on the armrest and spread it over my legs. The stack of logs that Giovanni had had cut now that we were certain we’d not have radiators this winter was just across the room, ready to replenish the weakening fire, but I didn’t relish the idea of getting up. Buona could do it when she came in.
Perhaps I could ask her for something for the ache in my limbs, too, since aspirin wasn’t budging it. I’d had no bruises from the blows, but the pain was rooted in me. Bone deep.
There was a light knock at the door.
“Yes?”
Buona leaned into the room, streaks of flour across her forehead and on the ridge of her nose. “There’s a man come to call. Piero, he said his name was.”
I frowned. What was he doing here?
“He said to remind you he was the driver who brought you from the station.”
“Yes, I remember him.”
I glanced around the room, taking in the coating of dust on the squat walnut table in front of me and the soot marks on the mantle of the fireplace. The buzz of the electric cables competed with the radio’s static for attention. It wasn’t the kind of reception room I’d dreamed of when I’d thought about living in a villa, but none of the other ones were much better. Buona could do only so much in the day and lately I had become a useless waddling creature.
“Do I show him in here?” she said, smacking a cloud of flour from her apron.
“It’ll have to do, I suppose. Could you put another log in the fire, first? And turn off the blasted radio.” I had to at least be able to provide a bit of warmth, if not luxury.
She did as I asked and then left to fetch the man. I smoothed out my still-uncurled hair, folded the blanket out of the way, and gathered as much of my tired mind as I could.
Piero held his wool cap in his hands as he stepped into the room, his head tilting to look at the ceiling, which, though stained in various shades of yellows and browns from water damage, still had carved cornices and friezes on display.
I shifted forward in the armchair and pulled myself to my feet. “How nice to see you, Piero.”
He turned to me and frowned.
A peculiar reaction.
He tightened his grip on his cap before giving me a nod. “Signora Fenoglio, please forgive the intrusion, but I was on my way to Ovada and thought I’d stop by and see how you and your husband were doing.”
“That is very kind.” I motioned to the other armchair. “Please, sit.”
“No, signora, I couldn’t impose.”
“It’s no imposition at all. You’re giving me an opportunity to entertain, which I’ve not had the chance to do yet.” A spell of dizziness made the room lose some of its definition, but I forced myself to smile as I sat back down. “I don’t have much in the way of neighbors unless I count the trespassers.”
“Trespassers, signora?”
The lack of sleep was truly making me loopy. He had no idea what I was talking about, of course, and I really shouldn’t have even mentioned it.
I waved my own words away. “Just a bit of trouble we’ve had. Nothing at all to worry about.”
“Shall I bring tea?” Buona said.
“Yes, please,” I said. “That would be exactly the right thing, wouldn’t it, Piero?”
He nodded, his eyes on his hands.
“I do apologize for the state of the place,” I said once she’d left. “Everything is taking longer than we thought, and with only the girl helping me, it’s difficult to keep up with the house’s needs.”
“Are you happy with Buona?”
“I am, yes.” I frowned. “You know her, then?”
He hesitated. “Well, just in passing. It’s a small region, signora.”
But when she’d announced him, she had given me the impression she’d never seen him before. Like she’d never even heard his name before.
“If you’ll permit me the question, how are you, signora?”
“Oh, I’m very well, Piero, thank you. Though I am moving a bit more slowly these days.”
He cleared his throat and shifted his cap from hand to hand. “I only ask because, scusatemi, you are looking rather pale. Not quite as well as when I last saw you.”
“I’ve—I’ve had some trouble sleeping, that’s all.” I smiled again. “And the sun hasn’t cooperated much since we arrived, has it?”
“Perhaps you could ask your husband to go down to Savona, to the seaside, before the child comes. I’d be happy to drive you, signora.” He looked up at me and there was an urgency in his eyes that I didn’t understand. “Just to get away from the house.”
“Perhaps. Though Giovanni is rather busy these days.”
He leaned forward, hands tightening on his cap. “I don’t think you should stay here, signora. You’re not—”
Buona’s entrance, all clinking ceramic, stole the rest of his words.
“What do you mean, Piero?” I said. “I’m not what?”
With a rapid glance at the girl, he shook his head.
“Thank you, Buona,” I said, frowning, as I took the cup she carefully handed me.
The tea was stronger than usual, and it had a bitter edge to it that was almost unpleasant, a bit like burnt coffee. I glanced up at Piero as he took the first sip and found his eyes on me already. I smiled despite the grainy sourness scratching my palate. Like I had a dusting of sand in my mouth.
I took two cubes of sugar and dropped them in the dark liquid.
We chatted as we drank our tea, mostly about Piero’s work driving people to and from Ovada and about the mill, and the bit of energy I’d mustered up for my guest started to fade.
Piero placed his cup on the table. “I really must leave you now, signora. I’ve taken up so much of your time.” He stood and I made to do the same, but he stopped me. “Please, do not trouble yourself. Buona can show me out.”
I hesitated, thinking of what Mother would have said if she saw how little effort I was making for my guest. But I felt mired in this headache, this exhaustion that had worsened despite the tea. I nodded and sat back.
“Grazie, signora, for welcoming me into your home.”
“Anytime, Piero.”
He gave me a small bow of his head and followed Buona out of the room.
I groaned and closed my eyes, trying to part the pain like a veil, get at least an instant of peace, but there was no shifting it. And the armchair’s stiff back was offering no help. Perhaps it would be best if I tried to rest in bed, fully prone. The thought of closing the curtains and lying in a dark room, in silence, was enough to get me moving again.
Cradling the mound of my child, I rose and crossed the room to the door.
The voices reached me when I neared the bedroom. They came from the courtyard, magnified by the height of the ceilings and the marble lacquer of the villa. Buona and Piero were talking, which would not have been unusual if they’d been speaking in the same moderate manner that they had been until now.
But they weren’t.
Even though I couldn’t quite make out the words, the agitation and tension of their voices clearly indicated that they were not exchanging the pleasantries of taking leave.
And that was what made me continue past the bedroom door, toward the courtyard and its vestibule. They were having a conversation like they’d known each other for a long time. Which meant that they had both lied.
Why?
I stood as far up on the tips of my toes as I could manage without capsizing and drew closer. I pressed myself against the pillar of one of the arches leading into the corridor, peering out at the two of them. They stood close enough to embrace.
“—plenty of that tea. It is all under control,” Buona said. “It won’t be a problem.”
“You can’t be certain of that.”
“I’m being very careful, Piero. There’s no reason anyone should ever find out.”
He shook his head before shoving his hat on it. “It’s a mistake and you know it. You have to realize it won’t end well.”
She said something else as she pulled the door open, but she whispered it and I couldn’t hear the words over the sudden rush of blood to my head.
What did she mean? What was under control?
Buona closed the door and leaned her back against it. Her face was creased with irritation, her features pinched in a way that made her look a decade older.
I shifted, ready to slip out from behind the pillar and ask her about what I’d seen, get the truth about this, make her tell me what she meant about the tea, but I halted myself. Because what would that achieve?
I hadn’t heard enough to differentiate truth from lie. I had no context. All I’d accomplish would be to put her on the alert, making it more difficult for me to learn what she was doing. I’d realized that much from the matter with Giovanni and his papers.
He would have told me to dismiss her, of course, but I couldn’t do that yet. I couldn’t risk being left alone now that I was finding it difficult to merely greet guests without collapsing, and I doubted I could drag Giovanni’s attention away from the mill for long enough to get him to find me some other help.
No. I’d not let Buona know what I’d heard, and I would not dismiss her. I had to let her continue as she was while taking note of her actions. Once I knew what she was hiding, I’d make a decision.
What I’d not do, however, was drink a drop more of her teas. I was not that simple.
* * *
“What do you see?” Giovanni called.
I bent as much as the child in my belly allowed and squinted into the dark mouth of the millrace. “I don’t see anything. The smell is atrocious, though.”
Something had certainly rotted in there.
Giovanni spoke to the worker perched beside him on the bridge over the deep stone opening that allowed the deviated river to flow to the wheel. Only a light stream of muddy water trickled in. The flow was so constricted that Giovanni had had to allow a gap in the dam to give the water somewhere to go.
He took hold of a rope and began tying it to the new iron railing he’d had installed on the bridge.
I straightened. “What are you doing?”
“I need to see what is blocking the passage and I can’t do that from up here.”
“But you’re not going in the millrace.”
He gave the rope a sharp tug. “Of course I am. How else do you think I’ll be able to fix this?”
“Giovanni, you’ll get swept away if the water flows in!”
At the very least he’d crack his head against the bottom of the wheel. How would I help him in my condition? Only one worker was here today, and I wasn’t at all certain that he and Buona would be able to fight the current for him. I’d never get to the telephone in time to make a difference.
“That’s what the rope is for,” he said, wrapping it around his waist. “No need for hysterics.”
I leaned against the mill’s wall. Buona drew a little closer, lightly taking hold of my arm as we both watched Giovanni climb down the side of the bridge. My head began its low, simmering throb again.
He landed with a squelch at the bottom of the millrace and at his first breath began to cough. He pressed a hand to his face. I heard the hollow croak of a gag as he stumbled away from the dark mouth, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. He shook it open and tied it around his head.
He needed to get out of there. Why couldn’t he understand?
Hands on his hips, he took a few deep breaths, facing away from the opening. It could happen at any moment, the current could slam through whatever was blocking its passage and drag him under, and he just stood there.
He turned, squinting as he looked up, and motioned to me. “Hand me the pole.”
“I’ll do it,” Buona said and reached for the metal rod beside me. She knelt and allowed it to slide down the side of the millrace’s bank, where Giovanni grabbed it.
The worker crouched on the bridge and looked at me.
“Va bene, signora,” he said with a nod, hands tightening around the rope in a way that made me feel just a bit steadier. Although I would have preferred if he’d just started pulling my husband up, fist over fist.
Giovanni walked back to the opening and shoved the pole into the stone tunnel. Once, twice.
“There’s definitely something here,” he said. “Something rather large.”
With a grunt, he tugged the pole back and raised it, sliding it right against the tunnel’s top edge with a scrape of metal on stone.
All of that water was going to come rushing through. I could see it.
Giovanni brought his full weight and all of his strength down, leaning into the metal rod as if he were operating an uncooperative lever.
A suctioning, wet sound fell on my ears. A gust of putridity burned into my nose, setting my eyes watering and blurring my vision, so that at first I only saw the silhouettes of what poured out of that opening.
Giovanni exclaimed and leaped back.
I blinked.
And then screamed.
Four horse carcasses oozed out of the opening, their rotten legs tangled around each other, what remained of their black meat dropping off the bones in chunks, their hooves covered in layers of green scum. Their eyeless skulls were all bones and teeth.
My stomach contracted and bile rose up my throat. The whinnies I’d heard every night for two weeks filled my head. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
“Sibilla,” Buona said, grabbing my arms.
“Would you stop making such a fuss?” Giovanni said. “They’re just dead animals. And there’s more of them, so I suggest you leave if you can’t manage their sight.”
A numbness had come to my lips so that I couldn’t feel them move when I spoke. The blows I’d received on the mountain throbbed with the beating of my heart. “Those poor horses.”
“What do you mean?” Buona said. “What horses?”
Had she gone daft? I jerked my arm away from her and pointed to all that death at the bottom of the millrace. “Those! Those right th—”
They were deer.
The carcasses I’d seen weren’t horses but roe deer. There was even a crown of antlers on one of the skulls.
“No, I saw them,” I said. I stepped away from Buona and peered over the edge, scouring the shapes. My hands and head felt terribly hot while the rest of me was drenched in frozen sweat.
“There’s only deer, Sibilla.” She took hold of my elbow. “Come away from there; it’s not safe.”
“Buona, I saw them, I swear it.”
She nodded. “You’re very tired and you’ve had a lot of headaches the last few days. Your eyes got confused, that’s all.” She pointed. “Look, I think the water’s coming through.”
She was right. Two more deer carcasses slid out of the tunnel with a wet thud, garlands of bare bones adorning them, and a gush of water followed.
I held my breath as Giovanni leaped to the side, clutching his rope, and began climbing up the bank while the current dragged even more bones out of the opening. An entire graveyard of them.
My husband came to stand beside me.
We watched the water crash through the rest of the barrier, cracking skeletons and pushing skulls down with its force. It grew muddier and wilder and continued to pour into the millrace. Another deer carcass appeared, a flap of its hide snapping like a sail in the current.
“It’s no wonder the water couldn’t come through,” Giovanni said. “Some of those bones look old enough to be from the time of the Caparalias, before the dam broke. I suppose they have to be, for there wouldn’t have been enough force to have dragged them in there afterward.” He bent, peering in at the still meaty carcasses that were rising slowly to the surface. “These are probably from the past few weeks.”
“There are so many of them,” I said.
“Likely a herd that got spooked by the change in the water, leaped in, and got swept downriver. They’re notoriously stupid creatures.”
“Poor beasts.”
I could see him from the corner of my eye as he turned to me, but I couldn’t look away from the lives the torrent had taken, not even to mind Giovanni.
Something was pressing against me, an edge of that memory drenched in red. I could almost—
“Sibilla,” Giovanni said, “look at the wheel.”
I flinched and the memory disappeared. I turned to Giovanni, who was smiling for what I was certain was the first time in weeks. When I met his eyes, though, none of the smile reflected in them as they searched my face. For what?
The creak of long-dormant wood started behind us.
“It’s finally working,” he said, the wheel pulling his attention entirely from me with that one mewl.
Buona turned, following his gaze.
But I glanced down at the deer again, pieces of them now floating at the top, a flotsam of bones and rotten meat. I prodded at the red memory as one would an aching tooth.
Nothing came. Whatever had been there was now gone. Hidden. Buried.
“At least this one thing has gone right,” Giovanni said.
“It’s powerful,” Buona said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I forced myself to look away from death and up to the wheel, which was turning as if it had been doing so without pause for centuries. Moss that had spent its entire life staring up at the sun now found itself underwater.
“It’ll turn even faster,” Giovanni said to Buona, who had drawn closer and was peering up at the structure on the tips of her toes, “when I open all the chutes that bring the water up to that trough there.” He motioned to another long stone tunnel above the wheel. “The water will fall and fill the buckets on the side of the wheel.”
“And that will weigh it down and make it spin faster?” Buona said.
“Exactly. Right now, the wheel is only turning because of the force of the water beneath it.”
I couldn’t help feeling a pinch of irritation. He’d never taken the time to explain the workings of any mill to me, not even bothering to show me what the function of the part he invented was. Why did she deserve an explanation?
I pressed a hand on my stomach.
Oh, but perhaps I was being unkind. This could be a good sign. This could be how he would treat our child. How lovely it would be to see our son in his arms, staring up at this same wheel.
“We’ll have to drag all those bodies and bones out,” Giovanni said, calling up to the worker on the bridge. “We’ll start now, but bring two more men tomorrow and I’ll call for a tractor to come help us. I don’t want any more delays.”
“Yes, ingegnere.”
He started to turn but hesitated, pausing to look at Buona again. “When the entire mechanism is working, I’ll come fetch you so you can see it.”
“Well, I’d like to see it, too,” I said.
He cleared his throat and shrugged. “Of course, Sibilla. If you wish.” He nodded to the bridge. “Now the two of you should head back to the house so we can work without worrying about you.”
Buona bounded to my side like a colt and offered her arm to help me walk over some of the rougher terrain.
“No, I-I can do it. I’m fine.”
“You’re certain?”
There went that needle of irritation again. What was wrong with me today? “Yes, thank you.” I made myself smile at her.
“I’ll make you some tea, now, and something to eat. Would you like to have it in the music room?”
“Uh, no. I’ll have it in my bedroom. I’d like to rest for a bit.”
“Of course.”
And though it was true, I did want to lie down for an hour or so, what I most wanted from my room was the solitude that would allow me toss the girl’s questionable tea out the window to the ivy below.