The stablehand, Marco Bergamini, reached for her horse’s reins. She meant to avoid meeting his eyes. But dismounting, she landed with her face inches from his.
His eyes were crackling. Full of explosives.
As if, she thought suddenly, some sort of rage had made him unstable. As if all that anger were directed . . . at her.
Taking the reins from her, he stepped to the horse’s left side close to Lilli. “You,” he said, so low that no one else could have heard. “You are from New Orleans.”
Now she was struggling to breathe. So her memory from that day George hired him had been right. This Italian and his little brother had been part of that night of torches and death. Had been, incredibly, under her very window.
So this Italian might know who she was. What her father might have arranged.
Might be looking soon for a chance to exact his revenge.
So then perhaps she would take the offensive.
Chapter 21
Sal was reaching for the currycomb as she entered, gliding toward him with some glittering, secretive purpose. Dropping it and picking up a cotton cloth, he buffed oil into the leather of an older saddle. Buffed it hard.
What the daughter of Maurice Barthélemy was really after in coming to visit him all alone, Sal could not imagine. And whether she recognized him as one of the Sicilians accused of killing Hennessy, and one of the few who’d escaped from the jail, the night of the lynchings and the riot, he had no idea. He watched her eyes.
She scanned the tack room in a leisurely way, as if she had all day to be here, watching him. Like some sort of long arm of her father. More beautiful—and maybe just as deadly.
From beside the saddle soap, she lifted a page from the shelf. He moved to take it from her.
Her eyebrow arched. “Is this your work, Marco? This drawing of a house?”
He hesitated, gauging if he could trust her. Probably not. But he could tell the truth on this much at least. “It is.”
“I know proportion and design when I see it.” She scrutinized him, the eyebrow arching still higher, as if he were a stray cat who’d learned to paint. “It’s actually very good. Do you sketch these often?”
Hesitating again, he stepped to a lower shelf where he’d stacked others.
She flipped through them. “Incroyable. You wouldn’t mind if I showed these to George.” It was more statement than question.
Yes, he did mind. But Nico would be back at the boardinghouse even now, probably huddled in the kitchen with the landlady peeling potatoes, the boy’s face crumpled with worry as it always was these days—and had been for years. Sal couldn’t jeopardize his position here and risk losing Nico again.
Sal stared back at her without speaking. No need for an answer when there’d been no question.
She aligned the pages and tucked them under one arm. “Now. What I would really like to know”—her voice had dropped, breathless and low—“is what Sicily was like.” Her tone said that wasn’t all she’d like to know.
Her real interest could not possibly be the question she’d asked. Still, he could see Sicily as if he were there: parts of Palermo peering over cliffs to the sea, parts tumbling down terraced hills of vineyards to a turquoise bay.
Resuming his oiling and buffing of the saddle and keeping his eyes on its pommel and skirt, Sal began slowly, looking for signs of a trap. “From a distance, Palermo is much the pretty. The hillsides with the grapevines. Below, the blue—bright blue—of the sea. Up the hills are the churches, the mosques, the piazzas. Streets that wind.”
“Churches and mosques?”
“Invaders, they come. They like the island for the good life. The weather. The domination—by sea. The invaders, they have been many: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, barbarian tribes, the Arabs and Spaniards, the French.”
“Intriguing. But if Sicily was conquered by so many others, your people could hardly be the marauding, extortionist villains that one always hears.”
Ignoring what her comment implied, he continued buffing. He would keep his face as still as Michelangelo’s marble. He would not let her see his fear that she knew who he was—what he knew of her father and had come here with the reporter to expose.
She leaned closer. She smelled of magnolias. Voice soft as petals. Her eyes watching him work. “Tell me more of your country.”
A request that had nothing to do with New Orleans. Maybe she really did not know who he was. Maybe she had no idea he’d learned who she was, her father’s daughter—and so, how reckless it was for her to have come to face him alone.
He looked up to meet her eyes as she shifted infinitesimally closer. “The buildings, they crumble. The new Italy that is unified, it has the center in the North, the—how do you say?—rebirth. The North with the wealth, it has little of the interest in Byzantine mosaics that chip or Gothic arches that collapse.”
“Byzantine,” she repeated, as if she enjoyed the buzz of the word in her mouth. Delicately, slowly, she licked her lips.
He could kiss them, he realized. Could pull her to him and kiss those lips. She wanted him to—he could see that—at least part of her did. His own body throbbing, he stared at her. Whatever dangerous game she was playing, he could not let himself play, too.
Focusing back on his saddle—by now it had a coppery gloss—he steadied himself. “For the North of my country, Sicily is the nuisance, the island of trouble that Italy’s boot must kick away.”
She ran a finger down a length of girth on its stretcher. “What of the women?”
“Most often, left all alone to survive.”
“And you . . . ?”
Here it came. Her questions about Hennessy’s death.
She tinkered with the curb chain of a bridle hanging from a brass hook. “Did you leave a woman alone back in Palermo?”
Sal straightened slowly. The scent of leather and grain and magnolias filling the air.
A woman alone.
Sometimes in their boardinghouse just before sleep, Nico still whispered “Mamá. Mamá died.” Sal would kiss the child’s cheek then and murmur, “Buono. You made the full sentence.” Because there was too much else behind that to even begin.
“Our mother,” Sal said now, not looking up. “My younger brother’s and mine. She died. This was why Nic—Carlo needed to come with me to this country.” He did not meet her eye to see if she’d noticed the slip of his brother’s name.
“I’m . . . so sorry,” said Maurice Barthélemy’s daughter. “About your mother.” As if she meant it. Several beats passed. Her voice softer still. “And you had no girl you left behind?”
Sal pictured Angelina at the market. The red awnings angled over the street. The purple and black and green of the grapes mounded at her waist up to her chest.
Come back to me, Salvatore.
For a moment, Sal did not speak. Or move.
“There was,” Lilli Barthélemy whispered.
“Yes.” He turned back to buffing the saddle. “But she has married my friend.”
“Oh. How terribly . . . hard.”
He made himself lift one shoulder. “Five years. It is too long for a beautiful woman to wait.”
Five years.