‘You know nothing about it.’
‘I know you’re dying inside, and you’re letting it happen. You’re glad for it to happen because you think you can be with her again. But you can’t, Pietro, you can’t. She’s dead and you can’t bring her back.’
His eyes seemed to burn in their sockets. ‘I don’t need to bring her back,’ he raged. ‘She isn’t dead. She’s here, everywhere, all the time. Every door I open, I know she’s on the other side. She’s in every room I enter. When I dream, she’s there. When I awake, she’s there. In my last moment, as I fall asleep, she whispers that she’s there.’
‘And you can’t wait to find her,’ she challenged.
‘I don’t have to find her, she finds me. She always will.’
‘Was she there tonight?’ she flashed, and had her answer in the tension in his face.
‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely.
‘But must you always give in to it?’ she cried. ‘Is there nothing for us?’
His face softened. ‘There could have been everything for us-if things had been different. Do you want me to say that I love you? Is that what you’re waiting for, to hear the words?’
‘Can you say them?’ she asked, hardly breathing.
‘I-’ For a long moment he stood there, his face distraught, his whole being on the edge of words that tortured him, while she watched, knowing that her life depended on the next few moments. Then-
‘No!’ The word burst from him almost as an explosion. ‘No, I don’t love you.’
But suddenly her heart leapt and she looked at him with shining eyes. He loved her. By the very vehemence of his denial she knew the truth.
‘I think you do,’ she said simply. ‘Is it so hard to say it?’
‘It’s impossible. It can’t be true. It mustn’t be true.’
‘But she’s dead. You’re free now.’
‘Free?’ The word was like a knife. ‘I’ll never be free, and do you know why? Because she’s dead. Because I killed her. There’s no escape from that prison, and nor should there be. Why should I escape? I killed her.’
The words shocked her to silence. Whatever she’d expected, it wasn’t this.
‘But that can’t be true,’ she choked at last. ‘She died in childbirth.’
‘She died bearing a child, a child she should never have been asked to bear. She wasn’t strong enough, but she pretended that she was, and I pretended to believe her. I wanted that child. The terrible truth is that I wanted it more than I wanted her, and she knew it.
‘She never considered herself for a moment. Everything was for me. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done to please me, because she knew-’ He paused and shuddered so violently that Ruth could feel it. ‘She knew that I didn’t love her.’
His voice was full of bleak despair as he said the final words, and then a deadly silence fell, as though the end of the world had come, and there was nothing left.
‘Surely you must have loved her a little,’ she said. ‘You married her.’
‘I had a kind of fondness for her. She was sweet and gentle and I’d known her most of my life. I showed you the pictures of us as children.’
‘The dice game,’ she said. ‘Yes, I remember.’
‘When she grew up I danced with her, always feeling like her brother because I’d known her for so long. It never occurred to me that she-’
He broke off awkwardly.
Ruth didn’t need to hear him say all the words to be able to follow the progress. It had started with childish hero-worship, turned into a teenage crush, and then into womanly love. And he, with fairly typical male blindness, had been aware of it only distantly without seeing the implications or the danger.
‘When I started to notice girls in a big way, I went a little mad,’ Pietro resumed. ‘I was the son of Count Bagnelli. I could indulge myself with any girl I liked. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that aristocracy doesn’t matter in the modern world. It counts as much as it ever did.’
Ruth thought of Franco and Serafina, and knew he was right.
‘A title, or just the prospect of one, gives you a freedom no other man has,’ Pietro continued. ‘I won’t go into details about how badly I behaved. Let’s just say that I took what was offered, accepting it as my right. I’m not proud of that.’
She remembered Jessica saying, ‘He only slept with the best, very stylish ladies. But they had to be outstanding, not just beautiful, but with a certain “something extra”, to make him proud.’
And even Mario had wistfully implied that Pietro could take his pick.
But while Pietro connected his sexual success with his title she knew that his personal attractions must have played a big part. The title was a bonus, but it was the man himself who would make a woman’s heart beat faster.
‘So you had a colourful life,’ she said gently. ‘So do millions of young men with no money or title. You must have slowed down in the end.’
‘My father had a heart attack. I was away at the time and it was Lisetta who called me. Against all the odds he survived and returned home, and she volunteered to come and look after him. He was fond of her and she seemed able to make him relax. I was grateful to her.
‘But although he made a sort of recovery, we knew he didn’t have very long. He said that before he died he wanted to see me “decently married”, as he put it. He wanted to be at my wedding, and to know that at least there was a child on the way. He thought it was time I “chose a suitable bride”, as though we were still in the nineteenth century.
‘It didn’t seem so strange to me. His own marriage to my mother had been arranged this way. They were civil, but not madly in love, and to me that was normal.
‘He was dying, and I couldn’t bear to deny him his last wish, so I agreed. It was he who suggested Lisetta. We knew each other well, I liked her, and thought she liked me. At that time I had no idea that her feelings went deeper.’
‘Didn’t it come out when you asked her to marry you?’
‘No. I spoke of our friendship, our affection, but I didn’t pretend to a love I didn’t feel because it would have been dishonest, and that would have insulted her. She’d have seen through every word and despised me as a liar. And it seemed the best way because she was very cheerful, agreed with me about our marriage.’
‘Poor Lisetta,’ Ruth mused. ‘I suppose she concealed her feelings, afraid of frightening you off. She must have thought, when you were married, she could win your love.’
‘Yes, I finally realised that,’ he groaned. ‘I don’t know how I could have been so blind.’
‘Because she meant you to be. She was fighting for something she wanted, and she knew the way to do it. Good for her.’
He looked at her strangely.
‘You’re forgetting how badly it ended for her.’
‘No, I’m not. The future is always a mystery. You can only take the step you see ahead, and deal with the consequences as they happen. She sounds like a lady with a lot of courage.’
‘Courage?’
‘Think of the risk she took. How old was she then?’
‘About twenty-five.’
‘Then she’d waited for you, played high stakes to win the only prize she cared about because nothing less would do. That took real courage.’
In his mind he saw Lisetta again, docile, yielding, eager to please, but sadly without the magic that could have caught his attention. It took an effort to see her through Ruth’s eyes, daring, ready to risk everything and smile if she lost.
And she had lost, he thought remorsefully. She’d gained nothing from her marriage but two dead children and the dutiful affection of a man carrying an increasing burden of guilt. But the guilt had been his own fault. She’d never tried to lay that burden on him.
‘You’re right,’ he said suddenly. ‘She was a brave woman. I meant to be a good husband, and at first things went well. She became pregnant almost at once, and we were happy. I was grateful to her for giving my father hope, and also on my own account.