A Harvest of Secrets(46)

“I’m sorry. No lemon. No sugar. The war has made our simple lives even simpler.”

They each took a cup and sipped.

“Do you have many encounters with Father Costantino?” Sister Gabriella asked, and again, there was the slightest touch of discomfort in the nun’s eyes. So slight Vittoria wondered if she might be imagining it.

“Not really. We go to Mass in Montepulciano, not the village, though since he arrived, he’s been to the house a few times to counsel my father.”

“And you trust him?”

Emerging from the calm face as it did, the question hit Vittoria like a slap. “I barely know him. He visits on occasion, as I said, and he and my father take walks and have long conversations. He never stays for a meal. The workers—Old Paolo, Marcellina and the others—they see him every Sunday. I was under the impression that Paolo had been given . . . I don’t know the right word, instructions from him.”

“Paolo, yes,” Sister Gabriella said, as if she’d heard the name but didn’t know the man. She was peering at Vittoria now, reading her face.

Looking for sinful thoughts, Vittoria imagined. As if what she saw before her was a spoiled, unmarried woman, fond of sex behind the barn with a handsome worker, insufficiently grateful for her lovely life. “Why do you ask if I trust him?”

The nun took refuge in her tea again, sipped, swallowed, blinked, set the cup back on its saucer, every movement as deliberate as a choreographed dance step. There was a tiny flex across her shoulders that might have been a shrug. “In the work we’re doing now, one has to be exquisitely careful. And we’re entrusting the lives of these men to him. Along with our own lives.”

“The Nazis came to the vineyard last night. The SS. They shot one of our horses.”

“Searching for the three men you brought here?”

“No. For another reason, I think.” Vittoria described the explosion, Massimo’s death. The nun seemed interested, but said only, “I see,” as if the explosion confirmed something she’d already suspected. I see, a sip from her cup, and then, “So much death, so much sin, so much betrayal.” She moved the Bible a millimeter sideways with one finger and met Vittoria’s eyes. “Your mother came here often, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“She came by horseback. Alone.”

“She loved to ride.”

“We had several important conversations. Spiritual and political, both, though I don’t really make that distinction.”

“I’m surprised. Not about the conversations, about the visits. I didn’t know.”

Sister Gabriella nodded and shifted her eyes to the tea.

“You’re keeping something from me, Sister.”

Another tight smile. The pale eyes lifting again. “You were not bred to shyness, I can see.”

“I try to be honest.”

A flicker of a smile. Sad, bitter, wry. “How much do you know about your parents’ marriage?”

Another slap. “I . . . I suspect that my mother wasn’t happy.”

Sister Gabriella’s tiny smile flickered again and disappeared. “And you don’t know why?”

“My father’s . . . eccentricities, I suppose. The strain of my brother’s illness. Tell me, Mother Superior, if you know more than that.”

“It’s not my place, child. It would be a grievous sin to betray her confidences.”

“Even though she’s gone? Even to her own daughter?”

The nun raised her eyebrows, lowered them, watched Vittoria with what almost seemed like pity. Shook her head once.

“Then who will tell me?”

A long hesitation, and then, “I know that your mother kept a diary of sorts. Perhaps she wrote something there.”

“I haven’t seen it. I wouldn’t know where to look,” Vittoria said, but the second she spoke those words, she realized that, if there were a journal or diary, it would likely be found in the bedroom where her mother had died. Neither she nor her father nor either of the serving girls ever entered that room now. Keeping it undisturbed had become a ritual of mourning, one of the few things she and her father agreed upon.

The mother superior pushed back her chair and stood up rather suddenly. Vittoria stood, too. Her cup was still half-full. “Thank you,” she found herself saying. For no particular reason.

“We thank you,” Sister Gabriella said, stepping around the desk and escorting her to the door. “For your courage. As you make your brief retreat tonight, please pray for those men, for the end of the war, and when the war is finished, come here for a longer stay. We’d welcome you. Perhaps we can talk in more detail then.”

Vittoria opened the door and found the old nun there, waiting just down the hall. The nun led her downstairs to the dining area, telling her that the horse was being fed and watered, that the back of the wagon had been cleaned and “put in order again,” the men “treated kindly.” “Eat something, Signorina,” she said, “and then you can pray with us in the chapel if you like.”





Twenty-Six

Carlo walked north from Naples for three more days before he heard the first sounds of fighting. The weather was changing, and the cool fall rain was a torment, soaking him from hair to toes. North of Naples, with the sun out again, he came upon a German lorry with the bodies of two dead soldiers inside. There were heavy woolen blankets in the back, one of which he took, and a tin of food he managed to open with his knife. He found a field of tomatoes, ripe to the point of rottenness, unharvested. He ate three of them so quickly that the juice looked like blood on his hands and shirt.