The Italian Wife

by Kate Furnivall

Genres: Historical Fiction; Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

Italy, 1932 -- Mussolini's Italy is growing from strength to strength, but at what cost?

One bright autumn morning, architect Isabella Berotti sits at a café in the vibrant centre of Bellina, when a woman she's never met asks her to watch her ten-year-old daughter, just for a moment. Reluctantly, Isabella agrees -- and then watches in horror as the woman climbs to the top of the town's clock tower and steps over the edge.

This tragic encounter draws vivid memories to the surface, forcing Isabella to probe deeper into the secrets of her own past as she tries to protect the young girl from the authorities. Together with charismatic photographer Roberto Falco, Isabella is about to discover that secrets run deeper, and are more dangerous, than either of them could have possibly imagined . . .

From the glittering marble piazzas to the picturesque hillside villages and winding streets of Rome, The Italian Wife will take you on an breathtaking journey. Perfect for fans of Dinah Jefferies, Lucinda Riley and Rosanna Ley.

Release date: October 6, 2015

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 448

Sample

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter One

MILAN 1922

I didn’t know I was going to die that warm October day in Milan. If I’d known, I’d have done things differently. Of course I would. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have died.

But I was nineteen years old and believed I was immortal. I had no idea that life, which seemed so snug and warm in my grasp, could be snatched away at any moment, though I did nothing more than turn my head for a split second to inspect a market stall.

A gunshot rang out. The sound of it ricocheted off the ancient pink stone of the market square, making my ears ring and shoppers scatter in panic across the cobbles. It was market day and I had come to idle away an hour among the stalls, passing the time of day with neighbors and exchanging news with friends. Believing that an hour of life was something I could fritter away without thought.

I picked and prodded at the colorful piles of fruit and vegetables on offer, handling the warm leathery pomegranates as I chose the ripest one and inhaled the musty scent of the skin of deep purple aubergines. All around me stalls overflowed with the vibrant yellows and greens and rich scarlets that are the colors of life.

How could I know I was about to lose mine?

If it had happened in some stinking back alleyway in a rough district of Milan, I’d have understood. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I’d have understood. Or on one of Mussolini’s fast new autostrade where cars race each other, as if desperate to leap into the arms of death. There it would make sense. But not here. Not on the lazy warm cobblestones of my home district. Not with my belly swollen with child and a piece of pecorino cheese salty in my mouth.

“Take a bite, Isabella,” Arturo Cribori called out from behind his cheese stall, waggling his black eyebrows at me suggestively.

He sliced off a tiny triangle of pecorino for me to taste. I smiled at him and laughed.

Thinking back on it now, I listen to that carefree laugh and it makes me want to cry. It was the last laugh of the person I was back then. The laugh of a girl who believed she had everything she needed to make her happy for the rest of her life—a handsome husband, a baby growing inside her, a three-room city apartment with a set of silver spoons in pride of place on the sideboard, a future that stretched ahead of her on rails as shiny as Italy’s new train tracks. It was the laugh of a person who still believed in goodness. I remember that girl dimly. I touch her lustrous raven’s-wing hair and my chest aches for her.

The real reason I had come to the street market was to stroll between the rows of stalls alongside Luigi, showing off my fine husband and the bambino growing inside me, displaying them proudly for all to admire. I paused to taste the cheese, I remember that. I didn’t look out at the houses surrounding the square or spare a glance for the upstairs windows overlooking the stalls. Why should I?

If I had looked up, things might have been different.

I remember looking across at Luigi, seeking him out in the bustling crowd. So many people were milling around the stalls, laughing and arguing, haggling over the price of yellow peppers or the weight of a sack of potatoes, but my husband was easy to spot. He was half a head taller than anyone else and possessed the handsome features of a Roman senator, though in fact he came from generations of farming stock. “I’m a fine stud bull,” he would laugh, and stroke my swollen belly.

Luigi was a powerful presence in his crisp Blackshirt militia uniform. Men stood back for him and women’s eyes followed him like fawns. Not just the young signorinas tossing their dark manes at him, but the black-clad matrons as well and the loudmouthed peasants in the stalls, with bosoms as large and ripe as their melons. They all let their eyes linger on Luigi Berotti. I was proud of him. So proud it almost choked me at times. Stupid, I know, but that’s how it was. Even though he raised a hand to me after he’d taken a grappa too many, I saw no wrong in him.

I know better now.

The first shot came from nowhere, ripping through the market. It sent stallholders ducking behind their wares, and a tethered dog howled. The loud crack of the shot sent a wave of pigeons wheeling up from the campanile into the flat blue Italian sky. I swung around from a salami stall in time to see Luigi’s dark head slide from view. It lurched forward as if he’d spotted a five-hundred-lire note lying on the ground. I screamed. It was a vile sound dragged up from deep inside me and scoured my throat raw.

A man seized my wrist. “Are you hurt?”

It was my father. I should have thanked him, this father showing concern for his only daughter amid the whirlwind of fear that swept through the market. But I didn’t. Wordlessly I dragged my arm free and hurled myself into the huddle of people crouching on the cobbles in front of a stall selling embroidered shawls. Their eyes were huge with panic. Heads whipped back and forth, seeking the hand with the gun. But they didn’t run. Those brave people stayed with the limp figure on the ground. Others ran and I couldn’t blame them. They had families. They had loved ones. They had lives to live. Why should they stay behind to stop my husband from bleeding to death on the cobbles?

Luigi’s dark eyes were frozen open like a doll’s and gazing blindly up at the sun as if he could outstare it. In that tiny fraction of time before the second shot rang out, I saw the slack hang of his full lips that had always been so muscular in seizing mine, and I knew what it meant. I saw scarlet raindrops sparkling on the small hairs of his eyebrows. I saw his strong hand curled up like a claw. And in the center of his big bull chest I saw a hole in his shirt. The blood barely showed against the color of its material, but it made the blackness of the shirt glisten.

I snatched a shawl from the deserted stall. I would stop the bleeding with it. I would stop it and he would live. He must live. My Luigi. My husband. His child kicked fiercely inside me to urge me on.

“Luigi!”

I called his name to summon him back to me.

“Luigi Berotti!”

I didn’t hear the second shot. All I knew was that my sandal had left a perfect imprint in my husband’s blood on the ground. I was horrified by it. I saw it as I bent forward to kneel at his side and that was when the backache that had nagged at me all day, where the baby was pressing on a nerve, suddenly flared into a white blinding pain. I thought it was my bones cracking with grief.

Before I hit the ground, I was dead.

“Is she breathing?”

I woke. Nothing worked. Not my eyelids. Not my limbs. My tongue lay lifeless on the base of my mouth. I tried to cry out, but the silence in my head remained absolute while pain wrapped itself around my body.

“What in God’s name is the matter with you, nurse? You’re meant to be monitoring her airways.”

“Yes, Dr. Cantini, I’m sorry, I was just checking her . . .”

“Sorry? Where will sorry get you when she’s dead and cold on the slab? Tell me that, nurse.”

The doctor’s voice was loud and curt to the point of rudeness, the voice of a man who believed in the divine right of the medical profession. I knew that tone. He’d used it on me at times. It was the tone he resorted to when trying to hide fear. Dr. Cantini is my father. If my father was afraid, I knew I was in trouble.

Help me, Papa. Hold my hand.

But the words remained ice cold inside my head.

“Isabella, can you hear me?”

My father’s voice sounded close, as if he were leaning over me. I could picture him, his mustache black and bristling, his blue eyes behind his spectacles abandoning any pretense of professional calm. His daughter was dying.

“Isabella!”

Was he holding my hand? I couldn’t tell. I willed him to be holding my hand, but right now my will was a weak and flimsy thing.

“Isabella, hold on. Don’t let go.” His tone was fierce. “You hear me?”

“She’s lucky,” the nurse commented quietly.

“Lucky! You call this lucky!”

“Yes, Dottore. She was lucky that you were in the market beside her and you restarted her heart when she was shot. You pumped God’s good life-giving air into her lungs. Our blessed Virgin Mary was watching over your daughter today and the good Lord is giving her strength now to stay with us.”

Papa grunted. He was never one to argue against blind faith, though he possessed none himself. He claimed it did more good for his patients than any number of pills and potions.

“So why wasn’t your Virgin Mary watching over her dead husband too?” he muttered sourly.

Luigi. Luigi.

The sight of my husband’s eyes, blank as a doll’s, came into my mind and sucked the breath out of me.

“Oxygen!” my father bellowed. “Get her oxygen!”

There was a flurry of hospital noises around me and the soft sound of the nurse intoning a prayer for my soul.

“Don’t, Isabella.” I could feel Papa’s hot anger crushing my chest. “Don’t you dare die on me, cara mia.”

Papa, it’s all right. Don’t grieve for me. I love you, but I want to be with Luigi and my baby. Let me go.

But he didn’t listen. Papa never listened. A mask was pressed to my face and oxygen was pumped into my lungs. This was my second chance. A new life. Whether I wanted it or not.

Chapter Two

BELLINA 1932

Ten Years Later

The air vibrated to the sound of pigeons and the sun streamed down on the newly constructed buildings in the piazza. To Isabella’s eye some were a little too grand. Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini, had decreed that this brand-new town of Bellina must display the past glories of ancient Rome in its architecture. He wanted its people to revel in the fact that Italy’s Roman eagle had once dominated the world.

But all those arches. And columns. And marble colonnades. All adorning the Fascist Party headquarters. Did they really need to be quite so massive? Or quite so grandiose? Isabella’s fingers itched to redesign them. She was an architect, but was only one of the many lowly assistants to Dottore Architetto Martino, the chief architect here in Bellina, so what did she know?

Very little, according to Martino.

She sipped her scalding coffee, stretched her bare legs into a patch of autumn sunlight, and looked around at the people crossing the huge piazza. There weren’t many of them and they didn’t linger. A few were idling outside the cream curved façade of the elegant cinema. The film L’Armata Azzurra was showing there today—an Air Force adventure. Mussolini was a great believer in cinemas. Keep the populace entertained and they won’t bother you. That was his theory and Isabella wasn’t going to argue with it. But she suspected that the people of Bellina weren’t quite as docile as Il Duce liked to think they were and that they didn’t like the sense of being watched from the Fascist headquarters, which was raised above the piazza by a dozen sweeping steps. She didn’t like that feeling herself.

Every year Isabella took this day in October off work. She would sit sunk in silence, wearing the sleeveless peach dress that Luigi used to like so much, the breeze raising the small hairs on her skin. During the past week as this day drew nearer she’d started to get jumpy, and by the time this morning dawned, she was wide-eyed and sleepless.

It was ten years to the day. The day that she and Luigi were shot. It had been hot that day and was hot again now. She had taught herself self-control for the rest of the year, but on this one day each October she allowed herself to cry. Not so that anyone could see. Of course not. But deep inside herself. Something split open, she could feel it, and the tears flowed unseen. She cried for Luigi. For her unborn child. For that young easygoing girl she used to be. That October day had ruptured the fabric of her. It was that simple.

She had no idea that a decade later her life was about to be disrupted again.

She was sitting in Gino’s café, the only permitted café in the piazza because Fascists didn’t like people to gather anywhere in large numbers unless they’d organized it themselves. She was sipping coffee—strong and full of bite, just the way Gino knew she liked it—and all around her she could spy touches of her handiwork in the grand municipal buildings that bordered each side of the square. They sparkled in white marble, interspersed with intricate terra-cotta brickwork, their arches and their columns and wide spacious steps dwarfing the people who used them. These buildings were designed to impress. To remind each person who stopped to admire them of the power of the State.

Isabella found it hard to explain—even to herself—exactly why she loved pouring so much of herself into these buildings. All she knew was that it filled with warmth a place within her that was stark and cold. Sitting here in the sunshine, she could laugh at her passion for injecting life and breath into the stone and mortar of this town, and regard the piazza with a sense of quiet satisfaction.

The important thing to remember was this—for that brief moment she was happy and it was that sliver of happiness that made her vulnerable. If she had been in her usual rush, her brow creased in a frown of concentration, her mind churning over her next piece of architectural work and her eyes preoccupied with whatever was taking form within her head, the woman with the wild hair who hurried into the piazza dragging a child behind her would have chosen someone else to approach. And if not, Isabella would have said, No, I’m too busy. Nor would the child have been willing to remain with her, a stranger who had lost her smile somewhere along the way.

So it was that moment of happiness that Isabella blamed for what happened next. But how could she not be happy when she was looking at the tower? It was so beautiful. Of course she was biased because she had designed it herself. It towered the way a tower should, square and tall, surmounted by a great bronze bell, its pale travertino marble shimmering like a shaft of light, sending out a message of dominance to the whole region. It was attached to the Fascist Party headquarters. Oriolo Frezzotti, the architect in charge of the whole project of constructing Mussolini’s six new towns, caught sight of Isabella’s design on one of his lightning visits from Rome and gave Dottore Martino, her immediate superior, no option. Frezzotti had overruled his objections with an extravagant wave of his hand.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” Martino had growled at her.

“No, Dottore.”

And to make sure she didn’t get ideas above her station he’d stuck her to work on gutterings and facings for the next few months. But Isabella didn’t mind. She loved her work as an architect, all aspects of it, and from her office window she watched her tower grow block by block.

“Scusi, signora.”

Isabella looked at the woman. She didn’t know her or her child. She put her coffee cup down on the table and inspected her, squinting against the sun. The woman was slight and dressed in black shapeless clothes, with a face it would be easy to overlook, except there was an urgency about her that made Isabella pay attention. She wore an anxious expression, her eyes darting around her as she stood beside the café table and stretched her hand out to Isabella, palm upward. For a moment Isabella thought she was begging. But she was mistaken. The woman was offering something. It was a brass crucifix on a chain that was dull and grimy. Isabella shook her head. She didn’t want it.

“No, grazie, no.”

The woman looked a few years younger than Isabella, maybe no more than twenty-five, and the child, a girl, could have been anywhere between eight and ten. Both possessed unkempt black hair and a nervousness that was unsettling to be close to. Isabella wanted them to go away. She looked over at her tower, hoping they’d be gone when she looked back. She was more at ease with buildings than with people. Ten years ago she’d lost her trust in people, but buildings were solid and dependable. You knew where you were with a building. That was why she’d worked so hard to put herself through architectural college after her recovery from the hospital, to give herself something she could depend on.

“Signora,” the woman said, “I have to go somewhere for just a few minutes. It is very important. Will you please watch my child for me while I am gone?” Her eyes flicked a secretive glance at her daughter. “She will be good.”

The child stared at her own feet. She was dressed in a simple blue cotton frock and had sunk her hands deep into its patch pockets. She didn’t seem any keener on this idea than Isabella was.

“Well, I’m not sure . . .” Isabella said uneasily.

She looked for help at the next table, but the man seated there with his pipe didn’t lift his nose out of his newspaper. If it had been any other day she would have said a firm no, and maybe things would have turned out differently for all three of them. But it had to happen on the one day of the year when she was not her usual self.

“Please, signora, per favore?”

The mother placed the crucifix on the metal table, where it clattered noisily.

“I don’t want your crucifix,” Isabella said immediately.

“I will be quick. Very quick.”

Isabella saw sudden tears fill the woman’s eyes, and her pleading face loomed closer as she leaned down to Isabella.

“You are a good person,” the woman told her. “I see it in your face. You are full of resolve. Be kind to me.”

Isabella opened her mouth to object. She didn’t want to be told she was good or full of resolve, not while she was sitting quietly minding her own business over a coffee, but the woman leaned closer and said in a low intimate hiss, “They know who killed your bastard husband.”

Isabella saw the tremor in her own hand as she reached for her cup and heard it rattle in its saucer.

“Who do you mean? Who are ‘they’?”

The woman pulled back and jabbed an accusing finger in the direction of the Party headquarters. “Them.” She spat on the ground in disgust. “Those Fascist murderers.” Her mouth took on a strange shape that Isabella only recognized as a bitter smile when she heard the laugh that came from it. “They will pay for it now.”

“How do you know that my husband died?”

But the black-clad figure was already striding away, almost running down to the far end of the piazza, scattering the pigeons. Isabella stood up, aghast.

“Wait!”

“Mamma won’t wait.”

She looked down at the child’s mass of dark curls. She was too thin, all elbows and collarbones.

“What do you mean she won’t wait?”

Her narrow shoulders shrugged; her face didn’t look up. “She told me I must wait here with you.”

Isabella sat down again. She wasn’t certain what had just happened. She didn’t know anything about children. Since the bullet that had nearly killed her ten years earlier, she couldn’t have any bambini of her own and she’d gone out of her way to avoid them, though in Italy she couldn’t help but be surrounded by them much of the time. She tried to keep them at a distance when she could, but this time she had no choice.

“Please, sit down.” She waved a hand toward the chair opposite.

The girl slid into it, taking up no space.

“I’m Isabella Berotti. What’s your name?”

“Rosa.”

“So, Rosa, do you live in Bellina?”

“No.”

“Just visiting?”

“Yes.”

“Where have you come from?”

“Rome.”

Her voice was so slight, Isabella had to prick her ears to hear her.

“Did you come by train with your mother?”

She nodded. Or rather, her curls nodded. She still wasn’t looking up. They reached a brief impasse and Isabella finished her coffee to cover the awkward pause. She felt sorry for the child. Stuck with a woman who could find no words for her. In desperation her gaze returned to the figure of the mother racing across the sunlit piazza toward the Fascist Party headquarters. Isabella couldn’t bring herself to abandon the child and chase after her, but she was shaken by the woman’s words.

“How about something to drink, Rosa, while we wait?”

“No.” But the girl added a polite “Grazie.” It was almost drowned out by the cooing of the pigeons that drifted around the tables.

“An ice cream then?” Isabella called out to Gino before Rosa could refuse again. “A gelato, per favore, Gino.”

When it arrived at the table with a flourish from Gino, the girl gave Isabella a direct look for the first time. Her deep-set brown eyes were as wild as her hair and in a panic. Isabella felt a jolt of dismay for the pale-skinned face.

“I can go,” the girl said quickly. “If you want me to.”

“No, Rosa. Of course not. I want you to stay. Your mother has left you in my care.” Isabella smiled at her.

She didn’t smile back, but the panic in her young eyes seemed to die down a fraction. Isabella had an urge to hold her small angular body, to tell her not to worry so much. She was too young to worry. Isn’t that what Italian mammas do instinctively? Provide hugs and kisses? All Isabella had to offer her was ice cream.

“Eat up,” she encouraged.

The girl took up the spoon and steadily consumed the ice cream with quiet concentration. The warmth of the day was beginning to build and the sun was picking out the fasces, the symbol of Fascism that was carved above the entrance of each of the municipal buildings in the piazza, painting them golden. It was what Luigi had promised her—a golden future for Italy under Fascism. And she had believed him.

Luigi had put a sheen on life that had dazzled her into believing that this was the way forward, that Mussolini could make the impossible become possible. She had been beguiled by the dynamic allure of her strong husband who intended to change the world, not with words—her life was already full to overflowing with words—but with direct action.

Mussolini’s Blackshirts were set to mold Italy into a powerful force once again, with their bare fists if necessary. The idea had excited her young mind. Blinded her to what it meant. She shook her head sharply now and shifted her gaze back to her tower.

“Rosa, do you have any idea what your mother meant when she said, They will pay for it now?”

The child remained silent.

Isabella hunted for another subject of conversation, swapping to an easier one. “Do you like Bellina?”

Rosa frowned and glanced around the beautiful piazza that was the heart of the town. Its pavements were a mosaic of marble, of pinks and grays and unexpected bands of speckled white in geometric designs that gave endless pleasure to the eye of pedestrians. In the center rose a fountain—not one of Rome’s baroque monstrosities, but a simple yet powerful vast globe of black granite with a circle of water jets surrounding it. Bellina had risen from the watery marshes, and this was the symbol of the glorious new world that Fascism was creating for the workers of Italy.

“Do you like Bellina?” Isabella asked again.

“No.”

“Why not?”

But the girl was already back at her ice cream, hunched over it, blocking out all else.

Isabella knew that it must be excruciating to be abandoned with a stranger, so if Rosa wanted silence, that was fine with her. The sun was behind her, throwing soft purple shadows over the mosaic flooring, and Isabella sat back in her chair, remembering a time when she had gone among strangers herself. To Rome. To study architecture, to forge a new life for herself after leaving the hospital and learning to walk again. It was in Rome that she came to realize that Fascism was not the golden path she’d believed it to be. The Blackshirts were not just a revolutionary militia placed at the service of the nation to reestablish order and discipline. They were the vital tool of a dictator hell-bent on violence to impose his will.

Isabella released a soft sound of regret that was lost in the striking of the hour by the brass-faced clock on her tower. She glanced up at it.

Immediately she noticed a figure emerging onto the viewing platform at the top of the tower, and she felt a rush of pride that someone liked the town well enough to climb the two hundred sixty steps to gain a wider view of it.

Even from here she could see it was a woman. She had wild dark hair. With surprise Isabella realized it was Rosa’s mother. Rosa was sitting with her back to the tower, so Isabella opened her mouth to say, Look, there’s your mamma. Wave to her, Rosa, but in the split second it took for the words to travel from her brain to her mouth, she saw the woman in black clamber up onto the parapet.

She teetered there. Her arms spread out sideways, holding her balance on the edge, and a breeze snatched at the folds of her long black dress and tangled the loose strands of her hair. Behind her the empty blue sky seemed to watch and wait in silence. Isabella expected her to shout to Rosa, to cry out across the length of the piazza: Look at me. But she didn’t. She dipped her head, stared down at the people far beneath her, and without any warning leapt off the top. She performed a perfect swallow-dive to the marble steps below.

No sound emerged from Isabella’s mouth. How she kept her scream inside, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t stop herself from jumping to her feet. Rosa looked up, wary of her, but her attention was distracted by a man’s shout behind her and a woman’s high-pitched scream. The child started to turn toward the group that Isabella could see gathering around the steps.

“A dog has bitten someone,” Isabella said quickly, scooping the crucifix into her pocket. “Rosa, I’ve just remembered that I have to collect something from my home.” She reached out, took hold of the girl’s skinny arm, and pulled her to her feet. “You can come with me, it’s not far. We won’t be long.”

She didn’t know if it was because the girl was used to being told what to do or because she had finished her ice cream and was ready for other amusement, but she allowed herself to be marched out of the Piazza del Popolo without a murmur.

Neither of them mentioned her mother.

Isabella rushed Rosa along Via Augustus. The street of small shops with apartments above was quiet at this hour, but in the dusty heat there lingered the smell of arancini and fried onions from someone’s kitchen. Everywhere was coated in a pale layer of building dust that didn’t want to shift but hung in the air. It had a habit of getting between teeth and under fingernails.

Isabella was moving so quickly that she felt her limp grow worse. She was aware of people staring, watching her out of the corner of their eyes, and after all these years she thought she’d be used to it but it still stung. It had taken three years’ hard sweat and seven operations to get her walking again but right now she was more concerned with hurrying Rosa as far away from the Piazza del Popolo as she could.

How do you tell a child her mother has just died?

Isabella was shaken by a deep anger toward the mysterious dark-haired woman who would do this to her daughter. As they approached her home, she eased up on her pace and gently released Rosa’s arm.

“It’s not far,” she assured the child, waving a hand toward the elegant apartment blocks that lay ahead. This was the most stylish and expensive part of town. It was the quarter where the streets were widest and where an abundance of young trees had been planted that would one day transform them into leafy avenues. This was where the top government employees lived. There were forty different designs for the houses and apartment buildings in Bellina, the forty designs repeated