A bright moon is rising. Papery-white and just off the full, it is hanging low above the treeline and is bathing the old barn with a soft greyish light. Though somewhat ramshackle, with strips of moonlit sky showing through gaps in the wooden-plank walls, the barn is fragrant with the smell of cut hay; as Sofia’s eyes adjust to the gloom of the interior, she can see that this hay is piled untidily throughout the building. High above her, the underside of the roof is swathed with little swags of dust-heavy cobweb and, even as she stares, something tiny scutters along a beam, no more than a fragment of shifting shadow. Several sleepy hens croon softly as she takes a rustling step in from the door towards where a half-height wall supports a section of upper floor. A ladder leans up against this little wall, and an elderly mule is asleep on the far side of it, head down, spine sagging, ears drooping. Nearby, the Coraggiosi horses, too, are dozing. One of them, sensing Beppe’s presence, nickers softly and tosses its head.
Ippo, Beppe’s dog, is curled in the hay by the horses. He scrabbles to his feet as soon as they come in, and barks once, but Beppe hisses at him to lie down, to be quiet, and he obeys at once, his tail thumping softly.
‘Shall we go up?’ Beppe says quietly.
Sofia nods, and puts a foot on the bottom-most rung. It feels sound. She begins to climb, Beppe right behind her; she clutches the side of the ladder in one hand and an awkward bundle of her skirts in the other. Crawling carefully across from the top of the ladder onto the loosely boarded floor of the upper level, a sudden movement makes her gasp and start back – a white-winged owl, disturbed by the two intruders, sweeps silently past her – close enough for Sofia to feel the draught from its soundless wingbeats; it soars out through a gap in the wall on the far side of the barn.
‘Will this be enough for a bed for you?’ Beppe says, dropping his armful of blankets and pulling off his doublet. He stands in front of Sofia, stroking her hair back from her face. ‘Or would you rather go back indoors and share with the others again, on a proper bed in the warm? We can wait for somewhere more comfortable, if this is —?’
Sofia silences him with a kiss. He murmurs incoherently into her mouth, but the words dissolve and Sofia does not listen to them. ‘Stop it,’ she says. ‘No, I don’t want to wait – not one moment longer. Do you?’
Beppe coughs a short laugh. ‘God, no! I’m not sure I could have lasted more than another few seconds, to be honest.’ Dragging armfuls of hay together to make a thick mattress, and flapping out one of the blankets, he sits down on it, patting it with the flat of his hand. ‘Come here.’
Sofia sits neatly beside him, feet out in front of her, back straight, hands in her lap, like a child on its best behaviour.
She is not at all sure she can remember how to breathe.
Turning just his head, Beppe kisses her again, quietly and chastely; for a moment it is only their mouths which connect, and then Sofia finds herself lying back on the blanket, and the hay is scrunching beneath her, and Beppe is searching for her breast, but the stiffened front of the dress seems determined to thwart his attempts. Fiddling with the top edge of the bodice, he tries to pull it aside – once, twice, three times – and it stubbornly refuses to allow him access.
‘Undo my laces – quick,’ Sofia says, sitting up and turning her back towards him. Beppe fiddles with the knot of strings at the nape of her neck. Knot undone, he flips the laces through hole after hole and the tight pressure on her chest and belly lessens as the dress unfastens. Shifting around, she leans towards Beppe and he eases the bodice and sleeves from her, throwing them to one side, leaving her in skirt and shift. Then, reaching around behind her back with trembling fingers, she unfastens the laces at her waist herself, and kicks her heavy skirts down and off her legs.
Now she wears only her shift.
They look at each other for a long moment, saying nothing, not moving. All at once aware of her body and how very much it wants – needs – to be touched, she finds herself staring at Beppe’s mouth.
‘What was it we said that time – as much as a blade loves a whetstone?’ he says quietly, and Sofia’s insides leap.
‘Take your shirt off,’ she says, and Beppe sits back, crosses his arms, and tugs his shirt over his head in one fluid movement. Sofia reaches for him; he rolls with her until she is on her back and he is sprawled above her. Then his mouth is on hers; crooking one leg up and over her thighs and pushing a hand under the loose-fitting chemise, he at long last finds her breast. She arches towards him, gasping, as his fingers close around it.
‘Mmm,’ he murmurs, trying to push the folds of the chemise out of his way, ‘I think this needs to come off…’
Sofia sits up and pulls off the shift.
‘God, you’re so beautiful,’ he says almost inaudibly, reaching out and running his fingers around the swell of both breasts. Moving in close, pulling her in to him with a hand in the small of her back, he kisses her. ‘And you smell and taste as good as you look.’
‘Beppe,’ she says.
His face crooks into its tilted smile. ‘What? What is it, little seamstress?’ Taking her by her upper arms, he lays her back on the blanket, pulling the other rug over them both.
She strokes the skin of his chest with the tips of her fingers. ‘I… I’m not sure I know how to do this properly. I’ve… I’ve never —’
Beppe stops her question with another kiss and then returns his attention to her breasts, making her squirm with pleasure. ‘Don’t fret, lovely girl,’ he says, ‘you may not know, but just look at you – your body knows well enough, doesn’t it?’
‘Am I doing what I should, then?’ Sofia says, gasping again as Beppe’s mouth finds her nipple.
Beppe lifts his head. ‘What do you think?’
She does not answer, and for a while they say no more but content themselves with wordless exploration: searching and learning and discovering the secrets of each other’s bodies with fingers and lips and tongues, and the exploration is a revelation to Sofia, who quickly discovers that her body does indeed seem to know very much more than she ever believed it might.
Then Beppe hutches across and slides on top of her, and Sofia sucks in a breath as she feels his weight settle. He pauses. The quiver of anticipation that runs down through her belly is part-way between excitement and trepidation – she is not sure which it might be – but she crooks her knees and wraps her legs around him, finding that now the moment has come, she wants him very much more than she fears the unknown. Her hands lie fisted on either side of her head for a moment, until Beppe uncurls her fingers and links his own through them, pressing her hands down onto the blanket. She can feel and hear the hay scrunching under the pressure.
‘Are you ready?’ he says.
Sofia cannot answer, but manages a murmur of assent and a nod.
Murmuring her pleasure as Beppe kisses her, she frees her hands and strokes around the back of his head, down his back and onto the curve of his buttocks, pulling him in towards her. She feels him reaching in between her legs; his touch makes her gasp once more and she pushes her hips up against his, gripping around his back, wrapping her legs more tightly around him. He hesitates for a second… and then Sofia’s mouth opens in an O of surprise as he pushes gently into her and a jolt of exquisite pain melts quickly into a wave of sweetness.
Their bodies move rhythmically together; through the narrow gaps in the wooden-plank walls, fitful silver stripes of moonlight fall in flickering lines across legs and arms, backs and buttocks, and the breathy gasps and sighs of their loving are the only sounds in the night-still barn.
The first greyish light of dawn is filtering through the gaps in the barn walls sending dapples of silver across where Sofia is curled against Beppe beneath one of the blankets. Below them, the mule stamps a hoof and snorts softly. A barely-audible skittering scratches on the wooden floor somewhere nearby as some tiny creature moves somewhere beneath the hay, and the wood of the barn creaks as though it is stretching and yawning. The scent of the hay is strong in Sofia’
s nostrils; within the circle of Beppe’s arm she lies with her head against his chest and her knees bent up and over his legs. Her face moves gently with the rise and fall of his breath.
With his free hand, Beppe strokes her hair away from where it has tendrilled across his face, blowing from a jutted lower lip to clear the last wisps away from his nose. Turning his head, his face is right up against hers; he gives her a soft, slow, squashed kiss, and she nips his lower lip between her teeth.
Pulling it free, he lays a hand on Sofia’s cheek, and, stroking it with the edge of his thumb, he says, ‘I told you your body would know what to do.’
‘Only because you taught it well.’
She cannot see his face – he is too close – but a stretching of his skin against her cheek tells her he is smiling. She contemplates her body as a separate thing from herself, a thing which knows how to perform tasks she had presumed she could not do – and she starts to take stock of each part of it as it lies drowsily in Beppe’s arms. Her lips are tender and swollen with kissing and her skin is tingling. Her hips feel… stretched out. Flattened. There is a stickiness between her legs and down along the tops of her thighs; it has puckered and stiffened on her skin as it has dried. Putting a hand down under the blanket, she runs her fingers over the dried place, scratching at it. Within her loins an unaccustomed weight lies heavy, too, not unlike the monthly aches she so often experiences, and all this should, in the normal run of things, be discomfort, Sofia thinks, but somehow it is not; she finds she is cherishing every part of it.
She draws in a long, slow trembling breath, and lets it out again.
‘That was a big sigh.’ Beppe has opened his eyes. ‘Not a sad one, I hope.’
Sofia curls against him more tightly. ‘Oh, no. Not sad at all. Not in the least part.’
‘Then what?’
‘Just thinking.’
‘About what?’
‘My body.’
‘That’s funny,’ Beppe says, reaching for her breast under the blanket. ‘So was I.’ He pauses. ‘What were you thinking about it?’
‘Just about the things it has just done. Things I wasn’t expecting it to do.’
‘Were you not? I was expecting it to do just what it did.’
Sofia laughs.
Beppe strokes her hair away from her face. ‘Trouble is, I know your body better than I know you, now. Tell me about you. God – I told you all those terrible things about… about my father yesterday. Tell me something about you now. About your family.’
The lazy warmth of the moment chills in an instant.
Sofia holds her breath, trying to think how to tell him. Surely, she thinks now, of all people he will understand. He will know how hard it is to tell something like this.
‘It’s difficult,’ she says, wanting more time to think as a memory – her father’s voice, rough with fear – flashes into her mind.
‘For God’s sake, what’s the matter, Giacinta? Are you ill? What’s happened?’
Mamma will not look at him, though he holds her face in his hands and tries to force her to do so. She pulls her head away from him and stares instead at the still-open front door; the only change in her that Sofia can see is a further widening of her eyes – she can see white all the way around the brown iris. Papa takes her by the upper arms and shakes her, his voice louder now and more urgent. ‘Giacinta, please! You’re frightening me. Stop it! You’re frightening Sofia – look at her! Tell me what’s happened!’
‘Worse than my story?’ Beppe says softly, stroking her hair back from her face.
Sofia nods. ‘I think it might be.’
‘Can you tell me any of it, lovely girl?’
‘I’ll try.’
Beppe puts a hand on the side of her face and kisses her mouth. She responds, turning to him, pressing in against him, and, in an instant, their need for each other ignites again; for a few moments the urgency of their bodies absorbs them too intensely to think further of tales of past grief, but then, moments later, as Beppe shudders to a halt and Sofia clings to him, breathing as heavily as though she has been running, she says, in between gasps, ‘My mother was a healer.’
Beppe holds her tightly and her breathing slows.
‘She used to take curatives of her own making to sick neighbours and friends – she grew herbs and flowers, and made tinctures and salves and lozenges – and over the years she began to build a reputation. People would seek her out.’
‘And your father?’
‘Papa was a baker.’ She hesitates. ‘One day – I was about six or seven – Mamma came home from seeing one of her neighbours. It was as if she had lost her reason. She burst into the house, gasping for breath, wild-eyed, her hair loose… I was terrified. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.’
‘Sofia! Sofia! Quick! We must pack – we must pack as many of our clothes and belongings as we can carry. We have to leave, now, straight away!’
Mamma’s eyes are wide and blank, and a thin and shining line of spit has slid from one corner of her mouth and trickled down towards her chin. Her hair looks, Sofia thinks, as though she has not brushed it for days.
‘What’s the matter, Mamma?’ she says in a small voice, hoping her mother will smile at her and reassure her. But she does not reassure Sofia; she shouts at her in a hard voice that sounds as though her throat is tearing.
‘Just do it – don’t argue! Put your things into a bag. We have no time to lose. We have to go now.’
‘But what about Papa?’
Mamma stares at her and says nothing.
‘Papa,’ Sofia says again, beginning to cry. ‘We have to tell Papa.’
‘No. We have to go. There’s no time. We can’t wait for him.’
Beppe is sitting up now, watching Sofia intently. One of her hands is in his, and he is stroking it with the side of his thumb.
‘Then Papa came back and he couldn’t make sense of what she was saying either – not for ages. Finally, she came out with it. A woman she had been treating had died, and the woman’s husband had accused Mamma of poisoning her.’
‘I went there just now and she was dead.’ Mamma’s voice drops to a whisper. ‘He called me a witch, Paolo, and he says he will make sure they have me burned for what he insists I’ve done. I think he means it.’
‘What were you giving her?’
‘Lavender and barberry. For sickness and the flux.’
‘Nothing else?’
Mamma shakes her head. In a whisper Sofia can hardly hear she says, ‘It was the right thing to give her – I know it was. I don’t know why she died.’
‘I didn’t understand what she was saying. Have her burned? I thought she meant like the time I’d burned my arm on a hot pan. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to do that to another person deliberately.’
Beppe says nothing, but his eyes are huge and unblinking and his gaze is fixed upon Sofia’s face.
‘Papa agreed that we should get away – even if it was just for a short time – so we packed a bag with essentials and left the house.’ Sofia pauses. ‘Of course, we had no idea of what was to come, but —’
She is about to continue when the barn door crashes open, morning sunlight floods in and disturbs the hens; they flap their wings and scold the intruder with a barrage of irritable clucks and croons. Beppe’s dog barks. One of the horses snorts. Startled, Sofia clutches her blanket to her chest; her heart is racing. She is in a stranger’s barn and she is naked. Beppe puts a finger to his lips and shakes his head. ‘Don’t move,’ he mouths soundlessly.
Sofia’s memories hang fragmented in the air as the newcomer moves about below them.
Whoever it is begins to whistle. Tuneless and lilting, his song jolts and jerks as he works noisily: banging and thudding, then grunting with exertion as, so it sounds to Sofia, he lifts something heavy and shifts it across the barn.
‘Hey, hey, hey… good morning, good morning, good morning… up you come… come on then…’
Sofi
a thinks she recognizes the ale-man’s voice.
‘Ooh, but you are one lazy, ill-smelling, bad-tempered pile of old dog-meat,’ he says, in a tone far more affectionate than his words might imply. ‘Come on, out you come – good girl. That’s it. I’m not shifting twenty-five barrels on my own – come on.’
Beppe and Sofia glance at each other.
A scuffle of hoofs, a jingle of harness buckles, a half-hearted mumbling attempt from the mule at a discordant bray; several indistinguishable, muttered comments from the ale-man. Then Sofia hears man and mule cross the barn floor, and the great door closes behind them.
And opens again a second later.
A familiar voice. ‘Beppe? You in here?’ Sofia cannot see him, but Vico sounds as though he is grinning. ‘We’re moving on, Ago says, and we need to get the wagons hitched up straight away – thought you might have sneaked out here last night. You weren’t in the upstairs room and half the blankets were missing and – well, you had to be somewhere…’ He clears his throat. ‘Er hem. Both of you. I’ve looked everywhere else.’
The Girl with the Painted Face Page 20