by Nichole Van
Chiara talked about her latest dating fiasco. (Alessio. Hot. Soccer player.) Judith mentioned Sister Floozy had finally healed enough to fly away. I pinched my lips shut whenever Branwell held his hand for silence. I broke off tiny bits of bread for Boney as he scampered up and down the table. I worried with everyone over Tennyson, still living alone outside Volterra.
As lunch wound down, I slipped out of my chair to stare over the rooftops of Florence toward the Duomo. Light caught the gleam of tourists’ cameras atop Brunelleschi’s lantern dome.
“Mmmm, I was wondering where my gorgeous woman had gone off to.” Dante slipped his arms around me, pulling me back against his chest. He nuzzled my neck.
I sank into him. Reaching back to run my fingers through his hair.
“I adore you, you know,” he whispered into my ear.
Every time I thought about how close to death we had been . . . I would never take a second of my life with this man for granted.
So what was I waiting for?
I turned and wrapped my arms around his neck, standing on tip-toe so I could press my nose against his.
“This is probably way too soon,” I began. “And we haven’t known each other as Dante and Claire for too long . . . but, I just wanted to say . . .”
“Yes?”
I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth.
“Claire?”
“I love you, Dante,” I breathed. “I love you and Ethan and Edward and all the other men you have been to me.”
“Darling.” He crushed me to him. “I know how you avoid that four letter L-word.”
“I know it’s too soon, but—”
“I love you, too, carissima mia. Con tutto il mio cuore,” he murmured against my lips. “I love you with all my heart. To the edge of doom.”
“And beyond.” I kissed him.
“Gladly.”
Extra Goodies
Okay, so I don’t normally include an index to my afterward pages, but this book has more than my usual notes. So click below to jump to anything that looks interesting.
Other Books by Nichole Van
Author’s Note
Reading Group Questions for Gladly Beyond
Alternate Prologue for Gladly Beyond
Recipes
Schiacciata
Lemon-herb Chicken
Excerpt from Intertwine, House of Oak Book 1
About the Author
Copyright
Other Books by Nichole Van
The Brothers Maledetti
Gladly Beyond (Dante and Claire)
Branwell D’Angelo’s (as yet unnamed) story coming in Fall 2016
The House of Oak Series
Intertwine (James and Emme)
Divine (Georgiana and Sebastian)
Clandestine (Marc and Kit)
Refine (Linwood and Jasmine)
An Invisible Heiress (a novella included in the Spring in Hyde Park anthology)
If you haven’t yet read Intertwine, book one in the House of Oak series, click here for a preview.
Author’s Note
As usual, when writing a story set in the past, I have incorporated select aspects of history and then blatantly made up others. Though, be warned, there are (minor) spoilers in here.
First of all, let me express my appreciation for the entire country of Italy—Tuscany in particular and Florence most specifically. Outside of my current home state, I’ve lived more of my life in Florence than anywhere else in the world. Every time I visit, it feels like coming home. Firenze, carissima mia, ti voglio un saccone di bene!
Because of my deep love of all things Tuscan, pretty much every place I discuss and describe in this novel actually exists. The only things I made up are the Colonel’s residences and the D’Angelo family palazzo.
Everything else is a real place where you can visit and/or stay:
The Duomo and its exterior baptistry, Santa Croce, the Mercato Nuovo with its bronze porcellino, Chiesa di Santa Margherita (Dante Alighieri’s ancient church), Piazza della Signoria, Ponte Vecchio, Ponte di Santa Trinità with its enormous statues, San Miniato al Monte, Piazzale Michelangelo, the Certosa, the abbey church of San Savino in Cascina . . . all of them are decidedly real and lovely places to tour.
This also includes Claire’s hotel, Palazzo Alfieri. (Yes, it’s actually a high-end luxury hotel in the same building where Vittorio Alfieri and Louise, Countess of Albany lived. It also housed the British Consulate until 2011.) Even the incredible gelateria—Festival del Gelato—where Dante and Claire have some gelato is a genuine place.
As described, Michelangelo Buonarotti was hired to create a monumental fresco of the Battle of Cascina in the Sala delle Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio. He completed an enormous cartoon of the work (said be around 15 feet high by 25 feet long), which hung in place in the Hall of Five Hundred for several years. The work inspired an entire generation of artists and was copied endlessly, including the most famous by Bastiano da Sangallo (also called Aristotle Sangallo). Sangallo’s drawing is currently owned by the Earl of Leicester and on display at Holkham Hall in the U. K. (when not on loan to other museums).
From there, no one is entirely sure what happened to Michelangelo’s cartoon. Vasari insists it was destroyed by a jealous rival. Others assert it moved around Florence for a couple of years, losing bits and pieces to souvenir takers, eventually disappearing altogether. There is no record that Michelangelo ever created a modello of the work.
Louise, Countess of Albany, was married to Bonnie Prince Charlie (nearly forty years her senior) and lived with her lover, Vittorio Alfieri for most of her adult life. I am indebted to Christopher Hibbert’s work, Florence—The Biography of a City, for information about Florence during the early nineteenth century. According to Hibbert, Louise did indeed conduct salons without any furniture and served hard matonelle ice cream.
As for the Scottish Pretenders, as devout Catholics, they had a long history of involvement in Italy. Prince Charlie’s only child, Charlotte, lived the last few years of her life in Florence and Rome tending to her father. Charlotte had three illegitimate children of her own by a French Catholic archbishop (scandalous in the extreme). She left her children with her mother in France to tend to her father in Italy. Charlotte died in Rome in 1789 at just thirty-six years old.
All of the information on medieval condotierri, John Hawkwood and the Battle of Cascina is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Hawkwood is a fascinating historical figure, and he does have a large monument in his honor in the Duomo, painted by Paolo Uccello—a propaganda piece intended to lure other prominent mercenaries of the era.
I have created an extensive pinboard on Pinterest with images of everything I talk about in the book. So if you want a visual of anything, pop over there and explore. Just search for NicholeVan.
Other notes, PH lipstick—exactly as Claire describes it—is a real thing. I owe Lyndsie Campbell a huge thank you for gifting some to me.
I have also included a couple of recipes for several of the Italian dishes I describe, including Tuscan lemon-herb chicken and schiacciata. So read on.
As with all books, this one couldn’t have been written without help and support from those around me. I know I am going to leave someone out with all these thanks. So to that person, know that I totally love you and am so deeply grateful for your help!
To my beta readers—you know who you are—thank you for your helpful ideas and support. And, again, an extra large thank you to Annette Evans and Norma Melzer for their fantastic copy editing skills and insights.
A huge thank you goes to Rebecca Spencer, Lois Brown, Jennifer Jenkins and Amy Beatty for their helpful plot suggestions, revision notes and willingness to let me cry on their shoulders.
And, as usual, this work would not have reached its fruition without the excellent eye of Erin Rodabough. You have a touch of genius, my friend.
Thanks to Andrew, Austenne and Kian for your patience and willingness to eat a ridiculous amount of
Italian food while I wrote this book. I’d write about schiacciata, and then I’d have to go make some.
And finally, no words can express my love and appreciation for Dave. Thanks for listening to me, no matter how scattered, exasperated or frustrated I am. I also appreciate that you are always up for kissing research and late-night ice cream runs. None of this would be possible without you.
Reading Group Questions
Fair warning—these reading group questions contain spoilers.
This book had two dissimilar prologues. The prologue that ended up staying and then another one written from Claire’s POV. (Flip a page or two to read Claire’s version.) Why did the author chose to use the prologue that she did? Do you feel it was the right decision? Which prologue do you prefer and why?
Do you agree with Grammy’s definition of courage—that it’s not a lack of fear, but rather shouldering your fear and walking into the dark anyway? Why or why not?
Do you believe in the concept of soulmates? That there is a most-right person out there for you? Why or why not?
One of the challenges of this book was world-building Italy for the reader. What aspects of the world-building did you enjoy? Which did you feel went too far or not far enough?
Claire desperately wants a relationship with Dante, but she is too afraid and traumatized by past relationships to be able to trust him. Have you ever experienced anything like this in your own life? Not necessarily with love, per se, but something you wanted yet were afraid of at the same time?
How does the storyline from 1814 fit into the narrative of the present? How are Claire and Dante similar to Ethan and Caro, and how are they different and why? Did the resolution of Ethan and Caro’s story catch you off-guard or did you expect it?
Did Pierce’s appearance at the end surprise you? Or did you figure out Blackford’s reincarnation and the Colonel’s presence in the storyline earlier? Did you like the resolution of the book?
Several ideas and poems run through the book; ‘somewhere i have never travelled’ by e.e. cummings and ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ by William Shakespeare were the most prominent. Why do you feel the author chose these two poems specifically? What similarities do you see between the poems? They are listed below for you to read and discuss.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
—e. e. cummings
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
—William Shakespeare
Alternate Prologue: Claire’s POV
Sometimes when writing a book, I end up creating multiple versions of some sections. With Gladly Beyond, I went back and forth with the prologue. Should it be from Claire’s point of view with a more chatty style? Or did I want a more somber, omniscient tone? After a lot of feedback from reviewers, I opted to keep the more serious prologue as the official one. But here is the chattier version, if you’d like to see Claire’s take on the D’Angelo family curse.
It sounds like the beginning of a lame joke:
What do a gypsy curse, a man in tight breeches, a lost Michelangelo masterpiece and death have in common?
The answer?
Apparently . . . me.
It all began with a curse.
I know, I know—cursed by gypsies!—it’s like every bad historical romance ever written.
But, turns out, there’s truth in the cliché.
And, in the gypsies’ defense, everyone considered it a ‘gift.’
Right up to the point they realized it wasn’t.
The gift/curse began with one man—Giovanni D’Angelo.
A medieval Italian nobleman who, after a series of poor business decisions, found himself near bankruptcy. Giovanni faced mounds of debt, five unmarried daughters and one angry wife telling him to fix this now.
So he did what any god-fearing Renaissance man would do—he sold his soul to an old gypsy woman.
Okay, so no one knows if Giovanni literally sold his soul. But he did visit the camp of the zingari—the gypsies—and came away with the gift of Sight. The ability to see, hear and feel the past and the future.
Cool, right?
Eh, not really.
Don’t get me wrong. Initially, it was awesome.
With his new talents, Giovanni saved his family, had a son, outmaneuvered his opponents, crushed his rivals. I’m sure it was all stiletto-daggers and velvet-doublets and paid-assassin magnificence.
But the ‘gift’ grew in strength year by year.
Think about it. If you saw, heard and felt everything that had happened and would happen in a specific place . . .
It would drive you mad.
They say the voices destroyed Giovanni in the end.
Not the sights or the feelings.
Nope.
It was the never-ending noise.
Giovanni launched himself off the cathedral bell tower at the age of forty-one. Raving mad.
Twenty-five years later, his son was found swinging from the southern city gate, foam and blood dripping from his mouth.
A generation after that, his grandson strapped himself to the front of a newly-invented cannon and lit the fuse.
At which point, the D’Angelo women realized three things:
One, this ‘gift’ was seriously a curse.
Two, the curse was hereditary, passing on to each first-born son.
And, three—like women have been doing since the dawn of time—they needed to clean up the mess their men had made.
Right.
They didn’t have much luck.
Priest blessings and exorcisms proved futile. The zingari themselves just shrugged and said the original knowledge was lost to history.
For their part, the D’Angelo men did what men have always done: drowned their woes in wine and war, renamed themselves the Damned Earls—complete with a stylish coat-of-arms—and earned buckets of money before going completely insane.
This dysfunctional dance continued for seven hundred years.
Until a first-born D’Angelo heir said enough.
He refused to have children. It was that simple. The curse would die with him.
But then he fell in love. And because he loved, he married.
He and his wife didn’t intend to get pregnant. But—spoiler alert—they did.
Shattering everything.
Because nine months later, they became the parents of not one. Not two. But three tiny boys.
My name is Claire Raythorn.
No, I’m not a D’Angelo, though I ended up entangled in their family . . . issues.
My own story starts before that—
With me. Utterly alone. Destitute.
Haunted and hunted. Literally.
Desperately determined to put my life back together . . .
Recipes
Schiacciata (Tuscan flat bread)
This recipe will make 2-3 cookie sheets of schiacciata (skee-ah-CHA-ta). You can halve it if you would like less. But it’s so yummy, why would you want to? The dough will keep in the fridge for up 5 days, so make a full recipe and have some now and later.
1 c. Warm water
1 t. Honey
2 t. Yeast
2 c. Warm water
1 T. Salt or garlic salt (I opt for the non-traditional garlic salt.)
4 T. Extra-virgin olive oil
6-8 c. White bread flour
Additional olive oil and salt for baking
Proof the yeast in the cup of warm water and honey. Mix with the rest of the ingredients, adding enough flour to make a nice bread dough (just slightly tacky). Knead for five minutes (preferably in a mixer with a dough hook, though you can obvious do this by hand). Let sit for five minutes. Knead for another five minutes until you have a smooth dough.
At this point, you can proof the dough until it doubles in size. Or you can put it in the fridge overnight and let it slow proof. In either case, it will take longer than normal to rise, given the low amount of yeast in this recipe.