The Night Falling (45 page)

‘What do you mean by that, Marcie?’ she says. Marcie’s smile lasts a second longer, and then it vanishes. Her eyes are unreadable.

‘
Mean
by it? Why, I don’t mean anything by it at all. The pair of you haven’t had one of your own yet, so I guessed there must be some problem. But we reap what we sow, Clare. Perhaps this baby is your just deserts.’ For a long moment the two women stand eye to eye, and neither one speaks. Clare feels the malice of the words, is sure of it; then Marcie smiles. ‘For years of waiting patiently, I mean. You do want the kid, don’t you?’

‘With all my heart,’ Clare whispers.

‘Well then.’ Marcie carries on up the stairs, alone. ‘Congratulations. I’m sure Boyd will be delighted.’

At five to eleven Clare crosses the dark courtyard with her fists clenched at her sides and the tremors making her teeth chatter. The guard gets to his feet as she approaches, and when she sees it’s Carlo she has to fight the urge to throw her arms around him. She sways as she stands there, and her voice wobbles when she speaks.

‘Will you let me out? I’d like to go for a walk.’ She tries to smile but her face feels frozen. Carlo makes a regretful face, spreads his hands and shrugs.

‘Sorry, Signora Kingsley. I am not allowed.’

‘You can call me Chiara,’ she says. Her mouth is dry; she can feel her pulse in her temples. Outside, one of the dogs growls and goes quiet. ‘Please. I know we’re not supposed to. I know Mr Cardetta is … worried, after the fire. But I must go out, just for a short while.’

‘I don’t think …’ Carlo shakes his head, but she can sense his indecision.

‘Please. I’ll only be ten minutes, I promise. Aren’t we friends? And I’ll never tell anyone. Please,’ she says. She puts one hand on his arm and manages to smile. Carlo grins at her; he loves that she comes to him, that he has been able to grant favours; he loves the idea of her love affair. He’s really just a boy, full of mischief. Clare sends up a silent prayer for his safety.

‘Ten minutes. And we never tell,’ he says, picking up the keys and unlocking the small door, smiling at her all the while.

For a split second, Clare thinks nothing will happen. She stands there stupidly, looking at the open door, but then Ettore appears, moving fast, pushing Carlo back with a gun to his head. She can hardly believe he’s there; can hardly believe the danger he’s in.

‘Open the big doors. Do it! Now!’ Ettore says to the stunned guard.

‘Wait, Ettore! Something’s wrong!’ says Clare. She grabs him, trying to turn him, to make him listen. ‘Go – run! Please!’ she says. His eyes are avid, his forehead shines with sweat; he doesn’t seem to hear her properly.

‘Chiara, go inside! Lock the door – do as I told you!’ he says.

‘No, you must listen to me! Your uncle’s here and he’s been filling the place with guards since this morning. Armed men – I don’t know who they are! I don’t know what’s happening, but you have to
run
!’ She holds him as tightly as she can; wants to shake him, daren’t raise her voice when she needs to scream. For a second she thinks she sees comprehension dawning on his face; he pauses and she thinks he’ll do as she says, but then the dogs outside erupt, and his head snaps around, away from her. He hits Carlo with a backhanded blow and the young guard staggers back, slumping against the wall. Clare stares in horror as blood trickles down the boy’s face.

‘Go now, Chiara!’ Ettore shouts. He snatches up the keys, fumbles them as he tries to unlock the big carriage doors. She has seconds; they have seconds. She wants to hold him and tell him that she loves him; she wants to tell him about their child. The doors swing open and Clare stands stunned at the sight of dark figures pouring across the
aia
, kicking at the dogs when they lunge for them. Then a deafening barrage of gunfire starts up from the roof; there’s a whiff of cordite, voices shouting, and Ettore turns to Clare, his face pinched with fear. ‘Run!’ he says. And she does.

She sprints across the courtyard and movement above catches her eye – the roof is crowded with men, hurrying into action, reloading. The flash of muzzle fire is blinding in the dark, the sound of it impossibly loud, filling her skull, reverberating in her chest. Idiotically, because it won’t save her, she wraps her arms across her head as she runs. Lights are still on in the long sitting room; she thinks she sees movement behind the drapes and dodges away – she can’t let Leandro see her. She races up the outside stair and then turns before going in through the door, her eyes searching for Ettore down below. The courtyard is a mass of running figures and the roof is swarming, and several figures have fallen, sprawled, across the stones. Clare stares, bewildered by fear. She can’t tell whether any of the fallen is Ettore. A bearded man appears in front of her; she vaguely recognises him as the
masseria
guard who refused to let her out earlier. He has his rifle in one hand and pauses before going down the steps, turning to her, shouting something she can’t understand and shoving her in through the door.

Following corridors and stairs familiar from her secret visits to Ettore, on quiet nights so different to this one, Clare hurries to Pip’s room. She expects to see his door shut; expects to knock and call out, and be let in. She expects to hug him, and soothe him, and wait it out. But as she turns the corner she stops. Pip’s door is ajar, the room inside dark.

‘Pip?’ she says, too loudly. She pushes through the door. The shutters are still open from the day. Peggy is asleep, rolled up on the bed; it’s stuffy and warm but there’s no sign of Pip. Clare stands there with the sound of her own breathing deafening her. She has no idea where he can be, no idea what can have gone wrong, why he hasn’t locked himself in as planned. Desperately, she checks her own room, though there’s no longer a key to lock it, in case he got confused. But that room is empty too. ‘Pip!’ she calls out pointlessly. Her voice tunnels along the empty corridor, all but lost beneath the battle sounds outside. A door bangs somewhere, and glass breaks; there are other people moving inside the
masseria
.

For a while Clare stays where she is, and hasn’t the slightest idea what to do. She racks her brains, trying to think where Pip would go. Then she thinks she knows. She races up another flight of stairs, tripping in haste and splitting her knee open on the stone. But the bat room is deserted and the door to Marcie and Leandro’s room, the highest in the whole building, is locked, and when Clare thumps her fists on it and shouts thought the keyhole, there’s no hint of movement within. She goes back down the stairs, woodenly, not knowing what else to do or where she should go. She can’t hide herself away in safety until Pip is doing the same, and not while Ettore is outside somewhere, maybe hurt, maybe dead. She thinks about going up to the roof, but knows it would be madness; she thinks about going back out into the courtyard, but the idea terrifies her. As Clare dithers, the noise outside begins to dwindle; the gunfire is getting less frequent, and silences form between each shot. She carries on down the stairs that she and Marcie climbed earlier, which lead to the long sitting room. And halfway down she stops, a startled exclamation dying on her lips.

Pip is there, at the bottom, hiding in the shadows outside the brightly lit doorway, peeping through. Clare stares. Marcie is behind him, one hand on his shoulder, also peering round, tentatively.
Have you both gone mad?
The question doesn’t make it as far as Clare’s lips. There are raised voices inside the room, and though she can’t understand a word she knows the voices at once – one is Leandro, the other is Ettore. Her ribs clench in painful relief. They’re arguing furiously in the dialect, and outside it has all gone quiet. The raid is over already, and Ettore is safe. Clare comes down another two steps, softly, understanding why Pip and Marcie don’t want to interrupt. Then she stops again, bewildered, because Pip has a gun in his hand – a pistol – and she can see that he’s shaking from head to toe; he’s so vibrant with tension it’s like a glow around him, like a rank, feral smell. Clare looks at him, and at the gun in his hand; she looks at Marcie’s long white fingers, holding his shoulder. They’re both staring into the sitting room and when Clare follows their gaze she see Ettore, unscathed, his face twitching in grief and rage as his uncle roars at him, flecks of spit flying from his lips. She watches, stunned, as Ettore’s arm whips around and he punches Leandro; slamming his fist up under his uncle’s chin with a meaty sound. She hears Pip gasp and can’t react, can’t move a muscle when he suddenly walks forward into the room, into the light, and in the shocked silence raises his hand, points the pistol at Ettore and fires.

The air is dragged out of Clare’s lungs. She can’t make a sound, can only stumble after Pip with her arms out wide for balance because the ground is no longer flat, no longer solid. She’s dimly aware that Leandro has sunk lopsidedly to one knee, with his head bowed like he’s praying and his hands clamped around his jaw. Boyd is off to one side, pale and mute. But all she can really see is Ettore on his back, his legs a jumble, a spatter of red droplets across his face and all around him. She collapses next to him and he looks up at her with that same mix of confusion and wonder as when they first met.

‘Ettore! It’s all right, you’ll be all right,’ she says, in a voice she doesn’t quite recognise. He reaches up and she grabs at his hand. ‘You’ll be all right.’ She peels back the lapel of his jacket. Pip’s aim was erratic, he was still raising the gun when he fired and the bullet has gone into Ettore’s right shoulder, just above his armpit. There’s blood spreading out beneath him, and blooming through his shirt, but Clare chokes up with relief. The wound is nowhere near his heart, or lungs; it ought not to kill him. She struggles out of her blouse, wads it up and presses it gently over the bloody entrance wound. ‘Lie still, my love,’ she says. ‘You’re going to be all right. We’ll get the doctor back … you’ll be fine.’

Her vision is blurred, her thoughts scattered. She glances up and sees the gun in Pip’s hand, still raised and trembling at the end of his arm, frozen at the point it went off. His face is bloodless, even his lips; his eyes have a look of such blank terror that she wonders if he even intended to fire.

‘Pip, what are you doing?’ she says raggedly. ‘What on
earth
are you doing?’ Pip doesn’t even blink. Clare feels the heat of Ettore’s blood, soaking up through the thin fabric of her blouse and onto her hands. Behind Pip, Marcie comes into the room, her eyes huge in a drawn, stunned face. Clare looks to Leandro but he’s still on his knees, shaking his head, dazed. It’s Boyd who comes over to them, moving unhurriedly, like he’s on his way to fetch a book from the shelf. ‘Boyd – take the gun away from him. Take the gun away from him!’ says Clare. Boyd stares down at her for a second and then does as she says, prising the pistol from Pip’s clenched hand. Clare relaxes, turns back to Ettore and touches her fingers softly to his face. Boyd moves a step closer to them, and Clare knows she’s given herself away. But the baby in her womb had done that already – would have done it, sooner or later. She swallows, and looks up at her husband. His face has that melted look she’s seen before, slack with grief and fear. His mouth hangs open, his eyes are swimming. He looks just as he did in New York, drunk and drugged, right before he collapsed, and Clare goes cold. Boyd looks down at the gun in his hand; he’s holding it by the grip, his finger is curled around the trigger. Keeping his eyes on it he raises it slowly, turning its barrel upwards, towards his own chin.

‘Boyd,’ says Clare, as softly as she can. ‘Boyd, no. Don’t.’ He freezes for a moment, not even seeming to breathe; the pistol quivers in his hand, he sticks his chin out a little and the barrel touches his skin. He sucks in a breath, a ratcheting sob. ‘Boyd, no,’ says Clare.

‘No,’ he says, with a twitch of his head. He’s shaking all over and his eyes are fixed on her now, cutting into her. Then he straightens his arm, points the gun at Ettore and fires.

‘
No
!’

For a second Clare thinks she herself has shouted this out, but it can’t be her because her heart has stopped beating and her teeth are clenched, impossibly tight. It’s Marcie. ‘No, no,
no
!’ she screams. Her voice sounds weird and sluggish; the gunshot is ringing in Clare’s ears. She can’t move. She watches as Boyd repositions his feet for better balance, turns his torso and levels the gun at her face. She struggles to focus her eyes past the perfect black circle of the barrel. Boyd’s face, above it, is now so empty that he almost looks calm. But there’s a muscle ticking beneath the tears on one cheek, trapped in some mad dance of nervous trauma, and his eyes are furious. They stare at each other and while the moment lasts Clare has no sense of time passing. She looks up at this man and her death, and can’t recognise either one. Boyd jerks the trigger and the gun clicks, but doesn’t fire. He frowns at it, hesitates, then brings it in to check the cylinder. Then Leandro is on him, knocking him down, driving his fists into him, again and again. The gun clatters to the floor off to one side and Clare finds herself staring at nothing. Then she looks down at Ettore.

Boyd’s shot was clean. It has left a perfect dark circle above Ettore’s temple, an exact replica of the barrel Clare was just staring into, and his eyes are half-shut, and he’s too still, and even though she knows he’s gone she can’t let herself believe it. She picks up his right hand and puts it at the back of her neck, underneath her hair, as he liked to do. His hand is still warm; she imagines the fingers curling, imagines his grip, pulling her closer; imagines him taking a breath, still with her.

But these are imaginings, nothing more. She kneels there in silence, holding his limp hand; putting it to her face, her lips, the back of her neck again. The weight of his arm is surprising; the skin of his palm is hard and callused; he smells of earth and blood. She can’t believe he’s gone, and she doesn’t know or care what the others are doing – why Pip had a gun, why Marcie is next to her, sobbing brokenly over Ettore’s body; where Leandro has gone with her husband. She doesn’t care about any of it. She doesn’t care when Paola marches in, unarmed but ferocious, with a guard at her shoulder keeping a close eye on her; doesn’t care when the girl sees her brother lying there and her mouth drops open, and she emits such a terrifying howl of pain that it feels like a knife in Clare’s skull. Paola rushes over to them, grabs Marcie by her shoulders and tries to haul her away. Marcie fights her, snarling through her tears; they jostle Clare but she stays where she is. She holds Ettore’s hand, and lets go of everything else.