Chapter One

❧

The Pavese sat open at the desk under a small lamp, the verse half-finished on his sheet. He set the pen down. He had been reading the same line for the better part of an hour without moving it forward.

The letter beside it was Julian Valenti's third in two years. He knew the hand by now: square, narrow-spaced, a finance man's hand softened by Italian punctuation. The first letter had thanked him formally for the condolences he had sent through Rossi about Enzo. The second had invited him without occasion. This one named a day.

The conservator arrives tomorrow morning. There is a fresco fragment in the lower hall, lately surfaced behind plaster. You would be welcome at the villa when you choose. — J.

Below the signature, two lines lower, in the same square hand: There is something in the archive in your father's hand. You should see it when you can.

Luca read the last two lines twice. The lamp flickered when the woodstove shifted in the next room, a small log breaking down to coals. He banked it earlier with the last of the seasoned oak. The casale held heat poorly above the hearth-stone; the loft above the kitchen always went cold by dawn. He had lived with this fact for fifteen winters and never bothered to seal it.

He stood and went to the south window.

The villa-ridge was a long darker line against the snow now. From the casale's south window, in daylight, the cypresses along the lower drive of Villa Valenti made a thin grey-green seam against the hill. In this dark and at this hour, with snow still falling soft and erratic over the spring source, he could see only the line where the trees lifted the white from the underlying stone. A single light at what would be the kitchen. Another, fainter, at what he had been told was the day-book room.

He had not crossed the villa's threshold since 1996.

He was ten in 1990 and fourteen in 1994 and sixteen the spring his father took him to the villa once, for a Sunday lunch he could not now remember the menu of. Enzo had given him a book (Neruda, in Italian) and asked him gravely whether he had a girl yet at the lycée. He had said no. Enzo had said Bene, and that had been the whole of his welcome. Then the men had gone to the courtyard for grappa and Luca had sat with a small grey-and-white cat on the kitchen step and read the first page of the book five times because the Spanish was bleeding through the Italian and he could not stop hearing his mother's voice instead of Enzo's. He had not seen the cat again. He had not seen Enzo again either. His father had not crossed the threshold after that lunch, and neither had he.

The snow moved sideways for a moment, then quieted.

He went back to the desk and knelt under it.

The metal tin was where it had been for nineteen years: pushed against the wall of the cabinet behind a cardboard folder of his own old French translation contracts. The tin was the size of a small loaf of bread, painted dark green once, the paint worn at the corners to grey metal. It had been his father's office tin in Aix. He had carried it up to the casale a week after the funeral and never opened it in front of anyone.

He set it on the desk. Lifted the lid with one finger.

Inside, in order: three photographs in a paper envelope; the small leather pocket notebook that was the only one of Étienne's diaries Luca had kept up here (the rest were in a box at the Aix house); two folded letters; a thick fold of foolscap; a key with a leather tag.

He did not touch the photographs.

He took out the small leather notebook and opened it to the page with the silk ribbon still in it. He had marked the page nineteen years ago and not moved the ribbon since. The page bore three lines and a date. August twelve. Enzo a Lugano. Bertin di nuovo. Non posso scrivergli. (Enzo at Lugano. Bertin again. I cannot write to him.) That was all. Above and below, his father's neat handwriting in French ran for pages about the harvest of the Aix vines, the price of fertilizer that summer, a poet his father had been reading in Italian. Only this page in Italian. Only these three lines.

Luca closed the notebook and laid it on the desk.

He took out the two folded letters. The first was the Thorne foreclosure-threat letter, addressed to Étienne at the Fontaine estate in Aix, March 1990, on heavy cream paper with a London law firm's letterhead at the top. He knew its contents. He had known them since he was twenty, the year his father had finally sat down at this same desk in the casale and read them aloud to him in a voice that had no pity in it for either of them.

The second was Étienne's draft refusal. An unsent letter to G. Valenti, dated August 12, 1990. Two folds, one crease deeper than the other where his father had set it under a paperweight and lifted it again, set it under a paperweight and lifted it again, over the course of what Luca now believed had been the last week of August. The paper had gone soft along that crease. He opened it.

Caro Giuliano, it began. His father had never used Enzo's full name in person — to Étienne the man had always been Enzo, and Luca had grown up assuming Enzo was the name on the birth certificate. The first time he had read this letter, at twenty, the Giuliano had stopped him at the salutation, and his father had said, without looking up, He always preferred it. I never gave it to him.

He did not read the body of the letter again. He knew it by heart.

He set the unsent draft beside the notebook.

The other thing in the tin he did not touch tonight. The fold of foolscap was his father's last week of writing — pages and pages he had never been able to read in one sitting and could not begin tonight. The photographs he would not look at without a reason. The key would not be wanted yet.

He laid the lid back on the tin.

He went to the kitchen and put water on to boil. Not for the coffee (that was a morning ritual) but because the kitchen was cold and he needed something to do with his hands. He took down a small white cup with a hairline crack and set it on the table. He cut bread, two slices, and laid them on a plate with a slice of pecorino from the cloth and a smear of fig confit Lucia had pressed on him at the trattoria in November and he had been working through alone since. He ate standing at the stone sink. The bread was three days old and still good. He drank the tea black.

He washed the cup and the plate and the knife and set them upside down on the cloth.

He went back to the south window in the sitting room.

The villa-ridge lights had not changed. He could not tell from here whether anyone was moving in the rooms, whether the day-book had been opened. He thought about Julian Valenti standing at the desk in the day-book room (he had never seen this room but Rossi had described it once, dryly, the cracked green lampshade and Enzo's leather blotter) and writing this letter in the square narrow hand. He thought about the cracked green lampshade and the silver stopwatch he had heard from Rossi was kept in the drawer with a folder Julian had only recently opened. He did not know what was in the folder. He had not asked.

There is something in the archive in your father's hand.

He knew what it was. He had known since Rossi had written to him in November, dryly, Julian has opened the cellar. There is an Aix-en-Provence letter you should know about. He had asked Rossi to write nothing more until he was ready, and Rossi had not. The letter in the cellar archive was a letter his father had sent. He had been told that much. The hand was Étienne's. The address was G. Valenti, Villa Valenti, San Cipriano. The contents he did not know.

What was on his own desk, in the soft-creased draft beside the notebook, was a different letter. A refusal. Written in the same week. Never sent.

Two letters, then. In his father's hand, on either side of the same week of August 1990. One delivered to Enzo. One folded and folded and folded against the paperweight for the last week of August and laid in the tin and not sent.

He had been ten years old that month. He remembered very little: that his mother had gone to her sister in Marseille for the month, that his father had not slept, that the kitchen at the Aix house had smelled of black coffee at all hours, that Bertin from the Lugano bank had come to the door twice and stood in the courtyard and his father had not asked him in. Bertin had a moustache that smelled of pipe tobacco even through the doorframe. Bertin had said, both times, the same phrase, in French: Il faut comprendre, monsieur Fontaine. You must understand, Monsieur Fontaine. His father had said nothing, both times, and closed the door.

He had been ten and had understood nothing of it. He had understood, by twenty, more than he wanted to understand. By twenty-six, when his father stopped sleeping again the year before his death, he had understood that his father carried something he would never set down. By the next year, when the stroke had taken Étienne in a single afternoon at the Aix kitchen table over a bowl of soup his mother had been about to set in front of him, he had understood, at last, that his father had died still carrying it.

By forty-six, here at this window, fifteen winters into this house, he understood that his own carrying of it was not the same as bringing it forward.

The lamp flickered again. He turned.

He looked at his desk: the half-finished Pavese on his sheet (— niente è più estraneo — the line broke at estraneo because he could not yet find the French for the precise weight of estraneo in this poem and would not settle), Julian's letter, the notebook open at the August twelve page, the unsent draft to G. Valenti, the green tin with its lid back on. A small landscape in three colors. A man could read it as the day's reading, the day's writing, the day's not-doing.

He could read it the other way.

He went to the hall and took down his coat from the peg. Heavy wool, the one his mother had bought him in Aix the winter she could still drive into town for him, the year before she died. The lining was beginning to go at the collar. He had not yet replaced it. The sleeves had a fold of weight at the cuff for the cold.

He set the coat across the back of the chair.

He went to the kitchen cupboard and took down the small fireproof box. He did not open it. He set it on the kitchen table, closed, and stood looking at it for a long moment with his hand flat on the lid.

He took his hand away.

He left the box on the kitchen table and went back to the desk.

He took the August twelve page from the notebook with care (the binding had loosened where the ribbon sat, and he could lift the leaf out of the gathering without tearing the spine) and folded it once, along the existing crease. He folded the unsent draft to G. Valenti once more, the way his father had folded it again and again against the paperweight, and laid it inside the August twelve page so the two papers traveled together, the diary leaf cradling the letter.

He held them between his fingers for a moment.

The narrow gold band on his right ring finger had warmed in the lamp's heat. He turned the ring once with his thumb, the way his father had turned it; the way Étienne had turned it standing at the Aix kitchen window in 1990 with the curtain half drawn against Bertin in the courtyard. The ring was older than that year. It was older than Luca. He had inherited it the morning after the funeral, sliding it off his father's hand himself because his mother had been unable to do it, and had worn it on the right hand since because the left, then, had not seemed his to claim.

He put the coat on.

He took the gloves from the pocket and pulled them on slowly. Wool against the scar at the base of his left thumb — paper knife at twenty-two, the year he learned not to cut paper toward himself.

He looked once more at his desk. The Pavese on its sheet. The lamp. Julian's letter on the blotter, square hand, something in the archive in your father's hand, you should see it when you can.

He turned out the lamp.

The room held the after-glow of the bulb for a long count, then settled into the orange-rimmed dark of the banked stove.

He picked up the folded diary leaf with its letter cradled inside, and slid the two papers into the inside breast pocket of his coat, against the wool. He felt the slight stiffness of them between the wool of the coat and the cotton of his shirt.

He went to the blue plank door.

He laid his hand flat on the wood.

A Fontaine had not crossed the villa's threshold for thirty years. Étienne had not crossed it after the Sunday lunch in 1996. Marie-Claire had never crossed it. Luca had not crossed it since the day with the grey-and-white cat and the book of Neruda he had not been able to read.

He had not decided, even now, that he would cross it tomorrow. He had decided only this: that he would walk down the ridge trail tonight as far as the elbow of rock above the spring source, and look at the villa-ridge from the place his father had looked from in 1990 the one time Étienne had come up to the casale before Luca owned it. From there his father had looked at the ridge across the valley and then turned and walked back to Aix and not written the letter folded now against Luca's chest.

He would look from the same place. He would decide there.

He pulled the door open.

The cold came in off the ridge, past the collar, into the lining he had not been able to seal.

He stepped out.

He drew the door closed behind him.

The snow was thin on the threshold. The ridge trail was a darker pale line under the holm oaks. The casale's blue door was at his back, the unopened fireproof box on the kitchen table, the lamp out, the diary leaf and the unsent letter folded against his ribs through wool and shirt.

He went down the ridge trail toward the villa lights.

Chapter Two

❧

The road climbed in a slow set of turns out of the Val d'Orcia and Sophie kept the Fiat in second gear longer than she needed to. The little green saloon had no business on this gradient in winter. She had bought it second-hand from a friend in Florence the year she stopped publishing, and the dented passenger door was still dented because she had never quite cared to have it fixed.

She rolled the window down a finger's width at the elbow of the pass. Salt grit on her tongue. Diesel from a tractor she had not yet seen. The smell of stone in cold.

The council truck had been through that morning by the look of the verges. The cypresses were salt-edged at the lower drive, white at the trunks where the grit had gone down, white in a hard line along the gravel, and at the elbow of the pass the snow underneath had gone darker where the salt had eaten it. She let the Fiat slow without changing gear.

Carla had told her by telephone that the road was passable. Carla had told her, also, in the careful voice she used when she was giving away a job, that the photographs of the fresco fragment had been taken in August by a stonemason with a mobile phone and a torch.

Va benissimo per cominciare, Carla had said. But I would not trust the colours.

Sophie had not trusted the colours. She had read the photographs twice for losses and once for what they could not show her, and she had agreed on the telephone that she would come up at the end of the first week of January.

She crossed the last switchback and the villa came clear on the hillside ahead. A long ochre house set into the hill, stone at the courtyard wall and tiled roof going green at the lower edges. The light at this hour was already going thin and silver. She had been on the road four hours.

She stopped the Fiat at the iron gate and set the brake.

A woman in a grey wool coat stood at the inner door of the courtyard, sleeves pushed up to the elbow despite the cold. Dark hair in a loose plait at her shoulder, no scarf at her throat. She was not smiling. The lines at her mouth were not unwelcoming either. She came down the courtyard stones at an even pace, neither hurrying nor slow.

"Signora Brennan."

"Signora Ferraro." Sophie undid her belt and got out of the car. "Per favore. Sophie."

"Alessandra." A nod at the boot. "Lascia tutto. Tomás viene."

The cold was not the still cold of Florence. It was a hill cold that moved off the courtyard stones and up through the soles of her boots. She had worn her thickest socks. She had not worn enough.

Alessandra was already turning back toward the house. "Vieni dentro. Hai guidato."

The kitchen was warm. A wood stove broad as a small altar, a copper kettle, bread on a cloth at the long pine table, the smell of soffritto from a pot that had been on the back of the stove since morning. A grey cat at the windowsill flicked an ear and did not move. Sophie set her gloves on the table because Alessandra had set hers there. She kept her hands on the wood for a moment to take the warmth.

"You will eat at one," Alessandra said. "Then Julian will take you to the wall."

"Grazie."

"Tea?"

"Per favore."

Alessandra moved to the stove and poured from the kettle without asking what tea. The cup was white and old. Sophie took it in both hands.

A man came through the kitchen door at the back stair. Mid-forties, dark suit trousers under a heavy work-apron, an old face for one not yet that old. He carried Sophie's small leather case in one hand and her canvas tool roll in the other.

"Signora Brennan. Tomás Reyes." A small nod, very slight. "I will take these up. Camera dipinta, primo piano."

"Thank you," Sophie said, and then, "I can carry the roll."

He looked at the canvas on his palm, and at her hands. He did not give it back.

"After you have eaten."

She let her hand drop.

A woman appeared at the kitchen doorway in soft layered wools, a long scarf at her shoulders, pencil behind one ear. Early thirties, pale eyes, a deliberate stillness in the way she stood.

"Vivienne Caldwell. Vivi."

"Sophie."

"You drove from Florence in the green Fiat I saw at the gate."

"Yes."

"It is good to see a car that has not been waxed for the photographs."

Sophie almost laughed. She drank her tea instead. Vivi had a small precise smile that did not stay long.

"Alessandra will feed you," Vivi said, "and then I will take you up. I have put you in the painted-ceiling room. If the room is too cold tell me before tonight; we can move the brazier."

"Thank you."

"The smaller room over the kitchen garden is warmer," Vivi added. "But the bed is shorter."

"I am not so tall."

"You are taller than the bed."

Alessandra gave a small sound at the stove that might have been agreement.

She ate at one with Alessandra and Vivi at the long table. Bread from Gianna, a bowl of white-bean and pancetta soup, a small dish of olives Vivi pushed across to her with a finger. Julian was at the day-book room, Alessandra said, until they were done. Tomás came in once for hot water from the kettle and went out again without a word.

When the bowls were stacked Vivi took her up the back stair. The third board creaked under Vivi's boot and Vivi said, without turning, "That one always."

The painted-ceiling room was at the front of the house, large, with a wide window on the courtyard. Sophie looked up automatically: a clean nineteenth-century pattern of vines and small birds, restored, the colours holding well. Carla's seam at the west quadrant. Sophie knew Carla's seam in a wall the way she knew her own.

"Bath at the end of the passage," Vivi said. "The hot water is honest if Pietro has not been at the boiler."

A wide bed under a wool counterpane. A heavy oak wardrobe. A wardrobe chair beside the wardrobe, small and dark, and on the chair a parcel.

Brown paper. Twine slightly slack. London postmark in a small fading rectangle. The parcel was about the size of a hatbox, not heavy by the look of how it sat. The corners of the paper had gone soft.

Sophie did not pick it up. She looked at Vivi.

Vivi had already taken a folded grey blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed and was setting it across the counterpane. She did not pretend not to see the parcel. She did not pretend to see it either.

"Not mine to open," Vivi said.

Sophie nodded once, slowly. She set her own canvas tool roll at the foot of the bed beside her case.

"If you need anything," Vivi said at the door, "I am in the linen room or at the day-book."

The door closed softly.

She washed her hands at the small basin in the corner with very hot water and a piece of tobacco-pale soap that smelled of olive. She dried them on a linen towel. She took her field notebook from the canvas roll, the brass loupe from the case, and laid the loupe across the inside of her right wrist on its thin leather cord. The cord went through a small ring her father had set into the brass himself; Edward Brennan had cut watch screws on a bench in Dorset for forty years and had pierced the cord ring at his own bench the year before he died.

She found Julian Valenti at the day-book room.

He stood up from the desk when she came in. Tall, narrow at the shoulder, the kind of stillness that came from a long career at a desk and not from the country. The cracked green lampshade Carla had mentioned. A leather blotter under his right elbow. A square narrow hand on the page beside him, half a sentence in Italian, finished or unfinished she could not tell.

"Sophie. Julian. I will not delay you. The wall is down here."

"Show me."

He did not waste a word. He took her down the back stair past the courtyard door, along a passage that smelled of stone and wax. Heavy linen cloth had been pinned tightly across the lintel of the lower hall door, sealing it from the kitchen heat. She could tell by the tightness of the pins it was Alessandra's work. Julian lifted a corner of the cloth.

"In here."

The lower hall was smaller than she had expected. South-east-facing, by the line of the high window. The window let in only a hard winter slant of light, and the bulb at the trestle was old and yellow and the cord ran across the floor in a way she did not like. The wall opposite the door (the long wall on the left as you came in) was bare stone above and roughly plastered below, and at the lower right of it the plaster had been carefully cut away.

The fragment was about eighty by one hundred and twenty centimetres, the longer side along the floor. Almost at her own kneeling height. The exposed surface ran into a soft halo of cleaned plaster at its borders and then into a dirty raised lip where the rest of the plaster still sat. The mason had been careful.

The colours were worse than Carla's photographs had shown.

She set her notebook on the trestle. She did not yet open it.

"There is the working lamp," Julian said. He turned a green-shaded desk lamp he had brought down on its cord. The light went on without flickering. Forty watts at most; an old bulb at that. "Pietro can put a brazier in here tonight if you need."

"Tonight. Yes. Thank you."

"Before you ask," he said. "The photographs were August. You have what August can do to colour."

She nodded. "I would still like to see them again."

"They are in the day-book."

She knelt at the wall. She did not put the loupe on yet. She set the back of her hand flat against the stone above the plaster line first. The stone took the warmth out of her skin the way a slab of marble in winter did. She moved her hand down two centimetres onto the cleaned surface itself. The cold did not lessen. She left her hand there.

Julian did not speak.

The window was high. The bulb was dim. She would need her own lamps from the boot of the car, two of them, on stands. She would need a brazier and a sheet of polythene at the door. She would need to know what was under the surface before she touched it with anything wet.

She lifted her hand away.

"I will need to know what is under it," she said.

"Yes."

"That will be in the first three days."

"Yes."

He did not insist on a timeline. He did not say as quickly as possible the way the museum men in Florence said it. He stood at the door with the cloth held back on his wrist and waited.

The yellow bulb had been on long enough that she no longer noticed its warmth when she finally got up.

"Thank you, Julian."

"Carla said you would not be hurried."

She did not answer. He let the cloth fall back across the door behind her.

Chiara was at the corner study door at the top of the back stair, a small brown Moleskine in her right hand, the cap of her pen in her teeth. She took the cap out and held it between thumb and forefinger.

"Benvenuta."

"Grazie."

"Chiara Lombardi. If you cook with us at the long table tonight, the soup will not be the same soup at lunch."

"I will be there."

"Bene."

She put the cap back between her teeth and went into the study and closed the door softly.

Sophie went down to the courtyard before going up to her room. She wanted air on her face.

The courtyard stones had not been salted. The small grey cat at the kitchen step did not lift its head. The day-book room door at the far side stood open, a panel of warm light against the dusk.

A man stood at the threshold of the day-book room.

He had his back half-turned to her. A heavy wool coat that had been a good coat once and was still good. Dark hair greying at the temples, cut short at the back of the neck. He did not see her, or did not look. He was speaking to Julian inside the room and she could not hear the words.

She stayed where she was.

He did not turn his head toward her at any point. He did not lift his eyes to the dusk-blue air of the courtyard between them. He said something more to Julian — a short complete sentence she could not catch — and then he stepped back from the threshold and came away.

He took one step into the courtyard and then stood. He looked at the stones at his feet, and at the dark road beyond the gate, and then back at the door behind him. He did not look at her.

Then he walked past her along the courtyard wall, his coat brushing the line of the pinned linen at the lower hall door without his noticing it, and went out at the gate.

She had not been introduced. She had not spoken.

The latch made a small sound at the gate and then nothing.