Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper

That was the worst bit, she thought despairingly. Not that she’d been set up, but that it had felt so wonderful. She was so lonely and desperate that the empty kiss of a stranger had actually made her feel cherished and special and desirable and good…

Right up to the moment she’d realised he was laughing at her.

Reaching the brow of the hill, she tipped back her head and took a big, steadying breath. High up in the faded blue sky the pale ghost of the moon hovered, waiting for the sun to finish its flamboyant exit. It made her think of Lottie, and she found that she was smiling as she started walking again, quickening her pace as she descended the hill towards home.

Lorenzo bent to pick up the envelope that she’d dropped in her hurry to get away from him.

Funny, he thought acidly, in all the versions of the story he’d ever read it was a shoe Cinderella left behind when she fled from the ball. He turned it over. Ah. So her name wasn’t Cinderella…

It was Sarah.

Sarah. It sounded honest and simple and wholesome, he reflected as he pushed through the crowd towards the door. It suited her.

He strode quickly out into the middle of the dusty lane that ran in front of The Rose and Crown and looked around. To the right, the car park was packed bumper-to-bumper and he half expected to see one of the gleaming BMWs shoot backwards out of its space and accelerate out into the narrow road. But no engine noise shattered the still evening.

There was no sign of her.

Intrigued, he shaded his eyes against the low, flaming sun and turned slowly around, scanning the fields of wheat and hedgerows that unfolded on every side. The air was thick, dusty, hazy with heat and, apart from the distant sound of voices and laughter from the terrace, all was quiet. It seemed she had completely vanished.

He was about to turn and go back inside when a movement in the distance caught his eye. Someone was walking through the field beyond the pub, wading through the rippling wheat with fluid, undulating strides. Unmistakably female, she had her back to him, and the sinking sun lit her riot of curls, giving her an aura of pure gold that would have won any lighting technician an Oscar.

It was her. Sarah.

He felt the deep, almost physical jolt in his gut that he got when he was working and instantly his fingers itched for a camera. This was what he had come here looking for. Here, in front of him, was the essence of Francis Tate’s England, the heart and soul of the book Lorenzo had loved for so long, encapsulated by this timeless, sensual image of a girl with the sun in her hair, waist-high in wheat.

On the brow of the hill she paused, tipping back her head and looking up at the pale smudge of moon, so that her hair cascaded down her back. Then, after a moment, she carried on down the slope and disappeared from view.

He let out a long, harsh lungful of air, realising for the first time that he’d been holding his breath as he watched her. He didn’t know who this Sarah was or what had made her run out like that, but actually he didn’t care. He was just very grateful that she had, because in doing so she’d unwittingly given him back something he thought he’d lost for ever. His hunger to work again. His creative vision.

Which, he thought grimly as he walked back across the road, just left the slightly more prosaic matter of copyright permission.

CHAPTER TWO

THREE weeks later.

Sarah’s head throbbed and tiredness dragged at her body, but as she closed her eyes and took a deep inhalation of warm night air she felt her battered spirits lift a little.

Tuscany.

You could smell it; a resiny, slightly astringent combination of rosemary and cedar and the tang of sun-baked earth that was a million miles from the diesel smog that hung over London’s airless streets at the moment. Britain had been having an extended spell of hot weather that had made the headlines night after night for weeks, but here the heat felt different. It had an elemental quality that stole into your bones and almost forced you to relax.

‘You look shattered, darling.’

Across the table her mother’s eyes met hers over her glass of Chianti. Sarah smothered a yawn and smiled quickly.

‘It’s the travelling. I’m not used to it. But it’s great to be here.’

She was surprised, as she said the words, to realise how true they were. She’d got so used to dreading Angelica’s wedding with all its leaden implications of her own conspicuous failure in so many departments—most notably the ‘finding a lifelong partner’ one—that she had neglected to take into account how wonderful it would be to come to Italy. The fulfilment of a lifelong dream, from way back when she could afford to have dreams.

‘It’s great that you’re here.’ Martha’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘I think you needed to get away from things because frankly, my darling, you’re not looking in great shape.’

‘I know, I know…’ Aware of her straining waistband, Sarah squirmed uncomfortably. The bonus of having a broken heart was supposed to be that you lost your appetite and the weight fell off, but she was still waiting for that phase to kick in. At the moment she was stuck in the ‘bitterness-and-comfort-eating’ stage. ‘I am on a diet, but it’s been tough, what with Rupert and work and worrying about money and everything—’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Martha said gently. ‘I meant mentally. But if money is difficult, darling, you know Guy and I will help.’

‘No!’ Sarah’s response was instant. ‘Really, it’s fine. Something will come up.’ Her thoughts strayed to the letter she’d had a couple of weeks ago from her father’s publishers, the latest in a long line of requests she’d received for film options on The Oak and the Cypress in the eleven years since she’d inherited the rights. In the beginning she’d actually taken several of these offers seriously, until bitter experience had taught her that Francis Tate seemed to attract penniless film students with a tendency to bizarre, obsessive psychological disorders. Now, for the sake of her sanity and her burdensome sense of responsibility to her father’s memory, she simply refused permission outright.

‘How’s Lottie doing?’ Martha asked now.

Sarah glanced uneasily across at Lottie, who was sitting on Angelica’s knee. ‘Fine,’ she said, hating the defensive note that crept into her voice. ‘She hasn’t even noticed that Rupert isn’t around any more, which makes me realise just what a terrible father he’s been. I can’t remember the last time he spent time with her.’ Latterly most of Rupert’s visits to the flat in Shepherd’s Bush had been for hasty and singularly unsatisfactory sex in his lunch hour when Lottie was at school. Sarah shuddered now when she thought of his clumsy, careless touch, and his easy excuses about problems at the office and the pressure of work for the evenings and weekends he no longer spent with her. She wondered how long he would have carried on the deceit if she hadn’t found him out so spectacularly.

‘You’re better off without him,’ Martha said, as if she’d read Sarah’s thoughts. Sarah sincerely hoped she hadn’t.

‘I know.’ She sighed and got to her feet, starting to gather up the plates. ‘Really. I know. I don’t need a man.’

‘That’s not what I said.’ Martha stood up too, reaching across for the wine, holding the bottle up to the light of the candle and squinting at it to see if there was any left. ‘I said without him, not without a man in general.’

‘I’m happy on my own,’ Sarah said stubbornly. It wasn’t exactly a lie; she was happy enough. But she only had to think back to the dark, compelling Italian who had kissed her at Angelica’s hen party to know that she was also only half-alive. Briskly she moved around the table, stacking crockery, keeping her hands busy. ‘You’re just missing Guy. You always get ridiculously sentimental when he’s not here.’

Guy and Hugh and all his friends weren’t arriving until tomorrow, so tonight it was just ‘the girls’, as Angelica called them. Martha shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I’m just an old romantic. But I don’t want you to miss your chance at love because you’re determined to look the other way, that’s all.’

Fat chance of that, thought Sarah, carrying the plates back to the kitchen. Her love life was a vast, deserted plain. If anything ever did chance to appear on the horizon she’d be certain to see it. Whether it would stop or not was another matter altogether.

Looming ahead of her through the Tuscan night, the farmhouse was a jumble of uneven buildings and gently sloping roofs. The kitchen was at one end, a low-ceilinged single-storey addition that Angelica said had once been a dairy. Sarah went in and switched the light on, tiredly setting down the pile of plates on the un-rustic shiny marble countertop. Despite being utterly uninterested in cooking, Angelica and Hugh had spared no expense in the creation of the kitchen, and Sarah couldn’t quite stamp out a hot little flare of envy as she looked around, mentally comparing it with the tiny, grim galley kitchen in her flat in London.

Crossly she turned on the cold tap and let the water run over her wrists. Heat, tiredness and a glass of Chianti had lowered her defences tonight, making it harder than usual to hold back all kinds of forbidden thoughts. She turned off the tap and went back out into the humid evening, pressing her cool, damp hands against her hot neck, beneath her hair. As she returned to the table Angelica was running through the catalogue of disasters that had beset the renovations.

‘…it seems he’s absolutely fanatical about having everything as natural and authentic as possible. He confronted our architect with this obscure bit of Tuscan planning law that meant we weren’t allowed to put a glass roof on the kitchen, but had to reuse the old tiles. Something to do with maintaining the original character of the building.’

Fenella rolled her eyes. ‘That’s all very well for him to say, since he lives in a sixteenth-century palazzo. Does he expect you to live like peasants just because you bought a farmhouse?’

Martha looked up with a smile as Sarah sat down again. ‘Hugh and Angelica have fallen foul of the local aristocracy,’ she explained. ‘From Palazzo Castellaccio, further up the lane.’

‘Aristocracy?’ Angelica snorted. ‘I wouldn’t mind if he was, but he’s definitely new money. A film director. Lorenzo Cavalleri, he’s called. He’s married to that stunning Italian actress, Tia de Luca.’

Fenella was visibly excited. Dropping a celebrity name in front of her had roughly the same effect as dropping a biscuit in front of a dog. ‘Tia de Luca? Not any more apparently.’ She sat up straighter, practically pricking up her ears and panting. ‘There’s an interview with her in that magazine I bought at the airport yesterday. Apparently she left her husband for Ricardo Marcello, and she’s pregnant.’

‘Ooh, how exciting,’ said Angelica avidly. ‘Ricardo Marcello’s gorgeous. Is the baby his, then?’

You’d think they were talking about intimate acquaintances, thought Sarah, stifling another yawn. She knew who Tia de Luca was, of course—everyone did—but couldn’t get excited about the complicated love life of someone she would never meet and with whom she had nothing in common. Fenella was clearly untroubled by such details.

‘Not sure—from what she said, I think the baby might be the husband’s, you know, Lorenzo Whatshisname.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Have you met him?’

Across the table, Lottie was lolling on her grandmother’s knee, her thumb in her mouth. She was obviously exhausted, and Sarah’s own eyelids felt as if they had lead weights attached to them; leaning back in her chair, she tipped up her head and allowed herself the momentary luxury of closing them while the conversation ebbed around her.

‘No,’ Angelica said. ‘Hugh has. Says he’s difficult. Typical Italian alpha male, all arrogant and stand-offish and superior. We have to keep on the right side of him though, because the church where we’re getting married is actually on part of his land.’

‘Mmm…’ Fenella’s voice was warm and throaty. ‘He sounds delish. I wouldn’t mind getting on the right side of an Italian alpha male…’

Sarah opened her eyes, dragging herself ruthlessly back from the edge of that tempting abyss.

‘Come on, Lottie. It’s time you were in bed.’

At the mention of her name Lottie struggled sleepily upright, reluctant as ever to leave a party. ‘I’m not, Mummy,’ she protested. ‘Really…’

‘Uh-uh.’ Lottie had the persuasive powers of a politician, and usually Sarah’s resistance in the face of her killer combination of sweetness and logic was pitifully low. But not tonight. A mixture of exhaustion and an odd, restless feeling of dissatisfaction sharpened her tone. ‘Bed. Now.’

Lottie blinked up at the sky over Sarah’s shoulder. Her forehead was creased up with worry. ‘There’s no moon,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t they have the moon in Italy?’

In an instant Sarah’s edgy frustration melted away. The moon was Lottie’s touchstone, her security blanket. ‘Yes, they do,’ she said softly, ‘but tonight it must be tucked up safely behind all the clouds. Look, there are no stars either.’

Lottie’s frown eased a little. ‘If there are clouds, does that mean it’s going to rain?’

‘Oh, gosh, don’t say that,’ laughed Angelica, getting up and coming over to give Lottie a goodnight kiss. ‘It better not. The whole point of having the wedding here was the weather. It never rains in Tuscany!’

It was going to rain.

Standing at the open window of the study, Lorenzo breathed in the scent of dry earth and looked up into a sky of starless black. Down here the night was hot and heavy, but a sudden breeze stirred the tops of the cypress trees along the drive, making them shiver and whisper that a change was on the way.

Grazie a Dio. The dry spell had lasted for months now, and the ground was cracking and turning to dust. In the garden Alfredo had almost used up his barrels of hoarded rainwater, laboriously filling watering cans to douse the plants wilting in the limonaia, and in daylight the view of the hillside below Palazzo Castellaccio was as uniformally brown as a faded sepia print.

Suddenly from behind him in the room there came a low gasp of sensual pleasure, and Lorenzo turned round just in time to see his ex-wife’s lover bend over her naked body, circling her rosy nipple with his tongue.

Expertly done, he thought acidly as the huge plasma screen above the fireplace was filled with a close shot of Tia’s parted lips. Ricardo Marcello was about as good at acting as your average plank of wood but he certainly came to life in the sex scenes, with the result that the completed film—a big-budget blockbuster about the early life of the sixteenth-century Italian scientist Galileo—contained rather more of them than Lorenzo had originally planned. Audiences across the world were likely to leave the cinema with little notion of Galileo as the father of modern science but with a lingering impression of him as a three-times-a-night man who was prodigiously gifted in a Kama Sutra of sexual positions.

With an exhalation of disgust Lorenzo reached for the remote control and hit ‘pause’ just as the camera was making yet another of its epic journeys over the honeyed contours of Tia’s flatteringly lit, cosmetically enhanced body. Circling the Sun was guaranteed box-office gold, but it marked the moment of total creative bankruptcy in his own career; the point at which he had officially sold out, traded in his integrity and his vision for money he didn’t need and fame he didn’t want.

He’d done it for Tia. Because she’d begged him to. Because he could. And because he had wanted, somehow, to try to make up for what he couldn’t give her.

He had ended up losing everything, he thought bitterly.

As if sensing his mood the dog that had been sleeping curled up in one corner of the leather sofa lifted his head and jumped down, coming over and pressing his long nose into Lorenzo’s hand. Lupo was part-lurcher, part-wolfhound, part-mystery, but though his pedigree was dubious his loyalty to Lorenzo wasn’t. Stroking the dog’s silky ears, Lorenzo felt his anger dissolve again. That film might have cost him his wife, his selfrespect and very nearly his creative vision, but it was also the brick wall he had needed to hit in order to turn his life around.

Francis Tate’s book lay on the desk beside him and he picked it up, stroking the cover with the palm of his hand. It was soft and worn with age, creased to fit the contours of his body from many years of being carried in his pocket and read on planes and during breaks on film sets. He’d found it by chance in a secondhand bookshop in Bloomsbury on his first trip to England. He had been nineteen, working as a lowly runner on a film job in London. Broke and homesick, and the word Cypress on the creased spine of the book had called to him like a warm, thyme-scented whisper from home.

Idly now he flicked through the yellow-edged pages, his eyes skimming over familiar passages and filling his head with images that hadn’t lost their freshness in the twenty years since he’d first read them. For a second he felt almost light-headed with longing. It might not be commercial, it might just end up costing him more than it earned but, Dio, he wanted to make this film.

Involuntarily, his mind replayed the image of the girl from The Rose and Crown—Sarah—walking through the field of wheat; the light on her bare brown arms, her treacle-coloured hair. It had become a sort of beacon in his head, that image; the essence of the film he wanted to create. Something subtle and quiet and honest.

He wanted it more than anything he had wanted for a long time.

A piece of paper slipped out from beneath the cover of the book and fluttered to the floor. It was the letter from Tate’s publisher:

Thank you for your interest, but Ms Halliday’s position on the film option for her father’s book The Oak and the Cypress is unchanged at present. We will, of course, inform you should Ms Halliday reconsider her decision in the future.

Grimly he tossed the book down onto the clutter on the low coffee table and went back over to the open window. He could feel a faint breeze now, just enough to lift the corners of the papers on the desk and make the planets in the mechanical model of the solar system on the windowsill rotate a little on their brass axes.

Change was definitely in the air.

He just hoped that, whoever and wherever this Ms Halliday was, she felt it too.

CHAPTER THREE

SARAH woke with a start and sat up, her heart hammering.

Over the last few weeks she had got quite familiar with the sensation of waking up to a pillow wet with tears, but this was more than that. The duvet that she had kicked off was soaked and the cotton shirt she was sleeping in—one of the striped city shirts that Rupert had left at her flat—was damp against her skin. It was dark. Too dark. The glow of light from the landing had gone out and, blinking into the blackness, Sarah heard the sound of cascading water. It was raining.

Hard.

Inside.

A fat drop of water landed on her shoulder and ran down the front of her shirt. Jumping up from the low camp-bed, she groped for the light switch and flicked it. Nothing happened. It was too dark to see anything but instinctively she tilted her face up to try to look at the ceiling, and another drop of water hit her squarely between the eyes. She swore quietly and succinctly.

‘Mummy,’ Lottie murmured from the bed. ‘I heard that. That’s ten pence for the swear box.’ Sarah heard the rustle of bedclothes as Lottie sat up, and then said in a small, uncertain voice, ‘Mummy, everything is wet.’

Sarah made an effort to keep her own tone casual, as if water cascading through the ceiling in the middle of the night was something tedious but perfectly normal. ‘The roof seems to be leaking. Come on. Let’s find you some dry pyjamas and go and see what’s happening.’

Holding Lottie’s hand, Sarah felt her way out onto the landing and felt her way gingerly along the wall in what she hoped she was remembering correctly as the direction of the stairs.

‘Please can we switch the light on?’ Lottie’s whisper had a distinct wobble. ‘It’s so dark. I don’t like it.’

‘The water must have made the lights go out. Don’t worry, darling, it’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m sure—’

At that moment loud shrieks from the direction of Angelica’s room made it clear that she had just become aware of the crisis. Then the door burst open and there was a sudden and dramatic increase in the volume of her wailing. ‘Oh, God—wake up, everyone! There’s water pouring through the roof!’

Lottie’s grip tightened on Sarah’s hand as she picked up on the hysteria in her aunt’s voice. ‘We know,’ said Sarah struggling to keep her irritation at bay. ‘Let’s just keep calm while we find out what’s going on.’

But Angelica only did calm if it came expensively packaged in the context of a luxury spa. Fenella appeared beside her, ghostly in the gloom, and the two of them clung together, sobbing.

‘Darlings, what on earth has happened?’ As she joined them Martha’s drawl was faintly indignant. ‘I thought I’d fallen asleep in the bath by mistake. Everything’s soaking.’

‘Must be a problem with the roof,’ Sarah said wearily. ‘Mum, you look after Lottie. Angelica, where would I find a torch?’

‘How should I know?’ Angelica wailed. ‘That’s Hugh’s department, not mine. Oh, God, why isn’t he here? Or Daddy. They’d know what to do.’

‘I know what to do,’ said Sarah through gritted teeth as she made her way towards the stairs. Because that was what happened when you didn’t have a man around to do everything for you; you developed something called independence. ‘I’m going to find a torch and then I’m going to go out and see what’s wrong with the roof.’

‘Don’t be silly—you can’t possibly go climbing up onto the roof in this weather,’ snapped Angelica.

‘Darling, she’s right,’ said Martha. ‘It’s really not a good idea.’

‘Well, let me know the minute you have a better one,’ Sarah called back grimly. The dark house was filled with the ominous sound of trickling water and her feet splashed through puddles on the tiled floor of the kitchen as she searched for Hugh’s expensive and unused collection of tools.

Amongst them was a small torch. Flicking it on, Sarah let its thin beam wander around the walls and felt her heart sink. Water was dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls in rivulets, just like the ones streaming down the window panes outside. The patio doors shed squares of opaque grey light over the wet floor. She opened them and stepped outside.

It was like walking into the shower fully clothed. Or maybe not quite fully clothed, she thought, glancing down at Rupert’s striped shirt. Within seconds it was soaked and clinging to her, which at least meant that she couldn’t get any wetter. Shaking her hair back from her face, blinking against the teeming rain, she sucked in a breath and forced herself to walk further out into the downpour, holding the torch up and pointing it in the direction of the roof.

The low pitch of the single-storey roof was easy to see, but the torch’s weak light showed up nothing that would explain the disaster unfolding inside.

‘Sarah—you’re soaked! Darling, come in.’ Her mother had appeared in the doorway, a raincoat over her elegant La Perla nightdress, an umbrella shielding her from the rain. ‘We’re way out of our depth here. Angelica and Fenella have taken Lottie with them to get help from the yummy man next door.’

Sarah directed the torchlight higher to the spine of the roof, squinting against the rain. ‘But it’s the middle of the night. You can’t just appear on someone’s doorstep at this hour.’

‘Darling, we’re damsels very much in distress,’ Martha yelled above the noise of the rain, collapsing the umbrella as she retreated indoors. ‘This is an emergency. We can hardly wait until morning—we need to be rescued now.’