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chronology of Italy’s military victories, and his father’s attention would always hover somewhere nearby, restless, as Lucio stood mute, clawing a hole in the pocket of his uniform. It was even worse now, because at drill Primo was always there to yell over the void of him, appeasing their father with the jut of his chin. Urso was right. His brother should have been the one to come. Primo would have kept pace with the butcher up the mule track, asking all the right questions, discussing the lay of the grounds, what weapons they would choose. It was Primo who should have been there. They all knew it. Especially his father.
    When they reached the plateau of Montemezzo, the chestnuts were tall and dense with yellowing leaves and fruit. They stood for a while, breathing hard from the climb. Lucio could taste the sweet rot of the forest on his tongue, the smell of autumn that had already arrived on the mountain. In the clearing they rested on a tumble of boulders, green with mosses and lichens. He expected they would take the path that sloped down to the lake and the tangled glades of the woods beyond. But instead they headed along the ridge, to the chain of caves where the grotto of Santa Lucia dei Boschi was set into the mountainside.
    â€˜She has the best view in the Lepini,’ Urso murmured, nudging his head towards the saint in her chapel behind them. Lucio stood next to him on the rocky outcrop, taking in the valley shaken out before them. Far below, the walls and rooftops of Montelupini seemed cold and strangely spent, cobbled as they were between the wooded hills that were beginning to glow like embers with the change of season. Even Valeriana was quiet, as if she too understood the sad majesty of summer’s passing.
    Lucio charted the year from this spot. In spring, he would escape the gangs of children playing football on the campo and climb there to trace falcons or griffons wheeling their lazy circles below him. The air was sharp then, the valley hard and clean as a pencil line, so clear he could see a shed feather if it spiralled down the range. In winter he came here to see the first snows, the mists swallowing up the village below, so that all he could hear were its muted mechanics: a discordant cowbell, the tick of a saw, the tock of an axe.
    His father was rattling at the lock of the chapel grille behind them. ‘Padre Ruggiero gave me a key,’ he said. ‘We’ll ask a blessing for the hunt.’ He motioned Lucio to follow him into the damp air of the cave, their steps echoing in the empty chamber. It felt odd to enter the chapel in the daylight, the hymns and candles and prayers of a hundred people replaced by the murmur of the woods. He’d only ever been inside at midnight, for the Saint’s Mass in December. He would line up then with the rest of the village in the frozen night to kiss the feet of Santa Lucia and take communion from Padre Ruggiero. His father always led the procession, one of the litter-bearers honoured with taking the effigy back down the mountain to her winter home in San Pietro’s.
    The saint’s statue stood at shoulder height. It was recessed into the rendered wall, the dim light through the gate catching the gold of her diadem. It glinted like hidden treasure, which Nonno Raimondi told him it would easily have become, had the villagers not hung the grille across the grotto’s entrance in the days when the caves were the hideouts of highwaymen. Lucio watched his father take a box of matches from his pocket and light two candles on the altar. He kissed the foot of the saint and settled into a pew. Lucio fell in line behind him.
    He had been born on the saint’s name day. His father often reminded him of it, as if that was at least one thing in his favour. No one in Montelupini doubted the special protection that Santa Lucia dei Boschi granted the village. On Sundays, the nuns taught every child how the Duke of Alba, at war with