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stop there, and he doesn’t loosen his grip.
    ‘I would die without you, you know. I swear it.’ Clare wants to deny it – she has tried to before. She has tried, in the hope that he will realise how onerous his words are. ‘My angel,’ he whispers. She can feel his arms shake from the strain of keeping hold. Or perhaps it’s she that shakes. ‘My angel. I would die without you.’ She wants to say, no, you would not , but when he says such things something gets hold of her throat and squeezes it, and no words will come out. She can’t tell if it’s guilt, or fear, or anger. She reminds herself that most women would be grateful for such devotion in a husband; she reminds herself to be grateful.
    ‘I should go and check on Pip,’ she manages to say, sometime later.

    When the sun has set they join their hosts for a drink in the garden, at the long table beneath the vine-covered veranda. A silent girl with her black hair parted in the middle, wearing an old-fashioned, high-necked blouse with a frill, brings a tray of glasses and a jug of some dark drink, and begins to pour. Small round fruit plop out into the glasses with the liquid, like soft pebbles.
    ‘Oh, good – amarena ,’ says Marcie, clapping her hands. ‘This is just the thing you folk need after your long trip. Wild cherry juice – we can’t always get them, but when we do, one of the kitchen girls mixes up a batch of this stuff. She keeps the recipe all to herself, mind you – she absolutely refuses to show me! There’s some herb she adds that I just can’t put my finger on. She says it was her grandmother’s secret. Isn’t that just hilarious? To guard something as silly as a recipe?’
    ‘It’s not silly at all,’ Leandro tells his wife serenely. ‘She has precious little to call her own.’
    ‘Well, fine then.’ Marcie doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Try it – go on. There’s sugar there if you want it, but I think it’s delicious as it is.’ She beams at Pip, and he does as he’s told. He’s changed into a clean shirt and tie and his stone-coloured linen blazer with its matching waistcoat, but somehow his clothes still look wrong in their surroundings. He looks like a hastily spruced schoolboy, when at home he’d worn the new outfit into town with the hint of a proud swagger in his step. As if he realises, Pip stays at the edge of his chair and looks embarrassed. Clare sips her drink.
    ‘It is delicious,’ she says automatically, and then realises that it’s true. She steals a long glance at Leandro Cardetta.
    He looks to be approaching fifty; he has copious iron-grey hair, swept back from his temples and from a high forehead, deeply lined. He is certainly not beautiful, but perhaps he’s almost handsome; his face has a certain gravitas, a kind of heft to the sculptural features – jaw and nose and brows. His skin is bronze and has the thick, smooth look of good leather. There are deep creases at either side of his mouth, and pouches under his eyes, and those eyes are so dark it’s hard to see the pupil against the iris – it looks instead as though his pupils are enormous, dilated far beyond the norm. Perhaps it’s this that makes his resting expression one of warmth and approachability. He is not overly tall, not nearly as tall as Boyd; his shoulders are strong and square, ribs like a barrel; a slight paunch, a mark of good living, fills out the space behind his shirt. He leans back in his chair, the small glass of amarena held in the fingers of his left hand with surprising delicacy. He is watchful without being disconcerting; elegant not but effeminate.
    Catching Clare’s surreptitious gaze, he smiles.
    ‘Whatever will make your stay with us more comfortable, you must only ask, Mrs Kingsley,’ he says smoothly.
    ‘Unless it’s music or shopping or cinema, or a blaze through a casino – in which case you’re bang out of luck!’ Marcie declares.
    ‘Marcie, cara , you must not make it sound as though Gioia is