Wife By Arrangement

Angie’s smile was both impish and mysterious. ‘There’ll be others. Let me help you get dressed and we’ll go ashore.’

‘I’ll just put something over my swimsuit-’

‘What swimsuit?’

Then Heather realised that she was wearing a towelling robe and nothing else. She tried to remember taking off her bathing costume, but her last memory was of Renato laying her down on the bed and kicking the door shut.

‘Did you-?’

‘Not me,’ Angie said. ‘You were like that when I got here.’ Her face was demure but her eyes were mischievous. ‘It’s all right. I won’t tell Lorenzo.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Heather said hastily, feeling a blush start in her face and spread all over her body. ‘Let’s just go home.’

On Angie’s orders Heather spent the next day in bed. She slept like a log and awoke feeling good. But when Baptista or Angie dropped in, she thought she sensed a certain tension that they wouldn’t talk about. She couldn’t ask Renato, because he didn’t come to see her at all.

At last Angie explained. ‘Renato called Lorenzo in Stockholm to tell him to come home, but he’d never checked into his hotel and nobody knew where he was. So everyone got a little uptight. But it turned out that he was already heading this way.’

‘He was coming home anyway?’ Heather asked.

‘I guess he couldn’t bear being away from you. He’ll be here later today.’

The knowledge galvanised her to get up, and by afternoon she was looking her best for Lorenzo. As soon as the car stopped he hurried up the steps to clasp her in his arms. He seemed tense and distraught, but she put that down to concern for her safety, and when he said, ‘Where’s Renato? I have to talk to him, now,’ she guessed he was going to berate him for allowing her into danger.

‘Darling, I’m all right,’ she said.

‘We’ll talk later,’ he told her. ‘Later. Renato.’

He vanished into the house and she didn’t see him again that day. Angie and Baptista made her go to bed early, and when she awoke next day the sun was up and Lorenzo was waiting for her at breakfast. He was pale but composed, and he smiled as he promised her he hadn’t quarrelled with his brother.

They saw little of each other after that. Renato didn’t send him abroad again, but kept him at Head Office in Palermo. Each morning the two of them would leave early for work, and return late.

Heather had no time to miss him. She was enjoying her flowering relationship with Baptista. The old woman showed her all over the house, and she began to understand a little better the family into which she was marrying. Renato had said, ‘If you marry one Martelli, you get the whole pack of us,’ and it was true.

Looking through photograph albums, she saw the wedding pictures of the young Baptista and Vincente Martelli, the extravagantly beautiful bride barely coming up to the shoulder of her unsmiling groom. He looked several years older, and stood straight and uncomfortable. His face was uncannily like that of Renato today.

Then the early pictures of Renato himself, always looking straight into camera, his dark eyes full of challenge, his mouth uncompromising. Right from the first this had been a young man who knew who he was, what he wanted, and how he was going to get it.

Then Lorenzo appeared, curly-haired, angelic, bringing forth Heather’s answering smile. At last there was Bernardo, grave-faced, always standing a little apart, looking as though he wanted to be anywhere else.

‘And soon there will be more photographs,’ Baptista said, ‘when we welcome you into the family.’

Baptista suffered from a weak heart, and spent much of her time resting, but one morning she appeared at breakfast looking strong and cheerful, and invited Heather to take a short trip with her, although wouldn’t say where they were going.

‘I would have invited Angie as well,’ she said as the car took them inland, ‘but she and Bernardo had already made plans.’ She gave a conspiratorial smile.

‘I’ve never seen Angie like this before,’ Heather admitted. ‘Usually she’s a bit-well-’

‘Love ’em and leave ’em,’ said Baptista robustly. She was proud of her grasp of English idiom.

‘Yes, but she seems really absorbed in Bernardo. I wonder about him, though.’

‘He’s a very difficult man, but since Angie has been here I’ve seen him happier than ever before. She may have more to contend with than she imagines, but it will be so nice for all of us if it works out.’

Inland Sicily was more sparsely populated than the coast. Now they were in the rural heartland, where goats grazed within sight of the ruins of a Greek temple. Their way was briefly barred by a flock of sheep, driven by a little nut-brown man with a gap-toothed grin. He nudged his flock to the side and hailed Baptista, who hailed him back.

‘We’re on my land now,’ she explained. ‘I have a small estate, a village, some olive groves, and a little villa. It was my dowry.’

At last they saw the village, called Ellona, clinging to the side of the hill. It was a medieval place with cobblestones, tiny houses and only two buildings of note. One was the church, and the other a pink stone villa with two staircases curving up the outside.

The midday heat was at its height, and they sat just inside the house, at a French door looking out onto a terrace, with the net curtains moving gently in the faint breeze.

‘I ordered English tea in your honour,’ Baptista said, with a note of triumph.

‘It’s delicious,’ Heather said, sipping the Earl Grey. ‘Deliziusu.’ She pronounced the Sicilian word very deliberately, to differentiate it from the Italian, delicioso. Baptista smiled.

‘Already you are becoming a Sicilian,’ she said.

‘Well, I learned some Italian to get on in the store, and Sicilian isn’t too hard if you remember how often it uses “u” where Italian uses “o”. I’ll get the hang of it.’

‘What matters is that you are working hard to become one of us, just as I knew you would.’

‘I’ll tell you something,’ Heather said impulsively. ‘I’ve only been in Sicily a few days, but as soon as I arrived I had such a feeling of-of rightness. I don’t know how else to say it, but it’s as though everything was conspiring to tell me that this is where I belong. I’ve never had that sense before.’

‘Then you have come to the right place, and the right people.’ Baptista made a sweep of her hand, indicating the sunlit landscape, down the valley, across to Palermo, with a faint glimpse of the sea beyond. ‘See, the very land welcomes you.’

‘This place is so beautiful. Did you live here when you were a child?’

‘No, but we visited sometimes in the summer, when the city was too hot. It was my property, to be kept in good condition so that it could be a fine dowry when my marriage was arranged.’

‘Arranged?’ Heather echoed, not sure she’d heard correctly. ‘An arranged marriage?’

Baptista chuckled. ‘Of course. Arranged marriages were very common, and even today-where there is property-’ she gave an eloquent shrug. ‘They often work out very well, despite what you think.’

‘But what about love?’

A faraway look came into Baptista’s eyes. ‘I was in love once,’ she said softly. ‘His name was Federico. I called him Fede. He was a fine-looking boy, tall and strong with dark, speaking eyes, and hands that could hold a woman so gently.’

She smiled, looking at something deep inside herself. ‘Of course, a well brought up young girl wasn’t supposed to notice things like that, but he was the most handsome young man in Sicily. All the girls were crazy for him, but I was the one he loved.’

‘What happened?’ Heather asked.

‘Oh, we never had a chance. He was a gardener, and in those days rich girls didn’t marry gardeners. In fact they still don’t. He used to work here and grow such beautiful roses, just for me. He said that whenever he saw a rose, he thought of me.’

‘What happened?’

‘My parents separated us. He was sent away and I never saw or heard of him again. I tried to find out what had become of him, for I thought if only I could know that he was well I might find a sort of peace. But I never