On the drive back to Staten Island, Gia stared out at the bright shopfronts and thought about the order she had just been given. Her father had not raised his voice, because he never needed to. He had simply handed her a role, as he had handed her a fiancé, a dress, a future, and expected gratitude for the giving. What frightened her was not his anger. It was his certainty that she would obey, because until now, in every way that he could check, she always had.
Aldo watched the car leave from the sunroom window. Then he picked up his telephone and made the second call of his morning, to a man who knew every kitchen maid and driver gossiping between Staten Island and Brooklyn.
"If the truth will not shame Enzo Valenti," he said, "we will give people a better story."
Chapter 15: The Rumour
A rumour in a great house does not arrive through the front door. It comes in with the laundry and the fish delivery, it rides up the back stairs in a cleaner's pocket, and by the time it reaches the dining room it has changed its clothes and learned better manners. By Thursday, everyone in the Valenti house who polished, cooked, drove, or swept had heard some version of it, and no one could say, afterwards, exactly who had spoken first.
The baby, they said. Look at the dates. Look at how he protects her. A man does not move a maid into the protected wing, does not set his own consigliere to guard her door, does not defy his future in-laws over a servant, unless the child is his.
Clara heard it first as a silence. She came into the kitchen with a basket of folded napkins, nearly eight months pregnant and moving with the careful deliberation that had become her habit, and the talk at the long table stopped in a way that told her it had been about her. Rosa, the cook, busied herself violently with a pan. One of the young girls would not meet her eyes. Another, braver or crueler, looked directly at her belly and then away, quickly, as if the looking itself were proof.
In the laundry room an hour later, she found two of the upstairs maids whispering over the steam, and this time they did not stop soon enough.
"—since before her husband was cold, that's what they're saying in Brooklyn—"
"My Tommy?" Clara said, and the words came out before she could soften them. "You are talking about my Tommy?"
The girls scattered with armfuls of sheets and apologies that were not apologies. Clara stood among the hanging linens with her hands shaking, breathing in hot cotton and soap, and felt a humiliation so complete it was almost physical, as if she had been undressed in a public place. Her marriage was the one clean thing she had carried through widowhood and poverty and service. She had loved Tommy Bennett with the uncomplicated devotion of a girl who had chosen once and meant it. Now strangers were spending that love as gossip to season their lunch.
She did not weep where anyone could carry the story of her weeping upstairs. She went to the small room that had been given to her, locked the door, sat on the bed with her back straight, and pressed both hands to her face until the urge to scream passed into something colder and more durable. The baby kicked, hard, as if in protest, and she whispered, "I know. I know what you are. Let them talk."
Enzo heard the rumour in a different way, as a report. Frank brought it to him in the study at noon, closing the door, setting the facts down without decoration: Aldo Romano's people were spreading it in Brooklyn kitchens, in drivers' cafés, in one parish hall. The child was Enzo's. The widow had been his mistress. The engagement to Gia was a screen, and a shabby one. It was designed, Frank said, to do three things at once: shame Enzo before the council, poison Gia against Clara, and make any protection Enzo offered look like confession.
Enzo listened with his face turned toward the window, and those who did not know him might have thought him calm. Frank knew him. He saw the hand resting on the desk, motionless by an effort of will that cost more than shouting would have done. Enzo Valenti had been called a thief in his youth, a killer in his prime, and a tyrant in the newspapers, and had borne all of it with contempt. But this slander used a dead man's widow and an unborn child as its weapons, and it did so precisely because they could not answer in the rooms where it travelled.
"I could have the men who repeat it visited," Enzo said at last. "By sunset, no driver in Brooklyn would dare."
"You could," Frank agreed. "And by sunrise, everyone would say you silenced them because it was true. That is the genius of it, Enzo. It is Aldo's work. He wants your anger to confirm his lie."
"Then what do you counsel? That I smile while they call her—" He stopped, because even repeating the word in that room felt like a second injury to her.
"I counsel proof, prepared in silence, and spoken once, in the right room, where it cannot be unsaid. Birth dates. Letters. Records. And I counsel that the girl hears from you, herself, that this house does not believe it. Rumours grow fastest in the person they are about, if she is left alone with them."
Enzo found Clara that evening not in her room, but in the small chapel off the hall where the staff sometimes prayed before feast days. She was not praying. She was sitting in the last pew, looking at nothing, her hands in her lap like a guest who expected to be asked to leave.
"I did not come to this house with a lie, Mr. Valenti," she said before he could speak, with a dignity that hurt him to hear because it had been made necessary. "I was married in St. Mary's, in front of forty people. I have letters. I have—"
"You owe me no defence," Enzo said. "Sit in this house as what you are: Tommy Bennett's widow, under my protection because your husband served this family faithfully and because you were wronged under my roof. Anyone who says otherwise to you, send them to me. Anyone who says it behind you will answer for it in time. Not with fists. With truth, presented where it will end the matter."
She looked up then, her eyes red but dry. "And Miss Romano? Do they expect her to believe it?"
"They expect her to feel it," Enzo said honestly. "That is a different cruelty, and it is her father's, not yours."