Upstairs, Rosa unlocked the door only when Frank himself knocked the agreed knock and said her name in his own voice. Clara was sitting upright in bed, white-faced, both arms curved protectively around her belly, her hair damp with sweat that had nothing to do with the warm room.
"Is it finished?" she asked.
"It is finished," Frank said. "They have gone. No one is hurt. The house is secure."
Clara nodded. She tried to smile. Then her face changed — not with fear of the men, who were gone, but with something older and closer and entirely her own — and she looked down at the bed, and then up at Rosa, with an expression neither of them would ever forget.
"Rosa," she said, very quietly, "I think something has started. And it is much too early, and I am very frightened. Please don't leave me."
Chapter 22: Labour in the Dark
Gia had arrived an hour before the men her father sent, driving through the first violence of the storm with her headlights on full and her dress ruined to the knee, and Enzo's guards had very nearly not let her in.
She had come to warn them in person because telephones, she said, standing dripping in the hall while Frank looked at her with open suspicion, were exactly what her father would be listening to. Her warning — tonight, the service side, not in usual colours — had reached Enzo twenty minutes before the gate chain made its soft complaint, and had been the difference, though no one said so to her face, between a house ready and a house merely careful. When the attempt failed Gia was still there, trapped by the lockdown and the flooded lane, sitting in a borrowed cardigan in the kitchen with her wet shoes by the stove, not knowing whether she was a guest, a witness, or a prisoner of good manners.
That was where Rosa found her when she came down the back stairs at a run, in the dark, with a candle in a saucer and terror in her face.
"Miss Romano. You will come now, please. It is Clara. And you are not to argue with me, because Mr. Valenti is seeing to the gate and Mr. Deluca is on the telephone to a doctor who keeps being cut off, and I need a woman with steady hands who is not me, because mine are not steady."
Gia was on her feet before Rosa had finished. She did not ask why her, of all people. She understood on the stairs, with the candlelight jumping on the walls and the wind still worrying at the shutters, that she had been chosen for the simplest of reasons: she was there, she was a woman, and some debts present themselves for payment without any arrangement at all.
The interior bedroom was lit by two candles and a torch laid on its side on the dresser, throwing a long, kind light that did not flicker as cruelly as the flames. The generator light had failed in that wing; the dark pressed at the door and the curtained hatch like something listening. Clara was in the bed, propped high, her nightdress damp at the neck, her hair braided back by Rosa with rough tenderness. Her face, in the candlelight, was grey with pain and effort, and when she saw Gia in the doorway her eyes filled at once — not with welcome, exactly, but with the relief of a drowning person who does not care whose hand it is.
"You came back," Clara whispered.
"I came back," Gia said, and crossed the room and took the hand Clara was reaching out blindly, and held it as if she had been doing it all her life. "I am here. Rosa is here. Breathe with me, Clara. In — and out. Again. There. Again."
The contractions came every seven minutes, then every six, each one rising through Clara's body like a tide that had to be endured rather than fought. Between them she was lucid and frightened and apologetic, which broke Gia's heart more than the pain did. "It's too early," she kept saying. "He isn't due. Tell them it isn't time yet. I haven't — the cottage isn't — his clothes are still folded in the drawer, Rosa, I counted them yesterday, nothing is ready." And Gia, who had never attended any birth, who had been raised in a house where women's pain was discussed in lowered voices in other rooms, found herself saying the only true things available: that babies did not consult drawers, that readiness was a story adults told themselves, that Clara's only work was the next breath and then the next, and that she, Gia, would do the counting and the worrying for both of them.
Frank, at intervals, appeared at the door with the doctor's relayed instructions — keep her warm, keep her calm, time everything, small sips of water, on her side if she could bear it, and above all get her to hospital when the lane allowed, because eight and a half months was early but not hopeless, and a hospital had what a candlelit bedroom in a storm did not. Enzo never came to the door. Clara learned later that he had stood guard at the corridor's end for two hours, so the bedroom could be a women's room entirely, and had sent in, by Rosa, his mother's rosary, wrapped in a handkerchief — not as an instruction, but as an offering, to be refused freely. Clara held it in her free hand all night.
At the worst hour, towards two, when a contraction longer than the others left Clara shaking and weeping and saying she could not, she could not, Gia's telephone rang in her cardigan pocket. Her father's name lit the small screen in the dark room like an obscenity. She stared at it. She knew what the call would be — that his men had reported her car at the Valenti gate, that she was to come home now, or open a door, or redeem herself in some smaller betrayal while there was still time. Every old obedience in her body stood up at once, like dogs hearing a whistle.
Gia took the telephone out of the room so Clara would not hear. In the corridor, by candlelight, with Enzo watching silently from the far end and making no move to listen or to leave, she answered it.
"No," she said, before her father had finished his first sentence. She said it again, more steadily, while the storm shook the house. "No. I am with a girl who is in labour in the dark because of what you sent into this house tonight. I will not leave her, I will not open anything, and I will not come home to discuss it. If that makes me no daughter of yours, then you must say so to the council yourself, because I intend to say everything else to them." Her voice broke only afterwards, when she had ended the call with a hand that shook so badly Enzo stepped forward, without a word, and took the telephone from her before she dropped it.