It was heavier than linen had any right to be. She knew that on the third step of the back stairs. She knew it, and she kept going, because needing the money had taught her to keep going under every weight she was handed, and because asking questions of the woman who would soon be mistress of this house felt more dangerous than any staircase.
Then Mr. Valenti had found her. And for the first time in seven months, someone else was carrying the weight — and looking at it as if it might be something far worse than linen.
Chapter 3: Don't Open It
Enzo did not open the suitcase on the landing. A man in his position learned early that the place where a thing is discovered is rarely the place where it should be examined, and that curious eyes in a full house could do more damage than any lock. He carried it himself — ignoring Clara's whispered protest, ignoring the way his own shoulder registered its unnatural weight — up to the small sitting room off his study, a room with one door, no windows to the terrace, and a lock he trusted. He set it on the low table, told Clara to sit in the armchair by the fire, and sent for Mrs. Alvaro with instructions that were not to be repeated: the girl was unwell, she was resting, no one was to disturb them.
The housekeeper, to her credit, asked nothing. She brought water and a folded blanket, looked once at Clara's face and once, longer, at the suitcase, and withdrew. Enzo locked the door behind her.
"You should drink," he told Clara.
She held the glass in both hands and did not drink. "Sir, if Miss Romano finds I didn't take it to the car —"
"Then Miss Romano may speak to me."
He stood looking down at the case. Up close, in the lamplight, it was older than he had first thought, the leather scuffed white at the corners, the stitching repaired in a darker thread along one side. It was the kind of suitcase that had belonged to somebody's grandfather, the kind that turned up in attics and estate sales. Not the kind a Romano bride kept her trousseau in.
He put his hand flat on the lid. The leather was cool. Under his palm, through it, he had the absurd and certain sensation of fullness under pressure — of a space filled completely, without the give that cloth would have allowed.
"Did she latch it in front of you?" he asked.
"No, sir. It was ready by the wardrobe. She just showed me which car."
"Did she give you a key?"
"No, sir."
"Did anyone else see you take it?"
"The new girl, Anna, was in the corridor, but she was carrying towels. I don't think she —" Clara stopped. Her eyes had gone to the case and stayed there, and her face changed. "Mr. Valenti. The latch."
He looked down. The brass latch on the left, the one that had been straining on the stairs, was moving. Not much — a fraction, as the pressure inside found the weakness his handling had given it. The catch shivered against its housing. He had just enough time to put himself between the case and Clara's chair when the latch popped with a sharp metallic crack and the lid lifted an inch on its hinges, held only by the second latch and the old leather strap across its middle.
From the seam, where the lid had opened, something pale showed for an instant before the weight inside settled again. Not linen. The edge of paper. Many edges of paper, compressed.
The knock at the door was not a knock. It was an arrival — heels quick on the corridor floor, a hand trying the handle, finding it locked, and then Gia's voice, high and bright and nothing like her drawing-room voice at all.
"Enzo? Enzo, Mrs. Alvaro said you were — why is this locked?"
Clara made a small sound. Enzo raised a hand, silently, and she pressed her lips together, both hands now flat over her belly as if the child, too, needed to be kept quiet.
"Enzo, I know Clara is in there. I gave her an errand an hour ago and the car has been waiting, the driver has been waiting —"
"Go back to your guests, Gia," he said, evenly, through the door.
"Open this door." The handle rattled again, harder. "That case is mine. It is my property, it has my mother's linen in it, it is nothing to do with — Enzo, if that girl has been telling you stories, if she has damaged it, if she has tried the locks like a thief —"
"I tried nothing!" The words burst out of Clara before she could stop them, and then she clapped a hand over her mouth, horrified, looking at Enzo as if she expected to be struck, or dismissed, or worse.
What happened next Enzo would remember for a long time, because it told him more than the latch had. Gia went completely silent on the other side of the door. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped and sharpened, and it was aimed not at him but at the girl she could not see.
"Clara. Listen to me. Whatever you think you saw —"
"She saw nothing," Enzo said. "The latch failed on the stairs. The case is damaged. I am dealing with it."
"Then let me in and I will deal with it, it is mine —"
"No."
The word landed in the corridor like a stone. He heard her breath. He heard, faintly, the waltz still playing below and the party going on in innocent ignorance, glasses and laughter and the alliance of two families being toasted while its bride stood outside a locked room trying to reclaim a suitcase she had paid a pregnant maid two hundred dollars to smuggle down the back stairs.
"Don't open it," Gia said. It was not a shout, in the end. It was lower than a shout and worse than one — raw, stripped of every practiced grace, a woman speaking from underneath herself. "Enzo. Please. Don't open it."
In his experience, innocent people demanded that their property be opened in front of witnesses. Guilty people begged for privacy, and frightened people begged for exactly what she had just begged for — that the thing stay shut, that the moment before knowledge last a little longer, because after knowledge nothing could be put back.
"Go downstairs," he said at last. "Smile for our guests. If you come back to this door, Gia, I will have it guarded, and everyone will wonder why."
A long pause. Then the heels receded, slowly at first, then faster.
Enzo turned to Clara. She was shaking all over now, fine tremors she could not control, the glass of water forgotten and tilting in her hands. He took it from her gently and set it down.
"Did I —" she began. "Is it — Mr. Valenti, is it something bad?"