Embrace the Night

Page 66



poverty in which they lived, hated the crowded house, the long hours in the fields, the constant struggle for survival. He had yearned for a different life, a better life, and the opportunity had come on a cool spring morning.

He had agreed to gentle a headstrong young stallion for one of their neighbors and he had been hard at work when a portly, gray-haired man stopped to watch him. The man had been impressed with the way Gabriel handled the horse, so impressed he had offered Gabriel a job working in his stables. For Gabriel, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Salvatore Musso was a wealthy man who owned a large villa in Vallelunga.

Gabriel had readily accepted the position. He had bade his parents a cheerful good-bye, promising to send money home and to visit often.

He had worked hard during the next six months, earning Musso's respect, making friends with the man's son, Giuseppe.

He had been sixteen when he received word that his parents were ill. He had left for home immediately, but it had been too late. A mysterious fever had swept through the village, and he had watched his family die, one by one. First his mother, then his sisters, his brothers, and finally his father.

Only then, when all those he loved were dead, had he realized how much he had loved them. Deep inside, he had felt as if their deaths had been his fault.

At the urging of the village priest, Giuseppe's parents had taken Gabriel into their home. At first, mourning the loss of his family, he had kept to himself, but as time passed, he discovered a whole new world, a world of wealth and aristocracy, a world where people never went to bed hungry, where servants did the work, where everyone dressed in fine clothes.

It was a world he had never seen before, a world he wanted for his own.

Giuseppe's parents had been most generous. They had fed him and clothed him, but fine clothes could not disguise Giovanni's lack of social grace. Still, he had tried hard and learned quickly, and he'd had one thing in his favor: he was young and handsome and the women adored him. They were willing to make allowances for his cloddish manners, willing to teach him the dances of the day, to instruct him in etiquette and proper decorum. He had quickly learned the polite phrases, the art of dancing and fencing, the proper way to sit a horse, to greet royalty. But always, in the back of his mind, had been the knowledge that he was only pretending.

He had been nine and twenty when he accompanied Giuseppe to Venice. It had been a time of laughter, of parties that seemed never-ending. It was there he had met Antonina Insenna. She had beguiled him from the start, and he had quickly fallen prey to her dark beauty. She had been a woman of untold wealth and power. To others she had appeared coolly self-assured, aloof, but for Giovanni she had smiled, and when she smiled, he was lost.

Nina had been everything he had thought he wanted in a woman: beautiful, desirable, mysterious. The fact that she was older than he only added to her mystique, as did her refusal to see him during the day, and though they had spent every evening together, she had refused to let him stay the night. And because he had thought himself in love, because she had been a woman of the world, full of fire and mystery, he had seen only what he wanted to see.

And then, on an afternoon in later summer, he had met Rosalia Baglio, a young woman of quiet,