Chapter 16: Eighteen Names

I had been looking for my husband since the kitchen.

Ines had said to ask him, and I could not ask anything of anyone.

He had come up from the cellar at dawn and shut himself in the study, and he had not come out.

I stopped outside the study door, and I heard nothing, not even a chair.

So I went down to the great hall, which had been scrubbed, and the doors had been mended.

Nobody had put the chairs back, and the long dining table was gone.

My brothers stood in the empty middle of the room in their funeral suits.

The fathers of my two sisters-in-law came in through the mended doors a little after ten.

They were both old men, and they came without their sons.

One of them carried a folded paper, and the other carried nothing at all.

My older brother stepped forward first.

"Signor," he said. "You asked to hear it from us."

"I did," said the man with the paper. "Say it."

My brother's hands hung open at his sides.

"I was at the castle with the Don and the others," he said. "My wife was here."

"I knew it was a test."

"I knew, and I raised a glass to it."

The old man did not move.

"Gemma Colombo said the women would cry," my brother said. "She said they would fall to pieces without us, and we would walk in and be heroes."

"And you laughed," said the other father.

"I laughed."

"At what hour?"

"At about nine. They were already dead at nine."

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