I Won't Bridge an Impossible Gap novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Blue Thread

At the council breakfast Nina proves the emerald was planted with a spool of black thread, and Alessio sends Ilaria out of his house. Domenico answers by pulling out the contract and its Saturday deadline.

The gate guards opened for me without a word.

Thirty people from the slums walked in behind me and stopped on the gravel, with their shopping bags and house slippers.

The council was having breakfast on the terrace.

I walked straight up the steps with the cloth bundle in both hands.

Domenico Montanari sat at the head of the long table with the old men on either side, and Ilaria sat at his right in a cream silk dress.

Her eyes were red.

She had cried for me, I realized, before anyone had even found me guilty.

"Nina," she said softly. "Oh, Nina. I prayed you hadn't."

I untied the cloth and laid the emerald on the white tablecloth, between the coffee and the plate of figs.

Seven green stones lay in the sun.

"The Ruffo emerald," I said. "Your men found it in my case at Teresa's bakery, in front of thirty witnesses. I brought it back myself."

"You brought it back because you were caught," said Domenico.

He had a pleasant voice.

"Gentlemen, I am sorry. I told my daughter. A woman who asks for nothing is a woman who plans to take everything."

"Papa," said Ilaria, and put her hand on his sleeve. "Please. She's frightened."

The old men looked at me.

I heard the car door shut at the foot of the steps.

Alessio came up slowly.

He had not slept either.

He stopped at the edge of the terrace and said nothing, and I did not look at him.

"Don Ruffo," said one of the old men. "Under our law the council must hear it. A theft from the house of the Don."

"Then hear it," I said. "But hear all of it."

I opened my case on the flagstones and took out my sewing kit.

"There is a lining in that suitcase. Someone opened it and sewed this inside. Look at the thread."

I held up my spool.

"Black. I use black on everything, because it's cheapest, and I have never owned any other colour."

I tossed the slit lining on the table.

"Blue."

The oldest man bent and looked.

"A girl who steals can buy blue thread."

"A girl who steals the Ruffo emerald does not sew it into her own bag with a different thread from the one in her pocket," I said. "I'm a seamstress, signore. My stitches are small and even, and these are neither."

I turned to the doorway where the housekeeper was standing with a tray.

She had been crying, too, and she did not look at Ilaria.

"Please," I said. "Who touched my suitcase yesterday?"

The tray shook.

"Miss Montanari's maid took it from the guest room at four o'clock," she whispered. "She said it was to press the lining for the journey. She brought it back an hour later."

Nobody breathed.

"The maid was only helping me," said Ilaria. "I asked her to look after the guest. A servant could make a mistake."

"With a knife and a needle?" I said.

A woman in house slippers, somewhere behind me on the gravel, said, very clearly, "Ha."

Ilaria's pretty face went still.

Alessio walked to the table.

He picked up the emerald and held it for a second in his scarred hand.

Then he put it on the tablecloth in front of her father, very carefully, like something that might break.

"Ilaria," he said. "Go home."

She looked up at him.

"Alessio, you can't think I..."

"I think your maid ripped open a guest's bag in my house and put my mother's necklace in it. I think you gave her the order. You'll leave this terrace, and you'll not come into my house again until I send for you."

The silence was so complete I could hear the fig leaves move.

"You are throwing me out," said Ilaria. "For her."

Her voice cracked on the last word.

"Twenty years, Alessio. I held your hand at your father's funeral."

"I know," he said. "That's why I'm saying it gently."

She stood.

Her chair scraped, and it was the only sound on the terrace.

She walked past me and she did not look at me.

At the top of the steps she stopped and turned back to her father.

Domenico Montanari put down his napkin.

He got up slowly, with a pleasant smile still on his face, and brushed breadcrumbs from his coat.

"So that is how it is, Alessio," he said. "I carried your father's docks beside my own for twenty-six years. As of this morning, my trucks stay home."

The old men shifted.

"Domenico," said one of them, "be reasonable."

"I am being very reasonable." He pulled a folded paper from inside his coat and laid it on the table beside the emerald. "I am simply reading the contract."

Alessio's hand went flat on the cloth.

I saw his knuckles go white.

"What contract?" I said.

Nobody answered me.

"Your father and mine signed it when you were ten," said Domenico, to him, not to me. "If the Ruffo heir is not legally married by the day he turns thirty, he marries my daughter, or the Montanari take half the Ruffo docks."

He turned to me and smiled.

"Your birthday is Saturday, Alessio. And your town hall date, if I'm not mistaken, was set for a week before it."

I looked at Alessio.

He was looking at the paper, and then at me, and he did not say a word.

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