Sold to a Marseille Don, So He Knelt at My Father's Grave novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Registrar

On her wedding morning she finds white lilies on her father's grave, pours the first cup for Mattei at the feast, and gives her husband the wedding night he did not plan.

On the morning of my wedding I went to my father's grave first.

The Saint-Pierre cemetery was still gray with the chrysanthemums of All Saints.

Pots and pots of them stood on every stone, going brown at the edges.

My father's stone was in the Corsican row, plain, with his name and the years and no photograph.

A bunch of white lilies lay against it, fresh, the stems still wet.

Nobody had told me.

My uncle did not bring flowers to anyone who could not pay him back.

"I don't know who you are," I said to the lilies. "But thank you."

I knelt and touched his name with my wedding finger, where the old gold ring sat snug and warm.

"I'm marrying an Orsini, Papa," I said. "I'm sorry. I'll make it cost them something."

Nobody answered, and I had not expected anybody to.

I walked to the Hotel de Ville on the Vieux-Port by myself.

I wore the ivory suit my mother had been married in, taken in at the waist.

Nobody gave me away.

The registrar's room had gilt chairs, a view of the water and eleven guests, all of them Orsinis.

Antone waited at the table in a dark gray suit.

He looked at me once, the whole length of me, and looked away.

Beside him stood a woman with black hair cut to her jaw and red lipstick.

She held a leather folder against her chest.

"Cecilia Albertini," she said to me, without a smile. "I run the chartering desk. I'm your witness, apparently."

"Apparently," I said.

She had the look of a woman who had been told for ten years that she would be the bride.

The registrar read the articles of the civil code in a flat, pleasant voice.

Nobody in the room looked at anybody else.

"Do you take this man?"

"I do," I said.

"Do you take this woman?"

"I do," said Antone.

"You may kiss the bride," the registrar said, and looked up with a small tired smile.

He turned to me, and I turned to him.

We looked at each other across a gap of a hand's width.

He kissed me.

It was dry and brief and correct, a mouth laid on mine and taken away.

But his hand came up under my jaw to do it, and I felt the pulse in his thumb.

When he drew back, a muscle moved in his cheek, where my hand had landed two weeks before.

The feast was in the long front room where the will had been read.

There were two tables of cousins and no Santonis at all.

My uncle had sent word that his stomach was bad.

Nobody else in my family had been asked.

In the hall, on its own brass hook beside the stair, hung a man's navy sea coat.

It was heavy wool, and the cuffs were stiff and old.

A white-haired woman stood in front of it with a dish towel in her hands.

"That is Pascal's," she said, when she saw me looking. "Nobody touches it. Nobody cleans it."

"I understand," I said.

"I am Marie-Ange. I keep this house." She looked me over, once. "You will eat."

She put a plate in my hands, and she walked away.

At the toast an old cousin stood and filled his glass.

"To the Orsinis," he said. "To Mattei, who is not here. And to the Santoni."

Then he stopped, and the wait went on too long.

Antone rose, glass in hand, and spoke in Corsican, low and fast, to the room.

I do not speak the island language.

My mother left it behind when she married my father in the Panier and learned French for his sake.

But I knew the one word he said twice.

Mattei.

The old men answered him with a hard low sound, and I understood that I had been toasted as the cause of a death.

Nobody looked at me.

I stood up with my glass and walked out through the French windows into the courtyard.

The stones were wet from the morning's rain.

I poured the first of my wine onto them, slowly, as my grandmother did on the feast of the dead.

"For Mattei Orsini," I said, loud enough that the whole room could hear. "I never knew him. I am sorry he is gone."

Then I poured the second.

"For Ange Santoni, who is also gone, and who was also somebody's."

I came back in and set my empty glass on the cloth.

For a moment no one made a sound.

Then the old cousin lifted his glass and drank it off.

"Santoni," he said, and nodded at me once.

Antone stood with his glass untouched, looking at the wet stones through the open doors.

He did not look at me again until it was dark.

Four flights of stairs led to the room at the top of the house, and he walked me up every one in silence.

He opened the door.

My workbench stood under the dormer window.

Beside it were my kiln stand, my brushes, my bags of clay and the unfired shepherds in their tray.

Somebody had carried my whole work up here while I was at the grave.

"It is not a kindness," he said, behind me. "It is an inventory."

"Everything's here," I said, and my throat closed. "Even the tray."

"You said the tray was your mother's."

I turned around.

He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame, his tie loosened by an inch.

His gray eyes were hard.

"You poured wine on my brother's stones," he said.

"And on my father's," I said.

"In front of my family," he said.

"I thought you would want him remembered properly."

"I want," Antone said, and stopped.

His hand flexed on the frame.

"I want to know why you are not afraid of me."

"I was afraid of you on Friday," I said. "Then you came to my atelier and let me hit you."

His eyes dropped to my mouth.

"Rule two," I said. "You broke it first."

"You broke it first."

"Then come in and shut the door."

He came in.

He shut the door and locked it, and then he stood there with his back against it.

I crossed the room and took his tie in my hand.

"Wife," he said, very low, and it was not an endearment.

"Husband," I said, and pulled.

He kissed me properly then, mouth open, one hand fisted in the back of my hair.

The other was already at the buttons of my mother's jacket.

I got his tie loose and his collar open, and I put my palms flat on his chest.

His heart was going hard under them.

He undressed me fast and clumsy at first, and then slowly, because he made himself slow down.

He took off the jacket and the silk blouse and stripped the skirt down my legs onto the floor.

He looked at me in my white slip and nothing else, under the bare bulb of that room.

He made a sound I had never heard from a man.

"Take it off," he said.

I pulled the slip over my head.

He put his mouth on my breast and drew hard on the nipple, and my knees nearly went.

I got his belt open.

I got his trousers down and my hand around his cock, hot and thick and heavy.

He groaned into my skin.

"Bed," I said.

He lifted me and laid me across the narrow iron cot under the dormer.

He came down over me, still half dressed.

His cock pressed against my thigh.

His mouth moved down my body, over my ribs and my belly, and I put both hands in his hair.

"Not yet," I said. "I want you inside me. You walked out on me Friday."

"Santoni."

"Vannina. Say it."

He looked down the length of my body, his chest heaving.

"Vannina," he said.

He pushed into me in one long stroke, and I cried out, and so did he.

He was big.

He stretched me full, and for a moment neither of us moved.

His whole body was shaking over mine.

"All right?" he said, roughly.

"Move," I said.

He moved.

He fucked me slowly at first, in long drags that opened me wider each time.

His forehead was against mine and his eyes were on my face.

The cot rang against the wall.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and he went deeper.

"Harder," I heard myself beg. "Please, Antone."

He gave me harder.

He drove into me, and the iron frame struck the plaster.

His mouth was against my ear, and he began to speak in Corsican, low and ragged, a stream of words I did not know.

Some of it was soft, and some of it was close to cursing.

"What are you saying?" I gasped.

"Nothing," he said.

"Tell me."

"No."

He reached between us and rubbed my clit with his thumb, tight and fast.

I came with a cry that rattled the dormer glass, clenching hard around him.

He followed me with his face in my neck and my name torn out of him.

He lay heavy on me for a while, his breath in my hair.

Then he rolled off and sat up and reached for his shirt.

"Do not think this makes you family," he said.

I lay looking at the ceiling with my pulse still going.

"I don't," I said. "Leave the door unlocked."

He stood at the door for a long moment, buttoning his cuffs.

Then he turned the key the other way, went out and left it open.

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