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‘Why would he have? As far as I know your father didn’t set foot in Ireland again until months after your mother was buried. I remember that first visit well,’ Joseph recalled with quiet assurance. ‘It was the talk of the village. He had a special memorial mass said for your mother at St Patrick’s. He had the house blessed. He was a superstitious man, and his conscience made him nervous. He came that once, and he was too uneasy to stay even one night below this roof. It was years more before he stayed again.’
‘How good is your memory?’ Rafael enquired.
‘As good as yours—perhaps even better.’
Dark eyes flashing with renewed energy, Rafael drew his plate back and began to eat. The old man’s memory tallied with what he himself had always believed to be fact. He could check it out. He could ask questions. But first and foremost he could bite the bullet and organise DNA tests. Harriet’s mother might not have lied, but there was a chance that she could be mistaken, wasn’t there? She would not be the first woman to make a false assumption.
‘Were there any rumours linking Valente to any woman apart from Una’s mother?’ Rafael enquired as an afterthought.
Tolly’s shrewd gaze narrowed. ‘None that I ever heard.’
Rafael drove down to the little church on the outskirts of the village. Although he had made liberal contributions to the restoration fund, he had not set foot there since his mother’s funeral, more than twenty years earlier. He went inside. He breathed in deep and slow and moved forward. He reached for a candle, lit it, and said a prayer to St Jude, patron saint of impossible causes. He needed a heavy-duty saint up to a major challenge.
‘Rafael…’ Father Kearney had come to a startled halt just inside the entrance. The little priest was striving to conceal his shock at finding the most stubborn black sheep in the parish on holy ground.
*
Harriet was discussing holistic schooling methods with a client when Rafael strolled into the stable yard. Inclining his handsome dark head in polite acknowledgement, he went into the office to wait for her.
Her client, the sensible mother of three little girls, expelled an ecstatic sigh and shot Harriet a comical grin of apology. ‘He looks just like a movie star. I know it’s rude to stare, but I always do.’
Harriet walked slowly past the loose boxes. Rafael made her want to stare as well. In Italy, every morning that she had wakened beside him she had looked at him with fresh appreciation. But now looking at Rafael with pleasure was yet another prohibited act. That admission made her feel more wretched than ever. Peanut pelted out of the office and across the cobbles in ecstatic pursuit of her ball. She was touched that Rafael had given way to the pig, and her eyes prickled with stupid tears.
Rafael straightened as she walked in. ‘OK…I want you to listen. I’m still not convinced we’re blood relations. The facts don’t tally enough to satisfy me yet—’
‘But—’
‘Exactly what did your mother tell you?’
Harriet shared the few facts that she had been told.
‘Valente didn’t smoke. It may well be the only vice he didn’t have,’ Rafael remarked drily. ‘And if he had been a smoker he would have sent his chauffeur to buy the cigarettes. He never did anything for himself that he could pay an employee to do for him.’
Harriet frowned uncomfortably. ‘Those are only small points.’
Level dark golden eyes rested on her. ‘I accept that. But we need to know if he was your father, and we need to know beyond all possible doubt. The only way of achieving that is by utilising DNA testing.’
‘No…I’ve spent two weeks struggling to come to terms with this, and chasing rainbows at this stage is pointless,’ she argued heavily. ‘I don’t like what my mother told me, but I’m not going to fight it. I’m accepting it.’
‘I don’t have an accepting attitude to very bad news. It will take DNA tests to convince me.’ Rafael banded an arm round her before she could guess his intention, and for an instant their reflections twinned in the age-spotted glass of the mirror above the fireplace. ‘Looks-wise, we could not be more different. I know that it’s possible for siblings to be dissimilar, but it’s rarely so pronounced. I’m into science, not chasing rainbows.’
Harriet tore her attention from the mirror. ‘I prefer just to close the book on what we’ve found out and live with it.’
‘But I require scientific confirmation. Valente left a sample of his DNA in store. Don’t laugh…my father hoped that one day he would be cloned. I will be DNA-tested too. It’s only a saliva swab. You may not want to take the test, but for my sake you must. Your identity should be fully established. After all, if you’re Valente’s kid too, yo
ur days of travelling economy class are over for ever.’
Harriet took an angry step back from him. ‘Don’t you dare say that!’ she told him in fierce repudiation. ‘I don’t want anything—least of all money. That’s the very last thing I’d be interested in. If I’d realised what my stupid questions were likely to dig up, I’d have happily lived a lifetime without knowing what I know now!’
‘Do you think that I feel any different? ‘The bleakness in his lustrous dark gaze swallowed her anger alive and pierced her deep.
Eaten alive by guilt, Harriet twisted away. ‘I’m so sorry…I should never have told you.’
‘You’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks that she needs to protect me.’ Rafael vented a roughened laugh. ‘I’m not at all breakable.’
Harriet compressed her lips and tactfully passed no comment. But, after all, she wasn’t the one who had spent three days on an alcoholic binge! Under pressure, Tolly had kept her informed, and she had worried day and night about Rafael. She had been desperate to go to him and offer support, but the unhappy fact was that she had to be the last person he needed in such a role. Yet she was painfully aware that just seeing Rafael in any capacity lifted her spirits and made the day a little more bearable. In turn that made her feel guilty and ashamed and horribly weak.
‘Will you agree to the tests?’
