Page 40 of Bloodlines and Birthright

“My name is Gavin. What’s yours?”

“Rocco. But I mean why are you here? Are you going to tell Pietro?”

I wasn’t yet sure if Signore Scala needed to know about his lover’s anarchist connections, so I didn’t answer and instead asked a different question. “Are you and your friends involved in a recent bombing in Milan?”

He blinked at me and hurriedly shook his head. “I was in Milan three days ago and near where a bomb went off, but I did not cause it.”

“Are you involved in the murder of the boatbuilder in Pecco?”

“No!” He stepped forward and lifted his clasped hands, imploring. “Please. Gavin, do not tell Pietro what you saw, I beg you. Those men are not my friends. They are just people I know. They mean nothing to me, and Pietro is everything. I cannot lose him. I need him. I am poor. I have nothing, only him.”

How quickly the tables turned. He was vulnerable, his confidence shattered as he realized I had power over him. I sympathized but didn’t want him to know it. He might see it as a weakness and try to manipulate me.

“Then how do you know those men?” I pressed.

“We all come to Monteoro every summer for years. I used to be a waiter in a hotel restaurant. That is how I learn English. Every summer, I stay at a pensione in the village. I met those men there. Like me, they come to Monteoro only when there is work to be found. Last summer, Pietro noticed me and took me in. I am his family now. He is mine.” He grasped my hand. “Please, Gavin. Do not tell him that I met those men. There is nothing bad happening, nothing for him to know.” His thumb rubbed my knuckles. “Say nothing, and I will give you what you want.”

I snatched my hand free. “I don’t want anything from you. Go back to bed, Rocco.”

He didn’t immediately react. He seemed to be weighing something up. After a few beats, he turned and crossed the corridor to the bedroom door. I couldn’t help but admire the way his firm, muscular buttocks moved with each step—even someone with no interest in taking a lover can appreciate the naked human form. Before he opened the door, he cast me a final, pleading look over his shoulder, then disappeared inside.

Blood coursing through my veins, I tiptoed downstairs. Moments earlier my mind had gone blank, but now dozens of thoughts fought for attention. They were rather distracting, however, and I needed to focus. We were still in danger of being caught breaking and entering. Indeed, with Rocco awake and back in bed with Signore Scala, the danger was even more acute.

Fortunately, he didn’t raise the alarm. The threat of me exposing his connection to the anarchists was too great. Did that make him guilty of the bombing? The murder? Or just worried that his keeper would throw him out of bed and the villa.

Despite my attempts to regain some focus, I couldn’t manage it. My attention kept wandering to the conversation in the corridor outside the bedroom. I found Oscar and Miss Wheeler in a sitting room, going through an escritoire. The small desk had an elegant shape with slim curved legs and brass handles on all drawers. The lady of the villa probably wrote her correspondence there in years past.

Oscar joined me, his steps bouncy. He’d found something. “There you are, Gavin. I wondered where you got to.”

“What did you find?” I asked, nodding at the escritoire.

“Aside from wood magic, Miss Wheeler discovered a hidden compartment behind the larger drawer. In it was this.” He handed me a photograph mounted on thick paper. “Recognize them?”

The photograph looked like a family portrait taken in a studio with a plain backdrop. A middle-aged couple sat stiff and unsmiling on chairs and two gangly youths, probably their sons, stood behind them. The lads were aged about eighteen or nineteen. I instantly recognized Signore Scala, but it took a moment to recall where I’d seen the other. The clothing and hair were very different to what he wore now, but there was no mistaking the tall man with the bulbous eyes. The abbot!

“They’re brothers?”

“I can see a family resemblance between them all in this,” Oscar said. “Both sons are very tall, but otherwise, the abbot looks more like their father and Pietro looks like their mother.”

“Why didn’t the abbot tell us Signore Scala was his brother?”

“Because he loathes him?” Oscar posed it as a question rather than answer. “The feeling is probably mutual, which explains why this lay forgotten in a drawer, hidden away and not on display.” He studied the photograph nestled on his palm. “Brothers…” he muttered. “They’re either best of friends or each other’s worst enemy.”

Miss Wheeler joined us. “That sounds like you’re speaking from unpleasant personal experience.”

“I don’t know how Isaac and I came from the same set of parents and grew up in the same house. And you, Miss Wheeler? Do you have siblings?”

“This is neither the time nor the place for chit chat.”

I thought Oscar might point out that she’d been the one to prod the conversation to life, but he merely suggested we should leave. He returned the photograph to the hidden drawer and we left the villa the same way we’d entered it.

On the walk back to the hotel, the two of them discussed what they’d found. Oscar mentioned the stripped library and the accounts ledger, both pointing to Signore Scala being in financial difficulty, perhaps due to strikes at the factory. Miss Wheeler mentioned feeling magic in most of the wooden furniture, although it was all quite faint.

“There was nothing linking him to the boatbuilder’s murder either,” she added. “There was also no correspondence of a private nature between him and the man who may have been the dandy you followed, Professor, and certainly no photographs of them together.”

“A man was there with him tonight,” Oscar told her. “Gavin and I saw two sets of men’s clothes in the library.”

Miss Wheeler didn’t seem at all shocked. “The same clothes the dandy wore earlier?”