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Of course Alicia did not know that it had, for it was an hour before dawn and she was still asleep in her bed. But there was an angry rap at the door of her bedroom.
Alicia startled awake and opened the door.
‘Is he yours?’
Sister Angelique stood there, her eyes bulging and with spittle at the edge of her lips.
‘Tell me now. Is the baby yours?’
‘Baby...?’
‘Have you been hiding it?’ She glowered.
‘Hiding a baby?’
She was so bewildered Alicia thought the nun was going to check the wardrobe or under her bed, but her mind had not fully woken up.
‘I saw you unkempt and with your earring missing that day. You were missing for hours with that Schininà boy. And nine months later there’s a baby at the door.’
‘Sister, I don’t know what you’re saying...’
It was late spring, and the night sky was already bright as she was marched to the convent and taken down to the small infirmary, where the cries of a newborn grew louder as they neared the nursery.
‘He’s not mine,’ Alicia insisted, and then stilled when she saw the tiny infant. His head was to one side, he was angry and red, and...
‘That baby is pure Schininà,’ Sister Angelique sneered as she stated the obvious. ‘He must have been busy in the short time he was back.’
‘What do you mean?’ Alicia asked, but she answered her own question.
Dante had barely been here.
One, maybe two nights.
It didn’t even matter if she’d been before or after, because in that very second all the bliss Alicia had found fell away.
Sister Angelique’s spiteful words merely twisted the knife. ‘It would seem you’re not so special after all.’
Alicia just stood there, the sound of her own pulse in her ears blocking the infant’s cries. She had thought that day mattered. That, however fleeting their time had been, something precious had occurred.
Clearly not for Dante.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ Sister Angelique scolded. ‘He needs feeding.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Come, now,’ Sister Angelique said. ‘It’s hardly the child’s fault. I shall get a bottle ready and then I must prepare for morning worship.’
‘I can’t,’ Alicia insisted.
But it fell on deaf ears, for Sister Angelique was making up a bottle. She placed it in a steel jug to cool, and then left her with the new arrival in the nursery.
Alicia lifted him, and as she fed him she tried so hard not to notice the perfect arch of his eyebrows, nor the shape of his jaw, tried to deny the clear evidence.
Then his little feet kicked out of the blanket...
Who would have thought toes could be so revealing? They were long, as were his limbs.‘Poco ragno,’Alicia whispered as she tucked him in—little spider.
Of course she could not be sure, and it would probably never be confirmed, but her heart knew that Sister Angelique was right—he was pure Schininà.
