The Italian's Token Wife

She thought she would faint. She could hear the blood drumming in her ears. Around her leg, Benji buried his face in the worn material of her cotton trousers and whimpered. He could not understand the words—but he could understand the anger, the raw hatred that came through. The contempt.

Her vision blurred. Rafaello’s father strode past her, and she heard him descend the marble stairs to the hall below.

She felt the tray shaking in her hands and knew that if she did not put it down it would fall from her nerveless fingers and crash to the ground. But she couldn’t stop her hands shaking.

Then, suddenly, the tray was taken from her.

‘In here—’

She felt herself propelled back through the bedroom door—open again somehow—felt Benji lifted away, heard his protest, and then she was sitting on the bed, Benji in her arms. She just sat there clutching him, clutching him, not seeing anything, not feeling anything, just hunched there, holding Benji, who was whimpering in her arms.

Someone was standing in front of her. Tall and dark, blocking out the light. She knew who it was. Rafaello di Viscenti. Who had chosen her for his bride not because she was convenient and malleable but because she would disgust his father. She was the ‘lowest of the low’—his father’s hideous words rang like blows in her head—the perfect insult to throw in his father’s face.

‘Magda…’

His voice came low.

She went on clutching Benji to her and staring blindly down at the carpet, trying not to think, not to feel…

‘You must not—must not believe what my father said. It is me he is angry with.’ The words grated from him.

Her hand curved round Benji’s head, his hair satin-smooth. She could say nothing. Nothing at all.

Rafaello watched the gesture. He wanted to find the words but he couldn’t. There were none to find. His father had said them all. But he had to try, all the same.

‘Magda, I—’

Her head lifted and her eyes met his. Hers were quite, quite blank.

‘You don’t have to say anything. It’s quite unnecessary.’ If her voice had a crack in it, she ignored it. Refused to acknowledge it. She would not feel anything; she would not. She stood up, settling Benji on to her hip. Another half-cracked breath seared from her. ‘Please tell me where I should go for breakfast this morning—or would you prefer that I stayed here in my room?’ Her voice was controlled, but it was thin—thin like wire pulled so taut it must surely break any instant.

Rafaello’s mouth thinned.

‘In summer the family has breakfast on the terrace. Come—’

He held out his hand to her. She ignored it, and walked to the door instead. Rafaello was there before her, opening it and letting her go through with a courtesy he would have afforded a duchess. Instead, she thought, with the peculiar blankness that seemed to have closed down over her, he’s wasting it on me.

He chose you for that very reason, deliberately and calculatedly, to knowingly insult his father by his choice of bride. He’d known exactly how his father would react all along—he hadn’t been thoughtless at all. He’d been cold-bloodedly set on using her to insult his father.

Family breakfast on the terrace was the very last thing that she wanted to endure, but the blankness would make it bearable after all. When she walked out with Rafaello she saw that his aunt and uncle were already there, as was his father.

Seeing Magda, the professor got to his feet and bade her good morning. She barely managed a nod in reply. With a scrape of iron on stone, Rafaello’s father got to his feet, too. He picked up his full cup of coffee.

‘I shall be in the library. I have matters to attend to.’

He walked away, making it obvious he refused to share her company.

The lowest of the low.

The words hit her again, and again.

Magda sat down, not where Rafaello was holding a chair for her, but at the farthest end of the table. She wanted to die, to sink through the floor. Her heart was in a vice, crushed with a pain she would not acknowledge.

‘So,’ said Elizavetta Calvi, her voice a little too loud, a little too determined, ‘this is your little boy. And you said his name is—?’

‘Benji,’ said Rafaello, sitting down opposite Magda and flicking open his napkin. His voice was strained and Magda wondered why. Maybe it was the effort of giving her fatherless child his name.

She busied herself settling Benji on her lap, not meeting anyone’s eyes, and one of the maids came out, bringing some warmed milk in Benji’s feeding mug, which he gripped with delight and proceeded to imbibe gustily. For herself, she had no appetite. She seemed to be very far away, sitting behind a sort of glass wall that separated her from the others at the table, even when they spoke to her and she made brief, low-voiced, withdrawn replies. There was none of the drawing out or stimulating conversation of the night before.