A Whisper of Disgrace

She remembered her mother’s face looking flushed and contorted. She remembered the sudden lull in the music as Carmela’s slurred words had echoed around the room. Awful, shocking words which had chilled her to the bone. They still did. Rosa tried to stop her lips from trembling as she stared into Kulal’s face, but it seemed that this was something else which was beyond her control. She took another deep breath. ‘I discovered that my father was not my father,’ she said.

‘You already told me that on the plane.’

‘I discovered that my father was in fact my uncle,’ she finished painfully, just so that there could be no misunderstanding. ‘My mother slept with my uncle.’

She was unprepared for the violence of his reaction. She saw his face darken as if some kind of violent storm was brewing there. She sensed that he was about to move away from her even before he actually did. He unpeeled himself from her warm body and got off the bed, walking to the other side of the vast room where he stood there surveying her, as if she was an alien species who had just dropped into his life from another world.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SHIVERING FROM HIS sudden departure from the bed and from the new coldness in his eyes, Rosa met Kulal’s accusing gaze.

‘Your mother slept with your uncle?’ he demanded in a voice which was icy with disbelief.

‘Yes.’ She tried not to flinch, thinking that it sounded even worse when it came from someone else’s lips. And Kulal clearly thought so too, because his face had frozen into a sombre mask. ‘But this is terrible!’ he flared. ‘I have rarely heard anything more shocking.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ she questioned. ‘You think I wouldn’t give everything I owned for it not to be so?’

‘Is this not incest?’ he questioned, almost as if he was speaking to himself.

‘No! No!’ And to Rosa’s horror, she burst into tears. All the tears she’d been bottling up ever since her mother had blurted out the horrible truth now came spilling out. She hadn’t dared to give in to the danger of crying before, terrified that once she started she might never stop. She had needed all her energy and her strength to get away from Sicily and the dark web of deceit which had been woven into her life for all these years. But now that the tears had begun, they seemed unstoppable. They slid down her cheeks and onto her breasts, dripping from the prominent curves to fall in a growing damp mark on the pristine linen sheet. ‘I d-don’t know what it is, but it’s not that,’ she declared raggedly. ‘My mother and my uncle were not related by blood.’

‘But they were related by honour!’

‘Yes, they were!’ She glared at him, wiping away the falling tears with a clenched fist. ‘Don’t you think this has been difficult enough, without you, a complete stranger, getting on your high horse and taking the moral high ground?’

‘But I am not a “complete stranger,” Rosa. I am your husband!’

His words seemed to bring her to her senses and she shook her head. ‘But only as a symbol,’ she whispered. ‘As an expedient measure which suits us both. You’re not a real husband, Kulal—and a marriage of convenience doesn’t give you the right to stand in judgement of me, especially when this was something which was completely out of my control.’

For a moment there was a silence. Kulal stared at the fierce set of her lips, as if she was determined not to cry again. And he saw something in her which he recognised with a painful twist of his heart. Something he had buried so deep that he had almost forgotten its existence but which was now reflected in Rosa’s tearstained eyes. It was powerlessness, yes, but it was anger too—that in a single moment, your life could change for ever. For him, it had happened when his mother had scrambled up a rock to go to the aid of her trapped child. For Rosa it had happened when her mother had looked at her husband’s brother with lust in her eyes.

Damn the past, he thought viciously. And damn the never-ending repercussions of that past.

He walked across the room towards her and sat down on the edge of the bed, watching her gaze slide briefly to the roughness of his naked thighs before she turned her head to stare into his face instead. He could see the wariness which had frozen her features and he took one of her cold hands in his. ‘You should have told me all this before,’ he said.

‘And would you have still married me?’

There was a pause as he imagined the reaction of the press, if ever this were to get out. He could read the desperate question in her eyes and he knew it would be the easiest thing in the world to tell her what she wanted to hear. But wasn’t it about time that people stopped lying to Rosa Corretti?