The Girl With the Painted Face (25 page)

‘Hmm. Lying here doing nothing sounds like a perfect plan to me. Shut up.’

Laughing softly, Beppe murmured, ‘Shall we get up, lovely girl?’

Nodding, Sofia kissed his mouth once more, then sat up, hunching and rolling her shoulders, pushing her fingers up into the now tangled mass of her hair. As she did so, Beppe stretched, cracking his knuckles above his head.

Turning sideways to pick up her skirt from where she had laid it on the floor, Sofia caught sight of Angelo’s perfectly profiled head on the other side of the room, on the pillow next to the still-sleeping Agostino; his eyes were wide and he was staring at her. Suddenly acutely aware of the flimsiness of the lawn of her chemise, she pulled the bundle of her skirts up off the floor and held them bunched in front of her. Holding Angelo’s gaze for a moment, she stared back without smiling and then looked away, turning her back on him.

‘Do you want me to do your laces?’ Beppe said.

‘No – not here. Not in front of him.’

‘What? Who? Oh. I see.’ Beppe’s voice was almost soundless. ‘Come on, take your dress and let’s go. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.’

In a corner of the little space just outside the door, Beppe held Sofia’s skirts out for her to step into, and, standing behind her, neatly fastened the laces at her waist; he tucked the long loose ends down inside out of sight. Sucking in a breath, Sofia closed her eyes as his hands moved around and upwards – but before he could do more than run a flattened palm against one breast, the door banged open, knocking into him. Lurching forwards, he bumped against Sofia and threw her off balance; scooping her up in his arms before she fell, he and Sofia both turned to see who had opened the door.

‘Oh. Sorry,’ Lidia said, catching her lower lip between her teeth to smother a smile. ‘Sorry to be in the way.’

And so, as the tavern room bustles around Sofia in the half-light of the evening, it seems to her that thus has the day unfolded: since dawn, today has been nothing but a series of interruptions and obstructions to every attempt she and Beppe have made to find a moment’s peace and privacy. Or – she corrects herself – almost every attempt. Her heart is beating faster now as the end of the evening approaches, for despite all the interruptions, she and Beppe did manage to make a discovery this afternoon.

Out behind the tavern is a large hay-filled barn.

‘I’ll not let Vico ambush us again tonight,’ Beppe said as they stood hand in hand at the barn door just after lunch. ‘If we wait until they are all noisy and busy drinking, we should be able to slip out, one at a time, and come out here. I’ll bring a couple of blankets. Will you like that idea?’

Sofia did not answer, but nodded.

Beppe runs a hand along her thigh now and grips just above her knee. ‘We might nip out to that barn soon,’ he says very quietly into her ear. ‘I think they’re all happy enough now not to notice us going.’

Sofia glances around. Agostino, smiling widely, has both arms raised as he declaims with great energy; cloth and jug in hand, the ale-man is watching him, round-eyed and fascinated, ignoring his other customers. Cosima is curled against Agostino, moving slightly with every one of his enthusiastic gesticulations, and Vico has his arm over Lidia’s shoulder. He is pointing with his other hand to where Federico and Giovanni Battista are busy arguing about nothing, their affectionate quarrel well lubricated with ale. Lidia’s head is resting against Vico’s but her eyes are closed. Angelo sits apart, slumped in his chair, his head resting heavily on one palm; he is watching the proceedings sideways on, through half-closed eyes. He is, Sofia thinks now, looking at his slow blinking and the slackness of his exquisite mouth, very drunk.

‘You nip out now,’ Beppe says. ‘Go out to the barn and wait for me. I’ll get a couple of blankets from upstairs.’

A bright moon is rising. Papery-white and just off the full, it is hanging low above the treeline and is bathing the old barn with a soft greyish light. Though somewhat ramshackle, with strips of moonlit sky showing through gaps in the wooden-plank walls, the barn is fragrant with the smell of cut hay; as Sofia’s eyes adjust to the gloom of the interior, she can see that this hay is piled untidily throughout the building. High above her, the underside of the roof is swathed with little swags of dust-heavy cobweb and, even as she stares, something tiny scutters along a beam, no more than a fragment of shifting shadow. Several sleepy hens croon softly as she takes a rustling step in from the door towards where a half-height wall supports a section of upper floor. A ladder leans up against this little wall, and an elderly mule is asleep on the far side of it, head down, spine sagging, ears drooping. Nearby, the Coraggiosi horses, too, are dozing. One of them, sensing Beppe’s presence, nickers softly and tosses its head.

Ippo, Beppe’s dog, is curled in the hay by the horses. He scrabbles to his feet as soon as they come in, and barks once, but Beppe hisses at him to lie down, to be quiet, and he obeys at once, his tail thumping softly.

‘Shall we go up?’ Beppe says quietly.

Sofia nods, and puts a foot on the bottom-most rung. It feels sound. She begins to climb, Beppe right behind her; she clutches the side of the ladder in one hand and an awkward bundle of her skirts in the other. Crawling carefully across from the top of the ladder onto the loosely boarded floor of the upper level, a sudden movement makes her gasp and start back – a white-winged owl, disturbed by the two intruders, sweeps silently past her – close enough for Sofia to feel the draught from its soundless wingbeats; it soars out through a gap in the wall on the far side of the barn.

‘Will this be enough for a bed for you?’ Beppe says, dropping his armful of blankets and pulling off his doublet. He stands in front of Sofia, stroking her hair back from her face. ‘Or would you rather go back indoors and share with the others again, on a proper bed in the warm? We can wait for somewhere more comfortable, if this is —?’

Sofia silences him with a kiss. He murmurs incoherently into her mouth, but the words dissolve and Sofia does not listen to them. ‘Stop it,’ she says. ‘No, I don’t want to wait – not one moment longer. Do you?’

Beppe coughs a short laugh. ‘God, no! I’m not sure I could have lasted more than another few seconds, to be honest.’ Dragging armfuls of hay together to make a thick mattress, and flapping out one of the blankets, he sits down on it, patting it with the flat of his hand. ‘Come here.’

Sofia sits neatly beside him, feet out in front of her, back straight, hands in her lap, like a child on its best behaviour.

She is not at all sure she can remember how to breathe.

Turning just his head, Beppe kisses her again, quietly and chastely; for a moment it is only their mouths which connect, and then Sofia finds herself lying back on the blanket, and the hay is scrunching beneath her, and Beppe is searching for her breast, but the stiffened front of the dress seems determined to thwart his attempts. Fiddling with the top edge of the bodice, he tries to pull it aside – once, twice, three times – and it stubbornly refuses to allow him access.

‘Undo my laces – quick,’ Sofia says, sitting up and turning her back towards him. Beppe fiddles with the knot of strings at the nape of her neck. Knot undone, he flips the laces through hole after hole and the tight pressure on her chest and belly lessens as the dress unfastens. Shifting around, she leans towards Beppe and he eases the bodice and sleeves from her, throwing them to one side, leaving her in skirt and shift. Then, reaching around behind her back with trembling fingers, she unfastens the laces at her waist herself, and kicks her heavy skirts down and off her legs.

Now she wears only her shift.

They look at each other for a long moment, saying nothing, not moving. All at once aware of her body and how very much it wants – needs – to be touched, she finds herself staring at Beppe’s mouth.

‘What was it we said that time –
as much as a blade loves a whetstone
?’ he says quietly, and Sofia’s insides leap.

‘Take your shirt off,’ she says, and Beppe sits back, crosses his arms, and tugs his shirt over his head in one fluid movement. Sofia reaches for him; he rolls with her until she is on her back and he is sprawled above her. Then his mouth is on hers; crooking one leg up and over her thighs and pushing a hand under the loose-fitting chemise, he at long last finds her breast. She arches towards him, gasping, as his fingers close around it.

‘Mmm,’ he murmurs, trying to push the folds of the chemise out of his way, ‘I think this needs to come off…’

Sofia sits up and pulls off the shift.

‘God, you’re so beautiful,’ he says almost inaudibly, reaching out and running his fingers around the swell of both breasts. Moving in close, pulling her in to him with a hand in the small of her back, he kisses her. ‘And you smell and taste as good as you look.’

‘Beppe,’ she says.

His face crooks into its tilted smile. ‘What? What is it, little seamstress?’ Taking her by her upper arms, he lays her back on the blanket, pulling the other rug over them both.

She strokes the skin of his chest with the tips of her fingers. ‘I… I’m not sure I know how to do this properly. I’ve… I’ve never —’

Beppe stops her question with another kiss and then returns his attention to her breasts, making her squirm with pleasure. ‘Don’t fret, lovely girl,
’
he says, ‘
you
may not know, but just look at you – your body knows well enough, doesn’t it?’

‘Am I doing what I should, then?’ Sofia says, gasping again as Beppe’s mouth finds her nipple.

Beppe lifts his head. ‘What do you think?’

She does not answer, and for a while they say no more but content themselves with wordless exploration: searching and learning and discovering the secrets of each other’s bodies with fingers and lips and tongues, and the exploration is a revelation to Sofia, who quickly discovers that her body does indeed seem to know very much more than she ever believed it might.

Then Beppe hutches across and slides on top of her, and Sofia sucks in a breath as she feels his weight settle. He pauses. The quiver of anticipation that runs down through her belly is part-way between excitement and trepidation – she is not sure which it might be – but she crooks her knees and wraps her legs around him, finding that now the moment has come, she wants him very much more than she fears the unknown. Her hands lie fisted on either side of her head for a moment, until Beppe uncurls her fingers and links his own through them, pressing her hands down onto the blanket. She can feel and hear the hay scrunching under the pressure.

‘Are you ready?’ he says.

Sofia cannot answer, but manages a murmur of assent and a nod.

Murmuring her pleasure as Beppe kisses her, she frees her hands and strokes around the back of his head, down his back and onto the curve of his buttocks, pulling him in towards her. She feels him reaching in between her legs; his touch makes her gasp once more and she pushes her hips up against his, gripping around his back, wrapping her legs more tightly around him. He hesitates for a second… and then Sofia’s mouth opens in an O of surprise as he pushes gently into her and a jolt of exquisite pain melts quickly into a wave of sweetness.

Their bodies move rhythmically together; through the narrow gaps in the wooden-plank walls, fitful silver stripes of moonlight fall in flickering lines across legs and arms, backs and buttocks, and the breathy gasps and sighs of their loving are the only sounds in the night-still barn.

The first greyish light of dawn is filtering through the gaps in the barn walls sending dapples of silver across where Sofia is curled against Beppe beneath one of the blankets. Below them, the mule stamps a hoof and snorts softly. A barely-audible skittering scratches on the wooden floor somewhere nearby as some tiny creature moves somewhere beneath the hay, and the wood of the barn creaks as though it is stretching and yawning. The scent of the hay is strong in Sofia’s nostrils; within the circle of Beppe’s arm she lies with her head against his chest and her knees bent up and over his legs. Her face moves gently with the rise and fall of his breath.

With his free hand, Beppe strokes her hair away from where it has tendrilled across his face, blowing from a jutted lower lip to clear the last wisps away from his nose. Turning his head, his face is right up against hers; he gives her a soft, slow, squashed kiss, and she nips his lower lip between her teeth.

Pulling it free, he lays a hand on Sofia’s cheek, and, stroking it with the edge of his thumb, he says, ‘I told you your body would know what to do.’

‘Only because you taught it well.’

She cannot see his face – he is too close – but a stretching of his skin against her cheek tells her he is smiling. She contemplates her body as a separate thing from her
self
, a
thing
which knows how to perform tasks she had presumed she could not do – and she starts to take stock of each part of it as it lies drowsily in Beppe’s arms. Her lips are tender and swollen with kissing and her skin is tingling. Her hips feel… stretched out. Flattened. There is a stickiness between her legs and down along the tops of her thighs; it has puckered and stiffened on her skin as it has dried. Putting a hand down under the blanket, she runs her fingers over the dried place, scratching at it. Within her loins an unaccustomed weight lies heavy, too, not unlike the monthly aches she so often experiences, and all this should, in the normal run of things, be discomfort, Sofia thinks, but somehow it is not; she finds she is cherishing every part of it.

She draws in a long, slow trembling breath, and lets it out again.

‘That was a big sigh.’ Beppe has opened his eyes. ‘Not a sad one, I hope.’

Sofia curls against him more tightly. ‘Oh, no. Not sad at all. Not in the least part.’

‘Then what?’

‘Just thinking.’

‘About what?’

‘My body.’

‘That’s funny,’ Beppe says, reaching for her breast under the blanket. ‘So was I.’ He pauses. ‘What were you thinking about it?’

‘Just about the things it has just done. Things I wasn’t expecting it to do.’