The Priest's Forbidden Love

"Open this door!"

Angela De Luca's voice tore through the narrow corridor of the Fontana Inn like a blade through silk. It was not a request. It was never a request when Angela De Luca spoke. The hotel manager,  a small, round man named Bertolini who had managed thirty years of scandal within these walls without losing his composure for once, found himself trembling for the first time in his career.

"Madam, I assure you, the guest in room seven has paid for her privacy and…"

"Her privacy?" Angela laughed, and it was the kind of laugh that made children cry and grown men step backward. " Give me that key, Bertolini, or I will have this establishment closed before the feast day bells stop ringing."

He gave her the key.

By then, the corridor had filled. It was Saint Michael's Feast Day,  the holiest day on the Calabrian calendar, a day when every decent family in the province sat together at long tables laden with roasted lamb and fresh bread, when the church bells rang from sunrise to sunset and the streets smelled of incense and orange blossoms. Nobody worked. Nobody argued. Nobody conducted any business that could not be mentioned in confession without a burning face.

Nobody, apparently, except Seraphina De Luca.

Doors had cracked open all along the corridor. Faces peered out , an elderly widow clutching her rosary beads, two merchant brothers still in their Sunday coats, a young couple who had come to the Fontana for their wedding night and now stood watching with wide, delighted eyes. Maria De Luca pressed herself flat against the wall beside her mother, her face drained of every drop of colour, her gloved hands clasped so tightly together that her knuckles had gone white.

"Mama," she whispered. "Please. Let us go home. We can send Giorgio to…"

"I will not send Giorgio." Angela's jaw was set like stone. "I will not send anyone. I came here myself and I will drag her out myself."

She pushed the key into the lock.

The door swung open.

The room was small and mean,  a cracked washbasin in the corner, a window with a broken shutter letting in the afternoon light, a narrow iron bed with a yellowed counterpane. The smell of cheap tallow candles and dried sweat hung in the air. It was the kind of room that was rented by the hour to people who could not afford shame.

Seraphina sat on the edge of the bed.

She was not fully dressed.

Her feast-day blouse hung off one shoulder, the laces at the front pulled loose, the fabric crumpled beyond the kind of crumpling that happened from a long day of walking. Her skirt was twisted sideways at the waist. Her dark hair, which Maria had spent the better part of that morning pinning into something respectable, was completely undone, wild around her shoulders and down her back, and there was a faint red mark on her throat that had nothing to do with a slap.

The young man was worse.

He stood on the far side of the narrow bed with his shirt balled up in one hand and his boots clutched in the other, his broad chest still flushed, his belt hanging open at his waist. He was a large man ,  the kind built by years of fieldwork and heavy lifting, and yet the moment Angela De Luca filled that doorway he seemed to shrink to nothing. The colour drained from his face so completely and so quickly that for a moment he looked like a man receiving his last rites.

The bed between them told the rest of the story. The counterpane was twisted. A pillow had landed on the floor. On the nightstand, a small icon of Saint Michael,  the kind the innkeeper placed in every room as a matter of piety, had been turned face-down.

Even the saint, it seemed, had not wanted to watch.He did not wait to be spoken to.He did not wait for anything.

He was past Angela, past Maria, past the gaping widow and the merchant brothers and the wedding couple before anyone could draw a full breath, his boots still clutched to his chest, his feet slapping against the stone floor as he thundered down the corridor and out of the Fontana Inn and, by all appearances, out of Seraphina De Luca's life entirely.

Not a single person watched him go.

Every eye was on Seraphina.

She had not moved. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking up at her mother with an expression that was almost, almost , bored. And then the corner of her mouth lifted, just slightly.

SLAP.

The sound split the silence of the room like a gunshot. Seraphina's head snapped sideways, her dark hair swinging across her face. The red mark bloomed instantly on her cheek, vivid and furious against her pale skin. From the corridor came a sharp collective intake of breath, the sound of a crowd that had hoped for drama and received it in full measure.

Maria pressed her hand to her mouth.

Seraphina slowly turned her face back.

The smile was still there. Smaller now, quieter, but still there,  and that, more than anything else, was what broke the last of Angela De Luca's composure.

"Have you completely lost your mind?" Her voice was shaking. Angela De Luca's voice never shook. "On Saint Michael's Day! In this, this place with a farmer, Seraphina! A farmer with mud still on his hands. Do you understand what you have done? Do you have any idea what people will say?"

"I have a very good idea," Seraphina said. Her voice was quiet and even. "They are already saying it. You can hear them."

She was right. The whispers had begun the moment the door opened and they had not stopped since.

"The De Luca girl…"

"On Saint Michael's Feast Day, of all the days she could have chosen…"

"A peasant. A field hand. Not even from the town proper…"

"Did you see Angela's face? God forgive me, but did you see it…"

"That family. First the father, now this. The devil follows the De Lucas like a shadow…"

"They say she has always been this way. Wild since she was a child. The one God sent to punish them…"

Angela stepped fully into the room and closed the door behind her, though it was a useless gesture , the walls of the Fontana Inn were thin as paper and every word she spoke would travel perfectly into the corridor and from the corridor into the street and from the street into every parlour and kitchen and church pew in the province before sunset.

"Get up," Angela said.

Seraphina stood.

"Fix your hair."

Seraphina pushed her hair back from her face without hurry.

"You will walk out of here with your head down, and you will not look at a single person, and you will not open your mouth until we are inside our own house with the door shut behind us. Do you understand me?"

"I understand you perfectly."

"Then move."

They came out into the corridor ,  Angela first, iron-spined, her chin lifted with the particular dignity of a woman who has decided that the only weapon left to her is posture; Seraphina behind her, unhurried, the mark of her mother's hand still burning on her cheek; Maria trailing last, her eyes fixed on the floor as though she could make herself invisible by refusing to look at the world.

The crowd parted for them. Of course it did. But it did not disperse. It followed, not closely, not obviously, but it followed, spilling down the corridor and out into the Fontana's narrow courtyard and then into the sunlit street where the feast-day decorations still hung between the buildings, garlands of dried flowers and small painted icons of the Archangel Michael fluttering in the afternoon breeze.

Half the town seemed to materialize from nowhere. It was the feast day , everyone was outside, everyone was idle, everyone had hours to fill and nothing more pressing to occupy them than the sight of Angela De Luca marching her disgraced daughter through the cobbled streets of town like a prisoner under escort.

The whispers followed them like flies.

"Sleeping with a peasant on a holy day"

"Her poor mother. Her poor, poor mother"

"They say the father was the same. Bad blood. It runs in them"

"God marked that girl from birth, I always said so. Some children come into the world as punishment…"

"Did you see her face when her mother slapped her? Did you see her smile?"

Seraphina heard every word. She was meant to hear them. The town of Terranova was not a place that whispered out of delicacy,  it whispered loudly, with relish, turning its cruelty over in its mouth like a sweet. She had been hearing these particular whispers her entire life, in one form or another. The child God sent to punish them. The De Luca shame. The bad blood.

She kept her face forward and her chin level and her hands still at her sides, and she told herself, as she had always told herself, that it did not touch her.

She was still telling herself this when Angela stopped abruptly at the corner of Via Sant'Angelo and turned on her, and the look on her mother's face was something Seraphina had not seen before. Not fury. Not humiliation. Something worse than both.

"Why?" Angela's voice had dropped so low it was nearly inaudible beneath the feast-day bells. Her eyes were bright and strange. "I have asked God every day of your life why He gave you to me. Today I am asking you. Why do you do this? What is it in you that will not stop?"

Seraphina opened her mouth.

And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she did not have an answer.