Chapter Three : The Devil Wears Silk

Ferdinand De Luca came home on a Tuesday.

There was no warning, no letter sent ahead, no messenger dispatched from the road to give Angela time to prepare the house and her face and the particular version of domestic peace she liked to present to her husband after a long absence. He simply appeared at the door of the house on Via Margherita with his travelling coat still on and his luggage behind him, looking exactly the way he always looked after weeks on the road, larger than the doorframe, darker than the hallway, filling whatever room he entered with a quality of silence that made everyone in it instinctively straighten their backs.

He was not a tall man, Ferdinand, not especially broad, but had the kind of presence that had nothing to do with size, the presence of a man who had never once in his life wondered whether he had the right to speak first, sit first, eat first, decide first. A merchant by profession, a patriarch by disposition, and a man who believed with complete sincerity that the only thing standing between a family and ruin was discipline. And that discipline, when words failed, had a leather strap to fall back on.

Seraphina had known that strap since she was nine years old. She was the only one of his daughters who had.

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Angela met him in the entrance hall and spoke to him for exactly eleven minutes with the door closed. Seraphina knew because she stood at the top of the stairs and counted. She could not hear the specific words,  only the low controlled current of her mother's voice, and then the longer heavier silences that followed each thing she said. The silences were worse than shouting. They always were with Ferdinand.

When the door opened, he did not come upstairs immediately.

He went to the kitchen first and poured himself water, before he sat at the head of the table,  always the head, even after three months away, and drank slowly, looking at nothing. Maria sat across from him with her hands folded, nodding at whatever he said with the devoted attentiveness she reserved exclusively for their father. Lucia had taken her daughter and disappeared into the back room, which was what Lucia always did when Ferdinand came home.

Seraphina stayed at the top of the stairs.

She was still there when he finally came up.

He did not shout. Ferdinand De Luca rarely shouted, shouting was for men who had no other tools. He stood in the doorway of her room with his arms at his sides and looked at her with the flat assessing look of a man examining damage to something he owned, calculating the cost of repair.

"Monday," he said. "Nine o'clock. The Church of Sant'Angelo. Father Lucien." A pause. "You will go."

"Papa…"

"This is not a conversation, Seraphina."

She looked at him. He looked at her. Four years ago she had looked at him exactly this way from the floor of this very room with her back burning and her teeth clenched against every sound he wanted her to make. She had held his gaze then too. She had not looked away then either.

She did not look away now.

"Fine," she said.

Ferdinand studied her face for a moment longer, searching for the rebellion she was already quietly planning behind her eyes. He did not find it. Not because it wasn't there, but because Seraphina had spent twenty-two years learning exactly where to put things she didn't want her father to see.

He left without another word.

* *  *  *  *  *

Sunday came and went, Monday morning arrived grey and close, the kind of Terranova morning that smelled of damp stone and distant rain. The feast day decorations had been taken down from the streets. The town had settled back into its ordinary rhythms. The bells of Sant'Angelo rang at eight, then again at quarter past eight, their sound moving through the narrow streets and into the house on Via Margherita where Angela De Luca stood in the entrance hall at twenty minutes past eight with her hands clasped and her jaw set and waited.

She heard Seraphina's door open, her footsteps on the stairs.

She turned and stopped.

Seraphina came down the staircase slowly, one hand trailing the banister, completely unhurried, as though she had all the time in the world and the world could wait. She had dressed carefully, very carefully,  and not in the way Angela had intended when she laid out the grey wool dress on Seraphina's bed the night before. The dress with the high collar. The long sleeves. The general silhouette of penitence.

The grey wool dress was still on the bed.

What Seraphina wore instead was deep green silk,  one of her good dresses, cut close through the waist and hips, the neckline sitting low enough to be deliberate without being low enough to provide legal grounds for an argument. Her round perfect breasts were slightly poking out of the low neckline of the tight dress accentuating every curve on her body, which was the detail that made Angela's jaw tighten. Her dark hair was completely down,, because Seraphina's hair down was never an accident and they both knew it. Her lips were faintly stained with colour. She smelled of the good perfume,  the one in the glass bottle Ferdinand had brought from the north two years ago that Angela had been rationing for special occasions.

She reached the bottom step and looked at her mother with an expression of perfect, serene innocence.

"I am ready," she said.

Angela stared at her.

"Go upstairs and change."

"I am dressed."

"You are dressed for a dinner party. Not a counselling session with a priest."

"You said go to the church." Seraphina spread her hands lightly. "You did not specify a dress code."

"Seraphina." Angela's voice dropped. "I am not joking with you this morning."

"Neither am I." Seraphina tilted her head. "You want me to sit across from a holy man and discuss my soul. I thought I should at least look presentable." She paused, and that small precise gleam moved through her eyes,  the one that always came just before she said the thing nobody in the room wanted said. "Besides. Father Lucien is a young man. Barely older than I am, from what I hear." Another pause, perfectly timed. "Perhaps holiness is easier to maintain when temptation does not bother to dress well."

Angela's face moved through several expressions in quick succession.

"What," she said quietly, "is that supposed to mean?"

"Only that your beloved reverend priest has eyes, Mama." Seraphina picked up her embroidered shawl from the chair by the door and settled it around her shoulders with the ease of a woman who has always known exactly what she is doing. "Like all men have eyes, and eyes, as we have established in this family…" she smiled, "tend to look."

"You will not walk into that church and disrespect that man." Angela stepped forward, her voice fierce and low. "He is a priest. He is a man of God. You will sit in that chair and you will listen and you will conduct yourself like a De Luca woman for once…"

"I am always conducting myself like a De Luca woman." Seraphina's smile did not move. "That is precisely what frightens you."

She opened the front door and walked out into the grey Monday morning.

Angela stood in the entrance hall and listened to her footsteps fade down Via Margherita, that unhurried, deliberate rhythm that had been driving her to the edge of herself for twenty-two years.

Then she turned and looked at the icon of the Virgin above the candle in the hallway.

"God help that priest," she said quietly, as she was not entirely sure she was joking.