She passed the tree, giving it a respectful nod. There were fresh lemons piled in a basket in its shade. There was a wide road nearby, a way for horses to get to the village, but she ignored it. Along another path, barely marked in the clover, she hurried her steps until she found what she sought. Her own perfect place.
While her father worked on the villa, once the dwelling place of rich men, and Thalia revived Antigone in the theatre, Clio looked for less exalted remains. Her explorations had brought her here, to this quiet little meadow, where she had found her farmhouse.
She paused at the edge of the site, as she always did when she arrived, drinking in the peaceful, quiet vision. It was not the ancient holiday house of a wealthy family, as the villa was. The people here had been prosperous, but they also worked for their coin. Lived off the fruit of their labour and their land. Once, this clover-covered valley had been fields of wheat and barley, with fruit orchards and groves of olives.
Until it all came to an end, one violent day in the second century BC. Now there were just some waist-high walls of small, uneven pieces of tan-coloured limestone, weatherbeaten and crumbling, to mark where their house once stood. But Clio intended to find more. Much more.
She hurried to the walls, pulling out her stash of tools wrapped in oilcloth and tucked into a sheltered niche. The wooden handle of the small spade fit perfectly into her hand, as a soldier’s sword hilt would in battle. Maybe she did not belong in London, not really, but she did belong here. When she worked, she forgot the world outside. She even forgot Averton—for a time.
All the passion she had once poured into the Lily Thief was now given to her farmhouse. To finding the voices of the people who once lived here.
She went to work.
Chapter Two
‘Is it quite satisfactory, your Grace?’ the agent asked, his voice quivering slightly. ‘Truly, it is the finest palazzo to be had in all of Santa Lucia. The views are most exquisite, and it is quite near the cathedral and the village square. And there is a hunting cottage, too, in the hills, if you require it. The baroness is usually very reluctant to leave her furnishings for the tenants, but for you, of course, she is only too happy…’
Only too happy to have an English ducal arse touch her couches? Edward Radcliffe, the Duke of Averton, examined the flaking, worn gilt of the apricot velvet chairs with some amusement. They looked as if the slightest touch would reduce them to a pile of splinters and shredded upholstery. The baroque flourishes of the place, plaster cherubs peering down from the ceilings and faded apricot-coloured silk wallpaper, seemed no better. Chipped and crumbling away, like an abandoned wedding cake.
It could certainly use a thorough cleaning, as well, for the scuffed marble floor was covered with a fine layer of silvery dust. Cobwebs spun from the elaborate frames of old portraits, where the baroness’s exalted Sicilian forebears gazed down at him in disapproval.
Well, they were not the only ones who disapproved, to be sure. Old Italian barons and their long-nosed wives had nothing on one Englishwoman’s contempt-filled emerald eyes.
Edward turned away from them, away from that cool green gaze that haunted him everywhere he went. He leaned his palms on a chipped marble windowsill, peering down at the scene below. The baroness’s palazzo perched at the edge of the hilltop where the village of Santa Lucia gazed out over the valley. The tall, narrow windows, curtained in dusty gold satin and tarnished tassels, stared right at Etna in the distance, to Lake Pergusa and eventually even to the sea.
The palazzo’s small garden, wild and overgrown, seemed to drop off into sheer space. As if an eagle could launch itself into space and go wheeling out over the amphitheatre and into the mist beyond, right from this garden.
The front of the palazzo, on the other hand, sported a much more respectable-looking courtyard, paved and neatly planted with myrtle trees, with tall limestone walls and wrought-iron gates that opened to the narrow street beyond. Its cobblestone length was silent, and seemed rather little travelled, but it did lead right to the village square with its shops and cathedral, its view of the whole village and everyone in it.
Perfect.
‘Tell me,’ Edward said, not turning his gaze from the theatre, ‘where is the house the Chase family rents?’
‘The Chases?’ the agent said, sounding a bit confused. His mind was obviously slow to turn from views and furnishings to the other inhabitants of Santa Lucia. ‘Ah, yes, the family with the daughters! Their home is on the other side of the square, just beyond the cathedral. They are often seen on walks in the evenings.’
So, not far from here. Edward closed his eyes, and it was as if he felt her very presence beside him. The wilful Muse.
‘I will take the palazzo,’ he said, opening his eyes again to the dazzle of the Sicilian sunlight. ‘It is perfect.’
By the next morning, Edward’s battalions of servants had removed the baroness’s dour-painted ancestors and the worst of the gilt furniture and replaced them with choice selections of the Averton antiquities collection. Graceful red-figure amphorae rested on stands under the shocked stares of the plaster angels. A few marble statues took up places in the newly dusted corners, touches of austere elegance amid all the wedding-cake flourishes.
Edward’s own chamber overlooked the front courtyard and the street beyond. The largest bedroom, which was obviously the baroness’s own to judge from the bedhangings draped from a huge family coat-of-arms, looked upon the grand view of garden and hills. But he preferred this smaller space, where he could watch the town and passers-by.
He examined the arrangements as the servants deposited the last of his trunks and crates. Gilded mouldings carved in the shape of roses, wheat sheaves and arrows garlanded the windows and doors, matching the white-and-gold bed and armoire. The blue-and-red carpet was faded and threadbare, as were the coverlets and bedhangings of blue watered silk. It all lacked the medieval grandeur of his Yorkshire castle, the Gothicism of Acropolis House in London. But the mattress was aired, the room spacious enough—and he could see almost the entire town from the window.
Including the edge of the Chase house.
‘It will all do very well,’ he murmured, watching closely as the footmen carried in the last of the antiquities so carefully shipped from London. A statue of Artemis with her bow raised. The famous ‘Alabaster Goddess’. They placed her next to the fireplace, where she looked as if she was about to shoot down a row of simpering porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses on the mantel. Along her base, barely visible in the veined marble, was a scratch mark from a thief’s lever.
Edward traced it lightly with his fingertip, the tiny groove that was the only reminder of that night in the gallery of his London house. Artemis’s cool fierceness always reminded him of Clio. The goddess of the moon, of the hunt—she never let any mortal man stand in the way of what she wanted, what she believed to be right. She never shied away from any danger.
But Artemis was immortal, the favourite child of all-powerful Zeus, who would never let harm come to her. Clio, despite her daring, was all too human. One day her gallant recklessness would surely catch up with her, and she would tumble heedlessly into the danger. Foolish girl.
Edward turned away from Artemis and her bow, and found himself facing a full-length mirror. What a strange vision he was, framed in the gilt flourishes and ribbons of that rented glass! The shoulder-length fall of reddish-blond hair his valet so often hinted he should cut, for the sake of fashion, was tied back. As stark as his black wool coat and white cravat, skewered with a stickpin carved with a cameo head of Medusa. As stark as the sharp cheekbones and square jaw that was the legacy of all the Radcliffes, handed down from some distant Viking ancestor.
Yes, he looked like a true Radcliffe, the heir to the old dukedom, but he was flawed. His nose, thin and straight as a knife blade in the faces of his late father and older brother, was marred by a