Read Online Courtesan's Lover by Gabrielle Kimm - Free Book Online Page B

begin to wander to her mouth or her breasts. Great iron gates would clang down around her, and she would feel her face close in upon itself, shutting her away from him behind a carefully practiced mask of untroubled elegance.
    Wincing, Maria saw herself each time as Filippo must see her: repulsing his advances, turning from his kisses, cold and apparently unaware of his need for her. He still wanted her. Although she was unsure why, after so long with no encouragement, she knew that her husband did still look at her with longing.
    And though she never responded, it was not because she did not wish to.
    He had leaned past her at dinner only yesterday, reaching for a wine bottle. They had been sitting together, with Emilia facing them across the table, and Filippo had inadvertently pressed against her side as he had stretched across her. She had sensed his warm bulk and smelled his comfortable male smell of woodsmoke and sweat. Glancing at his hand gripping the neck of the bottle, Maria had held her breath. How easy it should have been, she thought angrily, to have smiled at him then, to have perhaps reached across under the table, out of sight of her sister, and stroked his thigh for a moment, just to show him that he was loved. That he was desired.
    But she had not been able to move.
    ***
    It is not long after midday prayers, and the sun is fierce. Sister Antonia has closed the shutters in the big room which Maria and Emilia have shared for nearly a year, but little white slivers of light are pushing their way through the gaps between the slats, dappling the walls and sliding over Maria’s bed.
    The room smells — as it always does—of beeswax and dust, and there’s a faint, faint whiff of mold from the stone walls, which to Maria has always seemed somehow more of a taste than a smell.
    â€œI think you two children should stay in for a while now—it is too hot to go out this afternoon,” Sister Antonia says, and it’s true—the sun has been baking down all morning. Although it is windy, there is no respite from the heat: the wind is hot, like air pushing out of an unwisely opened oven. Sister’s big dough-colored forehead glitters with glass beadlets of sweat, and the dark hairs on her upper lip are shining. Her face seems too fat for her coif. It bulges, and the stiff, stained linen edges dig in all around her face. Maria imagines that when Sister Antonia undresses at night, her coif must leave a deep groove all around her face as though she were wearing a mask.
    â€œHave a little rest now,” the big nun says, as she leaves the room. “You can come down later and help prepare the evening meal.”
    She bustles out of the room like a pillow in a habit.
    Maria lies still for some moments with her knees crooked up and watches the light playing across her dress, little pools of creamy whiteness that shift and move across the blue linen as the branches of the tree outside rustle uncomfortably in the hot wind; then she shuts her eyes and listens.
    Emilia’s breathing has slowed: she must already be asleep. Her sister always sleeps easily, Maria thinks with a pang of envy. She herself knows all too well the unnerving mixture of stifling boredom and unpredictable fears that can fill a wakeful night.
    Outside, cicadas chirr rhythmically—on and on without pause, a ceaseless accompaniment to the afternoon; though sometimes they do suddenly stop—inexplicably all together—for seconds at a time, leaving a silence like a ripped hole in the noise they have been making. When they start again each time, Maria imagines the sound as grains of sand, trickling back into the hole.
    A new noise.
    Above the scratch-scratch of the cicadas comes a grunt. Scuffling and leaf-rustling.
    Maria crosses to the window and puts her eye to one of the gaps in the slats.
    The boy from the village is climbing the big tree again. He often spies on her in the gardens when she is outside and tries