Araluen (67 page)

Then, one day, she was waiting for him outside. Waiting in the shadow cast by the heavy open church door. She had glided up to him. ‘Come to me tonight,’ she whispered. He could barely see her face behind the dark veil and he had tried to ignore her. ‘Your life is in danger if you do not come to me tonight,’ she insisted, then she strolled over to her trap where her servant waited.

And so he had gone to her. Late that night, as he had done so many times before, he stole up to the servants’ entrance at the rear of the big house. And, as usual, she was waiting for him, her finger to her lips. Not a word was spoken between them as they crept through the narrow whitewashed corridor with its low
wooden doors on either side. Giovanni held his breath—behind those doors were the servants’ quarters.

He had always worried that the married couple who had been employed by Marcello would report Sarina’s infidelity to the De Cretico brothers. But she dismissed the notion. They were elderly, she said; they retired early and their quarters were far from her bedroom.

Not a word as the lovers crossed the interior courtyard and climbed the wide stone steps to the surrounding balconies. Not a word passed their lips until they were upstairs in her bedroom with its tiny open balcony overlooking the village.

In the safety of her bedroom, Giovanni whispered, ‘What danger, what has happened—do they know?’

‘Not now,’ she had murmured, slowly opening her gown. She was naked beneath and she placed his hand on her breast. As she unfastened his belt she caressed him through the fabric of his trousers. ‘Not now. Make love to me.
Mio piccolo toro,
make love to me.’

And then they were on the bed together and she was moaning and thrusting herself back at him. Then riding him on top. Then pulling him ever deeper and deeper into her, ankles around his neck. She was insatiable. Fingernails digging into his naked back until the pain was exquisite. Biting his neck. Whispering obscenities in his ear. Giovanni had been as transported by her abandonment as he always was. There was nothing but the two of them and the blackness of the night and the heat of their passion. Nothing else had mattered. Nothing. Still he had the presence of mind to pull away from her just before he ejaculated. She had taught him that.

She was ready for him as usual, the small hand-cloth beside the bed instantly to the fore. It never ceased to amaze him. But, as she had explained, there must be no sign of semen on the linen when the servant did the laundry. She could surreptitiously wash a small
hand-cloth herself; if she were to wash bed linen it would naturally arouse suspicion. It nevertheless amazed him that at the height of her uncontrolled passion she could display such presence of mind.

They’d lain panting for several moments. Then Giovanni had turned to her. ‘What has happened? You said my life was in danger.’ But she appeared not to have heard him.

‘Why have you not come to me, Giovanni?’ she asked. It’s been a whole month.’ ‘Your brothers-in-law ...’

‘Mario and Luigi left the village a fortnight ago. You know that, everyone does.’

‘You said danger,’ he had insisted. ‘Why could my life be in danger? Do they suspect something?’

Sarina’s pretty face had hardened. When she frowned she looked every bit of her thirty-three years. The difference was quite extraordinary. Animated and smiling, with her soft blonde hair and her dimpled cheeks, she could easily pass for a twenty-two-year-old.

‘Answer me, Sarina. Do they suspect something?’

She sat up, not bothering to cover her nakedness. ‘Not yet.’

‘Then why did you say—’

‘But they will if you stop coming to me.’ He had looked at her, puzzled for a moment. ‘If you stop coming to me I will tell them,’ she had said simply and her eyes had been hard and ruthless. Unable to speak, Giovanni had stared back at her, his expression one of utter disbelief. ‘I will send a message to Mario in Bologne. I will tell him that you raped me.’

G
IOVANNI COULD SEE
the village in the valley below. The black sky above it was clustered with smoke from the fires which would burn slowly throughout the night. It was late; only a few cottages displayed the lights of their
candles or lamps. There was no light evident at the big house but he knew Sarina would be waiting for him, there in the dark.

His life had changed since that night. He had tried to reason with her. He had even tried to pretend that she was joking, although he knew she was not.

‘But how can there be any joy in our meeting?’ he had finally argued.

‘It is not joy I want from you, Giovanni,’ she said. ‘If you value your life you will come to me.’ Sarina did not want to sound hard and ruthless, she knew it was not attractive. She would much prefer to have beguiled him. To have sat on his strong young thighs, her legs linked around his waist, running her tongue along his perfect boy’s lips and pretending surprise as she felt him become rigid beneath her. But that would not work, not this time. He was too frightened. Everyone was too frightened of the De Creticos. So she had to be hard. If she remained celibate until the brothers found her the husband they promised, she might never know a man again. ‘And you will continue to come to me for as long as I wish,’ she said.

From that night on Giovanni’s entire existence had become one of self-loathing. He loathed the fact that Sarina continued to excite him. He loathed the fact that he served her like a stallion. He wished he could make himself impotent—then the widow would quickly be rid of him.

But as he crept around the outskirts of the village, passing his family’s cottage in the dark, even as his pulse quickened with fear at the thought of discovery, Giovanni could feel the contemptible fire in his groin.

Tiger Men

The eagerly awaited new novel by Judy Nunn

‘This town is full of tiger men,’ Dan said. ‘Just look around you. The merchants, the builders, the bankers, the company men, they’re all out for what they can get. This is a tiger town, Mick, a place at the bottom of the world where God turns a blind eye to pillage and plunder.’

Van Diemen’s Land was an island of stark contrasts: a harsh penal colony, an English idyll for its landed gentry, and an island so rich in natural resources it was a profiteer’s paradise. Its capital, Hobart Town, had its contrasts too: the wealthy elite in their sandstone mansions, the exploited poor in the notorious slum known as Wapping, and the criminals and villains who haunted the dockside taverns and brothels of Sullivan’s Cove. Hobart Town was no place for the meek.

Tiger Men
is the story of Silas Stanford, a wealthy Englishman; Mick O’Callaghan, an Irishman on the run; and Jefferson Powell, an idealistic American political prisoner. It is also the story of the strong, proud women who loved them, and of the children they bore who rose to power in the cutthroat world of international trade.

Tiger Men
is the sweeping saga of three families who lived through Tasmania’s golden era, who witnessed the birth of Federation and who, in 1915, watched with pride as their sons marched off to fight for King and Country in the Great War.

Available from November 2011

Other titles by Judy Nunn

The Glitter Game

Edwina Dawling is the golden girl of Australian television. The former pop singer is now the country’s most popular actress, an international star thanks to the hit TV soap
The Glitter Game.
But behind the seductive glamour of television is a cutthroat world where careers are made or destroyed with a word in the right ear . . . or a night in the right bed.

The Glitter Game
is a delicious exposé of the glitzy world of television, a scandalous behind-the-scenes look at what goes on when the cameras stop rolling.

Centre Stage

Alex Rainford has it all. He’s sexy, charismatic and adored by fans the world over. But he is not all he seems. What spectre from the past is driving him? And who will fall under his spell? Madeleine Frances, beautiful stage and screen actress? Susannah Wright, the finest classical actress of her generation? Or Imogen McLaughlin, the promising young actress whose biggest career break could be her greatest downfall . . .

Centre Stage
is a tantalising glimpse into the world of theatre and what goes on when the spotlight dims and the curtain falls.

Pacific

Australian actress Samantha Lindsay is thrilled when she scores her first Hollywood movie role, playing a character loosely based on World War II heroine Mamma Tack.

But on location in Vanuatu, uncanny parallels between history and fiction emerge and Sam begins a quest for the truth. Just who was the real Mamma Tack?

Territory

Territory
is the story of the Top End and the people who dare to dwell there. Of Spitfire pilot Terence Galloway and his English bride, Henrietta, home from the war, only to be faced with the desperate defence of Darwin against the Imperial Japanese Air Force. From the blazing inferno that was Darwin on 19 February 1942 to the devastation of Cyclone Tracy, from the red desert to the tropical shore,
Territory
is a mile-a-minute read.

Beneath the Southern Cross

In 1783, Thomas Kendall, a naïve nineteen-year-old sentenced to transportation for burglary, finds himself in Sydney Town and a new life in the wild and lawless land.
Beneath the Southern Cross
is as much a story of a city as it is a family chronicle. With her uncanny ability to bring history to life in technicolor, Judy Nunn traces the fortunes of Kendall’s descendants through good times and bad to the present day . . .

Heritage

In the 1940s refugees from more than seventy nations gathered in Australia to forge a new identity - and to help realise one man’s dream: the mighty Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. From the ruins of Berlin to the birth of Israel, from the Italian Alps to the Australian high country,
Heritage
is a passionate tale of rebirth, struggle, sacrifice and redemption.

Floodtide

Floodtide
traces the fortunes of four men and four families over four memorable decades in the mighty ’Iron Ore State’ of Western Australia. The prosperous 1950s when childhood is idyllic in the small city of Perth . . . The turbulent 60s when youth is caught up in the Vietnam War . . . The avaricious 70s when WA’s mineral boom sees a new breed of entrepreneurs . . . The corrupt 80s, when greedy politicians and powerful businessmen bring the state to its knees . . .

Maralinga

Maralinga, 1956. A British airbase in the middle of nowhere, a top-secret atomic testing ground . . .
Maralinga
is the story of Lieutenant Daniel Gardiner, who accepts a posting to the wilds, of South Australia on a promise of rapid promotion, and of adventurous young English journalist Elizabeth Hoffmann, who travels halfway around the world in search of the truth.

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