The Sin of Cynara

The Sin of Cynara

Violet Winspear

CHAPTER ONE

  THE train sped on through the darkness with a swift monotony, and every few miles it swept around the bends with a breathless roar, tearing away at the miles like some great beast of the night.

  Although Carol felt apprehensive about this journey she was making, she felt sure she had made the right decision with regard to Teri. He belonged in Italy with his own sort of people and it was up to her to take him to Falconetti.

  Her preparations had been made secretly and carefully, so as to avoid arguments with the Aunts until the very last moment. Carol couldn't have faced the tantrums and the tears, having had a feast of trouble since her sister Cynara had run off and left her to cope on her own.

  The Aunts owned and ran the Copper Jug, a tearoom in the centre of the high street of Chalkleigh, a sea-country town with an outwardly serene air; a place that held the view that so long as grubby linen wasn't aired in public it was all right to pretend that it didn't exist.

  It would have been insupportable for the Aunts if their cosy clients, who came to the tea-room to enjoy buttered scones and strawberry tarts with a really hot pot of tea, had ever learned that the child Teri had been born to Cynara, who after his birth had vanished from the hospital and left him to be brought home to Chalkleigh by Carol, to be passed off as her son.

  After all, her husband had been his father ... Vincenzo, whom she had married after a whirlwind courtship, only to find him on the very day of the wedding making love to her sister.

  Carol had never lived with Vincenzo in the real sense of the word, agreeing not to make scandal for the Aunts by insisting on a divorce from the handsome Italian who had promised so ardently to make her happy and had given her disillusion in its place.

  'Why didn't you marry Cynara?' she demanded of him.

  'Because I didn't have to.' He hadn't said it brutally, but with the reasonable air of a Latin who would never have dreamed of marrying any girl but a virgin. That was part of his creed ... and it was part of Carol's nature to become icily indifferent to anyone who broke her trust in them, without even a touch of guilt to soften the painful blow. With an infuriating lack of principle Vincenzo had thought he could possess both the Adams sisters, and had swiftly learned that Carol didn't play those kind of games.

  He had made her despise him, right up until the day he had died. He and Cynara had been at a funfair when the roller-coaster had gone off the rails and a number of people had been flung from the whirling cars. Carol's sister had been hurt, but Vincenzo had been killed instantly and there hadn't been a mark on his dark, chiselled face that had fooled Carol into thinking him as fine as he looked. But his looks had been a perfect mask, and she had no more time for Italian men, and was only concerned that Teri wouldn't grow up to be as unprincipled as his charming Casanova of a father.

  Teri was now five years old, and what had precipitated Carol's decision to take him to Italy had been the letter she had received from her sister, far away in Texas and now married to an executive there ... alarmed that her husband would find out about the child, Cynara had begged Carol to go on pretending to be his mother.

  In lots of ways Carol didn't have to pretend. Teri believed her to be his true mother and she had never disillusioned him. Nor had the Aunts ever breathed a word to the contrary. They wanted people to believe that he was the legal child of their niece Carol ... the grubby linen of her unhappy marriage had been tucked away by them, and they, like Cynara, didn't want it disturbed.

  The marriage and its sad end was a dark crucible from which Carol had emerged heart-cool and never again to be the young dreamer of gallant knights who came along and swept a girl off her feet. She had believed in love, but her experience had taught her that other people were only concerned to find pleasure where they could and to the devil with the heartache they caused. She had grown cynical, and the only emotion she now valued was what she felt for Teri.

  He had the right to have things that boys with fathers had, and she just hadn't the means to provide them. Since Cynara had run away and left the Aunts without a waitress, she had quit her own job as a library book-restorer and taken over from her sister at the tea-room. Which meant that she had board and lodging but a very low wage.

  She just couldn't see a way to educate and care for Teri without assistance from Vincenzo's family, and she was desperately tired of being run off her feet for a mere pittance, for ever at the beck and call of the Aunts.

  Little old ladies, but bittersweet tyrants who felt she owed them her energy and her loyalty because they had taken care of Cynara and herself when their mother had died and their father had gone off to Central America to work. Out there he had married a Brazilian widow with a family of her own, and the twin sisters in England had found themselves dependent on the Aunts.

  Dependency had a sting to it, as Carol had learned, but she owed it to Teri to see that her father's people met him and made some sort of provision for his future. He was a quick, bright, affectionate child, and certain things about Vincenzo had informed her that he didn't come from one of the poorer families of southern Italy. He had always had ample pocket money and good suits to wear, and Teri wasn't going to have a deprived boyhood if she could help it. He existed because of Vincenzo, and she had made up her mind that if the Falcone family was a comfortable one, then the boy was going to share in that comfort.

  She didn't intend to ask anything for herself, but she fully meant to go on playing the part to which Cynara's sin had consigned her. To the Falcones she would present herself as Teri's mother, and there would be no one, least of all his real mother, to say that she told a lie.

  She gave her pillow another thump and tucked the blanket closer about her legs. This was the first time she had travelled all night on a train, and her limited means had not made it possible for her to afford first-class accommodation. The compartment felt rather cold, but Teri was well wrapped up and sound asleep, and somehow she hadn't expected to sleep easily herself. Her parting from the Aunts was still like the sting from a deep scratch.

  'Don't come running back to us when that Italian lot throw you out,' Aunt Lottie had shrilled at her. 'We'll get another waitress, and there won't be any more room for you and that mischievous little dago. Do you really imagine that these people are going to take you in and provide for you - his relatives, that foreigner with the morals of a tomcat? You'll be sorry all round, my girl, giving up a good home here to go off to this place with the outlandish name.'

  'Falconetti,' she had told her aunt, holding firmly to her patience and her decision to seek a better life for Teri. 'It's an isola off the Lake of Lina, and though I'd be the last person to pretend that Vincenzo treated me fairly, the boy has Falcone blood in his veins and even if they turn me away from their door, they won't do it to Teri. On my own I just can't give him the things he should have; on the wage I earn here I can barely afford to buy his clothes now he's springing up so quickly.'

  'You get your food, the pair of you, and a decent bed,' Aunt Rachel had broken in, less shrill than her sister but with something more deadly in her eyes.

  'They won't want you, no more than he did. There was always something a bit too proud about you, my girl, and let me remind you that if it hadn't been for our generosity you and that man-crazy sister of yours would have been packed off to an institution.'

  'I daresay we would,' Carol agreed, 'and you, dear aunts, would have lost a pair of underpaid servants. Half Cynara's trouble was that she wanted a bit of life after being on her feet all day, dashing about with trays, and listening to the snobbish gossip of the women who come to the Copper Jug to eat cream cakes - cats, some of them, ridiculously jealous of a girl like Cynara because she always outshone their own daughters for looks. I don't condone what she did, nor do I applaud

  Vincenzo. But I'm going to see to it that Teri grows up in a different environment.'

  And Carol meant it. Even if the Falcones didn't want her as part of their menage, then she would find the courage from somewhere to leave the boy in their keeping. Italians were kind to children, whereas at the Copper Jug he was in everlasting hot water with the Aunts. Like any child he had big eyes for creamy cakes and it had been difficult keeping him away from them. They were Aunt Rachel's speciality, and more than once she had cuffed Teri and called him a sneaking little thief, merely because his childish tummy couldn't resist a sticky strawberry tart.

  Falconetti sounded a wild and countrified place, and was probably a large farm of the Sabine variety. Vincenzo hadn't talked a great deal of his family, but there had been no doubt that he had been well educated and rather spoiled.

  It worried her a little that Teri might be spoiled, but on the other hand he could be deprived and brought up in fear of a pair of elderly women who had never known love themselves and clutched to their bosoms instead a Victorian code of morality and a fondness for the pennies they rarely gave away.

  It had been a difficult decision for Carol to make, especially about a child who wasn't really hers. She had thought of writing to the Falcone family, and had then decided that it might come as a more delightful surprise if they were suddenly confronted by the boy, who most certainly resembled his father.

  She had once asked Vincenzo why he had left Italy to come and work (if that was the correct word) in London. He had replied that he wanted to see more of the world ... and Carol had learned the hard way that he really meant that he wanted to sample the kind of girls who liked a good time and were less careful of their virginity if they were not Latin born.

  Poor Vincenzo ... whatever his faults he hadn't deserved to die so young.

  Carol drifted off to sleep, and awoke to pale light drifting into the railway compartment, and a crick in her neck. Teri had climbed out of his nest of blankets and was at the window with his nose pressed to the glass.

  'Are we in Italy, Cally?'

  That was his special name for her. 'When do we go on the boat —directly we get off the train?'

  'Not quite, Buster.' That was her special name for him. 'We get off at a place called Catalina, where we'll have something to eat, and then we take a cab to the lakeside and that's where we hire the boat.'

  Teri turned from the window to grin at her, his great dark eyes fixed lovingly upon her face. 'Isn't it a lovely holiday, Gaily? I liked sleeping on a train all night, did you?'

  'Ever so much,' she said wryly, emerging from her own blanket and stretching her slim legs. 'I think we'll go and wash up, caro, and make ourselves more presentable.'

  She held out a hand to him, and with her overnight bag clutched in her other hand they made their way to the washroom, already occupied by a stout and smiling Italian woman who at once made room for them at the wash-basin.

  She chattered away to Teri, obviously recognizing him for an Italian child, and because Carol had taken endless trouble to teach him his father's language (which she had learned partly from Vincenzo and from a course at evening classes) the boy was able to reply to the woman's questions.

  He told her all about their day in Rome, which Carol had also enjoyed, though conscious all the time that she wasn't really in Italy to fall in love with the warm sun, the jostling old houses, and the dolce far niente attitude of mind. She held on to her emotions just in case she wasn't wanted here, but couldn't deprive Teri of a walk through the gardens of the Palace of the Caesars, with its evocative ruins and wild-flowering shrubs; its crazy-paved paths and the perpetual husky music of the cicadas, Aesop's feckless fiddlers.

  At the Fontana di Trevi, with its water-gods and stone horses pawing the air, and the cascades beneath which the rock nymphs shone in the water, she and Teri threw pennies into the basin and made their wishes.

  Hers was simply that the Falcone family would accept Teri and take him to their hearts.

  They drove in a carrozza to the railway station, and now they were almost at their destination ... the Lake of Lina.

  'Ah, Roma, non basta una vita,' said the Italian woman, with a blissful smile.

  Rome, a lifetime is not enough! Probably not, thought Carol, and she didn't dare hope that Italy was going to be her place of residence. Teri belonged here because of his father, but she had been a wife in name only, and was a mother in name only.

  'Be always a good boy to your mother.' The Italian woman patted Teri's cheek. 'You are going to be a handsome cavaliere when you grow up, with all the girls after you, but never forget your very first girl, the one who loves you best of all - una bionda bella.'

  When the woman had gone from the wash-room, Teri gazed up at Carol, watching her as she combed her hair. 'Are you the blonde girl, Cally?' he asked her.

  'I have fair hair,' she smiled. 'That is what the lady meant.'

  'Then why is mine dark?' he wanted to know, turning to the wall mirror to stare at his own mop of brunette hair.

  'Because you take after your father, Buster. He was dark, like most Italian men.'

  'Was he nice?' This was a question Teri had asked her more than once, and it troubled her and made her wonder if he had overheard anything the Aunts might have said about Vincenzo.

  She thought of the Vincenzo she had fallen in love with, thinking him so much more gallant and charming than the rather intellectual young men who came in and out of the town library where she worked.

  'Yes, he had some nice ways,' she told his young son. 'He could be very charming.'

  But he could also be weak and reckless, and she couldn't bear to think of Teri growing up to follow in his father's footsteps. He was all she had in the world to love and she wanted him to be a fine, strong, good man.

  They were now in Sabine country, with its olive farms and flocks of sheep in the hills. Here in this unspoiled place there might be a place for Teri and he might take to it more than his father had. After all, he had a dash of Adams blood in his veins, which might dilute those Latin passions.