Free One With the Shadows by Susan Squires Page B

nemesis.
    “Luigi will pay the shot,” he remarked from the shadows in the corner. He seemed to read her mind. How exasperating!
    “You can deduct it from the payment for my stone.” She opened the door. Luigi, once a large, athletic specimen now just going soft about the middle, hovered, waiting to help her down. She took his hand quickly, jumped into the yard, and slammed the door.
    Then she turned, blinking, and looked up at him. She had an impression of a busy posting house yard bustling with horses and carriages, hostlers and passengers around her. The sun said it was late morning. The caramel light of Italy bathed everything in warmth.
    A sense of distance from herself came over her. Her surroundings faded away, replaced by a dark room with a low ceiling. The room was filled with low moans. Luigi knelt by a narrow bed. She was certain it was him by the expressive brown eyes, though they sat in a face with jowls and under a mop of gray hair. Luigi was bent over a bed with a frail woman lying in it. The woman’s skin was like yellowed paper in the light of the candles at the bedside table. Her eyes, a watery blue, searched Luigi’s face.
    “Mi amante,” she murmured. “Don’t mourn me.”
    “I cannot live without you,” Luigi sobbed, holding her fragile hand to his lips.
    “We will be together again soon…” The voice drifted farther away. The head turned away, as if answering some other bid for her attention, and stilled.
    Luigi let out a shout of grief that collapsed into sobs as he laid his bulk over the small form in the bed.
    Kate gasped as the vision faded and was replaced by the face of a much younger Luigi, looking concerned.
    “Is the Signorina well?”
    “Yes. Yes, of course,” she stuttered, breathing hard.
    It had happened again, just like her other visions. Had she seen this man’s future, the moment when he would lose the wife he loved very much? Kate found herself shaking, both from the fact that she might be having visions and the emotion that had filled that room. She experienced the love, the hopeless anguish of Luigi. She even knew the feelings his wife—Maria? Yes, Maria—had of drifting toward some other destiny, the moorings loosening, the emotion of her husband growing distant.
    “Perhaps some coffee?”
    Kate swallowed. “Yes.” She followed him into the busy tavern. She kept her head down, since she had no veil.
    “A private room, man,” Luigi called to the proprietor. He sat her at the table in the room the man indicated. “I must go, Signorina, else they will fob off their worst slugs on Adolpho and that the master would never tolerate. Order as you will. But be quick. He wants haste.”
    Luigi was gone. What a terrible responsibility to know his future sorrow. What could she say to him? She could not burden him with her knowledge. Yet, what if knowing he would lose his wife could make him treasure each moment more?
    But man was not meant to know his future. It was not her place to tell him.
    With a start she realized that she believed she could see the future. How unlike her! She believed only in what she could see and touch and taste and hear. And now she seemed to have another sense. One that was disrupting her life.
    The proprietor came in, pointedly avoiding looking at her. He had seen her scar and didn’t know where to cast his eyes. She ordered breakfast for herself, an egg, some toast. Her appetite was gone. The pudgy man turned to leave.
    “Oh, signore,” she called. “Could you also prepare a breakfast for my companion in the carriage?” The man looked wary. He was no doubt imagining her companion even more marked than she was, since he had not come in at all. That almost made Kate chuckle. And she needed to chuckle. “Two rashers of Parma ham and four eggs, bread and cheese and mushrooms grilled, with a flagon of good, strong coffee.”
    He looked surprised. Italians never ate so much in the morning. But he nodded at her decisive order and withdrew. As