Free Tourmaline by Joanna Scott Page A

caught him and held him upright.
    Much later, Claire would mark this evening as the beginning of the end of her idyll, for it had unsettled her, though why and how she couldn’t explain, and could only blame herself for craving a tranquillity that excluded others. She didn’t dislike the girl, but she found her enigmatic and couldn’t entirely believe what she was told by Murray, who repeated what Francis had told him after supper: that apparently Adriana was assisting Francis in his research on island history in exchange for instruction in English.
    They were a strange pair indeed. Still, when the visitors were preparing to leave, Claire readily invited them to return — and not just for Murray’s sake. She had a sense that she had more to learn from the Englishman and his young friend. The more she knew, the more at home she’d feel. Not that Claire had any intention of settling on Elba. But over the course of the evening, listening to all the talk about the island, she’d become aware of what she’d started to desire in the week already past. She wanted to live on the island as though she belonged, to experience it as if she had no country of her own.
    My brothers and I didn’t have to waste our time getting used to our grand island empire because, from our point of view, we had earned the right to stay. After our long journey across the Atlantic, we believed that anything we found we could claim as ours and anyone we met was someone we might as well have already known.
    After the first week we could gesture emphatically enough to promise Francesca that we wouldn’t leave the property, meaning we’d go no further than the dry streambed separating our land from the neighboring farm on one side and the driveway on the other. As soon as Francesca turned her back, we’d take off. We’d cross the sandy ditch and head up into the terraced vineyards and from there into the hills.
    On the edge of one field we saw a farmer sleeping in the shade of a cork tree every afternoon. Through the loops in a fence of chicken wire we’d watch an old woman milking a goat in a dirt yard and an old man weaving a basket shaped like a top hat. Every day we waved a greeting to the milkman when he rattled past us in his truck, and he’d honk his horn four times — a honk for each of us. High up on a rocky trail above the villa we’d shout just to hear our echoes. Down at the marshy shore below San Giovanni, Patrick and Harry would jump off the iron skeleton of a dock that had been left unfinished, and Nat and I, who couldn’t swim, would throw sticks for dogs whose names we didn’t know. The sun turned our freckles black. Salt streaked our brown hair white. Whenever Elbans spoke to us we would nod. Whenever they laughed we would laugh.
    About midway through the month the words we’d heard as nonsense began to take on meaning, thanks in large part to the two women who worked for our family. Francesca had a bedroom in the south wing of our villa. At the end of July, Lidia, who’d been living in a house she shared with relatives in Portoferraio, moved into one of the outbuildings — an old chapel that was equipped with a wood-burning stove. She made it clear to our parents that they must surrender all decision. And she made it clear to us that if we wanted to be understood, we had to use her language, not ours.
    Lidia, fat Lidia in her voluminous pleated skirts, treated us with the same wariness she demonstrated at the market when she prodded squids in a bucket. She’d poke our bellies after every meal, or she’d make a bracelet of her thumb and forefinger around our arms to measure the size of our muscles. She cared only that we were getting bigger. Children must eat in order to grow, and they — we — never ate enough to please Lidia. She didn’t urge us with the typical
mangia, ancora
we’d heard at trattorias in Florence. Rather, she’d stand over us while we ate our meals at the kitchen table, her folded arms resting on