Her goddess heavy on her chest, fear and rage flooded Regina. “No! No, you sow, you bitch, you cow, you whore, Cartumandua! You won’t leave me, not you, too, you slave, not now!”

But Carta did not respond, not even to apologize. The baby’s crying continued, thin and eerie.

That evening Severus returned from his hunting. He saw the baby, the mess in the hut, Carta’s body.

Severus stayed that night and the next. He helped Carausias and Marina prepare the body, and he used the plow to dig a shallow grave in the rocky ground at the top of the hill. But when Carta’s body was buried, he walked away, taking nothing but the clothes on his back. Regina knew they would never see him again.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

“I followed General Clark as we climbed the steps of the cordonata toward the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill. And all around Rome the bells of the campanili rang out . . .”

Lou Casella, my mother’s uncle, my great-uncle, was over eighty. He was a short, stocky man, bald save for a fringe of snow-white hair, with liver-spotted skin stretched over impressive muscles. His voice was soft, husky, and to my ears, mostly educated by movies and TV, he sounded like a classic New York Italian American, something like an old Danny DeVito, maybe. He sat facing Lake Worth, sunset light glimmering in his rheumy familiar eyes—the family eyes, gray as smoke—as he told me how, in June 1944 at age twenty-two, he had entered Rome as an aide to General Mark Clark, commander of the victorious Fifth Army.

“In the place where I stood with Clark, Brutus, fresh from the murder of Caesar, once came to speak to the people. Augustus made sacrificial offerings to Jupiter. Greek monks prayed their way through the Dark Ages. Gibbon was inspired to write his great history. And now here we were, a bunch of ragged-ass GIs. But we’d made our own piece of history already. All I could see was faces, thousands upon thousands of Roman faces turned up toward us.

“And even then I knew that among those hopeful crowds I would find family . . .”

I had found Lou in a retirement home just off Seaspray Avenue in Palm Beach.

“What the hell kind of a coat is that?” he asked of my duffel. It was the first thing he said to me. “Where do you think you are, Alaska? Haven’t seen a thing like that since the army.”

It had taken me a while to trace him. The address Gina gave me was out of date. She wasn’t apologetic. “I haven’t seen him for ten years,” she said. “And anyhow you don’t think of people that age changing address, do you?”