“Is good. It is. You may not be my wife, but you are becoming my friend. And for that, Signora Gerardi, I am truly thankful.”

Chapter 10

27 October 1943

How was it possible that she’d spent the first twenty-three years of her life with no real notion of where the food she ate was grown? Of the labor that went into its cultivation and harvest? It had simply appeared in shop windows and on market stalls, sorted and washed and neatly displayed, and she had handed over a few coins and never once stopped to think of the true cost of bringing it to her doorstep.

She understood now.

She’d been in Mezzo Ciel for barely more than a month. So little time set against the span of her life; but now, thinking back, she found it hard to remember how she had once filled her days.

She hadn’t been idle, not exactly, for she had helped her father, she had studied, she had done the marketing each day and had helped Marta with some of the chores—though not, she could now admit, any of the really difficult or disagreeable ones. Certainly she had never scrubbed a floor until her knees and back were aching, or stripped the feathers from a still-warm and very freshly dead chicken, or picked the pebbles from a pan of dried lentils until her eyes burned.

And she did so little work compared to Rosa, who never seemed to sit, who went to bed after the rest of them and was up again before sunrise, who kept them fed and did the laundry and cleaned the kitchen after every meal and, in her idle moments, baked bread, canned vegetables, made soap, and mended their clothes.

Dominating everything was the harvest, which wasn’t so much a finite period as a steadily swelling tide of work that soon consumed every waking hour. First was the haying, with Nico and Aldo swinging the scythes and everyone except Rosa, who was kept busy in the kitchen, raking the felled grasses down the hillside until they lay in great golden drifts to dry in the sun. Nina had done her best, but the wooden rake had blistered her fingers and she’d been so much slower than the others that Carlo had been bidden to help her.