While Ginie was preparing for her cousin’s wedding, she asked for a scarlet sash to go with her dress.

‘Why on earth would you want such a thing?’ Rosa asked, her eyes boring into Ginie’s.

‘So the boys will notice me,’ Ginie replied, staring right back at her.

She was leaning against her father’s legs. He chuckled indulgently and pinched her cheek. But Rosa’s face darkened.

‘You are so brazen, it’s disgusting,’ she said coldly. Dismissing Riccardo’s objections, she led Ginie to her room, her silk skirts rustling down the long corridor. Inside, she locked the door and beat Ginie with a heavy silver hairbrush until her skin purpled and bled. The pain was terrible, but Ginie stared at the wax statuette of the child Jesus on her mother’s dressing table, refusing to cry. Afterwards, Rosa said another rosary, praying that her only daughter might learn decency and humility.

It was clear that Ginie wasn’t the daughter Rosa had hoped for. The only thing that pleased her was that Ginie was growing into a beauty. Her softly waving, dark hair had a deep, rich sheen. Her eyes, framed by thick lashes, were large and brilliant; her puppy fat had melted away, leaving sculpted cheekbones and long, shapely limbs.

But on the inside, Ginie was filled with pulsing organs, fragments from scripture, romantic poetry and a great yearning to escape.

When she was eighteen, she moved with her parents to Genoa, her father’s birthplace, leaving her two older brothers in London where they had their own homes. The move was partly for business and partly because Riccardo felt intensely homesick.

The Peiranos wanted to spend their first summer on the fashionable Italian Riviera and Riccardo found a house to rent in Rapallo, just inside the gates of the Villa Spinola di Pagano. The Spinolas were aristocrats, one of the oldest and most illustrious families in Genoa, but their wealth was in decline and most of their income came from leasing their land and buildings.

Ginie loved her new home. She loved the calm and luminous rooms that had views of the sea with boats bobbing on the white-flecked waves. She loved the sunlit warmth and colours of Italy, so different from London’s grey stone and soot-stained brick. She spent hours exploring the garden: an enchanted place full of rioting flowers and myrtle hedges, terraces, lichen-speckled statues, winding trails and secret caves. All her senses were stirring and awakening. She felt alive.

Not long after moving in, her attention was caught by a slight, erect young man. At rest, his face was melancholy, but his eyes danced when they met hers. He seemed to love the garden as much as she did, for he spent a great deal of time in it.

One still morning in June, when the heat lay on the land like a blanket, he greeted her.