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Massimo Solini is an entrepreneur in the construction

industry and in catering as the owner of a famous
restaurant, a passionate writer with a keen sense of the
English language and in particular a lover of historical
fiction. He tries in his latest book to enter the world of
the epic fantasy novel not forsaking the depiction of
real historical elements.

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Massimo Solini
PITHECUSAE
WHITE

AND

THE

ANEMONE

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Copyright Massimo Solini (2014)

The right of Massimo Solini to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims
for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British
Library.
ISBN 978 178455 077 6
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2014)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LB

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Chapter 1
May 1949
The big room was stocked with portraits and sketch pads, on
the table were boxes of paints and pencils. A strong smell of
linseed oil and spirit overlaid the natural aroma of old books in
the room.
Robert leafed through a stack of canvasses and lifted one
onto the easel. He sat thoughtfully for a few seconds before he
glanced round for brush and palette. There was a problem but
he could not figure out what was actually wrong. Maybe the
colour?
He felt she must not appear too seductive, he ought to
paint her as she was.
Perhaps her colouring needed to be more definite, her
vivacity more pronounced, her features less visible. He leaned
forward and for several minutes worked furiously at the
painting, blocking in the face, shading the contours of the
cheeks, modelling eyes and lips, his anger increasing as he saw
that the result was not to his satisfaction. The portrait bothered
him. She was too sad, too mysterious evocations of mood
rather than of feature, of beauty by implication rather than by
definition. Somehow he had to get Lady Anna out of the
normal patterns of contemporary painting, projecting her onto
the paths of the past, forgotten images, or perhaps unknown
ones.
He stood back with narrowed eyes and stared at his
handiwork. Outside, the evening light stretched level across
the land, turning the big window of the house to flame. It
offered the bewitching alternatives of a vast Mediterranean
expanse or the isolated beauty of one of the loveliest places in
the world. In the mild breezes from the west and the east, the
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big trees waved here and there their early foliage, their boles
dull silver in that light, the new buds like clouds of green
butterflies that had not yet dried their wings. A pleasant land
situated on a plateau overlooking the sea.
Robert had never seen another soul there. His home was
the only house within several miles, a fantastic residence not
far from ancient Roman ruins. Dust carried on the winds had
buried most of the ruins, but there still remained great
megaliths of stone, marking a temple built two thousand years
before. A few stone columns still rose to the sky, while others
had toppled into a confused jumble.
Robert often wondered when they would start the work to
recover all these wonders; there were still subterranean
chambers and innumerable places to discover. He had explored
much of it, crawling through openings and burrowing beneath
slabs, discovering new passageways and rooms merely by
moving rubble and digging a little.
It was near Baiae, an old Roman seaside resort on the Bay
of Naples. It was said that the old town had been named after
Baius, who was supposedly buried there. According to some
historians, Baiae had been for several hundreds of years a
fashionable resort, even more popular than Pompeii,
particularly notorious for rumours of scandal, corruption and
repeated accounts of strange things going on there.
A few years after the war, Robert had purchased the
residence conscious of an intense feeling of excitement. It
was all a man could want, a fantastic house with stunning
views, and besides, he was driven by the need to find
somewhere he could afford to live, to lick his wounded selfesteem, to paint. It had not taken him long to decide that this
house would be an opportunity to renew his concentration, his
money and his commitment to find new ideas, new stimulus to
create new jewels in his art as a painter.
Robert was the only son of Michael Jamison, a key figure
as a poet and writer in contemporary culture. Robert was born
in 1920 in Liverpool and he never knew his mother who died a
few months later from breast cancer. Right from the very
beginning of his life, he possessed a particular talent for art,
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literature and design, together with great imagination, free

from pre-established patterns of painting.
When he was eleven his father moved to a small place
named Sennen Cove in Cornwall. Here nature influenced
substantially the quality of his paintings, and landscape
somehow always emerged as an integral feature of his
paintings. If he moved closer to his window, he would
necessarily have seen more than the simple landscape of a
great gulf or a few trees in the plain below; he would have seen
more in that fraction of the meadow where the pendulum of
seasons appeared before his eyes; he would have seen more
staring out across the sea toward the western sky.
As always from the first day he flexed the muscles of his
fingers slowly, staring down at his hand. Almost by magic, it
began to move across the canvas frantically as if driven by
some unknown spirit, as if some unknown god had called him
to represent a British or a Roman divinity from the past.
These gods were demanding, powerful, almost cruel; it
seemed for some unknown reason they wanted to punish him
as his hands moved down to release all his skill in creating
unusual paintings depicting Roman vestals, military
commanders and gladiators, and in this surreal moment of
emotion and abandonment he forgot everything, drowning in a
mixed of pleasure and pain. It was a long time before he threw
down the brush, wiping his hands carelessly on the front of his
ragged sweater, glaring down at his handiwork aware that the
gods were leaving him as swiftly as they had come and
wondering, not for the first time, where they came from and
why they were here.
The result of these paintings was, as always, unpredictable
and incomprehensible: images from the past, distant past, far
from being lost inside the puzzle that appeared in front of his
eyes. There were armed men with heavy swords, spring
wagons full of women, children and valuables; there were
other men throwing shovelfuls of earth out of deep holes,
preparing to bury money and gold; there were boys barricading
doors, but the most recurrent image was more likely connected
to two children a boy and a girl.
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Behind their frightened and confused faces Robert seemed

to recall, in that state of unconsciousness, their voices, their
cries. There was no happiness in their eyes, they rasped,
sometimes they seemed to scream words like:
Lets get out of this.
Sometimes, clearly visible in a small corner of the
painting, lurked a bull-like man who carried a heavy axe on his
back. A camp at the foot of a hill was lit by pole torches, in the
background a dark winter night broken by a sea of silver dots.
In other pictures he had painted something like a church
with ribbon grass growing around and in the sun, trees shining
like burning flames through the great caterpillar nets that
enclosed them.
Exhausted and drained of all energy, Robert looked for
hours at his paintings while the sun streamed clearly through
the window, then he sat and studied the size and the shape of
them, trying to interpret the contents and looking for a logical
thread where logically there seemed to be nothing.
In the following months, Robert started to study the
civilization of the Roman Empire and the succeeding Roman
Republic and all the great leaders of the Roman Imperial era.
He studied the huge encompassed area on the Mediterranean
that extended into continental Europe, Asia and Africa. He
studied the most significant contributions of their history
their architecture, their institutions of Christianity and their
forms of government and philosophy.
At twenty-five, he left England and came to Italy, lured by
the intoxicating aura of the Roman Empire trying to
understand how this Empire reached its splendour, expressing
the ideology that neither time nor space would limit its
expansion.
Some years later, it was not difficult for Robert to fall in
love at first sight with the wonderful residence in Baiae offered
for sale by an elderly couple wanting to move to Naples.
Here the nightmares suffered in Cornwall during his
painting ended. His brain was no longer tortured. In this
congenial atmosphere, he might have expected his mind to be
free, to have nothing whatever to fix on or see to, a special
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vacuous and relaxing freedom. Robert, his mind released, did

his best to consider what he was going to do with his life. Here
his thoughts were untrammelled and he was able to freely
focus on his paintings, especially those depicting portraits of
women. That was where peace and strength were to be had
nowhere else.
Mr Jamison, this is not me of course! said Lady Anna
bringing him back to reality. I dont understand who and what
you have painted on that canvas!
Robert looked first at the incredulous face of Lady Anna,
then at the portrait in front of him: a nuanced womans face at
the front, and in the background, daylight that didnt reach this
part of the painting.
The shadows took on a fearful aspect as a single torch lit
the path illuminating a Roman commander, or so it seemed to
him, his eyes gleaming terrifyingly in the darkness, a gladius
in his right hand. At his feet, pleading for mercy, two children,
giving this framework the flavour of a disaster.
When Robert, shortly after adjusting his eyes, focused on
the painting, a small detail became visible: in a small corner at
the far right a beautiful white anemone seemed to bring a bit of
light to a disturbing and terrifying image.

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Chapter 2
13 A.D.
The morning opened up like any other in May: clear, with
promise of heat to come. Overhead arched the great cloudless
sky of the coming summer.
Alexandria and Cato were milking the fat teats of a goat
that they had received as a present a few months before. The
animal had pendulous ears and big luminous eyes. The two
children liked the goats much better than sheep; they were
meek and intelligent, curious about everything, terribly
independent and sensitive. On his arrival, the goat was very
undernourished and the two children took turns nursing her.
Every day they filled baskets with tender green shoots of
alfalfa grass, which grew along the shore, and by the end of the
first week she had fattened considerably.
Very soon Alexandria and Cato experimented with making
cheese. The first few batches were inedible, but they improved
with practice and now they were able to make hard cheese to
conserve because of the perfect storage facilities of the stable.
Inside the refuge, over their heads, a sparrow couldnt find
the window to get out and played with its shadow on the
ceiling. The flapping of wings echoed in the dark little stable.
On the nearby shore a dog ambled about a bank of
dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. At the edge of
the tide he halted with stiff front paws and attentive ears. His
nose lifted as he barked at the noise of the waves and the
shoals of little wormlike fish. They swam towards his feet,
curling, unfurling many crests, breaking, plashing, from farther
out, wave on wave of them. The dog yelped running towards
them, reared up and pawed them, his red, panting tongue
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This part of the beach was a thin strip of sand that ran
along the alien coast. Nearby, thick foliage clustered right up
to the edge of it as far as the eye could see.
The island of Pithecusae was small with gentle slopes that
ran from sea cliffs in the north and east to the bays and
harbours of the south and west. Both land and water near the
main harbour teemed with activity. Boats of all sizes crossed
from Naples carrying men and supplies. Donkeys made their
way along rocky trails around the harbour, hauling panniers
loaded with material. Slaves and convicts imported from many
different countries were to be seen, digging great ditches,
breaking rocks, cutting stones; men shouted orders in different
tongues.
The people of Pithecusae were a volatile mix of North
Africans, Arabs, Greeks, Germans, Celts and Silicians. By the
beginning of the 1st century A.D., the Sicilian pirates roamed
across the entire Mediterranean and began to attack the towns
of the continent thus becoming the only considerable naval
power in the eastern Mediterranean. Their main trade was
slavery as a great number of Roman families bought slaves to
work in large plantations particularly in Sicily.
In the following years, for Rome and Pompeii an
extraordinary concession was granted to eliminate the Sicilian
pirates by keeping vigilance over all the sea and fighting their
bases across the entire Mediterranean. As a result, the pirates
became consolidated and well-organized and in the early years
even Roman communities unable to fend off the pirate
incursions were forced to come to an agreement with them.
On the island of Pithecusae, Alexandria and Catos parents
lived, like other families, by agriculture and sheep and cattle
rearing. Augustus had a bull neck and a ruddy weather-beaten
face the result of a life of hardship: Clelia was a tiny woman
but with a strong temper and great determination. Their house
was just a simple refuge surrounded by a large courtyard
overgrown with weeds and enclosed by a stone wall.
On the seaward side, the wall had two openings, one for a
window and one for a door. Their only hope for escape in the
event of a pirate attack was to work their way around the
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clearing to the landward side, where they could hide behind

rubble and then disappear through the inner wall into the
countryside where there were countless places to hide.
The hills all around were beautiful. A peaceful, pleasant
place. In the evening, cooking fires and the flames from
torches were visible from their refuge, and pungent smoke
flickered everywhere highlighted even more by serene
moonlight.
On the morning when the pirates came, however, Augustus
and Clelia were not home. They had purchased a part of a
shipload of grain from the continent that was due to arrive any
day and as usual they had gone to check if the load had
arrived.
The harbour teemed with shipping and the dock crawled
with activity as shipment of building materials and food
arrived almost daily. The island had sprung to life in recent
years and all the people living here had embarked on an
ambitious campaign to strengthen the island defences against
pirates, pouring resources into extended fortifications and
installing watchtowers. In the hills above the harbour the
landscape was, however, still unchanged. There were
vineyards and olive groves; meadows of wildflowers dotted
the slopes of Mount Epomeo, whose summit, as every
morning, was veiled beneath a soft mantle of mist.
As Augustus and Clelia were scanning the horizon, a light
westerly breeze caressed the trees, the air was sweet and pure
and finding that no ships were visible on the horizon they
walked for a long while along the near shore, listening to the
surf; afterwards they lay on the beach, warming themselves in
the glorious sun and indulging in a moment of relaxation,
unaware that not far away, only a little more than a mile away,
their children were in danger, a danger coming from the south
in the form of a ship, not the one they were waiting for, but a
ship carrying a single load of ruthlessness and cruelty.
Alexandria saw them first.
Raising her eyes for a moment from the goat she was
milking, she saw them. The blood left her face, her stomach
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turned sour with shock and fear. Cato saw the sickness in
Alexandrias eyes and followed her gaze. Five scrawny darkskinned men were arriving.
Its all right, Alexandria said quietly to her little brother,
for his sake feigning a calm she did not feel. She knew Catos
heart was as not as sturdy as hers, and even her own insides
was twisted in fear and terror, but she had to be strong for
them both.
As the children watched, the group came near, so close
they could sense the smell of their bodies, the smell of sweat in
their putrid clothes. Alexandria felt certain the pounding of her
heart must give them away.
She embraced Cato strongly; he was trembling like a
frightened rabbit, like a windswept leaf.
One of the pirates, sword in hand, looked at them with big
speculative eyes. He squinted, not certain what he was seeing;
his eyes were like hot coals burning into the childrens bellies.
Behind them they heard the heavy thudding of other mens
footsteps arriving.
There was silence.
Look, what a nice surprise! said the man in charge. A
succulent goat just to get started, this means being lucky.
Without giving the slightest attention to the children he raised
the sword end and with a rapid and precise movement slit the
throat of the poor animal. A fountain of blood spurted on
Alexandrias face. The sight made Cato erupt in a scream of
terror; he sank to his feet, gasping for air between great ragged
sobs.
Alexandria jumped up, embracing Cato and wiping her
face with one hand said:
What do you want?
She could see the hardness of his eyes, beneath the fold of
his dirty turban, gleaming, mocking; they squeezed even closer
together.
Shut up brat! Where are your parents?
They are at the port. We have nothing! What do you
want? she said again feeling a grip from Cato she thought
would crush her bones.
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Voices sounded above their heads. There was no way for

the children to be sure how many of the pirates were behind
the commander; ten, fifteen, twenty, maybe more.
A pirate crew was usually rarely more than twenty swords,
but the shadows moving on the cove entrance seemed many,
many more. There was no trace of pity in the man, as far as
Alexandria could see. His gaze was fixed on them, outlined
with sunlight shining through the door in wide golden beams
that swirled and glittered with dust.
Now, more voices spoke above and the two children
tensed even more, as they saw the light blocked by moving
shadows.
Outside a gentle wind was blowing now, scattering tiny
droplets of salt spray in the air, Alexandria heard laughter from
the men, awaiting, perhaps, the right moment to unleash their
entire stock of cruelty on them, then she looked into the
serious face of the man who approached even closer, his sword
gleaming in the sun.
Suddenly a movement at the door alarmed everyone.
A raven.
The bird had settled clumsily on the porch, a wing pressed
against a stone. The creature was skinny, scruffy; it limped as
it shuffled for position, seemingly observing the pirate chief
with one eye aimed his way. Alexandria noted that the other
eye was missing. A hole, a ragged indentation, still moist and
pink. As they watched, another bird came.
A hawk.
The bird settled on the porch elegantly. The raven flew
away. In the hawks beak a white flower, a large white
anemone. It rested for a moment, then moved slightly rising
only a few inches, its wings beating noisily. After a while the
anemone fell from the beak and, to the general amazement, the
bird flew away.
Never thought Id see the day when we are fighting with
children, one of the pirates said turning to his chief. Ive
fought a hundred battles, but never met children in my way
read the bird language, the pirate said waiting for an answer.
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The leader now took Alexandrias little hand firmly and

brought the blade up swearing in anger as he looked at it.
Alexandria eyes were wide with fear at the expression that
crossed the pirates face.
Look at that! Have you any idea how much you are going
to pay for what you have in mind? said the pirate again, No,
of course you havent, you are just blind if you cannot read the
signs of the gods. The man who faced the leader seemed a
warrior past fifty. He had iron-grey hair, very wide shoulders
and had the upright bearing of an old soldier. When he spoke,
it was in a fluent Latin. He wore a cloak and hood of dark
rough cloth; his features were half-covered in the inky
blackness of the cove. Daylight did not reach this part of the
cavern. He drew near the leader, so close so as almost to touch
his ear with his hidden lip.
Listen to me, please, let them go, believe me, the hawk
has spoken very clearly! He paused to look, his eyes straining
in the darkness.
All the men around them stood to attention, their
expression serious men from many different countries, faces
burnt by the sun and ravaged by insects (only a few of them
seemed unaffected), nervousness increasingly evident in all of
them.
After a tense wait, the chief leader, confused, snapped a
response. After brief pause, he eventually leapt onto the old
pirates back pulling his forearm across the mans throat with
all his strength. The man staggered forward a couple of steps
and fell in agony.
The sun was high in the sky and still the hills around
swarmed in all their beauty, the leaves on the trees were
moving in glorious liberty ruffled by a light breeze.
From that point, the childrens refuge on the beach looked
incredibly close, close enough to touch the water with one
hand. Alexandria was just twelve but she remembered
scrambling on the lower slopes of Monte Epomeo. She had
always loved this high place where the wind was a constant
force against the skin. It made her feel alive. She loved the soft
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odour that seemed to soak into her clothes and skin, the smell
of the sea, the soft perfume of the flowers caressed by the
wind, in a world that laughed and shouted all its splendour to
her and to her younger brother.
Wed better get going, Clelia said to Augustus, a hint of
concern on her face. She did not know why but she knew that
the best thing was to get home as soon as possible.
They started walking by the edge of the clearing. To the
left, the sun was half-way up the sky.
As they went along, it seemed that all the men had walked
off into another world, leaving them alone; they didnt like the
silence. Each tree was watching them, listening to the sounds
they made, each step was deepening into fear. It was not the
sort of fear they knew, this was a worse fear, unrelenting, and
conscious.
In the long silence, the sound of the leaves moved by the
wind filled the air as if each of them, properly apprehended,
might carry some kind of a revelation, and you could hear the
prolonged, sweet morning trill of a warbler, who flew singing
his melody then flipped out of sight.
Augustus felt, many times, like a stone beneath the cold
waves of his wifes great concern, as if in spite of all he knew,
there could be something else his wife knew that eluded him.
As they walked, a breeze lifted around, but when they
went down from a slight slope the mist swirled and evaporated
in a few seconds, revealing the plain below. Clelia froze in fear
as she saw a pirate ship not far from the coast and five or six
small canoes with about twenty men waiting in silence. As
always, the pirates had roamed the island in search of a weak
spot into which they could pour their violence without being
noticed.
Her heart thudded painfully under the muscles of her chest.
The pirates heads came up almost like dogs sniffing a smell,
knowing the effect the sight of them would have on Clelia and
Augustus. As they neared the cove Clelia yelled and began to
run.
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AlexandriaCato she screamed looking around,

while her husband glanced left and right to find the faces of his
children. Clelia bawled again, her desperate wail echoing
against the cliff on the far side of the cove.
Augustus and Clelia had to walk between twin lines of
bearded, armed men to reach the entrance where the leader
slouched in a chair, two others pirates behind him. In the
background, at the darkest part of the cove, barely visible,
were Alexandria and Cato tied and gagged near them a huge
man, naked above the waist to reveal muscles under a skin that
had been scored and coloured with ink. His forearms were
thick with rings, his beard was tied with small amulets, while
his skull was bald, his face scarred and malevolent.
Augustus instinctively tried to cross the space that
separated him from his children but two big hands grabbed and
blocked him.
If you were speaking with ordinary mortals we could
conduct a civilized discussion and reach a moderate
compromise, said the leader, but thats not me. Were pirates
and that means bad luck of the worst kind for you, so before
we negotiate I must first show my strength, he said, again
smiling.
What do you want from us? asked Augustus.
What do we want? We are not used to asking, we just
take what we need and that is all. Again a half-smile flickered
on his face.
We are here simply to devour this island, to clean it like a
dog with a bone, as a vulture with its carrion and you will be
the first victims of this cleaning.
Let the kids go, they have nothing to do with this! Take
me not innocent children.
Now the pirate started walking around Clelia, touched her
hair from behind and he brought his mouth almost to kiss it
and caress her shoulder.
A cold and savage fury drove Augustus to intervene
without thinking of the consequences. He kicked the pirates
leg hard.
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You want to die? I wonder if your children are precious to

you or if its just for your wife that youre worried. As he
spoke, his eyes suddenly turned to stone. The pirate did it fast,
by slicing Augustus throat with one quick scraping drag. He
looked into Augustuss eyes as he killed him, then stepped
over his twitching body, which slipped down collapsing onto
Clelias lap. She began to scream hysterically.
Stop crying! he said. This is why they call us pirates!
Yes, he said pulling out another knife from a belt. From the
next midnight, he said again scoring a cut on his left forearm,
and for the next three days you come into my bed and do
what I like. He went on, scoring another cut just next to the
first. That is today, this is tomorrow, he continued indicating
the new cut, blood flowing from deep wounds. Happiness is
my pay. In just three days time you will forget that hateful
man. Where we are? Oh yes, there is another cut to do. He
continued doing another cutting and sucking from open
wounds.
At the end of the cavern, Alexandria remained undeterred,
a coldness gripping her heart and terror consuming her. She
could neither breathe nor move but stood still, watching for the
horror to come. Cato, was not crying, he was just staring,
holding his breath. Outside, a hawk, its wings astonishingly
white flew close again and Cato thought he saw his fathers
soul going to the other world accompanied by the bird.
Eventually he took a deep breath to shout at the pirates through
his gag, but the shout never came because quite suddenly out
where the waves broke, between sand and rocks, a beam of
blue light showed. Not bright blue, not the brilliant blue of a
stormy sea, nor the blue of a sky full of rain. It was dawn
beyond the sea, a very dark dawn, a restive dawn, but it was
very light and Cato neither shouted nor moved; he just tried to
look for the hawk, but the bird was no longer there. On the
right side, the sky was molten gold pouring around a bank of
sun-drenched cloud, on the left it was yellow and brown and
little drips of rain fell down spreading ripples in a sea that was
shining slabs of light that slowly shifted and parted, joined and
slid.
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In the week that followed, the island of Pithecusae (the

modern Ischia) was sacked and plundered by pirates. After
stealing and ransacking its every corner, they set fire to the
whole island. Flames leapt into the sky consuming everything
like the wrath of an angry god. Within moments there were
people running everywhere, confused, shouting, watching the
blaze. Flames leapt and whirled outside all the windows and
broke through the walls.
The pirates watched until they knew beyond doubt that
nothing and no one could have survived, racing against people
running down the street toward the harbour, pushing through
the stream of persons that did not know which way to go.
During the raid, the pirates did not find resistance; the few who
tried to resist were immediately disarmed, killed and hanged
on wooden poles.
The lack of a single, stable political authority made it
easier and in these conditions, they continued for days
abducting and raping at will.
In their cavern, Alexandria and Cato were locked inside,
door closed, the exit blocked by huge stones through which
only a small light filtered. Through those small cracks they
looked out over the timeless splendour of the horizon; on the
left the wall of Eros, on the right, partially visible, the white
hills with the glorious Mount Epomeo, in front the wonderful
scenery of the sea at sunrise and the dark waters lit only by a
silver crescent of moon and a blanket of stars in the night.
They imagined running out and taking a boat or even a
little canoe and sailing away, or finding a horse and travelling
overland.
They were alone, out of reach of the light from the beach,
but able to observe, collecting whatever there was to witness or
overhear. They would disappear altogether or show up out of
nowhere; they were alone, their gazes caught on their damaged
faces, unable to ask what had happened, no water, no food, no
time, neither safe nor in danger, but suspended between the
two, waiting to die holding hands, wondering for what absurd
reason they were locked up.
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After a not determinable space of time in which the hours

of light and the hours of darkness alternated, Alexandria
looked out and watched the smoke as another vessel was
captured and burned by the pirates, the sea was alive with
ships fleeing the pirates fleet, no mercy for those who were
caught. Then she lowered her eyes and moved close to Cato,
close enough to speak into his ear; Im sorry, she whispered,
holding his hands feeling the stiffness of the fingers, Im
sorry I didnt take you away, Im sorry they hurt you so badly,
you were never part of it, forgive me, little brother.

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Chapter 3
September 1949
Robert Jamison couldnt believe his eyes. She couldnt be for
real, certainly she was one of the most beautiful women he had
ever seen, and he was accustomed to beautiful women when
painting. And instead of wearing all those things that had come
into fashion, this one just let her hair loose, natural, and it was
that light red colour that looked real. It was her eyes that really
rattled him. They were green, light green and glacial.
Why did you move here? Miss Morgan asked Robert.
For some reason he felt nervous. Damn it! He was too
curiousShe was dressed simply and there was no sign of
jewellery except a single earring in her left ear.
I wanted to live near the sea, was his response.
Why did it make him feel like he was snooping? This was
crazy. Why was he trying to make a favourable impression on
her? Shouldnt it be the contrary?
Then it did not take him long to realize that it was time to
remove the Secretary wanted sign from the caf of his best
friend Agostino.
What am I supposed to do? she had asked, looking
Robert straight in the eye and smiling slightly.
Oh yeswhat kind of job? Sureof courseyou have to
help, he answered, taken by surprise.
To help? she asked again curiously.
Yes, to help in many ways.
Many ways?
To be more than a simple secretary
I dont think I understand.
Dammit! He hadnt meant anything like that. He ground
his cigarette in the tray and lit another one.
Look, Miss Morgan, Im a painter, mainly portraits of
women, and I have to put my appointments in order, there are
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