Ch. 2: In Service
I opened the door to Signorina Gabriella's bed chamber softly and slipped into the room. I hoped that I could do my morning duties there and be gone before the mistress awoke. She was sure to see my swollen eyes and would want to know why I had been crying. But it was just too awful; I didn't want to be the one to tell her.
I passed close to the big four-poster bed in the center of the room on the way to the French doors to the small balcony overlooking the motor court at the back of Villa Montebella. The signorina was lying peacefully in the bed, although the sheets and spread were tangled about her, as if she'd had a fretful night. Her luxuriant black hair cascaded around her head and flowed over the pillow. She was a beautiful girl, no, now a woman. Her ample breasts rose and fell regularly as she slept; her diaphanous white peignoir had pulled off one of her breasts, and I stifled a sigh of desire as I saw the perfect, erect rosebud of a nipple rise and fall with her breathing.
There had been a time when I had enjoyed the charms of Gabriella's rosebudsβa time when we both were very much younger and experimenting with our bodies and before I had been claimed by her grandfather, the Conte. Seeing her like this, though, in vulnerable repose, was all the more troubling for me in my plight, and I turned from her and quietly stole over to the French windows and drew the curtains back.
The room was immediately flooded with Italian sunlight. I put my forehead to the warm glass and drank in the beauty of the Tuscan hills rising behind the villa. I loved this view, even though Gabriella often told me how much she hated it and resented it, claiming that it symbolized the difference in her status in the Ghiberti family, where all of the males in the family had rooms on the front, looking down toward the Mediterranean waters of the Ligurian Sea. Well, she should see the view from my room, in the dusty attic of the ancient villa, where I spent any night her grandfather didn't send for me.
A tear fell on the window pane, and I watched it spin its way down the thick glass as I thought of last night. The Conte had gone to the springs at Val d'Orcia that day to take in the healing waters and had told me before he left that I would be sharing his bed last night. But he had not called for me when he returned, and when I had performed my opening duties in his chamber this morning, there was a stranger in his bed. What did this mean for me? A servant in the villas of the rich Tuscan families had to be in constant wariness of their positions. Was I about to be discarded by the Ghibertis?
"Rosella! I asked you why you were just standing there mooning at the window?"
I was jolted back to awareness of where I was and instinctively turned toward the bed, not thinking to shield my face.
"Why, Rosella," Gabriella was now saying, "You've been crying. Tell me what's the matter."
"I'm sorry, Signorina. It's nothing. I'm sorry. I'll finish here and leave you."