Nun (9781609459109) Read Free Page A

used her charms and wiles to make the young man fall in love with her, and if he stood up to his parents, the Lepres were likely to be won over by the honor of becoming relatives by marriage to one of the first families of the kingdom. The previous year, when His Majesty paid a royal visit to Messina—one of three Sicilian cities that had just adopted a new administrative system—he not only treated the Padellanis publicly as something very close to blood relations, but he’d even asked the field marshal for his advice on the best candidates to appoint as chief police magistrate and to the senate; it was at the field marshal’s advice that the king had appointed senator the notary Lepre, the young man’s grandfather. That morning, Donna Gesuela was brutally frank with her daughter: the Lepres had already identified a very wealthy young woman and it was only a matter of time before Giacomo announced his engagement; she accused her daughter of bungling everything and letting an excellent catch slip through her fingers. Agata turned her sorrowful gaze to her father but he just went on fanning himself and listening with renewed interest to another conversation in the room.
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    The clock on the wall struck ten. In the Padellani home, there was a feverish hustle and bustle of preparation. The reception was scheduled to begin at noon, at the exact moment that the cart bearing the statue of Our Lady of the Assumption would be passing down the street beneath their balconies, on its way back to the cathedral. Before dressing for the party, Donna Gesuela stopped by the pantry to sample the sherbets and check on the jelly
trionfi
, trembling multicolored mountains cast in molds of varying sizes, shaped like castles, towers, and crowns, either to be stacked or else displayed on the table in simple geometric compositions. She spent a great deal of time nibbling tiny spoonfuls of sweets and ices; they struck her as lacking in sugar—they smacked of bitterness, like her thoughts.
    During the first few years of marriage in Naples, she and her husband had merrily run through her dowry with lavish spending, spectacular entertaining, and gambling debts: she’d never regretted it for a moment. A deeply spoiled daughter, born to the second wife of a coarse and ambitious baron of the Nebrodi Mountains, Gesuela had been given an excellent education, imparted by the Collegio di Maria boarding school and an English governess. Her education was later completed, after she was married, by observing the Padellanis. It was from them that she learned the art of entertaining and seducing the high nobility of Naples. Inferior to the women of the house of Padellani by birth and inheritance, but not by education and beauty, the youthful bride decided that she would outshine the rest as mistress of her household: in terms of food, presentation of the table, and entertaining. When her husband’s uncle, a duke and the ambassador to the court in Vienna, died, he inherited a number of handsome porcelain dinner sets, although not particularly expensive ones; she then dared to ask her aunt the dowager duchess to let her have the extra livery that she no longer needed. She could count on the fact that she had helped her aunt to gain access to the circle of the Duchess of Floridia, the morganatic wife of King Ferdinand and the godmother of her eldest daughter Anna Lucia. The generosity of her aunt the duchess proved to be fruitful, and even providential once money problems forced the family to opt for a move to Messina. There, the family received a warm welcome, and the Padellani name counted for more than any dowry, especially when it was judiciously served with a little extra something; a mediocre cup of coffee—reheated but presented on a tray by a page boy in white gloves and a white periwig, silk stockings and a uniform in English broadcloth complete with silver buttons—smacked of paradise, and had proven invaluable in