The Last Promise Read Free

had been in English. In spite of her hardships, the country had not lost its beauty to her. She was grateful for this. It was one of the joys life had not stolen from her.
    As difficult as the previous night had been, she was ready to start again. She had learned to live this way, discarding the past each night and starting each day anew—picking joy where she could find it—like hunting for mushrooms in the Chianti forests. Sometimes her own endurance astonished her.
    The fifteenth-century villa where she lived was twostoried and horseshoe shaped, enclosed with a front wall, forming a sizable courtyard. Her family’s apartment was the largest in the villa and took the entire east wing. While she was a new bride still living in America, her groom, Maurizio, had told her that their apartment in Italy was part of the new section of the restored villa. It was only after she arrived in Italy, three years later, that she realized that “new” is relative in an old country: the “new wing” was only two hundred and seventy years old.
    The villa’s center apartment was smaller than Eliana’s by half and was occupied by her sister-in-law Anna, who had lived in the villa since her husband left her five years previous.
    The western wing of the villa was used for storage and there was also a small apartment there that was rented out. An arched, wrought iron gate in the center of that wing led to the villa’s garden.
    The other buildings on the property were nearly a quarter mile away, surrounded by vineyards: a small, stucco home where Luca, the winery manager, and his wife lived, next to the three-story ochre cantina where the grapes were processed into wine, aged, bottled and shipped.
    Eliana’s painting studio was rectangular in shape, with white stucco walls that slanted slightly in toward the center of the house. It had a high, vaulted ceiling supported by heavy, wooden trusses that had been hewn by an ax. The room was on the second floor at the end of the hallway and the only room in the villa where one could see both the inner courtyard and the world outside the villa, depending on which side of the room one stood in. The space was larger than Eliana needed and she had only moved into one half of the room, piling the other half with blank canvases and unframed paintings.
    Eliana had wondered if the room was haunted. The first few weeks after she had moved in, she came in each morning to find six of the seven paintings she had hung on the walls tipped to their sides. Each day she checked the paintings’ hooks and wires then righted them, only to find them all tilted again the next morning. All of the pictures except for one.
    “All villas in Italy have fantasmi ,” an old man wearing a bloodstained apron in the butcher shop had told her. Actually the phenomenon was little more than a curiosity to Eliana, and after two weeks, when it stopped, she was disappointed. Fantasmi or not, she liked the idea that she wasn’t alone.
    Against the far wall of Eliana’s studio was a gray, cast iron stufa that she used to heat the room in the late fall and winter months when the thick outer walls of the villa turned cold with the season. Above the stove was the only picture in the room not of her own hand, the one her ghost had left alone—a portrait of the Holy Blessed Mother, her hands lifted in adoration, her heart revealed. It hung above an icon where Eliana kept her rosary beads and a score of stout candles in shallow glass dishes. She was a devout Catholic, though it had been some while since she had attended mass. This was not by choice. Her eight-year-old son, Alessio, was severely asthmatic, and the priest at the small church near the villa used copious amounts of incense in his worship, which was too much an irritant for her son’s lungs, setting off an asthma attack almost immediately upon their entering the chapel. As much as she craved to worship in the company of others, it was unthinkable for her to ask the priest