Page 143 of The Seven Sisters

After all, she had been with Senhora Bel since she was a child. And owed everything she had – as did her mother – to the Bonifacio family.

But now Loen knew she must think of herself. Her fingers moved from her belly and into the other pocket of her apron. They touched the smoothness of the tile that lay within it. Perhaps it would be easier for her to lie if she had at least completed half of her mission.

Making her decision and knowing that Senhor Gustavo would not be back from wherever he had gone in the cab for the next few minutes, Loen stood up and ran blindly in the direction of Laurent Brouilly’s apartment.

A few minutes later, she arrived breathless outside his front door and knocked loudly.

The door opened immediately and a pair of arms reached out to her.

‘Chérie, I was beginning to worry, but—’

As Laurent Brouilly realised that it was not his love, Loen saw his joyful expression contract into a mask of immediate and horrified understanding.

‘She has sent you? On her behalf?’ he said, staggering a little and holding on to the door for support.

‘Yes.’

‘Then she is not coming?’

‘No, senhor, I am sorry. She asked that I bring something to you.’

Loen held out the soapstone tile to him and watched as he took it from her. ‘I believe there is a message on the back,’ she whispered.

Laurent turned it over slowly in his hands and read the inscription. He looked up at her and she saw the tears appearing in his eyes.

‘Merci. . . I mean,obrigado.’

And then the door was slammed in her face.

*

Gustavo sat down in a quiet part of the library, thankful that the room was virtually empty, as it had been since the Wall Street crisis had struck. He ordered himself the whisky he so badly needed as he studied the envelope that sat on the table next to him. He downed the drink in one gulp and immediately asked for a replacement. Once that was by his side, he took a deep breath and opened the letter.

A few minutes later, he asked the waiter for a third whisky and sat, catatonic, staring into space.

Whatever the letter did or didn’t prove with regard to what his mother had insinuated, it did tell him without a doubt that his wife had been passionately in love with another man. So passionately in love that she had even been contemplating running away to Paris with him.

This in itself was damning enough, but reading between the lines, it also told Gustavo something more: if Izabela had been serious in her intentions of leaving with Brouilly, surely it meant that her lover must have known of her current physical state? Which in turn meant that the child his wife carried was almost certainly her lover’s . . .

Gustavo reread the letter, grasping at the thought that it could perhaps also be interpreted as a means to get rid of Brouilly once and for all, without the need for public revelation on his part. Faced with the knowledge that Izabela would love him forever, but that their situation was impossible, an ardent and desperate suitor might be pacified enough to leave quietly of his own accord, realising it simply couldn’t be.

Gustavo sighed and realised he was clutching at straws. He pictured Brouilly in his mind’s eye and saw his fine physique and handsome Gallic features. He was without doubt a man whom any woman could easily find attractive, and to many his talent would be a further aphrodisiac. Bel had sat for hours in his studio in Paris . . . God only knew what had passed between them while she’d been there.

And he had let her go, like a lamb to the slaughter, just as his mother had always suspected would be the case.

During the following half hour, as he downed one whisky after the other, Gustavo ran through a gamut of emotions: from sorrow and despair to dreadful anger at the thought of how his wife had made a cuckold of him. He knew he was absolutely within his rights to go home, show Izabela the letter and throw her out on the streets then and there. He had even offered her father a decent sum of money to put him back on his feet and clear some of his debts, so that Antonio could at least have a fighting chance of a future. With the letter as his evidence, he could destroy his wife’s and his father-in-law’s reputation for good and divorce her on the grounds of adultery.

Yes, yes, he could do all these things, Gustavo thought, rallying. He wasn’t the meek, frightened little boy his mother made him out to be.

But then the smug look of satisfaction on Luiza’s face if he told her that she’d been right about Izabela all along was simply too much to bear . . .

He could also go and confront Brouilly – after all, he now knew exactly where he lived. Few would blame him if he shot the man where he stood. At the very least, he could ask for the truth. And he knew he’d get it, since Brouilly had nothing more to lose by confessing. Because Izabela was staying with her husband.

She is staying with me . . .

This thought calmed Gustavo. Despite professing her enormous love for Brouilly, his wife had not surrendered to it and was not leaving him to run off to Paris. Perhaps Brouilly didnotknow that Izabela was pregnant. After all, if she truly believed that Brouilly was the father of her child, surely shewouldhave gone with him, whatever the ramifications.

By the time Gustavo left the club an hour later, he had managed to convince himself that whatever had occurred between his wife and the sculptor, it washe, her husband, she had chosen out of the two of them. Brouilly was on his way back to Paris tomorrow and was disappearing from both of their lives for good.