Chapter 10 - Dawn on Stone Steps
The estate was quiet three weeks later.
The lawn had been repaired; two truckloads of sod from a turf farm in South Jersey had covered the scars left by the Suburbans, and the shattered French doors in the dining room had been replaced with double-glazed safety glass that looked identical to the 1912 originals, but could stop a .308 round at point-blank range.
The autumn sun was high and clear, the kind of November afternoon that smelled of burning maple leaves and sea salt.
Adrian sat on the third step of the front terrace, where Clara had stood in her yellow raincoat twenty-one days ago.
He had a paring knife in his hand.
Beside him, sitting on an overturned wooden crate, Clara was watching his fingers with the intensity of an apprentice diamond cutter.
"You have to cut the skin without touching the white part," she instructed him, her small legs swinging rhythmically against the wood. "The white part is bitter. Mommy says it tastes like medicine."
"I know how to peel an orange, Clara," Adrian said without looking up.
"Daddy doesn't," she replied promptly. "Daddy uses his teeth and then he gets the juice in his eyes and curses."
"Your father," Adrian remarked, his knife moving with smooth, circular precision, "has many talents, but patience is not one of them."
He sliced a perfect crescent of orange and handed it to her on the flat of the blade.
She took it with two fingers, popped it into her mouth, and chewed with a small, contented hum that sounded remarkably like the *San Matteo’s* engines.
Across the gravel courtyard, near the restored gatehouse, Julian and Elena were walking slowly along the rhododendron path.
Elena was wearing a thick cable-knit sweater Adrian had bought for her in Manhattan, her hair loose around her shoulders, covering the fading yellow bruise on her jaw. Her arm was linked through Julian’s; they walked with the slow, synchronized gait of people who had spent a long time running and were still trying to remember how to stand still.
Julian looked different.
He had gained six pounds on Teresa’s cooking. His hair was trimmed, his beard shaped, and he was wearing a clean gray wool jacket that made him look less like a marsh scavenger and more like the junior vice-president of a coastal shipping line—which, according to three corporate documents filed in Trenton on Tuesday, he now officially was.
"Uncle Adrian?" Clara said, her voice dropping into that conspiratorial tone she used when she was about to ask for something she wasn't supposed to have.
"What?"
"Are we going to stay in the house with the lions?"
Adrian stopped cutting. He looked down at the orange in his palm, then out across the four hundred yards of green lawn toward the iron gates.
The war with Salvatore was over.
Don Carmine had accepted the settlement—two million dollars from the Vance estate, three piers in Jersey City, and the convenient fiction that Salvatore had retired to a farm near Naples. The Commission had closed the books. The DeLuca name was clean, or as clean as thirty years of blood and paper could ever be.
Julian was no longer dead.
He was just a man who had survived an accident and spent six years recovering in private clinics in the north. The state of New Jersey had issued a new driver’s license on Friday; the social security administration had un-flagged his number; the bank had restored his accounts.
"Do you like the lions?" Adrian asked her.
"The one on the left has a chipped ear," she said. "I think a bear bit him."
"It was a truck," Adrian said. "In nineteen-ninety-two. Your father was driving."
She giggled, a clear, bright sound that made Marco look up from where he was checking the oil in the tractor by the carriage house.
"Mommy says we're going to Ireland," she said, her small face turning serious. "To see the sheep. She said the sheep have black faces and live on the rocks by the water."
"You are going to Ireland," Adrian said. "For the summer."
"And then?"
Adrian looked at his brother, who had stopped by the gate to let Elena tie her scarf.
Julian looked back across the lawn, caught Adrian’s eye, and lifted his hand in that old, familiar salute—two fingers from the temple, half-insolent, half-loyal.
"And then," Adrian said, handing her the final slice of the orange, "you come back here. The lions need someone to make sure the bears don't bite the other ear."
Clara took the fruit, her gray eyes shining in the cold autumn sun.
"I will," she decided. "Because Barnaby is very lazy and he won't do it."
From around the corner of the west wing, a fat, scruffy terrier with one brown ear and a tail that had been broken in three places came trotting out onto the stone terrace. He didn't look like a dog that had survived four miles of marsh and two gangs of Moretti enforcers; he looked like a dog that had just eaten four breakfast sausages off Teresa’s cutting board and was looking for a sunbeam to sleep in.
He collapsed with a heavy sigh directly across Adrian’s boots, his nose tucked into the cuff of Adrian’s trousers.
Adrian didn't move his feet.
He wiped the blade of his knife on his pocket handkerchief, folded it with a soft *click*, and dropped it into his waistcoat.
The afternoon sun was beginning to drop behind the hemlocks, casting long, blue shadows across the limestone terrace. It was getting cold—that northern Atlantic cold that had once made Adrian feel so completely, terribly alone in this four-hundred-foot house with its iron gates and its silent archives.
He looked down at his right hand.
The black onyx ring was there, heavy and cold against his skin, but beneath his boots was the warmth of an old, stupid dog, and beside him was a child who was currently trying to balance three pieces of orange peel on the toe of her yellow boot.
"Uncle Adrian?"
"Yes, Clara."
"The frog song has nine verses."
Adrian leaned his head back against the limestone balustrade, closing his eyes against the fading glare of the November sky.
May you like
"Sing it," Adrian said. "All nine."
And as her small, clear voice drifted out across the stone terrace, rising into the cold air above the gardens where the lions guarded the gate, Adrian DeLuca finally stopped listening for the sound of boots in the gravel, and simply listened to the song.
