she agreed that I way not given to God. I was frivolous and did not take to my lessons and looked at myself in dark windows for they showed me my face and my body. I was to be given to man, and the padrone was the man of all men.
I was ten and seven years of age and a world beyond my imagination was revealed to me. Carriages with silver wheels and golden horses with flowing manes took me above the great cliffs and into the villages and the fine shops where I could purchase whatever struck me. There was nothing I could not have, and I wanted everything, for I came from a poor shepherd's family-a God-fearing father and mother who praised Christ when I was taken into the convent and never seen again.
And always at my side was the padrone. He way the lion and I was his cherished cub. He would take me around the countryside, to all the great houses and introduce me as his protetta, laughing when he used the word.
Everyone understood and joined in the laughter. His wife had died, you see, and he had passed his seventieth year. He wanted people to know-his two sons above all, I think-that he had the body and the strength of youth, that he could lie with a young woman and sat!* her as few men could.
Tutors were hired to teach me the graces of his court: music and proper speech, even history and mathematics, as well as the French language which was the fashion of the time for ladies of bearing. It was a wondrous life. We sailed often across the sea~ on to Rome, then we would train north to Switzerland and across into France and to Paris. The padrone made these trips every five or six months. His business holdings were in those places, you see. His two sons were his directors, reporting to him everything they did.
For three years I was the happiest girl in the world for the world was given me by the padrone. And then that world fell apart. In a single week it came crashing down and Guillaume de Matarese went mad.
Men traveled from Zijrich and Paris, from as far away as the great exchange in London, to tell him. It was a time of great banking investments and speculation. They said
that during the four months that had passed, his sons had done terrible things, made unwise decisions, and most terrible of all had entered into dishonest agreements, commiting vast sums of money to dishonorable men who operated outside the laws of banking and the courts. The governments of France and England had seized the companies and stopped all trade, all access to funds. Except for the accounts he held in Genoa and Rome, Guillaume de Matarese had nothing.
He summoned his two sons by wireless, ordering them home to Porto Vecchio to give him an accounting of what they had done. The news that came back to him, however, was like a thunderbolt striking him down in a great storm; he was never the same again.
Word was sent through the authorities In Paris and London that both the sons were dead, one by his own hand, the other killed-it was said-by a man he had ruined. There was nothing left for the padrone; his world had crumbled around him. He locked himself in his library for days on end, never coming out, taking trays of food behind the closed door, speaking to no one. He did not lie with me for he had no interest in matters of the flesh. He was destroying himself, dying by his own hand as surely as if he had taken a knife to his stomach.
Then one day a man came from Paris and insisted on breaking into the padrones privacy. He was a journalist who had studied the fall of the Matarese companies, and he brought with him an incredible story. If the padrone was driving himself into madness before he heard it, afterward he was beyond hope.
The destruction of his world was deliberately brought about by bankers working with their governments. His two sons had been tricked into signing illegal documents, and blackmailed-held up to ruin---aver matters of the flesh. Finally, they had been murdered, the false stories of their deaths acceptable, for the "official" evidence of their terrible crimes was complete.
It was beyond reason. Why had these things been done to the great padrone? His companies stolen from him and