her fatigue, and she kept glancing up at the chandelier – the salon looked even shabbier now that she had seen it glowing under those dewdrops of light. That evening, Sibilla asked her mother to leave the larder door unlocked, just in case she needed the outhouse. She lay in the blue-lit room, kicking impatiently at her pillow, waiting.
When the moon peeked its head in through the small upper window, Sibilla crept out and down the corridor and stood before the wooden doors of the salon. She pressed her ear to the grain of one. The sounds of the party were so muffled they seemed to be coming from inside the door itself – the wood’s tale or the woodworms’ ruckus. She knocked and the door snarled open at once. The Signora peered around it. Her eyes widened green, then narrowed black.
‘Benvenuta,’ she said wryly. ‘You will once again be the bright star of our constellation.’ Then she opened the doors wide, her palm floating in sardonic welcome.
This became what Sibilla did every night. As soon as she entered the salon, the air took on a quiet frenzy, a withheldness, as everyone waited for her to spin. Was that why she came? Or for a respite from the weight and shade of her hair? Or was it for the brothers Corsale with their steady hands? Every night, Sibilla would spin and stop and faint and wake to them – the Colonel with his moustache, the Sergeant with his codino. Every night, one would cut her from her soft tomb and the other would tend to her wounds. Afterwards, Sibilla would lie in a daze and ponder the difference.
* * *
For years, Sibilla’s nights glowed and blurred, tintinnabulary with the sound of wine glasses, while her days remained cracked and dirty, gritty and grey as mopwater. Then one morning, when she was fifteen, her nighttime stepped into her daytime and undid the dichotomous pattern. She had dragged a bucket of laundry outside to hang on the clothes line in the garden. During the occupation, her mother had planted all manner of vegetables here to feed the king’s men. But since the war, it had languished and nothing grew here now but a midden of kitchen scraps.
Today – the first day of winter, the last day of autumn, a sunken bridge between seasons – even the trees were bare. They looked gawky and sheepish, caught with their leaves down. Despite the shift she wore and the hair beneath, Sibilla was not warm enough. She wished she had borrowed her mother’s coat, though its purple lining had shredded to webbing. She quickly grappled the wind-tossed linens onto the line, the cold speeding her fingers. As she hurried back inside, she noticed a shape in the corner of the garden – it was a man, squatting with his back to her, his hair in a stringy tail. The Sergeant. She knew him, and she didn’t. He had dabbed a wet cloth down the knots of her spine every night for years, but they had barely exchanged a word.
She dawdled over to him, twisting the ends of her hair. He didn’t notice her at first. He was busy raking the dirt, mumbling. Once in a while, he would touch his ponytail and sniff his fingers, then grabble at the earth again, rocking with the effort. She listened for a moment.
‘Is what growing?’ she asked finally.
‘Hair!’ he said, blinking at her, seeming not the least surprised by her presence. Mortified by this direct allusion to her condition, Sibilla made to leave but the Sergeant grabbed at her and caught a fistful of her locks. Hair rose on her arms.
‘You see?’ He let go of her and extended his palm. ‘Hair! From the ground.’
Sibilla crouched beside him and watched him stir a little pile of dirt and stones and, yes, hair in his hand. She intruded her finger into the clutter and their fingers touched on his palm. They looked at each other.
‘Sì, it is hair,’ she said, pulling her hand away.
‘Is it yours?’
‘Sì, it is mine,’ she said slowly, savouring this new flavour of power.
‘But why is it coming out of the ground?’
‘I cut it every day and scatter it in the soil. It makes things grow.’
‘But then why—’ He gazed at her. His light brown eyes looked gold and silver at once, the colour of sunlight behind a cloud. ‘Why,’ he shoved his palm under her nose, ‘is some of it green?’
Sibilla smiled. ‘Because those,