Читать книгу The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 9

ANOTHER THING SHE knows about Hugh Fisher: last summer, he fell in love with her cousin Francisca, the third and the oldest of Tia Maria and Tio Manuelo’s children, who’s engaged to marry Pascoal Vargas in the autumn. Francisca, who was perfectly aware of Bianca’s infatuation, tried to keep the affair secret for her sake, but Bianca knew almost from the first, when Francisca made some excuse about taking a walk one night last July, and came back flushed and bright-eyed an hour later, smelling of a particular kind of masculine soap that Tio Manuelo doesn’t stock in his store. In truth, Bianca hadn’t really minded. Francisca going to meet Hugh Fisher at night was almost as close as Bianca herself going to meet Hugh Fisher, and when she heard the back door open and squeakily close, she imagined Francisca running up the slope to the cliffs under the moonlight, Francisca embracing Hugh Fisher while the phosphorescent sea pounded beneath them, in a way she couldn’t imagine Mr. Fisher embracing so distant an object as Miss Dumont. By touching Francisca’s skin the next morning, Bianca felt she was somehow touching Mr. Fisher.

And another thing. Last summer Francisca was fully grown, nineteen years old, lush and beautiful, and Bianca was only sixteen, her period had just started the previous winter, and her face was round and spotty and childlike. As she lay throughout July and August in the little bedroom she shared with her cousins, listening to their clandestine comings and goings, she was happier imagining making love to Hugh Fisher as beautiful Francisca than she would have been to actually make love to him as herself. It was safer and infinitely more pleasant.

Then came the end of summer, when the Families all returned to their houses in New York and Boston and Providence and Philadelphia, including the Fishers. Francisca moped to devastating effect. She appeared at the dinner table tearstained and listless, eating nothing, and she completed her chores like one of those machines in a factory, without joy. When she accepted Pascoal Vargas’s proposal at Christmas, everybody thought she finally saw sense, because the color returned to her cheeks, and her hips reacquired their old sway, and she plunged herself into the assembling of her trousseau, the most elaborate and comprehensive trousseau in the history of the Medeiro women, because Pascoal Vargas had made a great deal of money in his lobster boat during the past few years, a great deal, and now he has just received the appointment to keep the Fleet Rock lighthouse come October. Francisca will live in luxury, almost, so what if her devoted husband-to-be is past forty years old and resembles nothing so much as a leathery, dark-haired gnome? Who cares about romance when you’ve got a fiancé with money in the bank and a steady, respectable job?

But Bianca’s not so sure.

Bianca hasn’t missed the new brightness of her cousin’s eyes, now that the Fishers have returned to Winthrop Island. She hasn’t missed the way Francisca makes excuses to go walking in the cliffs above the village, or offers to help her brother Manuelo make the rounds throughout the Island in their father’s old Model T delivery truck. And this summer is a whole new summer. Francisca’s engaged, she’s practically a matron, and Bianca has finally achieved that transformation of which young girls dream, from duckling into swan. Over the winter, her spots disappeared and her face became luminous and refined, her hair grew in thick and her small, dainty body rounded out in all those places men admire. As Easter passed and the blossoms came out and the harsh New England air turned soft and warm, as she prepared to graduate from the tiny Winthrop Island School and turn free, Bianca felt her hour had struck. Her blood sang in her veins, she woke restless every morning. She felt that something grand beckoned around the corner, the future for which she was destined.

All she needed was a sign.