One Hot Summer by Norrey Ford

happy about it. Raf is a charming young man, and his family welcomed her. It’s a good match. So why should she suddenly take off into the blue—run away without letting us know where she is?’
    ‘ With another man?’
    ‘ That ’ s what I fear. But who? She has met so few, and all of them known to me, of course.’
    ‘ Have you been to the police? Are you sure she’s even safe?’
    ‘ The police, yes. I’ve searched myself, and Dino has scoured every inch of the island, all the rocks and caves. We’ve ruled out any possibility of an accident, though we never stop searching.’
    ‘ How long has she been missing?’
    ‘ Two days before you came. When I saw you, I thought I ’ d found her. You have the same way of walking, the same proud lift of the head, and almost the same colouring. I asked you here on an impulse, thinking if you were here we could cover up for a day or two, till she decided to come home.’
    ‘ So it was a masquerade?’
    He nodded. ‘ Unplanned, and, I see now, foolish. It wasn’t fair to you.’
    ‘ It was not. I was very angry when I found you’d been making use of me in that way. What I don’t understand is why you needed to cover up. Surely some publicity about a missing girl would have helped? Newspapers, television—in our country we’d have used all that, to locate her.’
    ‘ My dear girl! Publicity is the last thing we want. Rafaello and his family would never accept that; to have her name bandied about, people staring at her photograph. I wouldn’t do that to Bianca. There would be a scandal, her reputation would suffer. The engagement would be broken off.’
    She could hardly believe he was serious. ‘You mean—her fianc é doesn’t know? You haven’t asked him if he knows where she is?’
    ‘We protect our young ladies. The permissive society has not yet penetrated into some of our more traditional families. Raf will expect a bride of unblemished reputation.’
    There was a long silence. A bird cheeped as the light strengthened.
    At last Jan asked quietly, ‘Why did she run away, Marco?’
    ‘We quarrelled.’ His voice was weary. ‘ She didn’t want to marry Raf.’
    ‘ And you insisted?’
    ‘Yes. She had accepted him. She had nothing against him. And we do not break promises. I put the whole thing down to a girlish whim and told her to behave herself. This is not just a fisher-lad and a village girl. Both families have great responsibilities—wealth and big estates. Bianca has been educated for such responsibilities. She can’t play childish games with such important matters. She understands all that, or I thought she did. She’s no f o ol.’
    ‘ If she’s no fool, she had her reasons. You didn’t listen?’
    ‘ She didn’t offer any reasons. She just said she wouldn’t marry him, and nothing I could say made any difference.’
    ‘ That sounds as if you did all the talking. Did you, just once, shut up and let Bianca talk? Do you know what I’m thinking, Marco? She’s in love with another man. No, let me finish. You say she had nothing against Raf, and understood all that such a marriage entailed, so naturally she’d need to have the strongest of all possible reasons for wanting to break it off. And that could only be that she was deeply in love with someone else.’
    He did not answer at once. The rim of the sun was showing above the horizon, and the angle of light revealed the hard masculine bone structure, the deep lines of anxiety.
    ‘ You’re a woman,’ he said at last. ‘ You should be able to read a woman’s mind. Do you think she is with him now? That they are married?’
    ‘ From what you have told me of Bianca, I’d say not. I think this is an effort to make you understand that she must choose for herself; and that she is prepared to give up everything, if she must, to marry the man she loves. Perhaps an attempt to make you understand that even old families like yours cannot live for ever in the past. But I don’t think she’d