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Bellagrand
Paullina Simons
The passionate love story that led to The Bronze Horseman.They gave up everything to be together, but love was just the beginning …Italian immigrant Gina, independent, compassionate and strong, desperately wants a family. Boston blue-blood Harry, idealistic and political, wants to create a better world. Bound together by tormented passion, they rail, rage, and break each other’s hearts, only to come face to face with a stark final choice that will forever determine their destiny.Their journey takes them through four decades and two continents, through triumph and turmoil, from the wooden planks of the troubled immigrant town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the marble halls and secret doors of a mystical place called … Bellagrand.From internationally bestselling author Paullina Simons comes the passionate love story that led to The Bronze Horseman.
Bellagrand
Paullina Simons
Copyright (#ulink_c055897a-217f-5c7c-9a06-da7a9016ac56)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2013
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2013
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Aria Baro/Trevillion Images (girl); Macduff Everton/Getty Images (background)
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007493715
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007493746
Version: 2015-03-18
Dedication (#ulink_8b82dfed-ddf5-5fd5-a5a0-a3e9de9d0948)
For my mother,An engineerA teacherAn immigrantA romanticA dreamerA giver of lifeWho looked for ParadiseEvery place she lived.
But heard are the Voices
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
Choose well; your choice is
Brief, and yet endless.
—Johann von Goethe
Contents
Cover (#ud356d914-3cc0-519d-b6c5-918aa089f78a)
Title Page (#u7a32255d-9680-5b60-9dba-d09c1d8a31ca)
Copyright (#u6be06247-276f-50d7-98d8-02a2f649a896)
Dedication (#u30659468-d590-58e0-a49c-824a0d603bfc)
Epigraph (#u63514e62-9074-5218-a710-5a7b90c41075)
Maps (#uc2b69005-18af-563a-9a83-737687cf881d)
Prologue: 1936 (#u0b9aa8db-7e95-52fa-92ad-8203ef9529df)
Part One: Bread and Roses 1911–1918 (#u013f5b8e-ef2f-5c3d-b995-5b43fef636ec)
Chapter 1: Wine into Stones (#uf9773126-efb2-53fb-afff-0f2d4f188c43)
Chapter 2: Annie LoPizo (#u4cc1836d-0d91-5a9b-ad3b-d16b4cf61641)
Chapter 3: A Servant of Relief (#u43ef4354-c92d-599b-b413-e7f39e2bfe9c)
Chapter 4: The Love of an American Girl (#u7e328fd6-2722-5dd8-b1e4-566e62f5696b)
Chapter 5: Marble and Mud (#ue862cfa2-df17-529b-ab79-3c5088f1f981)
Chapter 6: Ten Days that Shook the World (#ueb69d777-ee4d-5e45-8cb3-5b9ce505a047)
Chapter 7: Bellagrand (#u10524563-1cb3-5c3b-ad97-81398f443b1b)
Part Two: Bellagrand 1919–1922 (#uaf443c62-3882-5ee4-9e69-5fe64a914784)
Chapter 8: Flagler’s Quest for Paradise (#ub48fd063-42d7-5b25-b764-c5010ae3031d)
Chapter 9: The Blue Room (#ue7f20acb-635a-5600-8005-a932249fc371)
Chapter 10: Molasses (#uf8683f22-bd7f-5754-bff1-4c4d7fcc66b6)
Chapter 11: Total Eclipse of the Son (#u294d5133-520e-5edd-aa02-dabc20a6ed7d)
Chapter 12: Birds of Paradise (#ucb362c67-b744-5daa-b631-57bfdc93cb5a)
Chapter 13: The Wisdom of Alexander Pope (#u4aa2b44c-22eb-5313-a5f2-8f907d2a0935)
Chapter 14: Spanish City (#u81811eec-295f-5b86-8b60-660069b82de2)
Part Three: The Man Without a Country 1922–1929 (#ue21e6ae5-fb47-50ce-ba7b-2b2e929c2378)
Chapter 15: Isadora and Sergei (#ud5b1a5a9-521f-52ca-aa36-1b37194ef842)
Chapter 16: Battery Wagner (#u36794647-3f9c-5227-acdf-e6be78a01a38)
Chapter 17: Prinz Valdemar (#u7d10d54c-40e2-57f2-ab5c-5d1f63289fab)
Chapter 18: White Terrorists Ask for Mercy (#u57647cc7-58cb-5644-8730-0b6b9a35c0b8)
Chapter 19: Psalm 91 (#u872d1045-ba67-5333-98f0-12f75e9109cd)
Chapter 20: Harry’s Favorite Book (#u1c6676b2-3f37-560a-99a7-56836a893e78)
Chapter 21: The Snake and the Falcon (#u6d166458-f684-5396-a6bc-b018a293bbb9)
Epilogue: 1936 (#u55397a84-575b-5417-98dc-fd12a31099ec)
About the Author (#u664e8923-3268-50d7-875f-e647b7eeed2c)
Also by Author (#u9c8a27aa-cecc-505e-9256-782f66e3a2b8)
About the Publisher (#u5ba0b03f-8904-5729-ab9b-6e15d3e74ad3)
Prologue (#ulink_7af13c3c-e3ed-5cfc-a59e-dbabe28d35fe)
1936 (#ulink_7af13c3c-e3ed-5cfc-a59e-dbabe28d35fe)
ON A TRAIN A once beautiful woman sits shivering in an old coat. Next to her is a young man nearly at full bloom. He doesn’t shiver. He stares straight ahead, stone cold, his face inscrutable. So is the woman’s. Except for her shivering, neither of them moves. She wants to speak but has nothing to say. She glances at him. He has nothing to say either.
Their ride is long. Eight hundred kilometers. Five hundred miles through bleakest terrain. The rivers hardly move, the melting ice crushing down the flow, the waters heavy. The flattened fields are black, old speckled snow clinging to the trees gray and bare. It’s grim, desolate, barren, and it’s all flying by. O World! O Life! O Time! On whose last steps I climb.
The young man stares out the window purposefully, single-mindedly. A boy yet not a boy. His hair is black upon his head, his eyes the color of coffee. He wants nothing less than to discuss the unspeakable. The train car is almost empty. They deliberately took the later train, the one no one takes, because it gets in late at night. They don’t want to be noticed.
The woman tries to take his hand. It’s cold. He gives it, yet doesn’t give it. He wants to be left alone. He wants to shout things he knows he can’t, say things he knows he can’t. He stops himself only because of her, because of his reverence for her—still and despite everything. The things he wants to whisper, she is not strong enough to hear and doesn’t deserve to. How could you bring me here, he wants to ask her in his most frightened voice. Knowing my life was at stake, how could you come here with me? It’s too late now for if onlys. Why didn’t you know enough back then?
Listen to me, she whispers intensely after the train screeches to a stop and the few remaining passengers shuffle out. There’s nothing to be done. You can’t think about what’s past.
What else is there to think about? The future?
I want you to not look back. Forget where you came from. Forget everything, do you hear?
That’s the opposite of what you’ve been telling me my whole life.
The train speeds on.
It’s a long way between two metropolitan cities. They have ample time to sit, to stare speechlessly at the countryside.
He wants to know about only one thing. He wants to ask about the place he can’t remember. She refuses to entertain his questions, hence her new commandment: stop looking back. His entire life, he has heard only: never forget where you came from. Suddenly she wants him to forget.
He asks her about the place he forgot. To help him remember what he can’t remember.
Stop asking me about what’s meaningless, she says.
The past is now meaningless? Why can’t you answer me?
Why do you keep wanting to know? What does it matter? God, you’ve been on and on about it lately. Why?
Why can’t you answer me?
She turns to him. Promise to remember about the money?
You just told me to forget everything. So that’s what I’m going to do.
Remember only the money. Make sure you hide it again. Keep it secure. But don’t forget where it is. Don’t keep it in the house in case they come, but hide it somewhere close to you, somewhere safe, where you can easily get to it. Do you have such a place? If you don’t, you’ll need to find one.
The money! The money is what makes him want to rail at her more, not less. The money is the thing that brings cold to his heart, and cold toward her. The money is what screams to him the brutal truth: You did know what you were doing when you brought me here. That’s why you saved the money, took it with you, hid it, kept it hidden all these years. Because you knew. You can’t claim ignorance, which is what I want to believe in most of all, your ignorance of the way things might turn out for us. Turn out for me. But you keep reminding me about the money. Which reminds me that this act on your part—bringing me here—was for my destruction.
He says nothing.
Do you hear me?
I’m trying desperately not to.
Promise me you’ll remember.
I thought you just told me to forget? Make up your mind.
It’s not about the money.
You want me to remember it’s not about the money?
Stop joking.
Who’s joking? After what happened today, how do you think your money will help me?
Here not much, you’re right. But elsewhere it might buy you another life. It might free you. It’s not magic. You must participate in your own salvation. Strength. Resoluteness. Courage. Will they be the hallmarks of your character? I don’t know. She shrugs her crumpled narrowing shoulders. I hope so.
He shrugs his widening ones. Perhaps instead I can misspend it. Drink it away, maybe? He stares—glares—at her. Buy myself fancy shoes and red wool overcoats?
Where are you going to get those here? she asks.
Anything is possible with money. You just said.
Please don’t jest. This isn’t the time.
