She remembered the feeling, still … of watching her father dragged away by Mussolini's men … watching him try not to scream, to look brave as he tried, helplessly, with his eyes to protect his wife. And then the horrible sounds of what they had done to him in the courtyard of the palazzo, and the terrible noises he had made at last. They hadn't killed him then though. They had waited until the next day, and shot him along with half a dozen others in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini was headquartered. Serena's mother had been there when they shot him, begging, pleading, screaming, crying, while the soldiers laughed. The Principessa di San Tibaldo crawling as she begged them, as the men in uniform taunted her, teased her. One had grabbed her by the hair, kissed her roughly, and then spat and threw her to the ground. And it was all over moments later. Serena's father had hung limply from the post where they had tied him. Her mother ran to him, sobbing, and held him for a last moment before, almost as a matter of amusement, they shot her too. And all for what? Because they were aristocrats. Because her father hated Mussolini. Italy had been sick with a special kind of poison then. A poison based on hatred and paranoia and greed and fear. A horror that had turned brother against brother, and sometimes husband against wife. It had turned Serena's uncle against her father, with a kind of passion Serena couldn't understand. Her father thought that Mussolini was a savage, a buffoon, a fool, and said so, but his brother had been unable to accept their differences. Sergio di San Tibaldo had become Mussolini's lapdog at the beginning of the war. It was Sergio who turned Umberto in, who insisted that Umberto was dangerous and half mad, that he was involved with the Allies when in fact he was not. The truth was, Sergio stood to gain a great deal if he could dispose of Umberto, and he had. As the younger son he had inherited almost nothing from their father, only the farm in Umbría, which he had hated even as a boy. And he couldn't even sell that. He had it for the use of his lifetime, and then he was obliged to leave it to his children, or Umberto's if he had none. As far as Sergio was concerned, his older brother had it all, the title, the money, the looks, the palazzo that had been in the family for seven generations, the artwork, the importance, the charm, and Graziella, of course, which had been the final spark to ignite his hatred for his older brother.

He hated her father most for possessing Graziella, the golden fairy queen with the incredible green eyes and spun-gold hair. She had been exquisite, and he had loved her since he had been a boy. He had loved her always … always … when they all spent their summers together in Umbria or San Remo or at Rapallo, when she was a little girl. But she had always loved Umberto. Everyone had loved Umberto … everyone … especially Graziella.

Sergio had knelt, sobbing, at her funeral at Santa Maria Maggiore, asking himself why it had all happened. Why had she married Umberto? Why had she run to him after he was dead? No one at the funeral had fully understood the part that Sergio had played in his brother's and sister-in-law's deaths. To their friends, he had always seemed ineffectual, a weakling. And now no one knew the truth, except Serena's grandmother. It was she who prodded and pried and inquired and pressured in all the right places, she who pressed everyone she knew until she learned the truth. Only she had been brave enough to confront him in a rage of horror and grief so overwhelming that when it was over Sergio understood as never before the nightmare of what he had done to his own flesh and blood. And for what? A white marble palazzo? A woman who had died at the feet of her husband, and had never loved anyone but him in any case?

For what had he done it? his mother had screamed. For the love of Mussolini? “That pig, Sergio? That pig? You killed my firstborn for him?” He had trembled in the wake of his mother's rage, and knew that he would spend the rest of his lifetime trying to live with the truth. He had denied everything to his mother, denied that he betrayed Umberto, denied that he had done anything at all. But she had known, as had Serena. Those brilliant green eyes of hers had bored into him at the funeral, and he had been grateful to escape at last. Unable to fight the tides of Mussolini, and unwilling to expose the horror of her son's fratricide to the whole world, the elderly Principessa di San Tibaldo had taken Serena and the oldest of the servants and removed them from Rome. The palazzo was his now, she told him as she stood for a last moment in the brilliantly lit black and white marble hallway. She wished never to see him, or the house, again. He was no longer her son, he was a stranger, and for a last moment she had gazed at him with tears filling the wise old eyes once more. She shook her head slowly then and walked silently out the door.

She and Serena had never seen her uncle, or the house, or Rome again. She had been twelve the last time she walked out the richly ornate bronze doors on the Via Giulia and yet even as she stood in the chill air of the Alps two years later she felt as though they had left Rome that afternoon. It had been a difficult two years, years of fighting off the memories of the sounds of her father being beaten by the soldiers in the courtyard, the frantic look of her mother as she had run out of the house the next morning, her hair barely combed, her eyes wide with fear, a red wool coat clutched around her, and the sight of their bodies when the soldiers had left them at the gate, sprawled on the white marble steps, their blood trickling slowly down into the grass … and Serena's endless screams as she saw them … saw them lying there … even as she said good-bye to her grandmother. The memories were not yet dim, and now she was losing her too. Losing her by being sent away, to safety, her grandmother had insisted. But what was safe now? Nothing was safe, Serena knew that at fourteen. Nothing would ever be safe again. Nothing. Except for her grandmother, she had lost it all.

“I will write to you, Serena. I promise. Every day. And when Italy is a nice place again, you will come back here and live with me. I promise you that, my darling. I promise.…”In spite of her strength the principessa had choked on the last words as she held Serena close to her, this last bit of her own flesh, this last link she had to her firstborn. She would have no one now when Serena went away. But there was no choice. It was too dangerous for the child to stay. Three times in the last two months the soldiers in the Piazza San Marco had accosted Serena. Even in plain, ugly clothes, the child was too beautiful, too tall, too womanly, even at fourteen. The last one had followed her home from school and grabbed her roughly by the arms and kissed her, pressed against a wall, his body crushed against hers. One of the servants had seen them there, Serena panting and frightened, wide eyed with terror yet silent, afraid that this time they would take her, or her grandmother, away. She had been terrified of the soldiers' faces and their laughter and their eyes. And the older woman knew each day that there was danger for Serena, that letting her out of the house at all was dangerous for the child. There was no way to control the soldiers, no way to protect Serena from the madness that seemed to run wild. Any day a nightmare could befall them, and before it happened Alicia di San Tibaldo knew that she had to save the child. It had taken several weeks to find the solution, but when the bishop quietly suggested it to her, she knew that she had no choice. Quietly, that night, after dinner, she had told Serena about the plan. The child had cried at first, and begged her, pleaded not to send her away, and surely not so far away as that. She could go to the farm in Umbria, she could hide there, she could cut off her hair, wear ugly dresses, she could work in the fields … she could do anything, but please, Norma … please.… Her heart-wrenching sobs were to no avail. To let her stay in Italy was to destroy her, was to risk her daily, to walk a constant tightrope, knowing that she could be killed, or hurt or raped. The only thing left for her grandmother to do for her was to send her away, until the end of the war. And they both knew, as they stood inside the Swiss border, that it could be for a very long time.

“You will be back soon, Serena. And I will be here, my darling. No matter what.” She prayed that she wasn't lying as rivers of tears flowed from the young girl's eyes, and the slender shoulders shook in her hands.

“Me lo prometti?” Do you promise me? She could barely choke out the words.

The old woman nodded silently and kissed Serena one last time, and then, nodding to the two women and the nuns, she stepped gracefully backward and the nuns put their arms around Serena and began to lead her away. She would walk for several miles that night to their convent. The next day they would take her with a group of other children to their sister house by bus some hundred miles away. From there she would be passed on to another group and eventually taken out of Switzerland. Their goal was London, and from there, the States. It would be a long and difficult journey, and there was always the danger of a bombing in London, or at sea. The route that Alicia had chosen for her grandchild was one of possible danger and an even greater chance for safety and survival. To stay in Italy would have meant certain disaster, in one way or another, and she would have died before she would have let them touch Serena. She owed Graziella and Umberto that much, after what Sergio had done. She had no one now, except Serena … a tiny speck of dark brown, her pale gold hair shoved into a dark knitted hat … as they reached the last knoll and then turned, with a last wave from Serena, and then they disappeared.