'At the moment, you are ready for a little . . . enlightenment.'
She stared at him in wonder as he lay her gently on the bed. 'How could you possibly know?'
For answer, he smiled. And then . . .
She wasn't sure how long she lay in his arms the next morning feeling drowsy and wonderful, but time seemed to have suddenly become detached, suspended. Though the morning was still in its earliest stages, a grey-blue guess in the east, she felt too excited and full of life to lay in bed any longer.
Extricated herself, kissing her husband several times as he lay looking like a sleeping, peaceful god of bronze, she washed and dressed herself, went downstairs to munch on something, and went outside.
She couldn't remember ever having felt so elated, so free, so utterly at peace. The cool, moist morning air tingled on her skin and seemed to make her feel as weightless as a sylph. The land itself seemed something out of a dream, hued in half-lights, shapes and shadows, colours that were mere hints of the glory of the coming day.
The mill, high up on the hill, she decided, was where she would sit with Guiseppe and await the day, as he was wont to do each and every morning. She would go to the high room in the loft, throw open the windows, watch the breaking of dawn, and share a little of her happiness with her friend, and with the day itself.
A fey mood seemed to be upon her as she ran lightly up the hill, the mill with its slow-turning sails and high darkened window awaiting her like the cyclops of ancient myth.
'Guiseppe?'
Silence.
'H'mf!' she grumbled good-naturedly, 'he's probably off doing something. I shall just have to suffer the glories of this morning in silence.'
As she mounted the several flights of stairs, a weight or shadow seemed to fall upon her heart. Looking upwards into the near-darkness, she dismissed the feeling as being caused by the interior gloom of the old mill. She ascended at a run, half-expecting to see her friend asleep at the crude wooden table before the window.
'Guiseppe?'
But the room at the top felt strangely hushed, still, and expectant. And there was no sign of Guiseppe.
'Oh, well,' she said, trying to push down a sudden sense of misgiving and moving to the window. 'Let's let in a little light and some fresh air-'
Light seemed to explode inside her head. As abruptly, everything was total dark and silence.
She was jarred into consciousness to discover that she was bound with her hands behind her back, that her mouth had been stuffed with some sort of rag and her face bound so that she couldn't spit it out, that she had been blindfolded, and that she was wound so tightly in a rug like a cocoon that she could just barely force little gasps of constricted air into her lungs. The combined feelings of suffocation and claustrophobia caused her to feel the worst terror she had ever experienced, and she had to fight the urge to weep hysterically because it only served to cause her mind to go black with sickening vertigo and swirling specks of light.