Bellarion the Fortunate

by Rafael Sabatini

'A boy, you say. Was that what you found him, lady?'

Scared, but defiant, she asked him: 'What else?'

'What else? Your concern suggests that you discovered he's a man. What was Bellarion to you?'

For once he so terrified her that every sense but that of self-preservation abandoned her on the instant.

'To me?' she faltered. 'To me?'

'Aye, to you. Answer me.' There was death in his voice, and in the brutal crushing grip upon her wrist.

'What should he have been, Facino?' She was almost whimpering. 'What lewdness are you dreaming?'

'I am dreaming nothing, madam. I am asking.'

White-lipped she answered him. 'He was as a son to me.' In her affright she fell to weeping, yet could be glad of the ready tears that helped her to play the part so suddenly assumed. 'I have no child of my own. And so I took him to my empty mother's breast.'

The plaint, the veiled reproach, overlaid the preposterous falsehood. After all, if she was not old enough to be Bellarion's mother, at least she was his senior by ten years.