"I, cruel to you? Did I not beg you to stay away from my uncle? Look what you have done today. He will send me to Siracusa for certain."
But she felt something break inside her at the sight of his pain. She had done this to him. She had hoped to give him something by letting him possess her one time, to make up for all that she could never give him. Instead, with the gift of her body she had bound him to her more tightly than ever. And then, haunted by her own feelings and the memory of what they had done together, she had simply tried to have nothing further to do with him. And now her effort to break with him was hurting both of them far more than if she had refused him that day.
"You drove me to this," he said, his eyes wide with anger. "You did not answer my letters or acknowledge my poems. When I tried to speak to you in the street and in church, you avoided me. I sent you gifts, and you sent them back."
She really would have to get out of Perugia. Back to Daoud. This would tear her to pieces.
But what about Rachel?
If she left Perugia, that would be as good as abandoning Rachel. She had sworn to herself never to do that.
Simon guards the Tartars. He must know what has happened to Rachel. Perhaps he can help her.
She stopped walking and leaned against the stone railing of the loggia. The leafless branches in the atrium below them rattled in the wind.
"There are many reasons that I did not want to see you. I do not know whether you would understand all of them. But one is that I have heard something very ugly about those Tartars of yours." She had decided not to admit that she knew Rachel. That would take too much explaining and too many more lies, and the lies would be like hidden holes in a leaf-strewn path, to trip her up.
"One of the Tartars, those men you guard so carefully, kidnapped a young girl from Orvieto and is holding her a prisoner now, here in Perugia at the Baglioni palace. It makes me unhappy to know that you are the protector of men who would do such things."