Chapter 6 - The Monastery on the River
The road to the Hudson Valley followed the winding curve of Route 9D, climbing through the cold, granite bluffs of the Hudson Highlands where the red oaks and sugar maples were dropping their final, crimson leaves into the gray waters below.
At 9:45 on Sunday morning, an antique black 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V—maintained with the surgical precision of an aircraft engine—turned off the state highway onto an unpaved gravel lane marked only by a pair of weathered stone pillars bearing no crest, no name, and no security cameras.
At the end of the half-mile drive, perched on a limestone promontory overlooking the widest reach of the river, sat the Priory of St. Jude—a fourteenth-century Cistercian cloister that had been disassembled stone by numbered stone in rural Burgundy in 1928, transported across the Atlantic in the holds of three cargo steamers, and reassembled by Italian stonemasons as a private sanctuary for the Moretti family.
The car stopped on the crushed gravel of the inner courtyard.
The driver—an elderly Italian gentleman named Paolo, who had worked for Gianna Moretti since the Nixon administration—stepped out, opened the rear door, and extended a gloved hand to assist me down to the flagstones.
I was wearing a simple, elegant black wool maternity coat over a forest-green cashmere dress, my hair pinned back with a tortoiseshell clip that had belonged to my mother. In my right hand, I carried the leather doctor’s bag containing my medical records, the ultrasound printouts, and the green leather jewel box Gianna had referenced in her letter.
The double doors of the heavy oak refectory swung open with a soft, counter-weighted hum.
Standing in the vaulted stone entryway was Gianna Moretti.
She was eighty-four years old, barely five feet tall, but she stood with the straight, terrifying posture of a woman who had survived the Allied bombardments of Genoa, the kidnapping of her eldest son by the Red Brigades in nineteen seventy-seven, and sixty years of managing a family of ruthless, expansionist men.
She was dressed in a simple, charcoal-wool skirt and an ivory silk blouse buttoned to the collar with a single black pearl. Her silver hair was braided and pinned in a crown around her head, completely unpowdered, her olive skin lined with eighty years of sunlight, olive oil, and absolute, uncompromised authority.
Beside her, standing by the stone fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back, was Adrian.
He had bathed. He had shaved. He wore a fresh navy wool suit, an open-collared white shirt, and his hair was combed back, but the hollow, haunted look in his gray eyes hadn't cleared.
When I stepped across the threshold, Adrian took half a step forward, his chest rising as if he were about to speak.
Gianna lifted her left hand—a single, tiny finger raised in the cool air of the hall.
Adrian stopped dead in his tracks, his jaw tightening, his mouth closing instantly.
"A man who does not know how to keep his wife in his house does not speak first at my table," Gianna said, her voice a deep, resonant contralto that filled the limestone vaults like an organ chord.
She turned her dark, diagnostic eyes toward me.
She looked at my shoes. She looked at the tortoiseshell clip in my hair.
Then, she walked forward, her small, silk-shod feet making almost no sound on the seventeenth-century terracotta tiles, stopped three inches from my coat, and reached out both hands.
She did not touch my shoulders.
She placed her small, warm, dry palms flat against the curve of my fifteen-week stomach.
The silence in the refectory was absolute. The only sound was the crackle of a dry oak log burning in the fireplace and the distant, lonely cry of a river hawk circling above the cliffs.
The baby moved.
A sharp, distinct kick against the lower right quadrant of my abdomen—strong enough that Gianna’s right hand lifted half an inch.
A slow, radiant, and terrifying smile spread across the old woman’s face, illuminating the deep wrinkles around her mouth until she looked twenty years younger.
"A boy," Gianna whispered, looking up into my eyes with a fierce, ancient triumph that made my throat tighten. "A boy with his grandfather's broad shoulders and his mother's quiet hands."
She took my right arm, tucking it securely into hers, completely ignoring her grandson standing ten feet away by the hearth.
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"Come, Claire," the matriarch commanded, leading me toward the dining alcove where a table was laid with white linen, silver cutlery, and two steaming bowls of potato gnocchi tossed in golden butter and fresh garden sage.
"Let the boy with the private jets stand in the corner until he remembers how to say grace."
