The Omega Scroll by Adrian D'Hagé Page A

Tricarico, did stand out academically – prizes for academic achievement, outstanding grades in all her subjects – a bright young thing. Petroni knew her education would come to nothing, she was a woman after all. He buzzed the outer office.
    ‘Put me through to the Bishop of Tricarico,’ he demanded, annoyed at having to waste his time organising a university scholarship for some poor nun in a village backwater. Petroni would soon find out that the power of a woman should never be underestimated.

CHAPTER TEN
    Tricarico
    I n southern Italy on the ‘instep of the boot’, the little town of Tricarico had stood for centuries, battered but unbowed, perched high on the side of a hill off the ancient Appian Way. The mountains had once been covered with huge oak forests but the progress of man had ensured the forests would never be seen again. Roman engineers had carved their roads through the thickly wooded countryside, and before them the Greeks had settled in the surrounding hills. The higher peaks of craggy granite were dusted with a light covering of early snow, the patchwork of fields seamed by deep ravines of limestone rising from the stony bed of the river that twisted and turned on itself through the valley.
    The thirteenth-century Convent of San Domenico stood alone on a hill across from the town. The only connection between the convent and the town was an old wooden bridge at the bottom of a ravine that had been etched and scarred by the rains of countless millennia.
    Allegra Bassetti crossed herself at the end of another hour of silent devotion and moved to the window of her small and sparsely furnished room, her dark hair hidden under her novice’s veil, her trim figure similarly hidden under her habit. The battered once-white buildings of Tricarico seemed less dirty in the cool autumn light. The jagged and broken terracotta roofs were tinged with orange as the sunset signalled the end of another day. Under the terracotta, the people of Tricarico lived as they had lived for centuries. Cheek by jowl. Nearly eight hundred families crammed into a maze of one-and two-room houses connected by alleys, stair-streets and tunnels filled with shopkeepers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, builders, peasants and padroni . At the top of the hill an old Norman tower stood sentinel over the town and just below it the Bishop’s faded and terraced palace formed the high side of the top piazza. Il Comùne, a dirty grey building housing the Mayor and what passed for administration, stood on the left of the Bishop’s piazza. L’Ufficio Postale was on the right. The bottom piazza lay a hundred metres away at the other end of the town’s main and only street. On either side of it, shops in various states of disrepair leaned drunkenly against one another.
    As the shadows grew longer Allegra’s thoughts turned to her family and she pictured her father, her mother and her three older brothers, Antonio, Salvatore and Enrico, hoes over their shoulders, all wending their way home after another backbreaking day in the fields. Her father, Martino Bassetti, as befitted his status as head of the household, would be riding the family donkey, precariously balancing a thatch of twigs for the evening fire on its neck. Her two younger brothers, Umberto and Giuseppe, would already be home from school and Nonna would probably be scolding five-year-old Giuseppe, the youngest of the six Bassetti children, who always seemed to be in trouble. Allegra said a silent prayer for her family and thanked God for each and every one of them, adding an additional ‘thank you’ that tonight she would be allowed to see them. On the last day of every second month, except when it fell on a Sunday or on a holy day of obligation, nuns who had family in the village were allowed to cross the rickety little bridge and go home for dinner. Normally Allegra looked forward to these days more than she would like to admit, but tonight she was troubled. An hour earlier she had