Christians they had tortured. In spite of the distance to which these
conflicting statements seemed to relegate them, Odo somehow felt as
though these pale strange people--youths with ardent faces under their
small round caps, damsels with wheat-coloured hair and boys no bigger
than himself, holding spotted dogs in leash--were younger and nearer to
him than the dwellers on the farm: Jacopone the farmer, the shrill
Filomena, who was Odo's foster-mother, the hulking bully their son and
the abate who once a week came out from Pianura to give Odo religious
instruction and who dismissed his questions with the invariable
exhortation not to pry into matters that were beyond his years. Odo had
loved the pictures in the chapel all the better since the abate, with a
shrug, had told him they were nothing but old rubbish, the work of the
barbarians.

Life at Pontesordo was in truth not very pleasant for an ardent and
sensitive little boy of nine, whose remote connection with the reigning
line of Pianura did not preserve him from wearing torn clothes and
eating black bread and beans out of an earthen bowl on the kitchen
doorstep.

"Go ask your mother for new clothes!" Filomena would snap at him, when
his toes came through his shoes and the rents in his jacket-sleeves had
spread beyond darning. "These you are wearing are my Giannozzo's, as you
well know, and every rag on your back is mine, if there were any law for
poor folk, for not a copper of pay for your keep or a stitch of clothing
for your body have we had these two years come Assumption--. What's
that? You can't ask your mother, you say, because she never comes here?
True enough--fine ladies let their brats live in cow-dung, but they must
have Indian carpets under their own feet. Well, ask the abate, then--he
has lace ruffles to his coat and a naked woman painted on his snuff