“How rapidly everything can change. Happiness is like a house of cards, easily destroyed even by the faintest of breezes or the lightest of touches.”

1614, Italy. Nine-year-old Beatrice Locatelli is forced to leave her family, and her beloved mountain hamlet, to move to Bergamo and work as a scullery maid for the Terzi, a noble family. Her future looks bleak until a fortuitous encounter with Eleonora, Lord Terzi’s daughter, changes the course of her life forever.
Ten years later, on a stormy summer afternoon, Beatrice meets Alessandro Lanzi, a young nobleman who saves her life. Despite being attracted to him, at first, she refuses his attentions, conscious of her humble origins and of the social disparity between them; as growing feelings become impossible to resist, will the love that they feel for each other be enough? With circumstances beyond their control, duty and a deadly pestilence raging through Bergamo, can their dream of a life together ever become reality?

‘Beatrice’s fate’ is a powerful story of love, loyalty, friendship, pain and loss. A tale whose plot twists and turns like the tightly clustered streets of Bergamo’s Città Alta. With the foothills of the Alps providing a backdrop as dramatic as her tale, Beatrice will take you there through her incredible journey, and you will not want to leave her side!

‘Beatrice,’ he whispered, pulling away from her just enough to be able to look into her eyes. ‘I think… I think that I am undeniably, irrefutably, unequivocally falling in love with you.’
She sat up, leaned forward and kissed him.
‘Alessandro,’ she said, parting from him. ‘I think that I am undeniably, irrefutably, unequivocally falling in love with you too.’

Gazing into her beautiful hazel eyes, brimming with heart-breaking sorrow, he said, ‘Oh Beatrice, do you really need to ask? I would step into a thousand fires to save you; had I failed to rescue you, I would have burned with you. Life would not have been worth living knowing that you were gone from this world.’

It is said time heals everything.
Certainly, what is broken can be repaired, what is destroyed rebuilt, what is wounded cared for, and the sick can be nurtured back to health. However, if a limb is amputated it cannot grow again; nobody, once dead, can be resurrected. Beatrice knew that if her heart had merely been broken, then, with patience and time, it could have been mended. Instead, it had been mercilessly ripped from her chest, crushed to dust and annihilated the moment she had walked away from Bergamo and from Alessandro.

Author: Camilla Galbiati
Genre: Romance
Subgenre: Historical fiction/romance
Audience: Adults