‘I think I’m dreaming this,’ said Robert, frowning. ‘I’m in Italy, aren’t I? I don’t know much Italian. But I understand what you are saying.’
‘I’m speaking to you in English.’ The younger woman grimaced. ‘I know you British think Italians are a mob of ignorant, stupid peasants. But a few of us can read and write. I went to school in England. My father wanted me to have an English education. He thought it was the best.’
‘What is this place?’ asked Robert.
‘A country house,’ the woman told him. ‘It’s been in my family for many generations. It was a Palladian villa once, and very grand and beautiful. But it’s pretty much a ruin now. You British and the Germans have both shelled it, and blown half of it to bits.’
Robert looked round the room, which didn’t seem to him at all palatial. More like a peasant’s cottage, it was small and whitewashed, with great wooden beams along the ceiling.
The woman saw him looking. ‘You’re actually in our pigeon loft,’ she said. ‘In the little room the man who kept the pigeons used to have. But if you think you can hear pigeons cooing, you’ll be imagining it. We’ve long since eaten them.’
Robert blinked again. Looking at the older woman, he saw she was still nodding and smiling amiably at him, and smoothing out the sewing which was lying in her lap. There was a jug of water on the table at her side. ‘May I have some water, please?’ he asked.
‘She doesn’t hear,’ the younger woman told him. But now she reached across and poured some water from the jug into a glass, and then she helped him drink.
‘How long have I been here?’ Robert asked.
‘A week, ten days – I haven’t counted.’ The younger woman filled the glass again. ‘You’ve been very ill. You have some shrapnel wounds, and these are healing, but we were very worried because you’ve been unconscious. Or you were half-awake and talking to yourself.’
‘What have I been saying?’
‘I couldn’t work it out. One day, you were muttering about a penny bangle, you were telling somebody you didn’t want to buy one. Or that was what it sounded like to me.’ The younger woman shrugged. ‘So – we tried to feed you. But you couldn’t eat. You just drank water. You’ve lost a lot of weight.’
Robert looked at his hands and arms, and saw how thin they were, how gaunt and wasted. ‘You
are
a real person, aren’t you?’ he enquired suspiciously. ‘I mean, you’re not a ghost?’
‘Yes, of course I’m real.’ The woman touched one of his hands. ‘There, do you see? My flesh is warm, not cold.’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Sofia,’ said the woman. ‘Do you wish to tell me yours?’
‘It’s Robert Denham.’ Robert felt he owed her that. ‘Why didn’t you hand me over to the Germans?’
‘I don’t really know.’ Sofia picked up her sewing. ‘If they found you here, they’d put us all against the wall. But maybe we Italians want to make some small resistance. To show we can be brave. We know you British soldiers think Italians are all cowards.’
‘We don’t think that!’ cried Robert. ‘There were lots of Italian soldiers in North Africa, and some of them put up a damned good fight.’
‘My brothers were in the desert,’ said Sofia, and she turned her head away.
‘What happened to them?’ asked Robert.
‘They’re missing, both of them.’ Sofia brushed her hand across her eyes and shrugged again. ‘We haven’t heard they’re prisoners, so I expect they’re dead. My own fiancé died at Alamein.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘They were your enemies,’ said Sofia.
‘I’m supposed to be
your
enemy.’
‘Oh, we’re not Fascists here.’ Sofia smiled a bitter smile. ‘When the
Duce
fell from power, and we had the armistice, my father gave a party. We hoped our war was over. But then the Germans came.’
Over the course of the next few days, whenever he woke up, Robert found Sofia or the grey-haired woman sitting quietly by his bed, usually with their heads bent over sewing.
It looked like they were making tablecloths, or sewing sheets, or shirts. But then Sofia told him they were actually sewing shrouds. These days, she added, they used a lot of shrouds, and there would be lots of deaths this winter – food was short, and so was fuel.
At first, they fed him thin, brown soup containing chopped-up vegetables and tiny shreds of meat. But two or three days later, they started bringing plates of macaroni with tomato sauce, and now and then a bit of bread and cheese.
As Robert became more wide-awake and stronger, what had happened started coming back to him.
He and his sergeant and two men had volunteered for what was on the face of it a fairly simple mission behind the German lines. They’d managed to blow up a German gun emplacement on a hilltop north of Florence. They’d almost got back home to their own lines when there’d been a terrible explosion that had blown him off his feet, and he had died.
Or, as it seemed now, he hadn’t died.
‘Some of our tenants brought you to our house,’ Sofia told him. ‘You were very lucky that they found you before the Germans did. The Germans would have shot you. But you’re still in danger. German officers come to see my father almost every day. They sit and eat his food and drink his wine. Our family goes without.’
‘What about my men?’ asked Robert.
‘I’m afraid they’re dead,’ Sofia said, and now she shrugged in sympathy. ‘We buried them where they died. We had to, because otherwise the Germans would have found them. They would have worked out what you’d done, and then searched all the houses in the district, looking for anybody who’d survived. You were all in British battledress, even though you didn’t have any dog tags, badges, anything like that.’
‘The CO thought it best, since we were going behind the lines.’ Robert rubbed his eyes. He’d gone with his reliable Sergeant Gregory, together with two privates, Blain and Thornton. The privates had been lively, bright, intelligent young lads, and always up for anything. But now they were both dead, and Alan Thornton would never get a medal to send home to his mum.
‘I was the officer in charge,’ said Robert, suddenly feeling sick with guilt and shame. ‘It was my job to get us back alive.’
‘It was not your fault,’ Sofia told him.
‘It must have been, because the Germans saw us!’
‘The Germans didn’t see you,’ said Sofia, quietly. ‘It was a mistake. As you were going home, you got hit by a shell that had been fired by your own side.’
‘You need a proper bath,’ declared Sofia, one October morning. ‘I’ll try to get some water brought up here, and a small tub.’
Then somebody tapped softly on the door, and Sofia looked around, alarmed. She called out something in Italian, and a male Italian voice replied.
‘It’s just the doctor,’ whispered Robert, who was getting to grips with his Italian and had come to know the doctor’s voice.
Sofia left them while the doctor examined Robert. He made encouraging comments in Italian as he listened to his patient’s heart, then checked up on his wounds, which were all healing nicely.
‘I’ve been thinking about my family in England,’ Robert told Sofia, as he ate his lunch that day, out of bed and sitting in a chair. ‘They’re going to think I’m dead. I don’t know if it’s possible to get a message sent?’
‘It would be very difficult,’ said Sofia, which Robert took to mean impossible. But then she smiled to see him eating with apparent relish. ‘This afternoon,’ she added, ‘I want to get you walking. Did you enjoy your lunch?’
‘Yes, thank you very much, it was delicious.’
‘I’m only sorry there was so little of it.’
‘I had more than enough.’ This was an outright lie, but Robert felt very guilty about eating the scarce food Sofia’s family could have had instead.
But she encouraged him to eat. ‘You’re getting stronger every day,’ she told him, as she made sure he swallowed every single precious mouthful.
Then, she made him exercise. Sometimes, when there was no moon, she took him down the rickety stairs behind the pigeon loft, and then she got him running around the yard behind the house. ‘Soon,’ she told him, ‘you’ll be killing Germans, and the Allies will win the war.’
‘I’m going to be a one-man army, am I?’
‘Well, not quite,’ Sofia said. ‘But we can’t help you to get back to your unit. It would be far too dangerous for us. So when you’re well again, you’ll join the partisans.’
Autumn was coming on, the days were cooler, and although the elderly grey-haired woman’s fusty black remained unchanged, Sofia’s cotton dresses gave way to knitted jumpers, cardigans, and tweed or corduroy skirts.
Robert insisted he was strong enough to leave the villa, to take his chances in the mountains, or to try to get back to his unit.
But Sofia wouldn’t hear of it.
‘You must wait,’ she told him. Then she smiled. ‘I can see that patience has never been your virtue, as you English say! You won’t be any use to anyone until you’re strong again.’
Robert worked very hard at being strong.
‘What’s happening in the world?’ he asked Sofia, as he jogged around his tiny prison, or did press-ups, determined to build his stamina up. ‘What’s stopping the Americans and British breaking through? I’d have thought we’d have the Germans on the run by now. Sofia, the Allied armies can’t be very far away?’
‘They’re very close to us in terms of miles,’ agreed Sofia. ‘But it’s nearly winter. The Germans are so well dug in the Allies just can’t shift them. I think they’re going to have to wait for spring.’
One morning in December, Sofia told Robert that later on that day, when it got dark, he would be collected by some friends and taken to the hills, and there he would become a partisan.
‘Excellent,’ said Robert, who was itching to leave his claustrophobic little jail up in the pigeon loft, which stank of lime and droppings, and to breathe fresh air again.
‘But I’ll be sorry to leave
you
,’ he told Sofia and the silent, grey-haired woman, whose name he’d never learned. ‘After all you’ve done for me. I mean, I’m very grateful. I hope we’ll meet again.’
Sofia looked at him and smiled. ‘But you’re not leaving me,’ she said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Robert stared at Sofia, horrified. ‘Sofia, it will be too dangerous. What if you were found with me? If the Germans caught you helping me?’
‘I’ll have to take the chance.’
‘What about your parents? I’ve never asked about them, I thought I shouldn’t know, but won’t they want – ’
‘My mother died in April of a broken heart, because her sons are dead. Or at any rate, she had convinced herself that they were dead, and she has gone to join them. My father is a tired old man, who has no fight in him. I told him I was leaving, and he gave me his blessing.’
‘I think I should meet him.’
‘No, you can’t do that.’ At the mention of her parents, Sofia’s soft brown eyes had filled with tears. ‘As I said, he’s tired. Since my mother died, he struggles to get through the days. He’s ill, he’s – I don’t know the word in English, but I mean he doesn’t care. Leave him alone, and let me come with you.’
‘Sofia, I still don’t think – ’
‘Robert, I’m leaving anyway,’ Sofia told him firmly. ‘I’m sick of sewing shrouds. I’m going to be a partisan. If you don’t want me to come with you, I’ll go by myself.’
Chapter Sixteen
January 1945
Rose Denham couldn’t quite believe her eyes, but the letter from the solicitor in Dorchester was clear and to the point.
The owner of Charton Minster, the lovely golden mansion that had once been Rose’s home, had died a month ago. She knew he’d died, of course. The elaborate, expensive private funeral had been the gossip of the village. The big surprise was that Sir Michael Easton had left the house to Rose.
But, as she realised straight away, his sole intention was to mock her from the grave, not make her happy. Since he had inherited Charton Minster, back in the 1920s, he’d let it to a succession of bad tenants, each more careless than the last. So now the whole place was a cavernous ruin.
Its last inhabitants, fifty delinquent boys locked up for various crimes from petty theft to arson and attempted murder had – so Mrs Hobson said – destroyed the place inside, just as Sir Michael had no doubt hoped they would.