by Rhys Bowen
Hugo felt tears welling up and blinked them away.
“I have a gift for you, too,” he said.
“A gift? For me?”
“Of course. It’s Christmas. One has to give gifts. You said so.”
“Is it another pigeon? Another tin?”
“Nothing as useful, I’m afraid. Here.” He handed her the missal.
“It’s an old book.” She looked at it in wonder.
“I found it among the rubble,” he said. “It seems to be almost intact. Open it.”
She did and found the folded paper.
“Carefully,” he instructed.
She unfolded it and gave a little gasp of excitement. “It is a Miraculous Medal, just like the one I put into Guido’s pocket when he went off to war. How did you know?”
“I found it among the rubble,” he said. “I cleaned it up a bit. I remembered you said you had no medal for la Madonna. And I drew a picture for you.” He realised as he said it that he sounded like a hopeful little boy.
Sofia spread out the folded sheet and held it up to the lantern light. “It’s the nativity,” she exclaimed. “The Virgin and Saint Joseph and the infant Jesus. And shepherds and sheep. Oh, and it’s my home. Look at the church tower. It’s amazing. You are a true artist, Ugo. I will treasure this forever.”
He felt absurdly happy. She moved over to sit beside him and gently stroked his hand. “You are a good, kind man. I hope your wife learns to treasure you.”
They both looked up as they heard the low-pitched vibration of approaching aircraft.
“The Allies. They come to bomb the German winter line again.” She looked excited.
The noise grew in intensity until it rattled loose stones. Then there was a sudden whining noise followed by a deep, booming thud.
“They are dropping bombs,” she said. “There must be a convoy on the road.” She started in fear as a second thud came, making the whole hillside shake.
“Too close,” she exclaimed. “Hold me, Ugo. I am frightened.”
She nestled up against him and he wrapped his arms around her, feeling the softness of her hair against his cheek.
“Don’t worry. You are safe with me,” he said.
I could stay like this forever, he thought. No sooner had this thought formed itself in his head when there was a screeching whine closer still. The dull thud of the explosion made the ground tremble. Sofia screamed and clutched at Hugo, burying her face in his jacket collar as they felt the blast. Stones rained down from the damaged walls, bouncing and thudding around them. Hugo flung himself on top of her to shield her. Then the floor was tilting. The lamp fell with a crash and they were in complete darkness. He could hear and feel rubble sliding past them. It felt as if the whole chapel was imploding. They were sliding, being swept along with cascading stones. Sofia cried out. Hugo grabbed at the side of the altar and hung on for dear life while the world crumbled around him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
JOANNA
June 1973
As the procession disbanded in the piazza, we stood watching while people hurried off in all directions. I looked at Paola, wondering if we, too, would be going home.
“They go to bring the feast,” she said. “We have been invited to join the Donatelli family this year. Maria Donatelli kindly invited us because it is a long way for me to walk down to my house and then back to the piazza with the food. We will wait for them at their table.”
I followed her across the piazza to a table with a white cloth. “Famiglia Donatelli” was printed on a card. I now saw that every family had reserved a table. I looked around to see where Cosimo and Renzo would be sitting. Men were passing carrying trays of carved lamb. I watched them place the trays at tables in front of the town hall. There was no sign of Cosimo or Renzo yet. I realised that they must have been among those dressed in the robes and hoods. People were arriving at our table now, bringing huge mounds of pasta, risottos, platters of salad, breads, a big ham. I was introduced and found myself sitting amid a loud crowd of many generations. The youngest was Angelina’s daughter and the oldest a shrunken little man with no teeth whose food was cut up for him. Everyone laughed and shouted, and this was repeated at all the other tables. The noise level in the piazza was overpowering. I looked around, wondering if any occasion in England would produce such obvious joy and celebration of family. I felt uncomfortable among them, although they were kind enough to include me, constantly pressing food on me and keeping my wine glass full.
Suddenly I felt that I had to get away. I excused myself on the pretext of finding a lavatory. As I stepped into the shade at the edge of the piazza, I saw someone coming up behind me. I stepped aside to let him pass, but instead he stopped and faced me. It was Renzo. He took my wrist again, held up my hand, and compared it to his own, now wearing a ring.
“Yes, they are identical,” he said. “Incredible.” We stared at the rings, comparing them. He was still frowning, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.
“And there are letters inside mine,” he went on. “I only noticed them yesterday. ‘HRL.’ Do you know what they mean?”
“Yes, I do. Hugo Roderick Langley. My father’s initials,” I said.
He shook his head. “So I have to agree that this ring came from your father. It’s hard to believe that he was here and he knew my mother, but now we have proof that what you say must be true. I must apologise for my rude treatment earlier.”
“There is no need to apologise. I’m just glad that somebody now believes me.”
Renzo looked at me and I nodded. He gave a little laugh. “To think we had no idea. When my father finds out, he will be so surprised.”
“Don’t tell him,” I said quickly.
He gave me a questioning look. “Why? Why should he not know?”
“Because . . .” I hesitated. “Because we don’t know what really happened, and until we do, I’d like to keep this to ourselves.”
I was still unsure what to do and whether I could trust Renzo. I had learned the hard way that not all men are trustworthy. Then I realised I had no way of finding out any more about my father and Sofia if I did not share some of what I knew.
“I’d like to show you something,” I said. I held up my wrist. “This medal on a ribbon was among my father’s things. I am sure that your mother gave it to him. He was not religious and would never have chosen to wear something like this.”
Renzo took my wrist again, holding it up to look at it. I was horribly aware of his touch, but he seemed not to notice that he was so close to me. “Interesting,” he said. “I’m not sure which saint this is.”
“Paola said it was Saint Rita,” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m not exactly a student of saints. The older generation believes there is a saint for every problem. Frankly I haven’t found them to be very effective in solving mine.”
“You have had problems?” I asked.
Renzo shrugged. “I have had my share. Only small setbacks compared to the sufferings of the world, I suppose. Mainly problems of love.” He stopped, frowning again. “I should not bore you with this, Signorina Langley.”
“No, please. Go on. And do call me Joanna.”
“Very well, Joanna.” He shrugged. “There was a girl here when I was eighteen. I was sent to Florence to school, you know, and when I came home I told my father I wished to be a chef. He thought it was a stupid idea. I was going to inherit all this land, the prosperous vineyards. He wanted me to study agriculture, so I had to agree, and did a course on viniculture at the university. Then I came home and fell in love. I thought Cosimo would be happy, but he didn’t like her. She wanted to be a fashion designer, and miraculously she got a place at the fashion institute in Milan. Off she went and of course she never came back. I hear she’s quite famous now.”
He broke off and looked at me. “I don’t know why I’m telling you my life story.”
“Maybe because you sense that I’ve been through similar experiences.”
“Yes. The man I thought I was going to marry dumped me for someone who could advance his career.”
“I was always told that English men were cold and proper,” he said. Then he corrected himself. “But not all English people, I have to admit. I met an English girl once when I was working over there. She was very nice—funny and warm and not at all stuffy as the English are supposed to be. I thought I might stay in London and marry her. But then Cosimo had his stroke and I had to leave her and come rushing home. I feel that any time I fall in love, it is doomed.”
“There is still plenty of time,” I said.
“For you, maybe. I have already turned thirty. In our culture this is a hopeless case. An old bachelor, like my father.”
We had been walking in the shade up the narrow street, and I saw that the little park was up ahead of us. “There is something else I’d like you to see,” I said. “Can we sit in the park and I will show you? Maybe you can help me figure it out.”
We left the houses behind. Renzo followed me along the sandy path to the bench in the shade of the sycamore tree where the old couple had been sitting. He sat beside me and I opened my purse. I took out the cigarette packet on which my father had sketched the woman.
He gasped as I handed it to him. “Yes, this is her. My mother. Exactly as she was. That smile. Did your father draw this?”
“He must have.”
“He has captured her so well.”
There was no sound apart from the cooing of a pigeon in the tree above us and the chirping of sparrows as they pecked in the dust. It felt as if we were alone at the edge of the universe.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Your father gave my mother his ring, which must have been a prized possession. He took the trouble to draw a picture of her. So it is clear that he had feelings for her. And she gave him a medal. That must have meant that she had feelings for him, too. So what happened? What went wrong? Did he leave her and go back to England, so she chose the security of a German instead?”
“There is something else I want you to see—the letter I told you about.” I pulled out the letter my father had written.
Renzo examined the envelope. “Yes, the address was correct,” he said. “That was the house where I was born. And it was posted . . . after she went. Not at this address.” He sighed.
“Now read what my father wrote.”
He opened the letter. He started it, then looked up. “He wrote good Italian.”
“He studied art in Florence before the war,” I said.
“He was an artist?”
“Not when I knew him. He taught art at a school, but I didn’t know he had painted until after his death when I found some really lovely paintings.”
He went back to reading the letter. I heard the small intake of breath as he came to the part at the end. “Our beautiful boy?” he asked, looking at me.
“I wondered if that meant you, whether you had to be hidden at a time of danger.”
He shook his head. “I told you before. I was never hidden. I lived with my mother and my great-grandmother until my mother left us. Then I continued to live with Nonna until she died soon after the war ended. That was when Cosimo took me in. He took over my mother’s land and he managed to buy the land of those men who were killed in the war. So he became prosperous enough to give me a good education.”
“Is it possible that your mother could have had another child? A child with my father?”
“How could this be?” He shook his head. “We would have known.”
“How old were you? Three? Four? Maybe a child of that age doesn’t notice if an adult gets fatter.”
“But Nonna would have noticed. Every woman in the town would have seen. Nothing gets past the women of San Salvatore, I can assure you. They know everything. And if she had given birth, where would she have done this?”
“It comes back to the question of how my father was here and yet nobody knew about it. Would it have been possible to have hidden him away in your house?”
Renzo frowned at this, considering. “I suppose it might have been possible. We had a big attic, and you had to climb a ladder to reach it. My mother went up there from time to time to bring down things that might be useful to us. There was also a cellar. I didn’t like to go down there because there were rats and it was dark. But the wine and olive oil were kept down there.”
I looked at him hopefully. “So someone could have been hidden in your cellar?”
“Except how could your father have been brought in? The only door to the house opens to the street.”
“At the back what is there?”
“Windows and the town wall below. Besides, Nonna would have had to be in on it, and I remember her as a strict, correct, and demanding sort of person. I don’t think she would have permitted a foreigner to be hidden in what was her family home. She would have gone straight to the priest and confessed to him.”
“Wouldn’t your mother have done the same?” I asked. “She must have been religious, or she wouldn’t have given my father this medal.”
“I suppose so. And the priest must never reveal the sanctity of the confession.”
“I talked to Father Filippo,” I said, “in case your mother had told him something important. He remembered her fondly but was hazy about details.”
“Yes, I heard that his mind is failing. Such a pity. What a fine old man.”
“She would have taken an awful risk to hide an enemy pilot in her house, risking her son and her grandmother’s lives,” I said.
“Not only that, but there was the German, remember. The German she ran off with? But perhaps he came to the house after your father had gone. How was your father rescued? Perhaps the Allies came and found him and drove him away, leaving my mother.”
“Yes, I suppose that is possible.”
We looked at each other, our brains each trying to make sense of things.
“I am sorry I cannot help you,” Renzo said at last. “Truly I have almost no memory of that time. I know I was sick for a while and my mother took care of me. I remember the German in our house—the one she ran off with. I remember we ate rabbit and chestnuts and anything else she could find for us. She’d go off with her basket and look through the woods for something to eat because the Germans had taken all we had. And I have to believe now that she and your father did meet and clearly he felt that they had fallen in love. But the beautiful boy . . . I have no idea what he meant by that. And I am afraid now we will never know.” He looked up at me, as if processing this. “If there was a child and he was hidden, then surely he must have died. No good can come from this search. You should go home. Leave this place. I have a feeling it is not safe for you to be here.”
A cold wind sprang up, snatching at the letter in my hands. Out over the hills the clouds were building. Suddenly I felt uneasy sitting here with him, two people together on a bench with nobody else around. I wanted to ask him what he meant by “not safe.” Did he know something, or was he saying that the police might want to pin the murder on me?
I stood up. “I should be getting back. Paola will worry about me.”
“Yes.” He stood up, too. “And I should be helping Cosimo. He will not be pleased that I am talking with you. He thinks you mean trouble here.”
“I don’t want to cause any trouble,” I said. “I only wanted to know the truth. But it seems now that I never will.”
We started to walk together. “Do you think the police will let me go soon?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Who knows? I think it must be quite obvious to anybody but an idiot that you had no reason to kill Gianni and that you were certainly not strong enough to have put him into the well. But unfortunately some of our policemen are idiots. But don’t worry. We will do what we can for you, I promise. Such treatment should not happen to a stranger.”
Our footsteps echoed back from the walls on either side of the narrow street. In the distance we could hear laughter, and
someone had started playing an accordion. Voices were raised in song.
“They seem to be enjoying themselves,” I said.
He nodded. “In a place like this people expect little and are delighted by small things. Not like in London, where one must spend money to have a good time and nobody ever laughs. In the restaurant where I worked it was as silent as the grave. People whispered. Nobody laughed.”
I thought about this. “That’s true,” I said. “If someone talked or laughed loudly everyone would look at them.”
“And yet you live there.”
“I have to finish taking my bar exams,” I said.
“Bar? You wish to work making drinks?”
I laughed then. “No, that’s what we call the exam to become a lawyer. Called to the bar. Silly, isn’t it?”
“So many silly expressions in English,” he said. “I was constantly puzzled about what people meant. So you take the exam to become a lawyer?”
I nodded. “And when I have passed . . . if I pass, then I can practice law wherever I want. But I haven’t yet found a place where I feel at home.”
“Not where you grew up?”
I shook my head. “I never felt that I really fitted in,” I said. “My father came from a noble family. He was Sir Hugo Langley. We owned a beautiful big house called Langley Hall and a lot of land before I was born, but my father had to sell everything because of the taxes owed on the estate. So we lived in the lodge and he was the art teacher at the school that took over our house.”
“That must have been hard for him,” Renzo said, “to be reminded every day of what he had lost.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was. My mother was from a less noble background and was quite happy to look after us. But she died when I was eleven, and after that life was quite bleak. I attended the school, but the rest of the girls were rich. And they were not interested in their studies. They either teased or despised me. So no, I don’t think I’d want to go back there.”
“So we both grew up without a mother. It is never easy. There is always something missing,” he said. “Sometimes I used to wake up from a dream that my mother had kissed my cheek as she used to when I was sleeping.”