She forced herself to eat when he spooned food into her mouth, even though she felt food would choke her. She smiled at him, and held his hand, because they were the only ways open to her in which to show her gratitude. But he was too busy nurturing the flame of life that flickered weakly inside her to notice the change. All he knew was that she was mercifully quieter.
‘Genoa, Signor!’
Although he had dressed Maud and repacked their suitcases in preparation for reaching the town, Ronnie had been dreading the end of the rail journey. It meant having to leave the steward’s care and the security of the bedded stateroom that had enabled him to care for Maud with at least the rudiments of comfort to hand.
‘I’ll find you a porter, Signor,’ The steward offered.
‘And a taxi,’ Ronnie pleaded, slipping him two more pounds. ‘I need to get to the Bardi bus. But first I need to change my English money for Italian lire ...’
‘Signor, all the buses leave outside the station. May I make a suggestion? My cousin’s wife runs a small pensione here. You can leave your wife with her while you change your money and find your bus.’
‘I’ll do that.’ Ronnie grasped eagerly at the idea of finding another bed for Maud to lie in.
The steward returned with a porter and handed Ronnie a small heap of coins.
‘You paid me much too much, Signor,’ he said gravely. ‘I have already tipped the porter and told him where to take you. Good luck to you and your wife.’
Ronnie shook the man’s hand appreciatively. Picking up Maud, he stepped off the train into an icy blast.
‘Italian winds are just as bloody freezing as Welsh ones,’ he muttered as he gritted his teeth and followed the porter.
‘Did you say something?’ Maud mumbled sleepily. After the excitement of the journey through France and the attack it had precipitated, Ronnie was taking no chances. There’d been more than a spoonful of laudanum in the coffee he’d fed her after their last meal.
It was six o’clock in the evening. The square was full of people hurrying home from work. A sprinkling of travellers lingered in the café waiting for their buses and trains. A few steps and he found himself in the small lodging house. The room the proprietress showed him to actually overlooked the square. It was clean, and the woman friendly. If Maud’s condition was bringing them sympathy and good service, he certainly wasn’t too proud to accept it. He put Maud to bed, and left after asking the woman to keep an eye on her. He had no choice. They needed Italian money, and he had to find out about buses to Bardi.
‘The day after tomorrow!’
‘They only go once a week, Signor. Bardi is not a popular place. Every market day, one bus comes in and one goes out. It will leave at noon.’
The market bus. He had a sudden memory of that bus. Packed with gnarled old countrywomen laden with chickens and geese, the whole shrieking every time the ancient, battered vehicle jerked over pot-holes that speckled the unmade roads, like currants in Welsh cakes.
‘There’s no other way? A car, perhaps?’
‘A car! To Bardi? No, Signor.’ The driver laughed at his naivety.
There was nothing for it. He returned to the pensione, lay next to Maud on the bed and waited. Perhaps it was just as well she could rest before the worst part of their journey began. And their landlady proved as kind as she was friendly, doing their washing for them and bringing rich minestrone soups and omelettes to their room to tempt Maud’s non-existent appetite.
The Signora had a cousin who knew the driver. At her injunction he kept seats for Ronnie and Maud close to the front of the bus, where they could receive some benefit from the warmth of the engine. They needed it. The Signora’s husband carried their cases on board, and Ronnie carried Maud.
The journey from Genoa to Bardi was every bit as hellish as Ronnie had feared. They bumped and rocked their way painfully over dirt roads, stopping at every out of the way hamlet and farmstead, and all he could do was hold Maud suspended on his lap and hope that the cheeses and live chickens stowed overhead on the string racks next to their suitcases wouldn’t fall on to their heads.
They eventually reached the square in Bardi at five in the afternoon, and even Ronnie was cold, tired and exhausted. He left Maud slumped in her seat and carried the suitcases off first, then he went back for her. He stood feeling totally lost and bewildered in the darkening square, holding a sick and barely conscious Maud in his arms.
He couldn’t remember anything. Not even the road out of the town to his grandfather’s farm.
‘You look as though you need help, Signor.’ The man was old, bent and grey. A busybody. A blessed busybody who might know everyone in the village – and outside.
‘I need to get to Signor Ronconi’s house,’ Ronnie blurted out urgently, worried about the darkness and the rapidly dropping temperature. ‘My wife is sick.’
The man studied him thoughtfully in the lamplight.
‘You are related to Signor Ronconi, perhaps?’
‘His grandson.’
‘Ah, now I see, you are Giacomo’s son?’
‘I am Giacomo too.’
‘Come, we will go to Mama Conti. She will look after you, please follow me.’ The man led the way to a large house on the edge of the square. Trusting to fate to look after their cases, Ronnie followed him. Mama Conti, a large and warm-hearted Italian housewife, asked no questions – at first. She opened her door, took them in, sat Maud by the fire and spoonfed her minestrone soup – which Ronnie was beginning to think was the Italian cure for all ills.
Bit by bit he told his story, and a boy was dispatched to the square to pick up their cases. An ox was found which would draw a wheel-less sled to his grandparent’s farm, both to carry their luggage and bring news of their arrival, and later, much later, when they were both fed and rested and after much discussion as to the best way of conveying Maud there, they were allowed to leave with a guide who promised to show Ronnie the way to their new home. He carried Maud. It seemed the easiest solution to the problem. Too weak to sit on a horse, even if one could be found, and far too delicate to withstand the bumping of the local sleds, the only solution seemed to lie in Ronnie’s strong arms.
He had been warned it was eight kilometres. He had remembered it as five, but when he finally saw the oil lamp flickering in his grandfather’s kitchen window he would have believed anyone who had told him it was twelve.
Maud was taken from him, and carried upstairs by his aunt and a neighbour who had been summoned to help. His grandparents embraced him, sat him by the fire in the only chair that boasted both a cushioned seat and back and fed him minestrone soup and wine that was so raw it hurt his throat. They asked only one question: ‘Are you here to stay?’
When he said yes, they nodded and smiled so broadly he felt that he really had come home.
Maud was sunk deeply into a fluffy feather bed that had enveloped itself around her. She felt warm, cosy, sheltered and very, very comfortable. She opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was her own arm, encased in the sleeve of an unfamiliar linen nightdress, the wrist ornamented by thick, crunchy cotton lace. She looked up. A candle flickered on a pine chest next to the bed she was lying in. Two brown faces looked down at her, both smiling, one old and wrinkled, the other impossibly ancient. There was a single moment of blind, urgent panic.
‘Ronnie?’ she called out weakly.
‘I’m here.’ His hand grasped hers, strong and reassuring.
‘Ronnie, don’t leave me,’ she pleaded.
‘Not now darling,’ he murmured. ‘Not ever.’
Epilogue
It had been a glorious summer, and the weather showed no sign of abating even in late September. The harvest had been a rich and golden one. The vines had never been as full, nor the grapes as sweet. Ronnie had even suggested to his grandfather that for once the wine might not need watering down. The sheep grazed, bald and contented, on dried grass that was already hay on the lower slopes of the valley. The cattle chewed on a sweet
er cud nearer the stream and the farmhouse. The sow suckled her thirteen piglets, and even the runt that Aunt Theresa had taken to feeding wrapped in a shawl in the farmhouse kitchen was doing well enough to warrant a prognosis of continued life rather than a sticky end as a glazed suckling pig for Sunday dinner.
The animals lazed in the sties and the fields, Aunt Theresa and grandmother spun wool as they sat on the wooden kitchen chairs that grandfather had carried outside for them, and held their noses as they watched Ronnie carry buckets in and out of the stone tank beneath the farmhouse.
There’d been so many things he had forgotten about Bardi, he reflected, choking on raw sewage fumes as he lowered himself and his buckets into the murky depths of the cesspit. Not least the ritual, twice-yearly emptying out of the huge stone waste pit beneath the house.
The animals in the barn rested their hooves on a slatted stone floor. The slats were carefully spaced, close enough to allow the hoofs a firm grip, but not too close to obstruct the animal waste from falling into the tank. It didn’t help that the waste from the farmhouse drained into the same pit from chutes that led out of the kitchen sink and outhouse.
He carried his buckets to another tank, two fields away, built conveniently close to the vegetable plot. Stopping to breathe in clean air for a moment, he doused his hands in a horse trough before picking up his wooden buckets again. The walk back and forward across the fields he enjoyed; it was the short descent into the pit that was unpleasant. Only this time, he noted with satisfaction, the job was done. He was hard pushed to fill both buckets.
‘Dear God, I never expected to see Ronnie Ronconi, the immaculate Ronnie, dressed in work dungarees and up to his eyes in ...’
‘You don’t have to say the word.’ Ronnie struggled out of the pit. Putting down his buckets, he extended his hand.
‘I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,’ Trevor shook his head.
‘Coward,’ Ronnie smiled. They walked together across the fields. Trevor watched while Ronnie emptied the buckets and washed them in the wooden trough, before tipping it out on its side.
‘Shouldn’t you have stepped in there?’ Trevor asked gravely.
‘I’ve a better place lined up,’ Ronnie grinned. A set of perfect white teeth gleamed through the grime on his face. He walked on down to the stream. Trevor followed. Ronnie stepped straight into the cold water, still wearing his grandfather’s old working dungarees. He scrubbed the worst of the filth from them with sand, then, taking them off, he scrubbed himself with a crude wooden brush and bar of strong carbolic soap that he’d had the foresight to place on the bank before he began his job.
‘Looks like you’ve done this before,’ Trevor commented, squatting on his heels.
‘Second time this summer. Did you and Laura have a good journey?’
‘No. And as you’ve done it yourself, how can you even ask?’
Ronnie lay down, full length in the stream, and allowed the water to rinse off the soapsuds.
‘By the time we reached Bardi –’
‘You were tired, hot and hungry. And as the last straw, you found you had no other choice but to walk here.’ Ronnie left the water and pulled a pair of rough black cotton trousers over his slim, soaking flanks.
‘Aren’t you going to dry yourself?’
‘No need to in this heat.’ He picked up an unevenly woven linen shirt, and a leather belt.
‘How on earth did you manage with Maud, when you reached here?’ Trevor asked.
‘That was difficult.’ Ronnie’s face fell serious. ‘She was so done in by the time we got to Bardi, she was barely conscious. I met one of my grandfather’s friends. He had a sled –’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Trevor groaned. ‘One of those wonderful contraptions pulled by an ox, with no wheels, that bumps over every lump in the road.’
‘Good God, man, don’t tell me you and Laura tried to sit on it?’
‘For about five minutes.’ He watched Ronnie tuck his shirt into his trousers and pull the leather belt tightly around his waist. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said critically.
‘I could afford to,’ Ronnie said carelessly. ‘Those sleds are all right for luggage.’
‘That’s what we ended up using it for.’
Ronnie picked up his filthy overalls. Wrapping them in a bundle and grabbing the soap and brush, he began to walk up the hill, back towards the farmhouse. ‘I carried Maud here,’ he said quietly.
‘She must have been exhausted.’
‘Half dead might be a better description,’ Ronnie told him.
They reached the top of the hill. Trevor was panting from the heat and the unaccustomed exertion, but Ronnie was as fresh as if he’d just left his bed.
‘As I said, I carried Maud here. It’s only about four miles.’
‘Dear God, Ronnie, weren’t you tired yourself? I could barely drag myself up the hills to here. The thought of carrying Laura as well ...’
‘Maud’s lighter than Laura,’ Ronnie pointed out. ‘And by that time I’d seen enough to jog my memory. I remembered enough of my grandmother and my aunt to be sure of our welcome. I wasn’t disappointed. My grandmother had already stripped, cleaned and made up the biggest bed, in the best bedroom, for Maud. Not that they wanted me to share it with her,’ he complained drily. ‘Between them, Aunt Theresa and my grandmother elbowed me very nicely out of the way. They must have been bored out of their minds before we turned up, because judging by the amount of time they spent nursing Maud they couldn’t have had anything to do before. They spoonfed her the best spaghetti, the freshest vegetables, the richest cream. They stayed with her day and night, pouring weird concoctions of herbal teas down her throat. They talked to her, sang to her – not that poor Maud understood a single word they were saying – and I couldn’t swear to it, but in my opinion I think they even resorted to casting a spell or two.’
Ronnie looked to the back of the house where his grandfather had carried out three more chairs and a small table. The older women had put away their spinning, and a bottle of his aunt’s strawberry wine stood on the table together with four glasses. Maud, still thin, but more robust than she had been in Wales, was sitting engrossed in conversation with Laura.
‘You had a chance to examine her before you came looking for me?’ Ronnie asked Trevor.
‘Only a third of her right lung is functioning, and her left is badly scarred, you do know that?’
‘The local doctor told me she’ll never be strong.’
‘He’s right,’ Trevor agreed flatly. ‘And if you’re asking for my opinion I think a return to Wales would be as good as a death sentence for her.’
‘Who wants to go back to Wales?’
‘You’re happy here?’ Trevor asked incredulously, staring at the primitive farmhouse, and Ronnie’s rough clothes.
‘Blissfully,’ Ronnie laughed. Maud looked up, saw Ronnie and smiled. He smiled back, and Trevor saw everything.
‘Good God, she’s now as besotted with you as you were with her!’ he exclaimed.
‘Of course. Did you doubt my ability to make her fall in love with me?’ Ronnie slapped his brother-in-law soundly on the back.
‘Come on, I’m still waiting for you to tell me what you think of Maud’s progress.’
‘Considering she’s only been here a few months, it’s incredible. She might not be strong, might never be strong, but the disease is no longer active. Provided she takes things quietly –’
‘As if my aunt will allow her to do anything else,’ Ronnie interrupted.
‘It’s a complete and utter miracle.’
‘No, not a miracle.’
‘Then what?’ Trevor asked.
‘Just my wife.’ Ronnie went to the well and pulled up a rope. Attached to the end of it was a bottle of his grandfather’s rough wine.
‘It’s not best brandy, but I guarantee you won’t have tasted anything like it before,’ he warned, handing the cool bottle to Trevor after pulling the cork with his teeth and taking a
deep and satisfying draught himself.
‘What are we drinking to?’ Trevor asked.
‘Life, health and happiness.’
Trevor looked across at Laura, remembered the secret she had told him that morning, and saw the bloom it had already brought to her cheeks.
‘I must be the luckiest man alive,’ he murmured as he put the bottle to his lips.
Ronnie walked towards his wife, smiling, thinking of what they had to look forward to that night once they were closeted in the privacy of their bedroom.
‘You’re wrong,’ he said firmly, taking the bottle from a coughing, spluttering Trevor. ‘If there’s such a thing as a luckiest man alive, I’m it.’
An excerpt from
SILVER LININGS
Book Three in the Hearts of Gold series
by
CATRIN COLLIER
Chapter One
Oil lamps glowed, a straggling line of beacons wavering in the damp wind that whistled and tore through the sodden canvas that tented the market stalls. The cobbled gangway between the trestles that lined Market Square was far too narrow to accommodate the swell of late-night shoppers who spilled continuously into the area from both sides of the town. And not only the town: the lilting speech of those who lived in the multi-stranded valleys above Pontypridd could be heard mingling with the sharper, more commercial accents of the traders and the softer intonations of the townsfolk who were attempting to push their way through the jammed throng.
The air, even beneath the canvas shroud, was thick, heavy with moisture; the atmosphere rich with the eye stinging pungency of paraffin oil, the sour odour of unwashed clothes, and the reek of seasonal nips of whisky and brandy wafting on the tides of the traders’ breath as they called their wares.
‘Last chance for a bargain before Father Christmas comes down the chimney to burn his bum on hot ashes tonight, love. Come on, two a penny. You won’t find cheaper anywhere.’ A tall, thin man with a pockmarked face, shabby clothes and military bearing held up a pair of unevenly hemmed, coarsely woven handkerchiefs.
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