The Secret Messenger

by Mandy Robotham

  In such surroundings, I’m amused by his playful imagination, and we lean over the balustrade, neatly camouflaged by a large flower display hung from the balcony, each picking out individuals we would place in our ballroom scene. Cristian helpfully puts names to faces that I haven’t yet committed to memory. It might be the champagne, or the fact that I am – guiltily – enjoying myself a little, but we giggle like schoolchildren as we paint Austen-esque portraits, some of them none too complimentary.

  The game exhausted, he leans back in the chair and lets out a large, cathartic sigh. I watch his shoulders sink down under his suit. It lasts all of three seconds before he’s back to being Cristian De Luca, reliable servant of the fascist state.

  ‘I suppose we had better return to the floor and do our bit,’ he says, a touch of weariness to his voice. ‘Can you bear another round of hand-shaking before it’s acceptable to leave?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say, re-dressing in my own virtual cloak once more. I surprise myself at how easy it’s becoming.

  Our duties over, the fresh air of the canal is a welcome change from the smog of good living inside, and we both take a large breath. It’s well after curfew, and the canal is virtually motionless. Only the gentle push and pull of the wider ocean on the lagoon creates silver flecks under a half moon, uncut by returning aircraft. I breathe the stillness into my lungs.

  ‘I’ll call for the boat,’ he says.

  ‘Couldn’t we just walk? It’s not that far.’ I figure if a man with the Reich on his side can’t get us through the checkpoints easily, then who can?

  ‘If you wish,’ he says. His tone says it’s not an unwelcome surprise. Like any man escorting a young woman, he offers his arm and I take it. The fresh air has brought me round a little, but the effects of the champagne are still lurking.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard such silence,’ I say at last, as I curse my kitten heels for spoiling the hush.

  He turns his head with a quizzical look. ‘Poetry, Signorina Jilani, at this time of night and after such an evening?’ The smile says he is teasing.

  ‘Well, you have to try,’ I retort. ‘And please, call me Stella. I think when we’ve shared the delights of the Netherfield ball, formalities can be pushed aside – Mr Darcy.’

  Was that me or my persona uttering it – the Resistance flirt that I am tonight? In that moment, I question my own motives; I want to cultivate this relationship for the cause. It’s necessary. Yet, at the same time, I don’t harbour the same creeping dread of contact with Cristian as I would for, say, General Breugal, or the wheedling Captain Klaus. It feels wrong – it is wrong – to enjoy the company of an active fascist. I think of Jack in his dank hole on Giudecca, in pain and unable to enjoy the beauty of even this muted Venice, and suddenly there’s more than champagne swirling around my insides. I feel I’ve let my guard down, allowed Cristian De Luca to look a little beyond my guise. While it feels uncomfortable, I can’t seem to stop it.

  The walk back is uneventful and we encounter only one patrol, who are easily satisfied when Cristian pulls out his identity card. We’re a few streets away from my apartment when I slip my arm from his.

  ‘I’ll be fine to walk the last few streets from here,’ I say.

  ‘It’s no bother to see you all the way,’ he says. ‘I’m not in the least tired.’

  I hesitate, considering whether insisting on walking alone will incite suspicion on Cristian’s part. Very few people know my home address – I’m still officially registered at Mama’s house – and I want to keep it that way. It’s my bolthole, where I’m Stella, not of the Resistance or the Reich’s office. Just me. It’s where I shed my clothes and my various personas and I’m free within my own walls. But I reason that even a coy refusal might breed some mistrust in me as an employee.

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Although don’t be surprised if there’s a few curtains twitching even at this time of night.’

  True to form, a sliver of light from Signora Menzio’s ground-floor window cuts through as we enter the darkness of my own little campo, our steps echoing off the uneven flagstones. For me, though, my elderly neighbour is not being nosy, merely giving me her usual signal that all is safe, a certain ornament on display in her window. She rarely leaves her apartment these days, but the widow’s keen eyes and ears are part of a valuable armoury for the stealth of the Resistance.

  As we stop outside my door, Cristian casts around the tiny square, adjusting his gaze to the gloom – its ancient well at one end is just visible, with a tiny, these days unused, chapel alongside.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he says.

  ‘In its own way,’ I concede. ‘It’s not Santa Margherita or Santo Stefano, but I like it. We’re a friendly community.’

  ‘Perfect,’ he whispers, and I know then that it’s Cristian the art lover and the bookworm who is appreciating Venice, and not his other, politicised self.

  ‘I’ll say goodnight then,’ he adds. There’s no awkwardness, no suggestion that he’s hanging out for an invitation upstairs, or even to offer a peck on my cheek. ‘Thank you for coming and making my evening much more bearable, Miss Bennet.’

  ‘It was a pleasure, Mr Darcy,’ I say as I turn to go. And I wonder how much I mean it.

  10

  A New Role

  Venice, late March 1944

  Jack is not his chirpy self on my next visit two days later, after my newspaper shift. He’s back in bed, with a sheen of sweat on his brow. Still, he makes the effort to smile as Sister Cara shows me in.

  ‘Stella, so lovely to see you.’ He tries to make more of an effort to appreciate the new books I’ve brought – a mixture of English and Italian novels – but it’s clear he’s not well. The wound on his leg has become infected, Sister Cara whispers to me; they are cleaning and dressing it as best they can, but it’s clearly spreading. Jack tries not to show it, but he is worried. Mostly alone, and without proper treatment, he is clearly aware this may be the battlefield that he succumbs to.

  ‘Surely, they can get a doctor out to you?’ I say. ‘Someone sympathetic.’

  ‘Apparently, no one can be spared at the moment – too many men being shipped in from outside the Veneto. A couple more days in bed, and I’ll be fine.’

  His face, though, and his pallor suggest rest isn’t enough. I’m no medic, but I can see he needs a doctor – and soon. I make a decision, potentially a foolish one, but it’s born of true concern rather than any rational thought.

  All next day I can’t shift the image of Jack’s pale and sweat-stained face from my mind, and I have to concentrate at work just to appear focused. I leave the Reich office a little early, feigning a headache, but with a firm purpose. Instead of walking towards home, I divert the few streets from my apartment towards the main hospital that sits behind the choppy water’s edge of the Fondamenta Nuove. I know my brother Vito has a partisan friend whose own brother is a doctor – I can only hope and guess this doctor shares the family’s politics, but it’s a chance I have to take.

  It’s strangely quiet as I enter through the large doors, flashing a smile and my Reich department ID at the guard and pretending I’m there to visit the sick. I find Doctor Livia on the medical ward, slumped in a chair against the wall of the sluice room, eyes closed and his head almost lolling with exhaustion. He seems unaware of the low-level stench of bedpans hovering around his nostrils.

  He opens his eyes smartly when I say his name – ‘What? Oh, sorry!’ – but calms when it’s clear I’m not one of the senior staff or a Nazi commander on an impromptu visit. Despite his clear fatigue – his eyes sit in deep, grey circles of skin – he listens carefully when I explain about Jack.

  ‘And he can’t be moved to a house on the main island?’ he quizzes. ‘I could go to him there.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He seems to have a low fever, and his leg – if anything – is more immobile with the pain.’

  ‘Hold on a minute, wait here,’ Doctor Livia says, and exits the sluice. H
e comes back a minute later with a small bag, and ushers me out.

  ‘If we go now, I can be back before I’m missed,’ he says. But it’s already six o’clock, and I’m concerned about beating the curfew if the boats are delayed.

  ‘Don’t worry – we have a boat set aside for emergencies,’ the doctor reassures me. ‘We won’t advertise it, but if we get stopped, the driver has papers.’

  ‘And is he trustworthy, the boatman?’

  ‘He’s one of us. I would trust him with my life – I have done.’

  It’s good enough for me. It has to be – I’ve asked for help and Doctor Livia has responded without hesitation. I have to return the trust. My one concession is that I swiftly don a nurse’s spare uniform in the event of spot checks on the boat, pulling the cape tight against me to disguise the poor fit. I’ve given up guessing at how many guises I will have adopted by the time this war of theatrics and deceit finally ends.

  The journey on the water from the Fondamenta Nuove and around the curve of the Arsenale – the navy barracks under total Nazi control – is strangely uneventful, which makes me more nervous. The boatman, however, is experienced, slowing the engine if any craft nears us, and only pushing its raspy growl to a certain noise level so that our trip appears routine and not urgent. Doctor Livia dozes in his seat, not even the wind spray interrupting the precious minutes of sleep he grabs, a world away from the anguish I’m feeling and the vision of Jack’s face draining of life. I have to gently nudge the doctor awake as we moor up in the small canal beside Santa Eufemia.

  Doctor Livia – Ignazio, as he tells me to call him – needs almost no light to make a diagnosis. Sister Cara is with Jack, sponging water around his flushed face, and he’s clearly deteriorated in the twenty-four hours since I left. Ignazio gets to work with the equipment he’s brought, pushing a needle line into Jack’s arm and hoisting a rubber tube attached to a bottle containing precious antibiotics, which I work to prop up on whatever wooden shafts I can find. Finally, he unwinds the bandages; even the good doctor almost recoils at the putrid odour that floods the room. I think it’s almost better that Jack is now slipping in and out of consciousness, as the sister fetches more boiled water, and the doctor does what he can to scrape away the decay of Jack’s leg. It’s safe to say that if he makes it out of Venice, Jack’s war is over, or his active part at least.

  The smell I can tolerate, but the obvious cries of pain that break through Jack’s semi-conscious state are harder to bear. The antibiotics are rare enough, but the little anaesthetic they possess at the hospital is needed for more serious wounds. I want to push my fingers in my ears at his agony, but I’m needed to fetch and carry, and even hold some of the dressing as Ignazio works his medical magic.

  Finally, the doctor refixes Jack’s leg in the brace, avoiding contact with the wound and leaving it accessible to the sisters for further dressing. Jack is asleep, and I’m grateful to see his chest rise and fall noticeably. He is alive at least.

  Ignazio gives instructions to Sister Cara and packs up his equipment. The treatment has taken longer than expected and he may not make curfew.

  ‘We’d better go. The late-night water patrols will start soon, especially around the Arsenale,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll stay,’ I say. ‘At least tonight. I’m sure the sisters are busy, and he shouldn’t be left.’ Although it’s a work night, I feel sure I can use my earlier headache again as an excuse to turn up to the Reich office later in the morning.

  Ignazio looks at me quizzically, but he’s either too tired or too busy to query my motives, or my relationship with Jack. ‘All right, just make sure you wake him every two or three hours to drink. Sister Cara will take down the drip tomorrow. If he improves slightly overnight, we’ll know we caught the infection in time, but if he deteriorates …’ He doesn’t elaborate, but there’s little need. Jack will either improve, or we’ll require a different service, one which the church can perform very well.

  I clutch at his hands. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘For coming. For doing something.’ He looks at me, as if to say: why wouldn’t I help a human being? And then he’s gone.

  Sister Cara returns with a blanket and a cushion for me to make up a bed of sorts. But I’m too wired for sleep. I want to hear Jack snuffle and snore occasionally. I want to be here when he wakes and feed him the water he needs. Despite the fakery of my dress, I am no nurse, but I feel strongly he should not die in this dank, lonely room, thousands of miles from his family. Not when he’s given so much of himself to the Allied cause, to Italy and Venice.

  I sit at Jack’s desk, underneath his lamplight, and I do what I do each time I feel unsure, scared, overwhelmed or just not myself. I write. I write what comes into my head, scribbling in the notebook I keep constantly in my handbag, pages to scratch partisan codes or messages, but which are firmly torn and then passed on or burned. Only what’s in my imagination is fixed on the remaining pages, nothing to incriminate me if I’m caught except my own silly ramblings.

  For the first time in an age, my thoughts turn to love. How it’s been thwarted by this war, destroyed in some cases, but also how it can survive, like the timeworn bricks of Venice, or the ancient wooden piles on which we’re all suspended in this city. Love can endure.

  It’s a love story pulled from my head in the stillness and the rhythms of Jack’s deep sleep. Where it springs from I don’t know, and I try not to connect it with the company I’m keeping, either here in this room, or across the water in my ‘other life’. The characters simply form, and I’ve learned not to shun the gift of words when they come. Much like the tide of the ocean, you roll with the words and not against them. And this is how the tale of Gaia and Raffiano is born – he from a good Italian family, she from a long line of Jewish Venetians. Such a union of cultures has been frowned upon throughout history, but in this cruel war it could also prove to be a death sentence – handed down by those who recognise only the stark lines between religions. Gaia and Raffiano, they see beyond those boundaries; they are simply people. In love.

  Once the first paragraph is set, I am lost in the narrative, conversations and images flooding my mind, tic-tacking back and forth – it’s the task of my granite pencil to translate the colour I see onto the page. I write for so long that I almost forget to wake Jack. He is drunk with exhaustion, and it’s hard work pulling up his head and cajoling him to drink. But he does, opening his eyes only briefly and muttering something in English, then sinking into sleep again. As my watch inches towards three a.m., I surprise myself with how awake I feel; I’m forced to use Jack’s penknife to whittle more of my pencil, and it’s only as it becomes a stub that I wake Jack one more time and then give in to eventual tiredness myself, covered with Sister Cara’s blankets in the chair.

  It’s her gentle fingers that wake me – though I come to with a start – a few hours later. Only when I see Jack’s eyes open does my heart pull itself back to earth. The early morning light pushes in through the top windows and rouses me further.

  ‘He seems to be through the worst,’ the sister reassures, and Jack’s weak smile tells me she’s right.

  ‘I thought I was imagining things when I saw a nurse’s uniform hovering above me,’ he says, as we help him sit up a little. I’d all but forgotten I’m still in the badly fitting uniform lent by Doctor Livia.

  The tea the sister brews stirs me just enough to make it home, and I send a hasty message to the Reich office that I’m still sick. With the reassurance that Jack is improving, I sink into a deep and satisfying slumber – oblivious to the drone of heavy aircraft pulsing overhead, like queen bees in a grand formation, homeward bound to their hives.

  I’m disorientated when I wake at midday. With little food in the house, I make the few steps to Paolo’s café, where he rustles up some soup and works his magic with the coffee beans again.

  ‘I’m not going to ask if you were up for business or something else,’ he says. ‘But you, Stella Jilani, are burning the candle at both ends
. Your fingers are in danger of being singed.’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ I say, with a wrinkle to my nose. I know the gentle jibe is because he cares – where Vito is my younger brother, Paolo acts like an older sibling – but I also know he’s right.

  It doesn’t stop me making the trip back over to Giudecca in the early afternoon, careful to skirt around San Marco and the Reich office so I’m not seen out of my sickbed. The spring sun follows me over the canal’s expanse and a wind ripples across the water, helping to clear the cobwebs filling my head.

  I’m soon satisfied Jack really is improving, without any sign of a relapse. He’s eating a little and, with help, he can put a half weight on his leg. His face doesn’t have that deathly pallor and, although he’s weak, he seems back to being the Jack that I’ve come to know, if only for a short time.

  ‘You saved my life – does that mean I am beholden to you to the end of my days?’ He says it with a grin, but his eyes are red and intent.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I reply. ‘I’m not about to make you the genie of my lamp. Anyway, it was Doctor Livia who saved you.’

  ‘But you called him. Without you, I would be fish fodder for your lovely lagoon.’

  ‘Well, that’s a nice image, I must say!’ We’re both aware of trying to keep it light, but I can tell there’s genuine gratitude in what he says. ‘Perhaps you will parachute in one day and save a damsel like me from certain death, like in all the best films.’

  ‘Hmm …’ He gestures at his leg again. ‘Can I hobble instead? I’ll do it very gallantly, I promise.’

  ‘Well, OK, but only if you are very swarthy.’

  I depart from the church, promising to visit in two days when I’m next due at the newspaper office. Unusually, I’m at a loose end as I’ve had no instructions that my services as a Staffetta are needed; Mimi is at work and I can’t face the third degree from Mama, telling myself guiltily that I will do my duty and visit at the weekend. She’ll only wonder why I’m not at work and I haven’t the energy to fabricate another story amid the layers that seem to make up my life. On Sunday, I’ll go with her to church and make her smile.