Angels of the Flood

by Joanna Hines

  Yes, well. She’d never been shot at before either. Remember what they say: just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean no one’s trying to kill you.

  Kill? It was bad enough if someone had been trying to frighten her off—but murder?

  And why suspect Simona? Mario might be hostile, but Simona had been welcoming—she’d even sent her those pictures to get her to visit the place. And what motive might Simona have?

  Kate couldn’t think of one. But she remembered Signora Bertoni’s chilling outburst at the dinner table. ‘You killed my daughter!’

  Kate groaned. Maybe Simona shared her mother’s crazy logic and held her responsible for Francesca’s death. How had she ever imagined that the years would be sufficient to wash away the horror of that tragedy? It was crazy to hold her responsible, but maybe it was enough that she’d been a part of it. She could understand how Signora Bertoni, in the confusion of old age, had turned on her.

  Kate had been a player in the tragedy. She’d been there.

  Suddenly she found herself sitting on the edge of the bed, her face wet with tears. The panic was washed away and in its place was an ache of loss… she knew now why she’d come back to the Villa Beatrice after all this time. Partly, yes, it was curiosity about the altered paintings, who was sending them, and why.

  And partly it was the chance to travel with David and find out if their relationship had any mileage in it, or if it was to be just a summer affair. This journey had been his idea. ‘I’ll spend a couple of days with Lucy in Rome. You can stay with your friends in Siena and then we’ll go to the villa together.’ But at the last minute she’d decided to come on ahead. It was better that she go alone to this place that had had such an impact on her life.

  Because most of all she’d come back to the Villa Beatrice for herself. She’d reached the age when she was starting to glance back over her shoulder, to wonder which had been the key moments when she chose one path instead of another.

  Florence in 1967 had been one such moment. Florence and the friends she had made when working there after the flood. And one friend in particular: Francesca Bertoni. They had been mud angels together and they had explored what it was to be grown-ups and free. And then Francesca had brought her here, to the Villa Beatrice estate. For one brief and glorious and terrible weekend Kate had become a part of the Bertonis’ lives, and had fallen in love, that desperate illusion of first love when anything is possible. And yes, she’d been a player in the sequence of events that culminated in the outrage of Francesca’s death.

  For years she had thought she could close the door on the past. Carry on. Make a life. And so she had. A good life. But now she was back and the nightmare was closing in on her again.

  All Kate’s instincts told her to escape. Get out while she still could. Even now, at four o’clock in the morning, she must be able to call a taxi. She could even be in Rome for a late breakfast.

  Yet still the tears flowed—old, old tears—and she did not move. Her heart ached for Francesca. She’d never imagined it was possible to miss someone after so long.

  She tried to think clearly, but she was numb. The more she struggled to work out what she should do now, the more her thoughts drifted back to those weeks she’d shared with Francesca in Florence and the person she’d been, so gloriously and stupidly certain that the present was theirs to enjoy. And so innocently sure that their futures would be filled with endless opportunity.

  PART II

  Chapter 11

  Flood

  November 1966

  IN ITALY IT HAD been a wet autumn. The rivers were full and the ground saturated. At the beginning of November, swollen mountain streams in the north-east of the country caused landslides and destroyed bridges, cutting road and rail links. Rough seas burst through the dykes and large areas of the Po river valley were flooded. Venice was badly hit, the islands of Pellestrina and Sant’Erasmo being completely inundated. In Venice itself large famished rats were reported to have emerged from the sewers and attacked a group of children.

  Italy was cut in half by the storms that raged from Sicily to the Brenner Pass. A pilot who flew across the centre of the country said it resembled a storm-tossed sea with only the tops of bell towers and tall trees breaking its surface.

  On the afternoon of the third of November, while Prince Philip and his five companions were bagging nearly two hundred and fifty pheasants during the first shoot of the season at Sandringham, a series of torrential downpours fell on Florence and the surrounding hills. As night fell the rain became continuous and it did not let up till late the following day. By then over eighteen centimetres of rain had fallen.

  A peculiar meteorological situation, much discussed on Italian radio in subsequent days, meant the rain and high winds were prevented from moving away. The Arno rose twenty feet in as many hours and finally burst its banks. The force of the flood was devastating. An unstoppable sea of chocolate-coloured water, mud mixed with oil from burst central heating systems, surged through the streets at up to forty miles an hour, hurling cars and even lorries into piles. In some areas the flood water was over six metres deep. On the Ponte Vecchio, the age-old jewellers’ shops were smashed. Cars, tree trunks and even bloated cattle plugged the gaping holes.

  For twenty-four hours the city was virtually unreachable; it was without piped water, electricity and phones. The archives in the National Library were swamped with the toxic mix of mud and naphtha. On that first terrible night, volunteers formed human chains to hand the sodden books and documents to safety. For many of the city’s treasures, it was already too late.

  On the evening of the fourth of November, as the rain eased and the flood waters subsided, a man was seen walking knee deep in mud; he was weeping. In his arms he carried the remains of an enormous wooden crucifix; he was followed by a sombre line of workmen, students and friars. Professor Ugo Procacci, superintendent of the Uffizi gallery, was carrying all that remained of the Crucifixion by Cimabue, the greatest artist of the thirteenth century. This irreplaceable masterpiece, ruined beyond repair, was to become the symbol of Florence’s tragedy.

  The flood waters left in their wake a residue of slime and mud, cars and lorries stacked on top of each other, shops and houses in ruins. Ten days later, in the New Market piles of decomposing fish and vegetables had turned sections of the piazza into a giant compost heap, while behind the church of Santa Croce dead animals were still rotting where they lay.

  Young people responded at once and gave what they could. School children, students and foreign visitors worked tirelessly in cold and wretched conditions. Over the following weeks their example was followed by youngsters from further afield in Italy, from Britain and Scandinavia, Canada and the States. They stayed to help with the clean-up for a few days or for months. In time these bands of youthful volunteers came to be known affectionately as Mud Angels. Or, occasionally, as Angels of the Flood.

  Chapter 12

  Uffizi

  KATE HAD NEVER BEEN on such intimate terms with anyone’s head before. She reckoned the boy was about fifteen years old, a good-looking youth with a straight nose and intricate curls covering his scalp. As the days passed, each detail was becoming as familiar as her own body, the dimple on his chin, the hollow at the base of his throat, his nostrils. Luckily he was attractive enough to make the attention worthwhile.

  The sixteenth-century bust of an unknown youth had been stored in the basement of the Uffizi when the flood struck. Large dark patches, where oil and gloop had penetrated deep into the stone, gave his face a piebald appearance. Kate’s task was to apply a poultice of absorbent paste, making sure every smallest crevice was filled, and then, after a period of about forty-eight hours, during which some of the muck had been drawn out into the paste, to remove it again using toothpicks and fine brushes. The whole business was then repeated. When the process was explained to her, Kate expected the work to be tedious, though obviously a doddle compared to cleaning cellars. She was in for a surprise. As her
fingers moved over the delicate curls, the firm lips and the gently rounded cheeks, she experienced profound intimacy, not just with the stone, but with the hands and mind of the anonymous artist who had carved it over four hundred years before her birth. Experiencing art through her fingers was proving to be a revelation.

  Their studio workshop on the ground floor of the Uffizi was a long, cold room sparsely furnished with trestle tables and benches. Like everywhere in Florence during that extraordinary winter, it smelled of wet stone and decay, and the little heaters were inadequate against the cold.

  At a nearby worktable, Francesca was busy cleaning an enormous eighteenth-century gilded frame, a task requiring delicacy and patience and an inexhaustible supply of cotton buds. ‘Treat it like a butterfly’s wing,’ the professor had instructed her. ‘The gold leaf was blown on in the first place, so it’s just as fragile.’

  Kate realized that Francesca was the sort of person who always got assigned the most delicate jobs. After she and David had taken her back to the hostel after the consul’s party, she’d had the weekend to settle in during which she mysteriously collected her belongings from Left Luggage. Unlike most of the volunteers, Francesca seemed to have access to plenty of money, but she never let on where it came from. There was no problem about getting her work with the English team at the Uffizi. Two days working in the cellars was all it took to demonstrate that she had no familiarity even with the humble dustpan and brush, let alone with spades and shovels. Besides, the London expert was happy to employ attractive young women—and Francesca was as attractive as they come.

  Of all the mud angels, Francesca was the only one to look remotely angelic. With her long, expressive eyes, fine bone structure and tumble of light brown hair, she might have stepped down from a fourteenth-century fresco.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ Professor Fuller commented one afternoon, ‘that no invented angel is ever more beautiful than an attractive young man or woman?’ Anna, who was pretty, with long hair which she hadn’t cut since someone had told her it made her look Pre-Raphaelite, assumed he was referring to her, but Kate realized he was looking at Francesca. A shaft of light was falling on her hair, causing it to shine with iridescent colours. Head bowed over her work, she remained unaware of the attention.

  None of the group had ever noticed the human quality of angels, as it happened, so he went on thoughtfully, still gazing at Francesca, ‘Our mortal imaginations cannot conjure up an image of any creature more perfect than what we know. I suppose that’s why God had to take human form. Greater beauty may well exist in some other realm, but it’s beyond the grasp of our feeble perception.’

  Something in his tone caused Francesca to look up and catch his eye. Maybe she realized she’d been the trigger for his angelic musings, because she coloured, then looked away and asked in a strained voice, ‘Is it normal for angels to have black hearts?’

  There was a tense silence. No one had the faintest idea why she had reacted so strangely, and even Professor Fuller was nonplussed by her question. Kate had already observed Francesca’s tendency to go off at a tangent to everyone else. To lighten the mood she started singing, ‘Teen Angel’, which Anna followed with ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’. The others all groaned and told them to shut up and the tension eased.

  The professor had been intrigued by Francesca from the start. ‘Are you by any chance related to Signor Bertoni?’ he asked when she told him her name.

  ‘Who’s he?’ She looked blank.

  ‘The art collector, Umberto Bertoni. He lives at the Villa Beatrice about fifty miles from Florence. They say the paintings no one has seen are far more valuable than those on display. I thought perhaps you might—’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ said Francesca flatly. ‘Besides, I’m American.’

  She was being evasive, Kate thought. If Umberto Bertoni had been really unknown to her, then surely she’d have been curious about her famous namesake. And the way she’d stared unblinking at the professor when she denied even having heard of him reminded Kate of the time she and some friends had tried to brazen it out with their headmistress when they’d been spotted in a coffee bar with a group of boys instead of doing a cross-country run.

  Still, if Francesca was being dishonest about her background, then so were many of the volunteers. Quite apart from the girl who said she was having an affair with the Aga Khan, no one could be quite sure that Jenny the dancer really had worked in West End musicals, or that Dido’s father was a cabinet minister, or that Aiden, with his black cloak and his yellow hair, had once worked as a runner for a Jamaican drug baron the way he claimed. Since the city of Florence was so different from its normal self, it seemed as though everyone there could experiment with different pictures of themselves: like skinny Larry with his squeaky voice who claimed to be a brilliant intellectual, in spite of working in a tax office, or like Hugo, doing floodwork at the consulate, who described himself as ‘to all intents and purposes a virgin’—a phrase which was endlessly dissected but which he never precisely explained. Then there were the people who were just pretending to be young and rootless, men who’d taken time off from wives and jobs in England, but were simply too old to be working for nothing and talking endlessly about sex with a bunch of kids fresh out of school or university. Even Kate, who told no overt lies, was pretending to be a sophisticated woman of the world, whereas she’d only left school six months before.

  Francesca was unusual simply because she alone was trying hard to be just like everyone else. She gave the impression, right from day one, that she wanted to be ordinary, but she lacked the reference points the others shared. Conversation in the studio at the Uffizi while Kate and Francesca and half a dozen others worked together on the damaged sculptures was not all highbrow. It was soon obvious Francesca had never heard of Top of the Pops or the Avengers, nor even of American imports like The Lone Ranger or Bonanza, and her curiosity about what she’d missed only made it more obvious.

  ‘Where did you grow up?’ asked Jenny one day when Francesca had been asking about family relationships in Peyton Place. ‘On a desert island?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t!’ she snapped. ‘That’s a stupid thing to say!’ And she sank into hurt silence for the rest of the afternoon.

  ‘They don’t like me,’ she said to Kate later that evening when they were back in their digs and changing to go out. Now they were officially employed by the Uffizi they had moved out of the hostel and were sharing a room with Anna. Dido and Jenny had the room across the corridor. The signora who owned the flat was so far uncomplaining about the number of ‘friends’ who often shared their rooms with them. Francesca peered into the mirror to apply some of Kate’s white eyegloss. ‘Everyone thinks I’m odd, but I’m not!’

  Kate was still young enough to be flattered by confidences. ‘We’re all odd,’ she reassured her, ‘so I don’t see why you should be any different. But it might help if you didn’t try so hard. Sometimes that puts people off.’

  ‘You’re criticizing me!’

  ‘No, I’m not. Honestly. It’s just that you make life hard for yourself sometimes. People like you the way you are. However that is. Even if you did grow up on a desert island.’

  Francesca stared at her. For one moment Kate thought she was going to be angry. Then, suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Do you mean that, Kate?’

  ‘Which bit? About people liking you how you are? Yes, it’s true.’

  Francesca turned away quickly. ‘You are so strange, all of you.’ Her voice came out a bit growly. ‘I don’t understand it.’

  ‘It is puzzling,’ teased Kate. ‘Why would anyone like you how you are?’

  Francesca regarded her warily before asking in an uncertain voice, ‘That’s a joke?’

  ‘It’s called irony, Francesca. Sarcasm’s grown-up sister.’

  Francesca sighed. She seemed baffled by the joking and the approval. But it was true that she was popular, even though she could be difficult sometimes. Ever since she joined the
group, she’d become a kind of unofficial mascot. The story of her maybe-suicide had spread quickly and her transition from doom to cheerfulness made everyone feel happier about themselves. In the ten days since joining them, she had blossomed.

  ‘Do you want to borrow my earrings?’ she asked suddenly.

  Yes, Kate would. Francesca’s earrings were the most beautiful items of jewellery she’d ever seen, strange and delicate birds made of silver and enamel.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Kate as the two birds lay in the palm of her hand.

  ‘Phoenixes,’ said Francesca. ‘It’s kind of crazy to have two of them, because the poor things never have partners. They live for a bit and then they just burn up.’

  ‘So where does the next generation come from?’

  ‘Each one is reborn out of its own ashes.’ She smiled her odd little smile. ‘My kind of birds.’

  ‘What a way to carry on,’ said Kate, clipping the phoenixes on her ears. ‘Imagine, never having any sex.’ She slid a glance at Francesca, to see if she’d offer some information about herself. Alone among the group, she never talked about boyfriends. Aiden said it was obvious she was a virgin and she neither agreed nor disagreed with him.

  ‘They’re more than two hundred years old,’ she said.

  ‘They must be valuable.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then you’d better wear them. I’d hate to lose one.’

  ‘It’s just jewellery,’ said Francesca as Kate admired her reflection in the mirror. She’d never worn anything so beautiful. ‘They suit you. You should keep them.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ said Kate with a laugh. ‘But I’ll wear them tonight, for Jenny’s birthday.’

  They were going that evening to a slightly more expensive restaurant than their usual cellar taverna serving cheap pasta. Jenny had received money for an advertisement she’d done in the summer and wanted to spend it taking her friends out for supper to celebrate her birthday. No one objected to being treated.