The Penny Bangle

by Margaret James

  ‘Simon is apparently one of the Cheshire Helstons, and he’s related to a baronet. But he didn’t tell me. Mummy got a friend to make enquiries. I don’t care if Simon is related to this Sir William person, or to Mickey Mouse. But, if it makes my mother happy to believe that one day I might marry into the minor aristocracy, it will make life easier for me.’

  Cassie was busy working in the motor pool that morning, and now she folded up the letters and put them in the pocket of her grease-stained overall.

  God, she thought, as she picked up her spanner, poor old Frances, that mother of hers is such a nasty bitch. I’d tell her to go and take a running jump if she were mine.

  Yellow, gaunt and scrawny, with a pinched and puckered face that seemed to have no lips or eyebrows, Lady Ashford must be jealous of her daughter’s beauty. There was no other reason for her to be so mean. Frances might have been a podgy child but, since she had met Cassie, she had always been attractive, in a statuesque, impressive way.

  These days, she looked lovely. Being in the army had given her some much-needed confidence. Drill had made her stand up straight and tall. She was well-covered, yes – but nobody except her evil mother would have said that she was fat. Her skin was like fresh cream, and her dark hair shone in natural waves.

  Most men would look at Frances and think she was some sort of heavenly vision.

  Robert blinked, opened his eyes, and saw a heavenly vision.

  The slender woman who was sitting by the bed, and sewing something white, looked like a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary. She was in her late twenties, he supposed. Or maybe early thirties. Older than him, he thought – but beautiful.

  She wore a summer dress of pale blue cotton, which flattered her complexion. The fine material looked almost glowing against her soft brown milky-coffee skin. She had dark hair the colour of damsons, carelessly tied back with yellow ribbon. She had a rather long, straight nose, and he could see faint crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.

  He couldn’t decide if she was real or not, and so he coughed politely, to make her look at him.

  She dropped her sewing. She stared straight at him, startled. ‘So you’re awake at last,’ she whispered. ‘Please, don’t scream or shout,’ she added urgently, covering his mouth with her left hand.

  ‘I shan’t scream, I promise,’ mumbled Robert, who didn’t think he could have screamed or shouted, even if he’d tried.

  So the woman took her hand away.

  Robert tried to move, to lift one hand, to ease the cramp in his right leg. But, to his dismay, he found he couldn’t do it. He had no strength at all. He struggled to sit up against his pillows, but he failed, and lay back, gasping.

  Then he felt someone help him to sit up, and turned to see a little grey-haired woman dressed in black, who nodded and smiled at him, but didn’t speak.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked the women. ‘Why am I in this bed?’

  ‘We found you on our land,’ the younger woman told him. ‘There are some German gun emplacements half a mile away. We heard they had been sabotaged. So we’ve been assuming you and your companions were the ones who’d blown them up.’

  The woman looked at Robert with concern. ‘At first, we thought you must be dead. You’d lost an awful lot of blood. But then we realised you were just unconscious, and so we brought you here.’

  ‘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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  Rose had no money to repair it, so all she could do was watch her childhood home decay.

  France
s had been on leave and staying in Charton when Rose first learned the Minster would soon be hers again, and Frances wrote to Cassie to tell her all about it.

  So when Cassie next had leave herself, she wrote to Stephen. If he could get some time off too, she said, they ought to go and see Rose.

  ‘Yes, good plan,’ wrote Stephen. ‘I haven’t seen Mum for months. She wanted me to go back home for Christmas, but I couldn’t get any leave, not even a day.’

  They travelled down to Dorset on the train. Stephen didn’t seem to remember getting drunk and trying to kiss Cassie. Or perhaps he did, for he was on his best behaviour. He carried Cassie’s kitbag, found her a window seat and paid for lunch, treating her like the sister-in-law that she still hoped to be.

  ‘Tinker!’ Cassie cried, as they approached the bailiff’s cottage, and the chocolate Labrador came hurtling out to greet them, barking and wagging his tail in ecstasy.

  Rose came running after him, hugged Cassie and Stephen one after the other, and then she told her dog to just calm down, stop making such an exhibition of himself.

  ‘Steve, look at the size of him!’ cried Cassie, as she made a fuss of the dog, who licked her face and hands delightedly. ‘Rose, what on earth have you been feeding him?’

  ‘We go out hunting,’ Rose replied. ‘I shoot the rabbits, he retrieves them, and of course I share the kill with him.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could shoot, Rose?’

  ‘I’m a country girl, my dear,’ said Rose. ‘So I learned to shoot when I was young. It’s what people did. Back in 1939, Alex got me polishing up my skills again, in case the Germans came.’

  ‘As long as you’re not trapping, Mum,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Steve, as if I would,’ said Rose. ‘I remember when you and your brother used to rescue animals caught in Michael Easton’s traps. I’d never trap or snare. It’s far too cruel. Well, you two, don’t stand there looking vacant – come inside.’ She took her visitors into the comfortably cluttered cottage, which smelled invitingly of rabbit pie.

  After Stephen and Cassie had eaten supper and washed up, they thought they’d go and look at Rose’s house. They could see its lichened roof and chimneys, and some of the leaded windows in its upper storeys, from the lane that led from Charton village to the bailiff’s cottage. So now the house belonged to Rose, they both thought they’d like a closer look.