Rose had been emphatic she didn’t want to stir up any old hostilities, reminding them the road to Charton Minster was on Easton land. So Stephen told his mother they were going to the pub.
Cassie and he walked down the lane, and then sneaked off across the moonlit fields. Disregarding all the Keep Out, Private Property notices which were nailed up everywhere, they jumped over the stiles, crossed fields, and climbed high boundary walls.
‘When Rob and I were kids, we were always trespassing on the old bugger’s land,’ Stephen said to Cassie as he helped her fight her way through undergrowth, which might once have been a formal garden but which now was merely tangled laurels, brambles, bracken and straggling, dying weeds. ‘As Mum was saying, we used to rescue animals caught in Easton’s traps. We had a hospital for them in our old stables back at Melbury House.’
At the recollection, Stephen grinned, and suddenly he looked so young and childlike that Cassie could see the children he and Robert must have been – two grubby, black-haired urchins on undercover missions, taking wounded fox cubs and badgers out of traps, then smuggling them back to Melbury.
Finally they made it and stood in front of the old mansion, staring at its dull-eyed, leaded windows from the weed-strewn gravel drive.
‘What a dump,’ said Stephen.
‘I think it’s romantic.’ Cassie gazed and gazed. ‘It’s beautiful. It’s like the enchanter’s castle in a fairy tale.’
‘It’s a crumbling ruin.’ Stephen walked up to the entrance porch, once grand but now decrepit. ‘Look at this wood here, Cass,’ he said, breaking off a piece of rotting timber streaked with green and orange mould. ‘It all needs replacing. The whole building must be riddled with dry rot.’
Stephen tossed the piece of wood away. ‘It would cost thousands to repair it. More than the house is worth, I shouldn’t wonder. Mum should go and talk to Lady Easton. They could either have a giant bonfire, or they could knock it down and sell the stone for building. Then Mum could flog the land back to the Eastons, if they’ll buy it. She doesn’t need more stuff to worry about, and all this place would be is one big worry.’
‘How do you think she’s feeling these days, Steve?’ Cassie could see his point about the worry of this rambling great house, but thought it was a pity it might have to be knocked down. ‘She must be lost without your father?’
‘Yes, she must.’ Stephen looked at Cassie. ‘Mum was brought up to be stoical, and not to make a fuss. But I can see she’s grieving. She still misses him. She always will. Now Robert’s missing too, of course, it’s hard for all of us.’
‘You keep telling me you think he’s dead. I hope you haven’t shared that with your mother?’
‘Of course I haven’t, Cass.’ Stephen looked apologetic now. ‘I’m sorry, Cassie. I should keep my gloomy thoughts and worries to myself. Come on, let’s get back.’
‘It’s the only thing to do.’ Rose had not been pleased to hear they’d been to look at the old house. When they told her it was in a terrible condition, she’d merely shrugged and sighed.
‘I’ll need to go and see Lady Easton,’ she continued. ‘I’ll have to get permission to move the demolition people in.’
‘But do you have to knock it down?’ asked Cassie.
‘I think so,’ Rose replied. ‘I can’t afford to have the place repaired.’
‘But it’s so lovely,’ Cassie said reproachfully.
‘I know, my dear, I know.’ Rose shook her head. ‘Cassie, I was born there, I grew up there. I remember what the house was like when people cared about it.’
‘How did you come to lose it?’
‘My parents and the Eastons were close friends. The Eastons’ eldest son – the one who eventually became Sir Michael – we were friends, as well. In fact, we almost got engaged.’
‘But then you married Mr Denham.’
‘Yes, and then my father decided to believe I’d broken Michael’s heart, and made him a laughing-stock, as well. He was so angry that he left the whole estate, the house and land and everything, to Michael.’
‘Blimey, what a mean old sod!’ cried Cassie. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ she added, reddening. ‘That’s no way to talk about your father.’
‘I’ve often wished I hadn’t been quite so headstrong.’ Rose smiled ruefully. ‘When I was young, and everything seemed so black and white, I saw my choice as being between the man I loved, and piles of bricks and mortar. If only I’d been kinder to my father, a bit more diplomatic – ’
‘Oh, Mum, don’t cry.’ Stephen put his arm around her shoulders. ‘It’s only an old house.’
‘But it was my old house. It should be yours. This has been done to mock me. The intention was to give me back my home, then force me to watch it all fall down.’
‘There must be some way round it, though,’ said Cassie, frowning. ‘Why don’t we ask Daisy? She might think of something.’
‘Yes, she might.’ Rose wiped her hand across her eyes. ‘She’s most resourceful, is our Daisy. Steve, there’s some fresh shortbread in the pantry, and shall we have another cup of cocoa, made with milk? The coffee’s not worth drinking nowadays.’
Robert and Sofia sat in a mountain hut, drinking acorn coffee from tin cups and eating stale, dry bread which they softened slightly by dunking it into the acrid coffee.
‘I still dream of my morning cappuccino,’ sighed Sofia. ‘I dream of fresh, white bread.’
‘I dream of eggs and bacon and my mother’s home-made sausages.’ Robert glanced at his companion, and he sighed as well. ‘Sofia, please stop talking about food!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sofia.
‘I hate to see you cold and hungry,’ added Robert. ‘Why don’t you go home, while there’s still time?’
‘No, I’ve told you half a dozen times, I want to join the partisans!’ exclaimed Sofia fiercely. ‘So I shall stay with you.’
While he’d been in the pigeon loft, Robert had let his beard grow strong and black, leaving it untrimmed, so now it covered half his face. Although he hadn’t had any daylight exercise for months, and so he didn’t have a tan, he was naturally olive-skinned, and now he could have passed for an Italian, born and bred.
Like most Italians these days, he was very thin. Sofia had found him clothes so old and tattered that most people would have thought he was a beggar, or a jobbing labourer – the kind of half-wit wanderer who goes from farm to farm, picking up any casual work and sleeping rough in barns.
‘You must slouch and shuffle when you walk,’ she’d told him, when they’d first set off. ‘You must try to look confused and stupid, not arrogant and confident, not like a British army officer. If you have to talk to anybody, you must mumble, and stammering would be good.’
But, even though he was learning the language, and understood much more than he could say, Robert knew he’d never, ever sound like an Italian, however much he mumbled. So he was in almost constant danger of giving himself away.
Or of betrayal.
The German planes flying over Northern Italy dropped bombs, incendiaries, and also leaflets in English and Italian. Those in English told Allied POWs who had escaped after the armistice, and were still on the run, to give themselves up now, then spend the winter in a comfortable prison camp, rather than try to rough it in the mountains. Those in Italian warned that anyone found helping or sheltering Allied POWs would be shot. They also offered cash rewards to anyone giving information leading to arrests.
‘There’ll be plenty of people who would happily take the money,’ said Sofia. ‘So don’t trust anybody, keep your mouth shut unless you have to speak, and let’s hope we don’t meet any Fascist bounty-hunters on the road.’
On their journey north into the mountains, hidden under sacks and baskets in the back of an old Fiat truck belonging to a farmer who was a tenant of Sofia’s father, and who had dumped them when the road gave out, they’d made some plans.
If they were stopped by any Germans or Fascist militiamen, Sofia woul
d say Robert was her deaf-mute idiot cousin, who had spent the summer and autumn working on her family’s farm, and whom she was taking home to his parents in their village up here in the mountains.
Sofia’s own papers were in perfect order. The doctor who had treated Robert had forged an identity card for him, so he was Roberto Russo now.
Robert hoped he wouldn’t need the card. The doctor had done his best, of course, and Sofia had roughed it up a bit. But, even so, it didn’t look convincing.
They had a week or more of wandering, of asking suspicious, anxious peasants who obviously didn’t want to talk, of being sent off along steep mountain paths in wrong directions, before they found the partisans – or, as it turned out, before the partisans found them.
Robert had long assumed that unseen eyes were watching them, weighing them up. ‘But we must wait for them to come to us,’ Sofia told him. ‘The people we’ve met, the farmers who have given us food and let us shelter in their huts and barns, they’ll have passed the message on, that we want to join the partisans.’
Sofia was proved right. One day in early January, on a clear, sharp morning after a freezing night, they were going to fetch some water when they met a trio of men with rifles, blocking their path and smoking.
‘We’ve been watching you,’ said one.
‘We know,’ Sofia said.
‘Why are you here?’
‘We wish to join a banda.’
‘Who’s your gormless friend?’
‘A British army officer.’ Sofia crossed her fingers – these people might easily be the Fascist militia, after all.
‘Yes, he looks like a British army officer – I don’t think!’ The man who’d spoken grinned. ‘Give your bags to him.’ He pointed to one of the other men. ‘Then put your hands up on your heads, and follow me.’
So, with one man leading them, another herding them and one man carrying their bags, Sofia and Robert stumbled along the track, and then through the wild countryside, hoping they hadn’t made a huge mistake.
They finally arrived at a stone house, in a very bad state of repair. It was the kind of summer residence a wealthy Italian family would have used before the war. Well concealed by firs and evergreens, it was a perfect hideout.
As they and their captors reached what was left of a garden, a tall man and some shorter, stocky ones came running from the house. They all carried rifles, and looked as if they’d use them.
‘She says he’s British,’ said the leader of their captors, indicating Robert. ‘He looks like a Sicilian village idiot to me.’
‘A jolly good afternoon to you, old boy,’ the tall man said to Robert, in a deliberate parody of English. ‘Everything tickety-boo back home in good old Blighty, then?’
‘No, not particularly,’ said Robert, shrugging. ‘Please may I put my hands down now?’ he added, in stumbling Italian. ‘I’d like to scratch my nose.’
The group Robert and Sofia had joined was made up of Italian soldiers who didn’t want to end up in German POW camps, and who had wisely hung on to their weapons.
‘It was either become a partisan or join the Fascists,’ one of them explained to Robert, adding that their main objective was to pin down any German troops who were still occupying the region, while waiting for the Allies to break through and end the war.
‘Up here in the mountains, we can look down on them and pick them off,’ he added, grinning. ‘That’s when we have some ammunition, obviously.’
Marcello, their undisputed leader, was older than the others. He said he was a Communist who had been in prison before the war, but had escaped after the armistice.
He was delighted to welcome Robert to the band. A British army officer, skilled in explosives, a trained killer and a seasoned fighting man, he’d always be an asset.
But he wasn’t keen to have Sofia in the group, and told her to go home. ‘My men will see you safely down the mountains,’ he continued, adding that he never liked using women. They were not only unreliable, but if they were captured by the Germans or Militia, women always broke down under torture.
‘If you’re taken by the Fascists, and handed over to Black Brigade, you’d squeal like a pig,’ he told Sofia.
‘I would not!’ replied Sofia, stung. ‘Give me a job to do, and you’ll find I can be as brave as any man, and I – ’
‘You’ll never survive a winter in the mountains,’ Marcello interrupted tersely. ‘You’ll get sick from cold and hunger, and your nerves will trouble you. Go home now, while it’s still possible.’
‘I will not go home,’ replied Sofia. ‘The Englishman and I – ’
‘I need her to translate for me,’ said Robert.
‘You don’t,’ Marcello told him. ‘You understood what we just said.’
‘We came together, and we stay together,’ insisted Robert firmly.
Marcello scowled, and muttered something rude about the arrogant British soldier and his bossy, chatterbox puttana, which Robert knew meant whore.
‘Thank you,’ said Sofia, as Marcello stumped away. ‘I’ll prove to you I’m up to it.’
‘You better had, Sofia,’ said Robert grimly. ‘Otherwise, we’ll both be shot – or worse.’
Marcello told them he’d soon be giving them a job to do, reminding them if they got caught, they would be on their own.
‘If you’re interrogated, and if you betray this group of partisans, other partisans will find you and they’ll kill you slowly – that’s if the Germans haven’t shot you first. So either way,’ Marcello said, ‘get caught, and you’re both dead.’
The job was pinching whatever they could in the way of weapons and ammunition from a shepherd’s hut that was currently being used for storage by the Germans, on a road a few miles down the mountain.
They had to kill the sentries, too.
The place had been reconnoitred, said Marcello. Most days, there were just two guards, one a surly-looking veteran, and one a skinny kid, a recent conscript by the look of him.
‘No,’ said Marcello, ‘you can’t have any weapons. If you start a firefight, half an hour later this whole mountain will be alive with Germans, and they’ll find this house.’
‘I won’t do this unarmed,’ said Robert firmly.
‘You can have a knife each, but that’s all,’ Marcello told him. ‘So make sure you kill the Germans, yes?’
‘It’s a test,’ Sofia said in English, and she trembled.
‘One we’d better pass,’ said Robert. ‘I expect you wish you’d gone back home?’
Sofia didn’t reply.
Robert and Sofia had soon learned the art of moving silently through any kind of landscape. On the morning of their test, they took some hessian sacks, they scrambled down the narrow mountain paths, and then they wriggled on their stomachs through the undergrowth which had not been cleared since the Germans had arrived, and so was dense with laurel, broom and brambles, making perfect cover.
Italian peasant farmers were fanatical about clearing grass and weeds from the terraces where they grew their crops, because the undergrowth was such a fire risk in the summer. But since the Germans had occupied the country and made life impossible for many of the farmers, had burned some villages and evacuated many others, the weeds grew where they pleased.
At first Sofia and Robert did very well, getting close enough to hear the German sentries talking. Robert signalled to Sofia to move back a little, so they’d be out of earshot.
‘I’ll go and throw some stones at them or something, to distract them,’ said Sofia. ‘You get inside and grab whatever you can, and then we’ll run away.’
‘I don’t think that would work,’ said Robert. ‘We’ll end up getting shot. Look, here’s what I suggest. You speak some German. So you go a bit further down the hillside, and then get on the road.’
‘What do I do next?’
‘You walk back up, and when you pass the hut you stop, you smile, you say hello.’
‘You must be joking!’
; ‘No, I’m deadly serious.’
‘You hope those men will shoot me?’
‘I hope those men will want you.’
Then Robert turned Sofia’s collar down, straightened the neckline of her grubby blouse, and pushed her long, dark hair back from her brow.
‘Bite your lips to make them red,’ he added, ‘and pinch a little colour into your cheeks. Okay, I think you’ll do. So off you go and flirt as if your life depended on it, which of course it might.’
‘You will be covering me?’
‘Of course I will. Sofia – ’
‘Yes?’
‘Good luck.’
Ten minutes later, Robert saw Sofia come sauntering up the road towards the German sentries, who walked into the road to block her way.
She smiled, and wished them both good morning.
One of the guards was middle-aged, a thick-set, bull-necked corporal. Scowling at Sofia, he asked for her identity card.
She handed it to him.
As he was checking it, Sofia preened and flirted with the other guard, a slight, blond teenaged boy, who giggled, blushed and answered back.
As Robert watched, he wished he had insisted on a firearm. The Germans were both armed with submachine-guns, but he had just a knife.
He was supposed to kill them both. Or, at any rate, he didn’t expect Sofia to kill them, so he’d have to do it. But one was just a child. He really didn’t want to kill a child. The older man was doomed, he’d had his life. But it seemed so wicked to kill a child.
Then he thought of what could happen to Sofia in a German prison, or in an interrogation centre run by the Militia, and he shuddered. He didn’t dare mess this up.
He watched Sofia talking, flirting, tossing her damson-coloured hair, and finally she took the young blond lad into the hut. The older man stood moodily outside, smoking a cigarette and stamping – waiting for his turn, presumably.
The Penny Bangle Page 21