The Tuscan Girl: Completely gripping WW2 historical fiction Read online

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Don’t believe you. What have you eaten since arriving? Not enough to feed even a lizard.’

  ‘I can’t keep anything down.’

  ‘Shall I make you hot water with lemon?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Alba sank back into the pillows, full of love for this woman who’d arrived in her life when she was eight, and going through a difficult period after the death of her birth mother. Anna had been there for her ever since, treating her exactly the same as her younger stepbrother and twin sisters.

  When Anna returned, they sat together in silence for a couple of minutes, Alba taking a nibble from a roll, sipping her hot lemon.

  ‘This is good, Anna. Thanks.’

  ‘Look, I know you don’t want to talk, but it would do you good, darling.’

  Silence.

  ‘Would it help just to let me listen? I know you can’t believe anybody can understand what’s going on inside you, but… it would help to try and put it into words.’

  With a sigh, Alba said, ‘I thought we were going to get married.’ She started to cry again, wondering where all these tears were coming from. ‘I thought everything was good.’

  Anna let her talk, without responding. At last, her stepdaughter was starting to open up.

  Alba looked at her, speaking in a little voice. ‘I’m trying to snap out of it, honestly I am. I feel like a spoiled brat, everybody tiptoeing around me, being so kind. But…’ Her tears spilled again. Anna stayed where she was on the side of the bed, not touching her stepdaughter, waiting for Alba to be ready.

  ‘Half my heart is gone. And knowing James was going to break up with me before he died… it’s like the five years spent with him mean nothing.’ Alba pulled a tissue from the box on her bedside table and blew her nose.

  ‘You think it’s been a waste of time at the moment,’ Anna said, ‘but – and I know you’re going to think this is just an old lady spouting wisdom – it will eventually have served its purpose in making you into the person you’ll become. You’ll learn about yourself from this.’

  ‘Sorry, Anna, but yes – you are sounding like you’re spouting wisdom.’

  ‘I’ve never told you much about before I met your lovely dad, have I?’ Anna said, ignoring her and pouring Alba more hot lemon.

  ‘I had a few boyfriends. I was no nun. But the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with told me, in a note pushed under my door, that he couldn’t go through with the huge wedding we’d planned. We were only days away and I had to cancel flowers, guests, venue… it was so humiliating. And at the time, I believed I would never get over it.’

  ‘Oh my God… that’s so awful. What a prick.’

  ‘Mm. But best to find that out beforehand.’

  Alba fiddled with her sheet, twisting it round her fingers. ‘We hadn’t got as far as that. I mean, I was certain he was going to ask me any day, but he never proposed… and it’s my fault he died, Anna. He was fed up with me and went off in a huff. I shouldn’t have nagged him.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ Anna said, folding Alba in her arms. ‘Of course it’s not your fault. All couples argue from time to time. It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. A truly dreadful accident.’ She kissed the top of the young woman’s head, wishing she could bear some of her sadness. ‘Now, what I suggest is that you get up for a while. I’ll wash your hair for you, and we’re going to go for a walk in the snow.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it.’

  ‘Tough! I do, and I want you to keep me company. And besides, Davide and the twins will be home in a couple of weeks for Christmas, and I’ve a million things you can help me with.’

  Anna washed Alba’s hair at the bathroom sink, massaging conditioner into her scalp. Then she dried her hair thoroughly, gently brushing out her tangles.

  ‘Thanks, Ma,’ Alba said, pulling her stepmother down into a hug, and Anna was the one to blink back tears now. She’d never heard Alba call her ‘Ma’ before, and her heart melted.

  * * *

  Outside, a sprinkling of snow had left a white film on the meadows. Red hips on wild roses were frosted silver, and as they walked along the riverbank, Anna pointed out icicles hanging from willow twigs.

  ‘It’s a perfect Christmas scene,’ Anna said, snapping away on her mobile phone. ‘I might print some of these, instead of buying cards this year.’

  ‘The shops in England have been full of Christmas stuff since October. It’s good to get away from it.’

  Anna pulled at some strands of old man’s beard entwined around a tree. ‘I have an idea for this, too. Saw it in a magazine. We’ll wind it round a ball of wire and then thread through little Christmas lights.’

  Alba wondered if she’d ever have half Anna’s flair, imagination and enthusiasm for anything.

  ‘Can we go back now, Anna? I’m cold,’ Alba said, gazing at the icicles hanging from the waterfall where holiday guests usually sunbathed.

  ‘Sure. But maybe you can help me bake for the freezer. And I need to make the Christmas cake too.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow?’ Alba knew she was disappointing Anna, who was doing her best with her home-style therapy, but all she wanted to do was sleep. Maybe if she hibernated for a week, she would wake up and everything would feel normal again.

  * * *

  But over the next few days she did make an effort. Her father had been sterner than Anna, coming up to her room and telling her that unless she got up to do something – even a short walk on her own – he would call the doctor. Pulling her into his arms, he’d told her he was missing his daughter, the one with the spirit, who had always been such a great example to her step-siblings, who were coming home in a couple of days. They had both cried, and Alba knew he was being cruel to be kind. As the landscape outside froze over, she began to thaw inside.

  Alba walked along the river to a spot near the big waterfall where she used to swim each summer. Ice shapes hung like enormous chandeliers, dripping as they melted a little in the lukewarm midday sun. A birch tree stood stark and still in the frozen air, and Alba’s breath created mist like cigarette smoke. She remembered how she’d pretended as a child to puff on twigs; how one year the pool further down the river had iced over and Babbo had arranged an impromptu skating party, and cooked spicy sausages afterwards over a fire for her school friends. She thought of how she’d planned to repeat all these things one day when she and James had babies, even though he hadn’t been keen on starting a family. He’d told her the planet was overpopulated and not in a fit state to introduce more children. But she’d been sure she could change his mind. Anyway, he was gone now. It was best to banish such thoughts, she told herself.

  She pulled out her sketchbook and spent half an hour drawing the view of the mill, the waterfall in the background, snow-laden clouds in the sky. She blew on her fingers to restore feeling and when she’d finished, she returned to the converted stable where the family lived. Their home stood metres away from the mill, which was now closed up for winter. They only let it out for summer guests.

  Inside the house, a pine tree stood in the centre of the living room, waiting to be decorated by the whole family the following day, when her brother and sisters were to come home for the Christmas vacation. The house was full of the aroma of cinnamon and spices from the cake she’d helped Anna bake earlier.

  ‘I think I might go for a longer walk tomorrow morning,’ Alba said. ‘Before the others get home. I’d like to take a picnic with me and go up to the Mountain of the Moon.’

  She chose to ignore the looks of relief that passed between her parents.

  ‘Shall I come with you?’ Francesco asked. ‘It’ll be really cold up there.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Babbo. I’ll wrap up warm. I know the way like the back of my hand.’

  ‘And she can take her mobile with her, Francesco,’ said Anna.

  Alba didn’t feel like explaining her need to be alone. How she felt the walk would be good for her, becau
se it would give her space to sort out her thoughts. And once the house was packed with family, with their noise and energy, there would be no more time to think. It would give her a chance to hold a kind of personal wake for James.

  * * *

  Her rucksack was stuffed with a flask of hot soup, sandwiches, fruit, chocolate, thick spare socks and gloves, as well as her sketch pad and pencils. Francesco and Anna had fussed over her, making sure she pointed out the exact route on the map she’d been urged to take, despite her protests about having downloaded a walking map on her phone. They asked her to check, for the umpteenth time, that her mobile was completely charged.

  ‘Anybody would think I was going away for three months on a polar expedition,’ she complained.

  ‘Well, you almost are. It’s over one thousand metres up there, and you’re bound to find snow,’ Francesco said. ‘Promise me you’ll turn back if it’s too icy.’

  Kissing them goodbye and telling them not to stand on the doorstep too long, as they’d let all the warmth out, she set off, feeling a sense of freedom at being truly alone.

  Hoar frost painted every surface with sparkle. The trees were fish bones outlined against the clean light of the sky, and above, a line of pines straggled like a bad haircut along the ridge she was making for. In the distance she heard church bells from the village chime the quarter-hour.

  She climbed steadily for thirty minutes, crossing an expanse of meadow that once would have been used for grazing cattle, but was now studded with frosted juniper bushes that bore black berries on their upper branches. They looked like miniature Christmas trees. Anna had in fact cut a couple from the forest to place on either side of the door to the stable, adding festive red bows and baubles. The berries were used for making gin, and her stepmother added them to stews for flavour. Just as Alba was reasoning that the berries were most likely missing from the lower branches because they’d been eaten by wild animals, a pair of roe deer bounded across the path above her, making her jump and drop one of her alpine sticks. She was too slow to take a photo on her phone as the animals disappeared behind rocks, the white around their rear ends seeming like a cruel hunter’s target to Alba.

  She stopped at midday to drink her soup and eat her rye bread with cheese and rocket leaves, feeling hungry for the first time in days. Anna had included a couple of home-made shortbread biscuits and an orange to her picnic, and she decided to keep those to celebrate her arrival at her destination. Across the valley from where she perched on a moss-covered boulder, beneath which nestled a huge Carlina thistle, known as the poor man’s artichoke, she watched the flight of a goshawk, its shadow playing in the sunshine on the sandstone cliffs like a mate. Eventually it disappeared into one of many crannies.

  When she was a little girl of nine or so, she had walked these hills with her step-grandfather, Danilo, and been entranced by his stories of wartime. He had fought as a partisan against the Nazis and fascist militia up here during the Second World War. He’d pointed out remnants of the defensive Gothic Line as they passed by, and places where the Germans, the Tedeschi, had used caves to store ammunition. He’d shown her trenches on the ridge where they had set machine guns to fire on planes overhead. He’d taken her to a few places where resistance fighters had hidden as they plotted assaults on the invading Germans. They weren’t stories, he had corrected her, they were real events. But the way he recounted them to her, a child, had turned them into adventures from a storybook. Since then, she’d done research of her own, reading any documents she could find. And she understood the brutality of what had taken place in this beautiful corner of Tuscany: the massacres, sacrifices and hardships that ordinary people had endured. Babbo had a complete shelf of history books in his study and personal accounts written post-war, and she’d devoured them all. Modern history would have been her second choice after art, if she’d gone to university.

  At about two o’clock, Alba reached the ruins of a house, not much more than a pile of stones scattered beneath the ridge of the Mountain of the Moon. A wooden sign had been erected since the last time she had ventured up here. She read the name of the place: SECCARONI.

  The silence here was almost noisy. In London, where she’d lived on and off for the last eight years, there was never this sense of quiet and she wasn’t used to it. It was normal to hear neighbours arguing, trains rumbling by or sirens from police cars. Here, at over one thousand metres, where the jagged peak of the Mountain of the Moon soared above her, not even a blade of grass moved. She knew the weather could change dramatically. She and Nonno Danilo had been caught out often enough, but her grandfather always knew where there was a hollow, a shepherd’s hut or a cave to shelter in while the worst of the storm raged.

  The ruins of Seccaroni were almost swallowed by brambles and the strangling vines of old man’s beard, their white seed heads like balls of cotton wool. But she could make out the right-angled column of a chimney breast, ready to fall at any moment. There was a gap that once upon a time must have housed a window frame, through which she could see the mountains outlined. She pulled out her sketch pad from her rucksack and, leaning her back against half a remaining wall, she began to draw. Instead of a ruin, her fingers guided her pencil to design what the building might have looked like in the past. She added a couple of metal rings to the outside wall, and a tethered mule. Smoke curled in a wisp from the chimney and she used her fingertip to smudge the effect. A hoe leant against the door, and a pair of worn clogs was discarded to one side, the right clog pointing in towards the left almost as if the person who had been wearing it had walked with a crooked gait. A face peered from an upstairs window, a frown creasing its forehead.

  When Alba looked up from her sketch pad, she was startled to see what seemed like a young man through the remnants of the window frame. She wasn’t sure if it was shadows playing on the stones, but she thought he beckoned her to follow and she dropped her sketch pad in surprise. She hadn’t heard anybody approach the ruin, because she’d been totally absorbed in her work. It had been a long time since she’d enjoyed anything creative.

  ‘Hey!’ she called out, and her voice echoed back to her from the steep walls of the mountains. Stepping over the stones, she peered through the frame and from the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of someone in the distance, standing near a pine tree swaying in the wind at the very edge of the ridge, a long coat flapping around his ankles like a scarecrow. Intrigued, she continued towards him as he disappeared over the edge. These mountains were a lattice of footpaths used by animals and shepherds, but as she approached where he’d stood, she couldn’t make out a path or identify where he’d gone. The slope had been swept away by a landfall, the old roots of a turkey oak sticking in the air like ghostly fingers. If she’d advanced four more steps, she’d have hurtled into the ravine below, where a trickle of a stream silvered in the sun.

  ‘Are you all right? Where are you?’ she called, but there was no answer. Instead, where it had been still, the silence was replaced by the sounds of a wind getting up, first as a whisper through the trees, and then developing into fierce gusts that whipped her long hair around her face. She shivered, afraid the stranger had come to harm, but there was no sign of him. The pine branches swept back and forth in the storm and Alba told herself that these were what she had seen, mistaking the limbs of a tree for the limbs of a shadowy person. She shivered as thunder clapped and echoed around her and, without warning, it started to rain. Great fat drops at first that quickly changed to curtains of water. Within a couple of minutes, Alba was wet through. She ran to the ruin and crouched against the wall where she’d been sketching, stuffing the pad into her rucksack. She hoped the storm would soon abate. The sky was grey, the sun no longer visible and all she wanted to do now was return to the warmth of her family.

  After ten minutes, the rain stopped. But she was soaked. It was hardly worth replacing her wet socks, as her walking boots were sodden. The best solution was to walk back from where she’d come as fast as she could, bu
t the path was muddy now and the going much harder. She kept slipping and was grateful she’d agreed to bring Anna’s alpine sticks with her.

  As soon as she left the woods and descended to the alpine meadow where she’d seen the Carlina thistles, the sun came out again and as she walked, her clothes started to steam in the warmth. As she looked up behind her from where she’d walked, she realised the peak was no longer visible, a coronet of cloud separating it from the rest of the world, and she hoped the young man had managed to find his way back to wherever he’d come from.

  About one kilometre from the stable, she met her father hurrying up the path.

  ‘Thank God, Alba,’ he said as he drew near, a look of relief on his face. ‘We looked at the peak and could see there must be a dreadful storm up there. When it got to four o’clock, we started to worry in earnest.’

  Francesco pulled out his phone to let Anna know all was well, asking her to make sure the immersion heater was switched on and to brew some hot coffee.

  ‘I think I saw somebody else up at Seccaroni, but… I can’t be sure,’ she told him as they walked down together. ‘I hope he’s okay. There was a huge storm with masses of thunder and lightning. He went over the ridge towards Fresciano village.’

  ‘I heard there was a group of youngsters squatting up there last summer. But I thought they’d returned to the city by now. Apparently, they were constantly in trouble with the forest guards for making fires in prohibited areas. They wouldn’t listen and didn’t appreciate the danger. They were off their heads half the time.’

  ‘He looked odd. He was wearing funny clothes – not a typical trekking outfit.’

  ‘There are plenty of abandoned houses up there where he could shelter. I shouldn’t worry about him.’

  But as they walked the last few metres together, Alba wondered if she really had seen somebody. If she had, she wondered where he’d disappeared. The weather was miserable, and she hoped he’d managed to find shelter somewhere on the mountain.