‘No. He raped her.’
Isabella made a small choking noise and her heart stopped dead.
‘No, no. Not even Luigi would do such a —’
‘He did it. With brute force. We never found out whether it was the only time he did that to the wife of a known rebel or…’ he fought for breath, ‘or whether it was a method of intimidation used by his Blackshirt unit. No other women came forward. We will never know.’
A nerve jumped in his grey cheek and he looked away abruptly, as though Isabella’s face was a reminder of her husband and what he had inflicted on Allegra.
‘I’m sorry,’ Isabella told him. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Her hands were shaking, and she clasped them together to hide their weakness.
How could she not have known? How could she not have seen it in Luigi? She had been too young and too blinded by his Blackshirt glamour. Sorrow for Allegra swept through her, but rage directed at herself drove her to bow her head in shame.
‘Enough, Carlo. Rest your lungs.’
‘Tell her.’ The Communist would not be denied. ‘Tell her the rest.’
45
Roberto wanted to go to her. To fold Isabella’s trembling body in his arms and take her away from this cave. He had heard the Communist’s words and they raised a black hatred in his heart for the man who could rise from Isabella’s bed and tear another woman’s life apart. Isabella’s head hung down, hiding her face and her shame behind her hair. Her curls were as tangled and snarled as he knew her emotions must be.
She’d heard enough.
When the Communist said, ‘Tell her the rest,’ Roberto had moved closer to her, ready to snatch her away from the words that carried what they called the truth. Truth? Truth was never absolute. It was never finite. The truth was that this Communist was a killer, and now Roberto and Isabella had become killers. They all had their reasons for doing what they did, so who was to say that Allegra Bianchi was in the wrong when she pulled the trigger?
‘Tell me, Papa. Tell me the rest.’ Isabella didn’t lift her head.
Her father said nothing for a long moment and then exhaled a harsh breath of resignation. ‘Very well. Allegra took revenge by shooting Luigi. She tried to kill you too because she believed at that time that he must have told you what he’d done.’ He shook his head in sorrow, and his gaze lingered on his daughter.
‘Go on, Papa. I’m listening.’
‘She had a bullet wound in her leg. A policeman had fired on her when she was fleeing the building that she’d used to ambush you and Luigi. She came to me. I patched her up.’
‘You helped her? While I was almost dying in the hospital?’
‘Yes.’
Roberto saw her flinch. But she said no more.
‘She came to me again a month later,’ Dr Cantini continued. ‘She was pregnant. She asked me to terminate it.’ The words seemed to stick on his tongue. ‘It was Luigi’s.’
Isabella’s head shot up. Her eyes were huge and seemed to have sunk deep into her head.
‘Did you do as she asked?’
‘No.’
A silence, thick as fog, filled the cave.
‘Rosa is that child?’ Isabella whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘Rosa is Luigi’s child.’
‘Yes.’
Carlo Olivera raised his head from the straw. ‘That’s why she brought her to you.’ His voice was raw with emotion. ‘I love Rosa like my own child, but Allegra never forgave her for being his.’
Isabella did not move. Did not seem to breathe.
‘The carabinieri were right on her heels,’ Olivera explained, ‘the day she came to Bellina. I can only guess that she’d had enough. Too many years on the run. Never having a home. Or knowing when the knock on the door would come to say I was dead.’ He let his head fall back on the straw, the tendons in his neck taut. ‘I did that to my wife.’
It was finished. Roberto would not let these two men rip the heart out of Isabella any more. He strode over, wrapped an arm around her and lifted her to her feet. She stood stiff and upright, but her shoulder pressed hard against his.
‘You tried to make me stay away from Rosa, Papa.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Her father pushed himself to his feet and studied her intently. ‘I didn’t want you involved in any of this, because —’
‘You were wrong,’ Roberto interrupted. ‘Isabella needed to know what had happened. You’re a doctor, couldn’t you see what it was doing to her? It was your duty as her father to tell her.’
Roberto took hold of Isabella’s arm and walked her towards the veil of greenery that obscured the cave entrance. ‘Let’s find Rosa,’ he said.
She turned her beautiful face to him. ‘Yes, it’s time to find Rosa.’
46
Carlo Olivera breathed his last just before sunset.
This time Isabella did not have to tell Rosa that her parent had died. The child was there, holding her father’s hand. She buried her young face in his neck and wouldn’t leave him. Her grief was silent and without tears, but she kept vigil at his side all through the long hours of the night. When Isabella took her hand well before dawn and led her away from him into the damp morning air, she whimpered once but no more.
In the darkness they silently retraced their steps across the mountains, listening carefully for any sounds, but there was no sign of any guards posted. They retrieved their cars from their hiding places and drove back down the winding roads, leaving the mountains and their secrets behind. The wide expanse of the Agro Pontino plain opened up ahead of them and Isabella was caught by surprise by the strength of her desire to return to it.
They had discussed the dangers of returning. Her father had argued against it, convinced that Roberto and Isabella would be arrested because of the fight in the mountains, but Roberto had pointed out that they were too far away across the valley to be seen during the exchange of shots and had been hidden too well among the shaded trees for anyone to identify them. They could have been any of Olivera’s fighting force. The sooner they showed their faces in town, and continued with their work as normal, the better.
As they drove down on to the plain the sun rose behind them above the hunched back of the mountains and bathed the barren fields in a shimmering golden light. Suddenly Isabella could see what the plain would look like next summer when golden fields of wheat would cover the land, and she felt a fierce need to be there to see it happen.
She looked down at the shorn dark head tucked against her shoulder and she tightened her arm around Rosa’s small shoulders. Allegra Bianchi had stolen so much from Isabella and it would take time for her to understand what drove Luigi and Allegra to do what they had done, to believe that they had the right to so much savagery. Yet Allegra had brought her a child.
This child.
She rested her cheek on the warm head and watched the tower of Bellina come closer.
‘Surviving?’
‘Yes. I’m good at that.’ Roberto smiled up at Isabella as she bandaged his shoulder.
Her father had removed the bullet, watched with care by Isabella, and he’d stitched up the wound, accompanied by comments like ‘It’s only a scratch’ and ‘You’ll be heaving pigs around again in no time’.
‘Papa, he’s a photographer.’
‘Was a photographer,’ Roberto corrected. ‘What good is a photographer with no camera?’
She remembered the smashed pieces of his beloved Graflex and the confetti of photographs littering his darkroom floor. The police had taken his Leica from him when he was under arrest.
‘You can start again. A new camera.’
He rose to his feet and lightly kissed her lips. ‘We can both start again.’
She smiled at him but a sharp knock at the door startled them all. A stab of fear made her reach for Roberto for a second, before she broke free and walked quickly to answer it. She swung the door open, knowing the dark uniforms would be on the other side.
/> ‘Hello, stranger, where have you been keeping yourself?’
It was Francesca, her white-blonde hair gleaming like snow in the sunlight.
Isabella laughed with relief. ‘I’ve been in Rome, looking at stone.’
‘You and your stones! Here, I’ve brought you breakfast. You haven’t been into the shop for a few days.’
She handed over a napkin wrapped around warm spicy rolls and Isabella kissed her on both cheeks.
‘Thank you, Francesca. Come on in for coffee.’
‘No, I can’t now. More baking to do. But this evening I’ll come round and you can tell me what you’ve been doing.’
Isabella smiled. ‘Any news?’
Francesca’s pale blue eyes opened wide. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘The chief of carabinieri was killed in a fight with Communists up in the mountains yesterday.’
Isabella didn’t blink. She recalled the kick of the rifle on Roberto’s shoulder and the weight of its barrel in her hand. The figure in its dark blue uniform slumping to the ground.
‘But, listen,’ Francesca waved her arms through the air, ‘the big news is that Mussolini has had Chairman Grassi arrested. He has been transported to Rome for failing to find who was responsible for the aeroplane crash at the rally.’
‘What?’
‘It’s true.’ Francesca grinned. ‘That bastard is having a taste of his own medicine.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And I must get back to my oven.’ She blew a kiss to Isabella and hurried away through the courtyard.
Isabella turned to look at Roberto and at her father, not quite able to believe what she’d just heard.
‘They’ve gone.’ The words reverberated quietly in the room. ‘Sepe and Grassi have gone.’
‘That is wonderful news,’ her father exclaimed, and his tall figure seemed to uncurl, as if a heavy weight had lifted from his shoulders. ‘Isabella,’ he was packing his instruments away in his medical bag after cleaning and sterilising them, ‘I might leave Bellina too.’
‘No, Papa.’ Isabella put a hand on his bag as if that small action could hold him. ‘Stay here with us.’
He shook his head in a tired gesture. ‘I’ve never liked this town, you know that. It’s too stark and modern for me.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘I want to go back to the old Italy, to the beautiful places I knew before. I’m thinking of returning to Milan. I can continue to help the rebels there.’
‘Papa, I’ll miss you. But if that’s what you want…’
‘It is. I only stayed here to watch over you, my daughter.’ He smiled broadly at Roberto. ‘But now you have someone else to do that. And you have Rosa. What will you do with her?’
‘Adopt her, of course. She won’t be going back to the convent.’
A sound from the doorway of the room drew Isabella’s attention and she looked round to see Rosa standing there in her loose smock. Her eyes were fixed on Isabella’s face.
‘I thought you were asleep on my bed, Rosa.’
‘I heard a knock.’
‘It’s all right, it was just a friend. She brought good news. Both Chairman Grassi and Colonnello Sepe have left Bellina for ever.’
A small moan escaped Rosa’s pale lips and she ran across the room to Isabella. Isabella crouched down and encircled the child in her arms, holding her trembling body close. ‘What is it, Rosa?’
‘I don’t ever want to go back there, but I’m frightened for Carmela.’
‘Your friend at the convent?’
Rosa nodded. ‘She’s all on her own now.’
Isabella realised at that moment how great were the complexities that this child was bringing into her life, but she stroked her young cheek reassuringly. ‘I don’t know what the connection was between Chairman Grassi and the Reverend Mother, but now that he has gone her position is weakened. In future she will have to be more careful how she treats her pupils at the convent. Anyway, I will keep a watch on Carmela and we will invite her to visit us as often as you like.’ She ruffled the cropped curls. ‘If that’s what you want?’
Rosa didn’t speak for a long moment. Her dark eyes shone and she nodded again. ‘Mamma was right,’ she said solemnly. ‘You are a good person.’
When Rosa finally fell asleep once more, Isabella walked with Roberto through the town in the amber light of early morning, heading for her architectural office. Back in the Piazza del Popolo, where it all began, she paused, gazing at the fine buildings around her. At last she could see a real future for Bellina. She was aware of Roberto standing close behind her and she leaned against him, feeling the strength of him at her back.
‘We could leave too,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Start again elsewhere, if that’s what you want.’
‘No, Roberto, this is where I want to be. Right here. With you and Rosa. I love this town and I love my work in it. There’s so much more I want to do here in Bellina, and there are the five other new towns that have yet to be built on the Agro Pontino. She stretched a hand out in front of her. ‘It is waiting for us to create the future we want.’
Roberto wrapped an arm around her. ‘We don’t know who will replace Grassi and Sepe, but let’s believe that whoever it is, they will have the good of the town at heart. I’ll order a new Graflex camera for myself,’ he added and she could hear the enthusiasm in his voice, ‘and continue to record the growth of the town in pictures. But this time it won’t be for Grassi. It will be so that in the future when everything has changed, people will be able to look at them and know what it was like here. How we built a town for them.’
Isabella looked eastward, her eyes drawn to the ancient mountains in the distance. They lay in purple shadow and watched patiently over the golden plain below.
Why I Chose To Write About The Pontine Marshes
The moment I heard about the extraordinary feat of the draining of Italy’s Pontine Marshes – the Agro Pontino – and the construction of the new towns in the 1930s, I knew I had found the perfect setting for my next book.
It was my husband who first drew my attention to this amazing project of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and I became fascinated by it. The scheme was driven by a risky combination of idealistic vision to create a brave new world and pragmatic political expediency to silence the unrest among the veterans of the Great War and give them employment. But it was the engineering expertise and the bottomless coffers that made it possible. I think it is debatable whether anything but a totalitarian state could have forced through such a vast project at the time. In 1933, at the peak of the work, 124,000 men were employed on it.
Of course I had to go and take a look at the flat expanse of the Agro Pontino as it is now – naturally checking out the delicious local Carmenere and limoncello at the same time! – and it was an enthralling research trip. The wide open plain covers an extended rectangle about thirty miles long and roughly twenty miles wide, bordered by the coastline of the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west and by the Lepini mountains to the east. It lies thirty miles SW of Rome, between the ancient towns of Cisterna in the north and Terracina in the south.
I started my research by reading all about the area and its history and quickly discovered what the problem was that caused the unhealthy swampland to form. Much of the land is below sea level and there is a quaternary dune that runs parallel to the coastline, preventing the mountain rivers from draining into the sea. So they pool and stagnate on the plain, and as a result these marshlands became an impenetrable forested malarial swamp. It was infested by dense black clouds of anopheles mosquitoes that had plagued this area for centuries. Even Nero and Napoleon and numerous Popes attempted to release the water by digging channels through the barrier dunes but no one succeeded.
Until Benito Mussolini.
His breathtaking ambition stormed through all obstacles.
How did he do it?
In 1930 the forest was cleared by a vast army of workmen, many of them veterans from the war.
It’s hard to imagine the logistics of this. The amount of timber that had to be hauled. The fires that had to burn day and night to consume the branches and stumps in the black volcanic earth. It must at times have felt like a scene out of hell.
The workmen lived in camps behind barbed wire, poorly fed and poorly paid. Many hundreds of them, maybe thousands, died from malaria and in accidents, but no records were kept of this. The sick and the dead were removed, so that the Great Scheme could claim it was untainted by failure. The workers then constructed over 10,000 miles of canals and trenches, as well as the essential pumping stations to keep the water flowing into the sea.