The Tuscan Contessa Read online

  Dinah Jefferies

  * * *

  THE TUSCAN CONTESSA

  Contents

  Brief Timeline of World War II in Italy

  Chapter 1. The Walled Village of Castello de’ Corsi, Tuscany

  Chapter 2. Castello de’ Corsi

  Chapter 3. Rome

  Chapter 4. Castello de’ Corsi

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 9.

  Chapter 10.

  Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12.

  Chapter 13.

  Chapter 14.

  Chapter 15.

  Chapter 16.

  Chapter 17.

  Chapter 18.

  Chapter 19.

  Chapter 20.

  Chapter 21.

  Chapter 22.

  Chapter 23.

  Chapter 24.

  Chapter 25.

  Chapter 26.

  Chapter 27.

  Chapter 28.

  Chapter 29. Florence

  Chapter 30.

  Chapter 31.

  Chapter 32.

  Chapter 33.

  Chapter 34.

  Chapter 35.

  Chapter 36.

  Chapter 37.

  Chapter 38.

  Chapter 39.

  Chapter 40. Castello de’ Corsi

  Chapter 41. Buonconvento

  Chapter 42.

  Chapter 43.

  Chapter 44.

  Chapter 45.

  Chapter 46. Rome

  Chapter 47.

  Chapter 48.

  Chapter 49.

  Chapter 50. Castello de’ Corsi

  Chapter 51.

  Chapter 52.

  Chapter 53.

  Chapter 54.

  Chapter 55.

  Chapter 56.

  Chapter 57.

  Chapter 58.

  Chapter 59.

  Chapter 60.

  Chapter 61.

  Chapter 62.

  Chapter 63.

  Chapter 64.

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Dinah Jefferies was born in Malaysia and moved to England at the age of nine. Her idyllic childhood always held a special place in her imagination, and when she began writing novels in her sixties, she was able to return there – first in her fiction and then on annual research trips for each new novel. Dinah Jefferies is the author of novels The Separation, The Tea Planter’s Wife – a Number One Sunday Times bestseller, The Silk Merchant’s Daughter, Before the Rains, The Sapphire Widow and The Missing Sister. She lives in Gloucestershire.

  By the same author

  The Separation

  The Tea Planter’s Wife

  The Silk Merchant’s Daughter

  Before the Rains

  The Sapphire Widow

  The Missing Sister

  In memory of the Italian people whose bravery and courage inspired this book

  Brief Timeline of World War II in Italy

  July 1943 A few weeks after the Allied invasion of Sicily and bombing of Rome, the Mussolini regime collapses. Vittorio Emanuele III, the King of Italy, appoints Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio to be the new Prime Minister of Italy. Mussolini is imprisoned. Meanwhile, the Germans contact Badoglio, who confirms Italy’s continuing loyalty to Germany. But the Germans are suspicious, so the Wehrmacht makes plans to take control of Italy if the Italian government switches allegiance to the Allies.

  8 September 1943 An armistice between Italy and the Allies is publicly declared. The King and Badoglio flee from Rome, taking shelter on the Allied side. As the Italians surrender to the Allies, the Germans rapidly occupy Italy, including Rome. Italy officially changes sides, making peace with the Allies against Nazi Germany.

  9 September 1943 The Allies arrive by sea to land on the beaches of Salerno. Shot and mortared by the enemy troops hidden in the mountains, it takes ten days to push the Germans back. Two thousand British soldiers die.

  12 September 1943 On Hitler’s orders, Mussolini is rescued by German paratroopers.

  23 September 1943 The Italian Social Republic is proclaimed with Mussolini as leader. Although he prefers to return to Rome, the Germans establish his capital in a villa at Salò on Lake Garda, in the north. However, he has already lost control of most of Italy and governs a puppet state dependent entirely upon Berlin. Much of the country is under German martial law.

  1 October 1943 After fierce fighting, Allied tanks liberate the city of Naples. The Allies then head for Rome, but the enemy is using Italy’s natural defences to stop them – impassable rivers, fortress-like mountains. Progress is slow.

  13 October 1943 Liberated Italy declares war on Germany. The country is effectively caught up not only in WWII but also in a civil war between Fascists and anti-Fascists.

  16 and 17 October 1943 Reinforcements from Commonwealth armies leave for Italy. There follow numerous brutal battles as the Allies slowly drive the German army back. German resistance is strong.

  November 1943 This story, The Tuscan Contessa, begins. At this stage the Italian partisans are not organized and are mainly involved in random acts of sabotage.

  5 June 1944 The Allies enter and liberate Rome. They head towards and then through Tuscany. By now the partisan units have grown in number, become better armed and are better organized.

  6 June 1944 Elsewhere in Europe, the Normandy landings – referred to as D-Day – take place, the operation which begins the liberation of German-occupied France. Despite the symbolic and strategic importance of the fall of Rome, D-Day takes precedence in the popular imagination and the Italian campaign is largely ignored.

  29 June 1944 Retreating German SS troops storm through Tuscany. In the villages of San Pancrazio and Civitella a massacre takes place in reprisal for the partisan shooting of four German soldiers.

  June/July 1944 Part of the Allied advance, French North African troops, known as Goums, allegedly rape and loot their way through Tuscany.

  4 August 1944 The Allies reach the southern parts of Florence and the battle for Florence commences, with enormous help from the Italian partisans. The German army retreats, looting and burning. Florence is left filthy, with no electricity, little water, no transport and almost no food. The fighting moves north.

  12 August 1944 In Sant’Anna di Stazzema the reprisal massacre by Waffen-SS of 560 local villagers and refugees, including more than a hundred children, takes place. During the retreat, other massacres follow.

  21 April 1945 Bologna is taken by the Allies.

  28 April 1945 Mussolini is shot dead by partisans and hanged upside down in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.

  29 April 1945 The German command in Italy signs the surrender.

  2 May 1945 The surrender of the German Armed Forces in Italy becomes effective, two days after the collapse of Berlin. Fifty thousand Italian partisans are dead; 300,000 American and British have been injured during the Italian campaign, 47,000 are dead. American casualties at Anzio alone are 59,000. German casualties are approximately 434,000.

  1.

  The Walled Village of Castello de’ Corsi, Tuscany

  29 June 1944 – 7.15 p.m.

  In the small piazza overlooked by shuttered windows, balconies and terracotta roofs, the heat hangs heavily, the air smells of smoke, and the inhabitants are either asleep or hiding. The only voices are those of tiny swallows, but when a large black-winged crow takes flight from the top of the crenellated tower, an ear-splitting screeching starts up. Another crow follows. And another. Three crows, the old lady thinks. Three means death. She counts them off on her fingers before sipping her watered-down wine where she sits on a chair in the doorway of
what had once been her son’s house. Despite the warmth of the evening, she wraps a frayed woollen shawl around her shoulders and stifles a yawn. ‘Old bones,’ she mutters.

  The ancient stone buildings surrounding the square gleam in the golden sunlight: homes, a couple of shops, the manor house with its large casement windows and the deep eaves from which water drips in the winter. Plus, a single archway into the village, wide and high enough for a horse and carriage. Blowsy crimson roses planted in a clay tub climb as far as the first floor of the manor, their heady scent drifting in the early-evening air. Before long, the sun – at present a mellow ball shining in the azure sky – will begin to sink and the sky will be threaded with red.

  It is a rare peaceful hour, but the tranquillity is disturbed when a shriek echoes around the square. A few dark shutters rattle. One flies wide open and a startled young woman looks out from her window, eyes fixed on the piazza. What now? What can it be now? And the old lady glances up as if she might already know what now although there’s nothing to see but for a few pigeons fluttering to the cistern in the centre.

  A breeze rustles the flat leaves of a fig tree and a young boy races through the huge curved archway, shrieking again as he chases after a white three-legged dog, the child’s crust of bread clamped between its jaws. They circle the cistern until the child slips on a fig and the old lady laughs as the dog escapes. Good for you, little three-legged, she whispers, though she knows the child and his grandmother, Carla, too.

  A woman in blue walks into the square and stops in view of the tower. She signals to another woman and points to her right. ‘Try that way.’ After the other one slips through a doorway into the darkness, the woman in blue heads towards the tower, only pausing momentarily when she hears an engine. Surely not the Germans, not now. Allies then? She takes a second to cross herself and then carries on.

  But, at that moment, a moment that will go on forever in her memory, she hears a strangled cry. She stares up at the tower, shading her eyes, disbelief flooding her whole being. A woman is perched on the crenellated battlement at the top with her back to the square. Head bowed, she is just sitting, not moving, not looking around. A few seconds pass. There’s a gust of wind and, with a further glance up, the woman in blue frowns in puzzlement, uncertain of what she’s seen. She calls out, ‘Be careful!’ There’s no reply. Had it been a shadow or were there two people up there? The woman in blue shouts out again but everything is happening too quickly now, and the woman at the top of the tower is tipping back dangerously. Something falls, billowing, drifting, floating in the breeze. The woman in blue is running, faster than she’s ever run before, tripping over her own feet as she does. She sees the silk scarf lying on the ground and, heart thumping, she races for the tower door.

  2.

  Castello de’ Corsi

  Seven months earlier – November 1943

  With a mixture of longing and hope, Sofia stared out at the Val d’Orcia where the deep-brown slopes folded into valley after valley and the sky, purple and backlit by the setting sun, appeared to hold its breath. In the distance, the brooding, lonely Monte Amiata watched over them, while the golden-red vines, and the oak trees blazing defiantly in their final moments, only heightened Sofia’s hunger to recapture what they had lost. Winter was skirting closer, but she still longed for those hazy summer nights when she’d wriggle her bare toes in the dry grass as they lay gazing at fireflies and drinking red wine from the bottle.

  She used to love these liminal times when for those few moments the world became misty, magical, impossible; loved the minutes between sleep and wakefulness because neither one nor the other could claim her. She could believe they were still walking hand in hand in the dusty olive groves, dreaming up plans for their future with no foreknowledge of what lay in wait.

  As the night slowly turned black and began to seep into the small salon, she yanked the creaking shutters so hard the window frames shook, then she closed the window itself and spun round to scan the scene. She smelt the rich comforting aroma of Lorenzo’s cigars as she squatted by the hearth to throw another log on the fire, before glancing back at him where he sat on their faded blue-velvet sofa, both dogs snoring at his feet. With the house at its quietest, it was at its darkest too, and it was then that her fears pursued her. The shadows in the room altered with the flickering flames, alive and monstrous as they flared almost to the ceiling, then waning as the flames subsided. But she could still see the glitter of them in his gentle grey eyes. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling. Grief, yes, but that edge he had was new. He patted the space next to him on the sofa and she stretched before going to nestle up close.

  Even as he ran his fingers through her hair at either side of her head and lifted it away from her face, she felt as if she were losing parts of herself; parts of him too.

  ‘There, I can see you now,’ he said.

  ‘You have always seen me,’ she replied, and then she told him she’d been thinking about the poppy fields.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I wish it were May and then all this would be over.’

  He pulled a noncommittal face. ‘It may not be.’

  ‘I had a dream about them. The poppies.’ But she didn’t add that the red of the poppies had spoilt and the flower heads had been dripping with blood.

  His voice was gentle as he lifted her hand and examined her broken nails. ‘That’s not paint under what’s left of your nails, is it?’

  ‘Gardening.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, I was thinking of Florence.’

  ‘You mean before?’

  ‘When you were at the Art Institute and I was in the Agrarian Faculty.’

  She smiled at the memory of her carefree nineteen-year-old self.

  ‘Nineteen twenty,’ he added. ‘And you are still the same.’

  ‘Small? Pale? Wrinkled?’

  ‘Hardly.’ His eyes danced with amusement. ‘Elegant. Beautiful as ever. But I’m going grey and you are not.’ He ran a hand over his pepper-and-salt hair.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘But you don’t paint as much these days, do you?’

  ‘Not since the war began, but I have started again.’

  They slipped into silence, both with separate reflections. She longed to reminisce about the early days, remind herself of who he really was, of who she was too, but couldn’t find the words. She watched him closely, but he only smiled, and she wondered if they were thinking the same thing. In the hush she heard the ticking of the grandfather clock above the sound of the fire, marking the seconds, separating them still further as the silence lengthened.

  ‘Do you …’ he eventually said, as if he were reading her mind.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He shook his head. ‘I was just … thinking.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Well … you know …’

  She frowned, unsure. Did she know?

  ‘About us,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes …’

  They left it, this odd little snippet of conversation, and she hoped they were headed for safer ground. In the end it was he who spoke.

  ‘Sofia, I’ve been wanting to say … well, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to say. But … really, there isn’t one, so I’ll just come out with it.’

  ‘Go on.’ She heard the touch of anxiety in her own voice as he, meanwhile, absently rubbed his chin.

  ‘The thing is, I’m going to have to be away,’ he went on.

  She pulled back and moved across to the chintz sofa opposite, curling up her legs and trying not to look wounded. ‘So, what’s different? You’re always away.’

  He grimaced. ‘And I always come back.’

  ‘You mean this time you won’t?’ she said, alarmed at the notion of coping with the whole estate alone.

  ‘No, I mean this may be for longer.’

  ‘Considerably longer?’

  He nodded. ‘But it’s not going to be straight away.’

  ‘What wi
ll you be doing?’

  ‘Nothing very difficult. No need to worry.’

  But the tone of his voice was too breezy, and she was sure he was lying. ‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

  He sighed. ‘I’ve recently been asked to pass on information that the Allies may find useful.’

  ‘Isn’t that terribly dangerous?’

  He held her gaze and she knew that of course it was dangerous. ‘You’ll still be doing your job at the ministry?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  He got up and she watched him from the corner of her eye as he took a small but bulky brown package from his pocket and held it up. She tilted her head, indicating he should put it on the coffee table.

  ‘Aren’t you going to look at it?’ he asked.

  ‘Later.’

  ‘You’ll be safe here at the Castello?’ he asked, and she registered the raw emotion in his eyes.

  The question was a serious one. He was picturing their high walls, and their home, not quite a castle but the manor house of their small, fortified, thirteenth-century village with only one archway in, or out, and walls which no enemy could ever break through. Until now.

  ‘Safe? Us? Maybe.’

  But not our pigs, she thought. Nor our turkeys, chickens, ducks, guinea fowl, wild boar, cattle. She resented the stealing from their thirty-two farms and reflected on the isolation of each one, below and beyond the village. Easy prey.

  ‘There’ll be no sausages this year.’ And if her voice was bitter, she didn’t care.

  ‘But you have hidden food supplies?’

  ‘Some, but there will be little meat for us or for the farmers. Why do you think we keep eating rabbit?’

  He smiled, trying to make light of it. ‘I like rabbit.’

  ‘Just as well then.’

  She gazed at her hands for a moment.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ And knowing she still hadn’t told him about the letter, she changed the subject. After all, it probably wouldn’t happen and then she would be glad not to have worried him. ‘What will you do about your card?’