Cast the First Stone: A stunning wartime story

by Angela Arney

  Liana screamed out in pain. It hurt, oh God, how it hurt. But she had him. Arching her back, she bucked her hips against his body with a strength that astonished and excited him. Then it was over, the final explosive thrust left him spiralling down, weak and gasping.

  Exhausted and drenched in perspiration, they lay still at last, arms and legs entangled in each other and the bedclothes. Liana let out a long, shuddering sigh of satisfaction. Every drop of him was in her, and she knew he had felt her skin tearing. Now the baby’s future was safe. She had done it, just as she had planned. A triumphant smile curved her lips. Oh yes, Nicholas, she thought, anything is possible if you want it badly enough.

  Her hand stroked the smooth skin of his back. She had promised herself that she would give him a wedding night to remember, and she would. The next time would not be so painful, not now that the recently stitched membranes were ruptured, and the more times they made love, the more convincing would be her immediate conception. With deliberate sensuality, she moved her body beneath his, and reached out to encircle his limp member with gently massaging fingers.

  Nicholas could hardly believe it. His only experience of sex before had been quick, fumbling affairs, and he had always ended up feeling that the girls had been doing him a favour. They had let him enter and come, and that had been that. They had never shown any particular enjoyment, and they had never touched him. But Liana was different, oh, so different. She did things to him which drove him mad with wanton delight so that he climaxed again and again. And to his joy, she let him do anything he wanted with her lovely body. Nothing was too intimate, nothing barred. Raul had taught her well, and her own natural sexuality led her the rest of the way.

  Finally Nicholas slept. ‘I love you,’ he mumbled as he pillowed his head against her soft breasts.

  Liana lay still, her fingers softly caressing his fine blond hair. I ought to say I love you, too, she thought, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to say those special words, not tonight.

  ‘I’m so glad you do,’ she said at last.

  Nicholas grunted sleepily. Why was it that tonight of all nights she had not said she loved him? He had said it, time and time again. Then he smiled contentedly, nuzzling like a child into the comfort of her breasts. Of course she loved him; she had told him that by giving him her wonderful, incredibly sensuous body. What more could a man ask for? Of course she loved him; there was no doubt of that.

  Liana lay pinned beneath the weight of his body, her hand still idly twisting locks of his hair. The sound of regular breathing eventually told her he was asleep. I have chosen well, she thought. Nicholas had surprised her with his love-making; he had been gentle and sensitive as well as passionate and demanding. She considered her life ahead objectively. Nicholas adored her, and she would make certain she kept it that way. Making love to him was not so bad; pretending was not as difficult as she had imagined it would be. The baby would be born in wedlock. She smiled; there would be no problems. All she had to do was keep memories of Raul at bay.

  That, however, was a problem. Hour after hour Liana lay in bed, weighted down by the sleeping Nicholas. Her body was exhausted, but her mind refused to be stilled. Making love with Nicholas had unleashed the very memories she sought to suppress. She tried to concentrate on the room, the here and now, and fixed her eyes on the lines of moonlight streaming through the gaps in the blinds.

  But as she tried to concentrate, the parallel lines of light disappeared, and Raul stood before her, every beloved feature etched indelibly on her mind. She watched as he turned. He was walking away, down the mountainside. If only she could reach out and touch him, stop him. But he kept on walking; the falling ash from Vesuvius swirled about him, gradually covering his hair, his clothes, everything, until he had disappeared from sight.

  The moonlight moved across the room, inch by inch, until it stretched in brilliant stripes across the bed. A bright spear of light glinted on Nicholas’s hair, turning the blond into glittering silver. For the first time since she had decided to marry Nicholas, the full enormity of the deception she had embarked upon struck home. For the first time she felt apprehensive, felt a deep-seated and terrible doubt about the rightness of her decision. She had always known she was cheating, but now she realized she was cheating twice over: cheating Nicholas, and cheating her unborn child. But there was no other way, she cried out in anguish, trying to justify it to her newly awakened conscience. If there was, don’t you think I would have taken it?

  Liana bit her lip and felt tears of self-pity and regret welling up behind her eyelids. Now was not the time to cry; it was too late, much too late for tears. And anyway, she knew only too well that tears achieved nothing, nothing at all. In spite of that, she was helpless to prevent them. Like a rising tide they advanced until, unchecked, they welled up and overflowed, rolling silently down her cheeks and seeping at last into the corners of her mouth until their wetness touched her tongue. If it had been a deadly poison, she knew the taste could not have been more bitter.

  ‘Forgive me, Nicholas,’ she whispered. ‘I had no choice.’

  PART TWO

  1944—1961

  Chapter Ten

  Donald Ramsay laughed, a warm, comfortable chuckle. ‘The mice have well and truly ravaged her mink this year!’ he said, rolling a cigarette with care. It was a difficult manoeuvre, using the last few precious shreds of his hoard of beloved tobacco. Lovely tobacco this, he thought regretfully, wondering if he would be able to obtain any more this side of Christmas. But although he used it all, it was not enough. The finished cigarette drooped limp and mournful from his mouth, and he singed his bushy grey moustache with the flaring match as he lit it.

  Wrinkling her nose distastefully at the smell of burning whiskers, his wife turned and stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Lady Margaret’s coat.’ He nodded towards the lonely figure of a woman waiting at the quayside. ‘I wonder if she knows.’

  Dorothy Ramsay laughed and glanced briefly at the woman, dwarfed now by the hull of the hospital ship as it slowly drew nearer the busy Southampton dockside. ‘I doubt it. Vanity is not a criticism that could ever be levelled at Margaret. I do believe she never looks in a mirror. Poor Margaret, she’ll never get another mink coat until rationing ends, and not even then unless her financial position improves.’

  As she spoke she tugged self-consciously at the sleeves of her blue summer coat. Perhaps turning the cuffs had not been such a good idea; it showed how faded the jacket had become. She sighed. She had always prided herself on being a smart woman, and clothes rationing was, for her, one of the most frustrating aspects of the war. ‘Although I did think that perhaps today, of all days,’ Dorothy Ramsay added reflectively, ‘she might have taken a little more trouble with her appearance.’

  Reaching over to the back seat of the car, she picked up a well-thumbed copy of a June edition of Tatler, and flicked it open at an article entitled ‘Way of the War’. In the centre of the page was a wedding photograph of Nicholas and Liana outside the church in Naples.

  Her husband took it from her and read out loud. ‘“It is fitting to report, now (June the fourth nineteen forty-four) that Rome has been taken.”’ He snorted angrily. ‘Although what the hell that has got to do with it I don’t know. Load of bullshit. Bloody stupid this magazine.’

  ‘Donald!’ Dorothy reproved him mildly. ‘Mixing with all these American soldiers has definitely not improved your language.’

  ‘Coloured it, though.’ Donald laughed, unrepentant.

  His wife sighed, reflecting how the war had changed them all. She knew her husband felt a vicarious thrill from mixing with all the American troops who had flooded southern England prior to the Normandy landings the previous June. In August, there were still quite a few waiting to be shipped over to France to carry on with the fight, and now the wounded men were beginning to return, most of them to Southampton, where they were taken by train and ambulance to the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netl
ey.

  Too old for the armed services himself, Donald Ramsay felt frustrated with his role of country doctor; he wanted to be on the offensive, at the front tending the wounded – doing something useful, as he always put it. Dorothy smiled at him fondly. Little did he know how much he was loved and needed by all his patients in the villages of Hampshire. Someone had to look after the civilian population, and he did a good job. He delivered the babies, comforted the war widows, jollied along the old folk, sorted out the epidemics of measles and chicken pox which the village children succumbed to at regular intervals, and, with the vicar, was regarded as father confessor and comforter to all.

  Her meandering thoughts came to a halt as her husband continued reading. ‘“To report, now that Rome has been taken, the wedding of the Earl of Wessex to the Marchesa Eleanora Anna Maria, Baroness San Angelo di Magliano e del Monte: Lord Nicholas and his new wife the Lady Liana, as she prefers to be called, will return to England as soon as hostilities permit.”’

  ‘They should have put as soon as pregnancy permits,’ said Dorothy pertly. She peered over her husband’s shoulder to look at the photograph. ‘She is a very good-looking girl, very good-looking indeed. That’s why I thought perhaps Margaret might take some trouble.’

  ‘With her appearance?’ Donald Ramsay finished the sentence for his wife, drawing fiercely on the flickering remnant of his cigarette before throwing the stub out of the car window. ‘She’s too worried to think about anything as trivial as that.’

  ‘About William?’

  ‘About everything. William’s out of hospital now, physically patched up as well as can be expected for a man minus a limb, but mentally a wreck. A pity, because he was going through such a good patch before the war. This injury has put him back to square one.’ Dr Ramsay contained his exasperation with difficulty. As a country general practitioner, he knew his skills were inadequate to help with William’s depression. He wanted him to seek expert help. Indeed he had pleaded with Margaret and William, but they had both stubbornly refused to even acknowledge that such help was needed. ‘And now, today she has Nicholas’s foreign bride arriving, and I’ve no doubt she’s worrying herself silly about the coming baby.’

  Dorothy looked anxious. ‘You mean, worrying that the child might turn out to be as difficult as William?’

  Donald snorted grumpily.

  ‘Well? Do you think the baby will be all right?’

  ‘There’s no reason why the baby should be anything other than healthy in every sense of the word. But I suppose she’ll worry; it’s in her nature – worry, but keep it under her hat as usual.’ He sighed. ‘Oh, I do wish she’d act on my sensible advice sometimes.

  ‘And then she’s got the added worry of Broadacres going to rack and ruin, although perhaps that wouldn’t be happening so fast if she weren’t being cheated right left and centre by that fiddling pair, the Catermoles.’ He moved restlessly in the cramped confines of the car. ‘It’s all too much for her. She’s a kind and gentle woman, but she has no strength of character. She hasn’t even got the courage to sack the Catermoles, although she knows very well that she ought to. Sometimes I think she’ll have a nervous breakdown if someone doesn’t come along to help her. She seems to have aged so much these last two years. She’s an old woman.’

  ‘Well, you can’t help her any more than you do, and she is not that old. Good heavens, fifty-three isn’t old! She’s younger than both of us,’ said his wife. ‘We’ll just have to hope that Nicholas comes home soon and sorts things out.’

  With one accord, their heads turned to watch the woman waiting on the quayside. She looked forlorn in the alien world of ships and cranes surrounded by busy little steam engines chuntering along their curving tracks, shunting goods wagons hither and thither. She walked slowly along to the far end of the wharf, eventually being brought to a halt by a mountain of coal piled up ready to feed the ever-hungry steam engines. The top of the pile was painted a startling white; the authorities believed it discouraged thieving. One piece of coal taken, even from the bottom, and the white line slipped, making the theft obvious at once.

  ‘Margaret ought to paint her bloody coal white. All of it. Then maybe the bloody Catermoles wouldn’t thieve ninety per cent of it.’

  ‘Don’t swear, dear,’ said his wife automatically, without the faintest hope that he would ever stop.

  *

  The Dowager Countess of Wessex, Lady Margaret Hamilton-Howard, stood for a moment staring at the coal with unseeing eyes, then looked down at a dog-eared photograph clasped tightly in her hand.

  ‘Liana, Liana,’ she repeated the name softly to herself.

  Nicholas had said in his letters that she must call her Liana, not Eleanora. He had also said her English was good. Oh, I do hope so, she thought. Her stomach tightened in a sudden knot of fear, the way it did so often these days. I can’t seem to get anything done when I give orders in English, so how will I manage to make her understand our way of life if she doesn’t speak the language?

  But she does. Dispiritedly she tried to reassure herself. Nicholas said so in his letters, and he wouldn’t lie to me, not to his own mother. She swallowed the fear. No point in worrying, the girl was almost here now. I’ll find out for myself soon enough, she thought with an air of resignation.

  Turning, she retraced her footsteps, her thick brogues clumping awkwardly along the concrete quay. She could feel the uncomfortable lisle stockings slipping on her thin legs, and knew that by now they would be hopelessly wrinkled. The girl in the photograph did not look as if her stockings would ever wrinkle. Lady Margaret snatched another surreptitious glance at the photo. Liana looked very glamorous – in fact quite daunting altogether. A warm breeze tugged at the untidy tendrils of her iron-grey hair scraped back into something vaguely resembling a bun, and she felt much too hot in the mink coat. I wish I hadn’t worn the damned thing, she thought irritably, but then remembered she could not find anything else in the last-minute rush. All her other coats, all old, either had buttons missing or the hems had come undone. Mrs Catermole had said she would mend one, but of course she had not; and Margaret herself could hardly thread a needle, let alone sew on a button or take up a hem.

  ‘I dunno as how you expect me to do everything, madam,’ Mrs Catermole had said sullenly when, summoning up courage, she had tentatively broached the subject the day before. ‘I’ve had no help in the house or kitchen these last two weeks.’

  I should have asked her about the two women from the village who were supposed to come in. I gave her the money. Oh, it’s no good; I’m absolutely hopeless. I’m getting worse and worse at giving orders and managing money, and the awful thing is the Catermoles know it. The thought made her heart sink; and not for the first time, Lady Margaret wished she had been given a different education, one which would have better equipped her for the life she now had to lead.

  The tug pulling the cumbersome troopship into her allotted berth let off a sudden burst of steam and tooted loudly. It was the signal for steel hawsers to snake over the sides, hissing as they made their way from ship to shore, ready to be wound round the sturdy iron bollards on the quayside. Lady Margaret, hastily moving farther back out of harm’s way, collided with a pair of American military police who were also awaiting the arrival of the ship.

  ‘I do beg your pardon.’ Lady Margaret glared at them as she spoke. Every single one of the silly young girls from the village would have given anything to bump into a pair of ‘snowdrops’, as the American MPs had been nicknamed. With their white helmets and gaiters they were considered to be very glamorous but as far as she was concerned, they were just another uncomfortable reminder of the war and all the unwelcome changes it had wrought in her life, changes she was increasingly unable to cope with. She glared at the Americans again and then immediately felt ashamed for looking so unfriendly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, attempting a tentative smile. I shouldn’t be cross, she told herself, they’re only boys. Why, they’re not even as old as Nicholas, a
nd they are far away from home, too. ‘My fault,’ she added, and walking away put a good distance between herself and the ‘snowdrops’.

  ‘Funny old girl,’ remarked one MP to the other. ‘My mom dresses better than that, and she lives in the Bronx.’

  ‘So what? Your mom is a Jewish immigrant; she has to look smart. That woman doesn’t need to bother. She’s probably Lady something,’ said the other knowledgeably. ‘Just take a good look at her face. Jesus, it’s like a horse’s. With a face like that, she’s gotta be a goddamn Lady. They all are!’

  *

  ‘A horse,’ thought Liana looking down at the waiting woman from her position at the ship’s rail. Nicholas’s mother looks like a horse.

  It had to be her mother-in-law; there was no-one else waiting, and she had written that she would be on the quayside. The baby suddenly kicked violently, and Liana forgot about her mother-in-law as nausea swamped her and she felt violently sick again. Oh, God, how the baby had been kicking this last week! The nearer the ship had drawn towards England the more she had kicked. It was almost as if her daughter – Liana was still sure it was a girl – was saying, ‘I don’t want to go.’

  The solitary figure of the woman on the shore swam out of focus as Liana’s nausea increased. For the moment she could think of nothing as she fought for control. Gripping the rail tightly, she gritted her teeth, telling herself fiercely that she hadn’t come hundreds of miles to arrive in England and immediately disgrace herself by being sick in front of Nicholas’s mother.