Cast the First Stone: A stunning wartime story

by Angela Arney

  But now, face to face with Liana in the library office, he found all his carefully rehearsed words frozen into silence. Instead, his brain rocked emptily in time with the ticking of the ormolu clock. Strange, he found himself thinking, why is it I’ve never noticed how loud it is before? With an effort he forced his brain back into gear and found some words, not the right ones, but at least he regained the power of speech.

  ‘Would you read this,’ he said abruptly, indicating the manuscript Liana now held in her hand, ‘and let me have your reaction as soon as possible?’

  Then filled with shame at his complete and utter cowardice, he turned and bolted from the library. Liana stood holding the package, surprised at Peter’s rapid departure. She could hear his footsteps echoing through the stone cloisters as he made his way swiftly towards the spacious Gothic hall which led out into the gardens near one of the cedar trees. It is better that she should read it alone, Peter told himself as he hurried along, without my influencing her in any way.

  What he could not bring himself to freely admit, and what had caused his precipitate flight, was a thought which had been haunting him intermittently ever since he had first read the manuscript; that enough of the story might be true to imply that Liana was not who she said she was. That she was Italian was not in doubt; that she was married to Nicholas and had a daughter Eleanora also was not in doubt; but was she the marchesa she had always claimed to be? Peter felt disloyal even allowing the thought to creep into his brain but found he was incapable of preventing it.

  Left alone, Liana opened the package, extracted the manuscript and read the title, The Two Girls. Then she noticed the handwritten note at the top, ‘a true story’! How odd. Why was Peter giving her a manuscript to read? She had nothing to do with the world of literature and knew very little about it. Why was he asking her opinion? Curiosity aroused, she sat down at her desk and prepared to read it. But as her hand reached to turn the first page, the telephone rang. It was Jason Penrose, now not only her London lawyer but her general manager as well, whose task it was to oversee all her international companies.

  ‘Lady Liana.’ He came straight to the point, knowing from past experience Liana could get very impatient if he skated round a subject. ‘We have run into problems with the French subsidiary of Elver Forge industries. An all-out strike at the factory in Lyons is threatened, and I don’t need to tell you how damaging that would be to the overall position of the company. We desperately need foreign revenue as the pound may yet be devalued, in spite of what Wilson says.’

  The manuscript was forgotten. Liana’s mind switched on to business matters. ‘I agree about devaluation, Jason. Personally I’ve never trusted that damned prime minister. Freezing wages and prices is never going to work. But our own problem in France: what do you suggest I do?’

  ‘You must come up to London so that I can brief you properly, and then I think we should fly out to Lyons together and have direct talks with the management and workers. In my opinion it’s the only way to defuse the situation.’

  Liana did not hesitate. ‘Right. I’ll get myself organized; it won’t take long, and I’ll be up on the next train from Winchester to London. Book a flight, tonight if possible, and please be sure that I can get back to Broadacres by Friday night. My daughter is coming for the weekend, and I don’t want to miss any of her visit.’

  Once she had made up her mind, Liana never wasted time. She worked quickly, methodically pulling out the papers in the Lyons file, putting them in her briefcase before dashing upstairs. There she just as methodically selected the few clothes she would need for the three and a half days she would be away and neatly packed a small case. After checking that her passport was in her handbag, she flew downstairs and out to the stables where she knew Nicholas would be. Margaret’s horse, Diabolus, had been limping, and Nicholas had called in the vet.

  He turned in surprise as Liana rushed in, noticing with faint alarm that she was wearing one of her city suits and was carrying her briefcase and a small suitcase. ‘You’re going up to town?’

  He felt hurt that she had not told him. Since their conversation about Eleanora they had slowly, day by day, moved a little closer to each other. Still not living as man and wife, they had nevertheless managed to gently ease their relationship on to a more stable footing. Talking was becoming easier, and even the silences were no longer quite so tense and awkward. So now, when he saw her obviously ready to leave without having said a word to him, he felt hurt and worried. Maybe she was on the point of withdrawing into herself again.

  Liana heard it in his voice and knew he felt aggrieved. On an impulse she crossed the space between them and, reaching up, kissed his cheek. It was the first time she had voluntarily touched him since the traumatic night at the Ritz when William’s illness had been revealed.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t know myself until ten minutes ago,’ she explained. ‘Jason Penrose has been on the ’phone. We have a crisis at the Lyons factory. I have to go there and sort it out before it gets any worse. I’m afraid there’s no alternative.’

  ‘But Eleanora is coming on Friday. That is only three days away.’

  Liana smiled and Nicholas’s heart suddenly lightened. It was almost like one of her old smiles, dark, mysterious, and he was sure he sensed tenderness. ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she said softly. ‘I know how important it is, and I shall be here. I’ve instructed Jason to get me a flight back so that I’ll be here for dinner on Friday evening at the very latest. I may even be back Friday morning.’

  Nicholas heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Eleanora and I need you here.’ Then, taking courage from her smile, he bent forward and kissed her gently on the lips. He felt her soft mouth tentatively respond beneath his before he drew back. They stood a moment, both smiling, suddenly as shy and awkward as a pair of teenagers, both instinctively knowing that the brief kiss had been a giant step towards mending the ravages of their fractured relationship.

  ‘I must go.’ Liana crossed to the stable door then stopped. ‘Oh, Nicholas, I’ve just remembered something. I’ve left my office window wide open. Will you remind someone to shut it? There are loose papers all over my desk.’

  It was late that evening, after dinner, before Nicholas remembered the open window in Liana’s office. He went down to shut it himself. The breeze through the open window had scattered papers from the desk all over the floor, and Nicholas collected them together. Having nothing better to do, he sat down and began sorting them into order. Liana was always fanatically neat; she would hate it if she came back to find everything in a muddle. The manuscript did not need sorting; it was all neatly stapled together. He put that to one side, then looked at the title page curiously. The Two Girls, apparently a true story if the note at the top was anything to go by. What was Liana doing with a manuscript? Surely she wasn’t thinking of going into publishing!

  He flicked open the first page and began to read.

  *

  The silvery chimes of the French ormolu clock on the marble mantelpiece struck twelve as Nicholas finally closed the manuscript and left the office. His footsteps were leaden, each movement an effort as he walked through the stone cloisters along which Peter had fled so precipitously earlier that day. The clocks throughout the house began to chime midnight, one after the other, the way they always did, none of them ever quite in time. It was a good five minutes before the last echo died away. Normally, the sound comforted Nicholas, giving him a feeling of permanence; he had been used to the sound of clocks chiming out of sequence since childhood.

  Now, far from comforting, the sound was irritating, intensifying the feeling that his own life was out of sequence. The words he had just read swam crazily through his head. Taken as a whole, none of the chronicle made sense. And yet passages rang so true that Nicholas’s heart had faltered, missing a beat, as he had read: the description of the bombed and broken-down castello; the half-burnt village of San Angelo; the life of Eleanora and the death of her father be
fore the war in Spain; the looting of the castello by Mussolini’s Black Shirts; the departure of Miss Rose, the Englishwoman, just before the outbreak of hostilities. All that was familiar to Nicholas. Liana, his own wife, had told him of her father’s death and the looting, and he had been to the castello and the village during the war himself, and it was exactly as described.

  But then came the puzzles, one after another: the presence of another girl, a peasant girl called Liana, the very same name that his wife had always said she had been called. But the Liana of the story had been a prostitute on the streets of Naples and her mother had been raped and murdered by deserters from the Italian army. That did not fit with the truth as Nicholas knew it, for it had been the marchesa’s mother, his wife’s mother, who had been so brutally murdered. After that, the story twisted and turned and became totally unfamiliar. It told of an old priest, Don Luigi, who lived with the two girls until his death and subsequent crude burial at night on the mountainside. But Liana had never mentioned anything about a priest. And the death of the Marchesa Eleanora in December 1943. That, of course, was absolute nonsense. The marchesa was alive and well. He should know, he was married to her.

  The whole thing was a fabrication masquerading under the banner of truth – it had to be. There was no other answer. It was extraordinary, though, the coincidence of the names, Liana and Eleanora. Extraordinary and worrying. Why had the author chosen those two names? It might have been credible if one had been used, even the full and correct title of the marchesa, but to use the two names which his own wife laid claim to seemed more than merely coincidental. Why did Liana insist she was always called Liana and not by her baptismal name of Eleanora?

  Nicholas relived the moments he had first seen the young woman destined to become his wife. And for the first time he began to have doubts about her reasons for being in that part of Naples. Had Liana really been telling the truth when she had said she had been delivering food to an old woman that night, the night of the bombing raid, the night he and Charlie had dug her out of the ruins of a slum tenement? Why deliver food at night? Night in the slums of Naples was not the usual place to meet a marchesa. A prostitute yes, but not a marchesa.

  Unable to sleep Nicholas sat in his room, staring out across the darkened lawns, a decanter of whisky by his side, a glass in his hand. Question after question tumbled through his head, and each spawned yet another and another and another, each equally unanswerable. Or were they?

  The pearly mist of an early autumn dawn crept across the lawns. A fox made his way along the edge of the lake, leaving a trail of footprints in the silvery dewed grass. He was blatantly sure of himself as he trotted back to his lair after a night’s hunting, and stopped for a moment, staring up at the house as if looking at the lonely figure still sitting motionless in a chair by the window. Nicholas watched him but the world of Broadacres waking to another day seemed unreal and far away. The splintered, nightmare world of Naples in 1943 felt much closer.

  Eventually he reluctantly became convinced that it was impossible to dismiss the story as just empty words. It had to be more than that. But who had written it, and why? Surely not Liana. But why was it on her desk? Nicholas sighed, his head ached; those questions would have to wait until she returned. In the meantime he decided that he must try to analyse it piece by piece.

  He took as his starting point the death of the Marchesa Eleanora. The description of her death, the other girl’s grief and the final, harrowing ordeal of her burial rang so true. Surely whoever wrote it could not have made it up? So, assuming the real marchesa had died, by fitting together the jigsaw of pieces he knew to be true plus pieces from his own memory, Nicholas came at last to two possibilities. Neither were pleasant as the same painful fact stood out, stark and accusing, in each: Liana, his wife, the Countess of Wessex, was an impostor.

  He considered the differing possibilities. A girl from the district, knowing the real Liana and Eleanora had both died, had assumed the mantle of the marchesa. There would have been nothing to stop her. Times were chaotic, most of the villagers had been killed or had fled from the bombing; no-one would have known. Then she had come down into Naples armed with a story about looking for her cousin Raul Carducci, a product of her imagination and an excuse to meet an eligible English officer. Nicholas baulked at the thought but then forced himself to face it. It was common enough knowledge that many Italian girls had been desperate to marry English or American soldiers, anything to get away from their own starving, poverty-stricken country. A lost cousin and the title of marchesa were a perfect introduction. As indeed, reflected Nicholas, they had been.

  But there were serious flaws in that line of reasoning. Only someone very close to the two girls could have known the family history or have access to the money and jewellery. Also, how would an ordinary girl from that district have been so well educated? She certainly would not have been fluent in English or so well versed in the classics. And finally, why insist on calling herself Liana? Why not stick to the correct name of the marchesa Eleanora?

  Dismissing that theory, Nicholas reflected on the second possibility which was that his wife Liana was the Liana of the story. It would account for the fact that she still preferred the name Liana. But the story was wrong in as much as she had not been killed as stated. Instead she had lived and had assumed the identity of her dead friend. With that identity she had married an Englishman and had escaped from Italy to England.

  Suddenly Nicholas felt the raging anger of betrayal. Whichever way he looked at it there was no escaping one fact. Liana had married him because of what he was, an Englishman, and not because she loved him. Perhaps she had laid her plans to marry him in much the same ruthless way he had seen her laying her business plans. It was a sobering thought, realizing he had been cold-bloodedly used by a woman to further her ambition. It was an even more sobering thought to know that he had loved her then, and still did now, even if she had manipulated him. And surely she must have loved him? In the earlier days of their marriage, before everything had gone so disastrously wrong, Liana had always been so loving and tender. It must have meant something to her. It could not all have been make-believe.

  He remembered their courtship in Italy, the way she had always resisted his advances. She could have let him get her pregnant and then blackmailed him into marriage, but she hadn’t. She had waited. He remembered her saying once that he would leave Italy and forget her. Then she would marry an Italian, and in Italy to get a good husband a girl had to be a virgin.

  It struck him like a thunderbolt from heaven. Good God! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? There was the fatal flaw to this line of reasoning, too. The peasant girl Liana in the story had been a prostitute, selling her body regularly on the streets of Naples for much-needed money and food.

  Nicholas almost wept with relief. What a fool he was not to have realized it before. Whatever the answer was to this strange tale which appeared to weave together fiction and truth, his Liana was not, and could not have been, the Liana in the story. He had experienced the indisputable evidence that she could not have been a prostitute, for his bride had come to him still a virgin on their wedding night. Nicholas remembered how he had tried to curb his eagerness so as not to hurt her, but failed, and in his haste had been unable to prevent himself from tearing her. He remembered, too, how she had cried out in pain although she had selflessly welcomed his body; and later, the following morning, he had seen the proof with his own eyes, the bedsheets stained with her blood, the blood of a virgin.

  Oh, God, what a relief! What the hell did that stupid story matter? Why on earth had he even wasted a moment just thinking of it? Standing up, he flung open the window and leaned out. The sun has risen now. He drew in a deep, ecstatic breath. It was going to be another hot September day. A bumble bee droned laboriously past, almost blundering into his nose. Nicholas smiled, remembering Donald Ramsay’s saying once that evolution had been unkind to the bumble bee. ‘Threw all thoughts of aerodynamics out of the window
when that insect was designed,’ he had said.

  He felt almost light-headed with cheerfulness. Whatever the origin of the story on Liana’s desk, it was obviously libellous, which was probably why she had it. He felt a faint twinge of pity for the author who had been so foolish as to use her names, having no doubt that Liana would be merciless when she instructed Jason Penrose to act on her behalf. He would ask her about it as soon as she returned from France.

  He looked at his watch. ‘Damn!’

  It was much too early for breakfast to be served. Meg was training a new maid, and she was proving to be a slow learner, so these days breakfast had been appearing even later than usual. Ravenously hungry and bursting with happiness, Nicholas did not feel inclined to wait. He went down into the kitchen and made himself a pot of tea and some toast.

  Meg came in just as he was leaving the kitchen to carry it upstairs. ‘You should have called me, sir,’ she said. ‘I’ve been up for ages. Two of the cows calved last night, and I went down to see them. One of them is a real beauty. Bruno thinks you have a champion Friesian bull in the making.’

  ‘I’ll be down to see him later,’ said Nicholas, ‘after I’ve had a couple of hours’ sleep.’ Meg looked puzzled. ‘I had a disturbed night,’ he said grinning widely.

  Meg wondered why, but did not ask. She looked at Nicholas closely; he did look tired but relaxed and for once, very happy. She breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps because her own marriage to Bruno was so blissfully happy and uneventful, she always felt acutely distressed when the relationship between Liana and Nicholas fell apart as it seemed to have done so often of late. The last few years had been difficult and her tender heart had bled for them, particularly as there was nothing she could do. But things were looking more hopeful now, with Eleanora coming back at last, even if it was only for a short visit. Perhaps their lives would change for the better. Meg hoped so.