Liberation by Joanna Scott

Author:Joanna Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780316028134
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE RAIN WAS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN, Luisa said—a sacred cleansing to wash away spilled blood. Ulisse’s boys squealed happily in the courtyard, catching raindrops on their tongues while Pippa danced around them. Luisa ran through the villa closing shutters. Giulia Nardi followed Lorenzo to the loggia. She stood with him, looking out across her land. The neat rows of olive trees, unyielding in the wind, made her think of stone columns inside a basilica. Those sturdy trees had survived a century’s worth of storms. And now she could add that they had survived a war.

Lorenzo speculated that the weather would slow the German evacuation. Giulia was certain that the storm wouldn’t last long. And though the sea was frothing wildly in the distance, the military ships would still be able to make the passage to the mainland. Signora Ambrogi, who’d been standing inside the doorway, wondered aloud where the Germans would go.

“They will come to regret ever leaving Germany to begin with,” Giulia said, her prediction saturated with relief.

The palms in the courtyard made their noisy protest—a comforting sound that seemed to express the personality of the wind. She could almost hear words embedded in the sound, the shhh of sirocco or sciroppo. The loud, syrupy, shushing wind that disturbed but never stole what belonged to her. A wind that bounced off the surface of the sea and dipped into the fields before curling up and over the mountains.

She looked toward the ancient ruins crowning Volterraio and wondered if fugitive Germans were hiding there. She wondered what would happen to them if they were caught.

The previous night had been oddly quiet, though she’d spent most of it awake, repeatedly propelling herself from the snare of sleep until her body had given up fatigue entirely and she’d sat on the sofa, the knife Luisa used to quarter chickens hidden beneath the cushions by Luisa herself, who believed, unlike Giulia Nardi, that sooner or later the soldiers would return to La Chiatta.

But Giulia had been persuaded by the French officers that the soldiers had a mandate to protect the citizens of Elba, especially the aristocrazia. Whether or not the soldiers had finished shooting open doors locked against them, they had been made to understand by their superiors that the villas were not to be disturbed. The wealth that Giulia Nardi secretly considered a burdensome responsibility during times of peace—an inheritance that had made her too fiercely suspicious to accept suitors when she was a young woman—proved to be a far more effective defense than a kitchen knife during a time of war. At least during this war. From the start, households like La Chiatta had been spared the deprivations that so many others suffered, and because of the bounty of their gardens and the black-market trade with the military, no one on the island had gone hungry. The provisions of rich Elbans were substantial enough to share with anyone who needed help. It was Giulia’s good luck that she was rich. And a baptized Catholic.

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