swum sickeningly. She was never at ease with heights, yet she’d chosen a life where heights would be encountered daily. She wondered if there was any insanity in her family, or whether she was the first.
Antonio was walking at Nesta’s head, encouraging her. Bernardo came up beside Angie, on the outside. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked quietly.
‘I’m fine,’ she said untruthfully. ‘I wish you wouldn’t walk there, so close to the edge.’
‘I thought you might feel safer if I was between you and the drop.’
‘That’s nice, but honestly it just makes me worry about you. Anyway, you’ve got it quite wrong. I’m not afraid of heights.’
‘I thought you were. That day in my home-’
‘No, no,’ she managed a laugh that came out sounding bright and confident, she couldn’t think why. ‘I was just taken by surprise that time.’
There was no need for him to answer because mercifully they had reached the top and were making their way to the tiny farm house. Angie saw that it was little more than a hovel, and she began to understand the kind of poverty she was dealing with.
Cecilia Servante came as a surprise. She was in her eighties but looked older, a little weatherbeaten gnome of a woman. But her eyes were bright and her voice lively. She couldn’t get out of bed but she could backchat her son and send him scurrying into the kitchen to make coffee for their honoured guest. Angie was enchanted by her.
She spoke nothing but Sicilian. Taking a chance, Angie waved aside Bernardo’s offer of help and tried to converse in her own tentative Sicilian. It turned out to be a smart move. Cecilia roared with laughter at her mistakes and spoke slowly to help her. In a few minutes Angie had learned some new phrases and established an excellent understanding with the old woman.
Her grip on life was still vigorous and to Angie’s delight she was eager for the vaccination, pushing up her sleeve impatiently, then pointing to her son, cackling with laughter when he was squeamish at the needle.
Looking around her, Angie was horrified. Everywhere needed repair, everything was of the most basic. Antonio brought coffee and bread, which she guessed was a strain on his budget, but the law of hospitality was unbreakable. Her worst moment came when he reached into his pocket and brought out some money. It was a tiny amount, little more than one pound, but it was clear he could ill afford it. Then her quick wits came to her rescue.
‘No money,’ she said, holding up her hand as if to ward it off, and speaking slowly in Sicilian. ‘Instead, you can do something for me. This room-Friday morning-I hold a clinic here. And you tell all your neighbours to be here. Yes?’
A smile broke over Antonio’s face and he nodded vigorously, shoving the money back into his pocket with relief. He did his best to reply to her, but had to fall back on Bernardo.
‘He says let him know what time, and he’ll be waiting at the foot of the path with Nesta,’ Bernardo translated.
They arranged the time, and Angie prepared to leave, with the sense that she had achieved something. But her smile died when she saw how fast the light had faded, leaving the path barely visible.
‘Stay here while I go down to the car and get the torch,’ Bernardo commanded.
‘No way,’ she said cheerfully. ‘If I keep hold of the wall I’ll be fine.’
‘Will you please do as you’re told?’ he yelled.
‘Nope. Let’s get going.’
She set off briskly but he darted in front of her and hurried ahead. By the time she was half way down he was back with the torch, which he directed onto the path ahead of her. By this time it was completely dark and she was glad of the help, although she would have died sooner than admit it.
‘Are you happy now?’ Bernardo demanded savagely.
‘Perfectly, thank you.’
‘You won’t do anything the sensible way, will you? Oh, no, that’s too easy.’
‘Well, it would have been easy if you’d remembered to take the torch from the car when we went up.’
‘I didn’t know you were going to be that long. How long does an injection take?’
‘Ten seconds. But assessing my patient’s general conditions takes a lot longer. You think a flu jab is all they need?’
‘You can’t give them all they need.’
‘No, but I can give them a lot that nobody’s ever bothered to give them before. Don’t lecture me, Bernardo. You know nothing about it.’
‘
‘You were as horrified by that place as I was.’
‘I could show you a hundred places like it. Are you going to single-handedly cure every ill in this place?’
‘I’m going to try,’ she said firmly. ‘With or without your help. You talk about “your people” but what your people need is money. Filthy lucre. Spondulicks. Ill-gotten gains. All of which I have. If you really cared about them you’d have married me for my money and spent it all on them. Now, can we get back, please? I have evening surgery to do.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
FROM this beginning other good things flowed. On the Friday morning Antonio was waiting for her, as promised, with Nesta, and as she approached the farm house she saw the crowd gathered outside. He had spread the word enthusiastically.
Holding a local clinic had been an inspired idea. Many of her patients lived lives so isolated that coming into town was hard for them, even Montedoro in the low season. She hired Nesta and, as January passed into February, she began to go among them, sometimes travelling considerable distances, and improving her Sicilian all the time.
Bernardo tore his hair at these trips, but she refused his attempts to accompany her. She now had her own heavy-duty car, and pride made her do as much as possible without his help. Besides which, she wasn’t short of assistance. Mayor Donati, determined to be seen ‘taking a lead’, was permanently at her disposal, plus there was a standing offer of help from Father Marco who had been her fan since discovering that she’d once tended a famous boxer for a minor injury.
Having investigated Dr Fortuno’s not very well-kept lists, she went onto the offensive, travelling the district, meeting her patients, taking blood samples which she then sent off to the laboratory in Palermo. In this way she achieved one of her most dramatic early triumphs, demonstrating that Salvatore Vitello’s violent thirst, which had made him the most notorious drunk in the area, was actually caused by diabetes.
His wife was in tears of relief but Vitello himself was sulkily ungrateful. His one claim to fame had been stripped from him. Instead of the admiration of young men as he quaffed the night away, his life was now governed by a diet sheet and pills, with the threat of daily injections if he didn’t behave himself. When he met the
When Angie rose in the mornings there was an increasing sense of satisfaction that she was really achieving something. There was pleasure too in the way Ginetta was asking her questions-about how hard was it for a woman to become a doctor? And if she returned to school and studied, perhaps-? Angie trod a fine line between gently encouraging her and giving her unrealistic dreams. But Ginetta’s grandmother, the woman she’d first met in the convent infirmary, was beginning to give her strange looks that had nothing to do with her trousers.
One morning something happened that really had nothing to do with anything. You had to see it in the right light to understand it. Pushing open her window and looking out onto the valley she saw a huge bird wheeling and circling, close enough for her to see that it was a golden eagle.
Angie held her breath as the beautiful creature swooped with the early morning sun on its huge wings, knowing she’d been given the sign of hope she longed for.
‘I am an eagle,’ she murmured to the unseen presence that was always in her heart. ‘You’ll see.’
It didn’t all go smoothly. Nico Sartone, the local chemist, was Angie’s enemy from the first day. In youth he’d
