This morning, when I wake, the bed next to me is empty, and I know that she will have walked down towards the camp. I begin pulling on my trousers, ready to follow her, but then I hear a scuffling outside and I realize that it wasn’t the light that had woken me.
The sunlight under the door is cut off and there is the scrape of a boot on our step.
A sharp knocking. Tap, tap, tap.
I freeze, one leg still in my trousers, breath held.
The shadow shifts. A boot creaks. Angus? Is it Angus, looking for me? Is the door locked? Where could I hide? What can I reach? There is a metal poker for the fire, but I don’t know if I will have time –
Tap, tap, tap.
I pull my trousers on, as quietly as possible, then stand very still, my gaze flicking between the metal poker and the shifting shadow under the door.
‘Dorotea!’ calls a voice.
Cesare.
I stand absolutely still, ignoring the clenching panic in my chest. He will leave soon. He must leave. And then I must find Dot and make sure she is safe.
The boot scrapes again on the doorstep. The slash of light reappears, and then is cut off again, and there is a rockslide beneath my ribs as I realize – Oh, God! – that Cesare is kneeling on our doorstep.
I see his fingers – his workman’s fingers, grubby-nailed – appear in the gap beneath the door, and I glance at the poker again. It would take a moment. He would never expect it. My panicked breaths are loud in my ears and, for a moment, I’m back within those nights when I’d be woken by the sound of our father’s terrified shouts. Dot and I would huddle in our room, listening to him weeping. He would never tell any of us what he dreamed, but I guessed he was back in France, crouched in a trench. Some terror stays with you, in your blood and bones.
Now there is another knock and a rustling as the man pushes something beneath the door. A piece of paper. I don’t move. I won’t touch it. It’s as if he’s entered the bothy himself and it takes all my strength to remain absolutely still and silent, when every jolt of my blood tells me I should scream or hide or run or –
That poker!
The creak and scrape of his boot as he stands.
A rasp as he presses his face against the door.
‘I am sorry,’ he whispers, ‘if I have frighten you.’
Is he talking to me? Or has he somehow terrified Dot? Is that why she has stayed here with me for three days? Is she scared of him? Has he hurt her? Some part of me knows that he cannot have, surely. She would have told me. I would have known.
Some terror lurks in blood and bone.
Unbidden, the feeling of hands around my throat. I force air in and out of my lungs and I watch the shadow under the door disappear, watch the sunlight return.
I count to sixty twice, and then I tiptoe forward and snatch up the piece of paper from the floor.
On it are two sketches. One is the outline of a woman’s face, and even though the eyes are blank, I recognize the angle of Dot’s jaw, the shape of her mouth. We are identical, but this is her without question. Somehow, he has caught the softness of her expression, the vulnerability she doesn’t know she radiates. The other sketch is of a pair of hands, the fingers interlaced. I have to study the paper carefully to see, in the confusion of linked fingers, that one hand belongs to a woman and the other to a man. Again, without needing to be told, I know that this is her hand held in Cesare’s. I am struck by how much bigger his hand is than hers, by how the veins and muscles and bones of his hand entirely envelop her tiny, pale fingers.
I hold my own hand out in front of me, curling it into a fist.
‘Oh, Dot,’ I say aloud. ‘What have you done?’
It fills me with terror, the thought that she has allowed this to happen – that she’s allowed this man to become infatuated with her, that she’s placed herself entirely at his mercy. And now he won’t leave her alone, just as Angus won’t leave me alone.
I should have told her everything. I should have warned her. This is my fault, my fault.
And then I tear the sketches into tiny pieces and I scatter them into the glowing embers in the grate. When I prod them with the metal poker, they flare, flicker and blacken.
Soon, the only remaining sign of the drawings is my own laboured breath and the images in my mind, which I cannot shake.
I finish dressing quickly, pulling on two sweaters and gloves: though it is warmer than it was, the bite of winter still lingers in the air.
Then I walk over the next hill, in the direction of the infirmary. I won’t tell Dot about the drawings or Cesare’s visit, but I must see her, must see that she is safe and well.
As I near the breast of the hill, I hear men’s voices and I stop.
There is banging and hammering, and a shout of laughter. And then, under those noises, the sound of . . . singing.
Men on our hillside, the prisoners apparently allowed to roam free. Men laughing and talking and planning . . . God knows what they could be planning. My first thought is to return to the bothy, to close the door and wait for Dot
