I leaned forward, stilling my breath, straining for the sound of his voice, for the sound of my name on his lips. He was silent, but I watched his shoulders rise and fall with the rhythm of his words.
I try to leave gifts outside the chapel for him, when I can. Pieces of metal I have found, or paints that I have managed to make using old onion skins, lichen and tree bark. I have boiled up bilberries and elderberries, which have stained my hands blue for days – I remember my mother making paints for us when we were children. She came from Fair Isle to the north, and knew how to make all sorts from plants: paints, medicines and even poisons.
Sometimes the chapel door is shut and I have to peer through one of the window holes that has been cut in the metal hut. Other nights, it is raining, or a biting wind blows in from the north and I stand in the darkness, shivering, watching him until I can no longer stand the cold. Then I walk back up to the bothy and huddle close to the burned-out fire, drawing a little heat from the dying ashes and trying not to wake Con with the chattering of my teeth.
Time after time, I’ve asked if she will go back to the camp, to work with me in the infirmary, but she has become more and more solitary. I don’t understand why her fear has grown over time. It is as though everything that has happened to her is an old wound, which, although it seemed healed, has hidden an infection under the scarred surface.
‘You will feel better if you come out with me, Con,’ I say.
‘I’m tired.’ She looks it, pale and drawn. ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ And she scratches the skin at her throat until it reddens, until it’s nearly raw.
She sleeps long hours and still she looks haunted, jumping at every shift of the wind. She must know that I’m going out to the chapel, although she never asks. I can’t meet her eyes when I leave, and when I return. I’m terrified she’ll ask me to stay. I’m terrified that I’ll not be able to stop myself leaving, even if she begs me.
By mid-May, it is nearly Beltane. There are no bonfires this year, no celebrations – the war has brought so much darkness and silence – but the weather softens. The winds drop, the land brightens, and thin fingers of sunlight stretch through the clouds, making each day longer than the last.
For a long time, Cesare has been painting the walls at the front of the chapel brown, to look like tiles, but one evening in May, he begins to work on the whitewashed walls next to the altar. I peer around the doorway, watching. His back is to me, as ever, but I can see the stern focus in the set of his shoulders. I have watched him long enough now to know every movement of his hands and arms, yet still, as the delicate blue-black arch of a crow’s head and neck emerge from under his hands, my breath catches.
I am used to beauty: the shattered sunlight on the sea; the brash purple and yellow of the autumn heather and gorse; two goshawks circling each other in an open blue sky. But I’ve never watched something so beautiful being created and with such ease. He dips his brush into white paint to add light and depth to the crow’s black eyes, and it seems that the bird is staring straight at me.
And what I feel, along with my sense of wonder, is desire. It is an inescapable tide rising through my limbs, throbbing through my veins; in that moment, the cost doesn’t matter.
I shift my weight, knowing my boot will creak. Knowing he will hear me. He stops painting. He sets down his brush.
‘Dorotea?’ he says, without turning. Inside the chapel, his voice resonates, thea, tia, tear. Not my name, not part of my name, but an echo of sadness and breaking, and yet I find myself walking forward, into the lamplight.
‘Cesare.’ His name sounds strange said aloud. I’ve said it to myself so many times in the dark, but it seems foreign to me now.
I step further into the chapel, my nerves humming, and, to avoid his gaze, I look upwards.
The building is a marvel: each tile has been carefully painted to give the illusion of height and depth. Even though the ceiling is not the arched roof of a church, it gives the impression of loftiness, of reverence. And on the whitewashed wall near the altar, I can see pencil sketches of birds and animals and angels.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I gasp. ‘How do you paint the flat wall to look like tiles? They seem so real.’
‘It is not finished,’ he says. ‘But I show you.’ He picks up a brush, dabs it in the brown paint, then strokes it in the centre of one of the rectangles he has drawn to be a painted ‘tile’. ‘In the middle must be dark. And light at the edge, with white. You try.’
He passes me the brush and nods towards the wall. I touch the bristles to the rectangle Cesare was just painting. I’m aware of his eyes on my face, aware of the heat in my cheeks. I dare not look at him directly. My hand is unsteady and I blot the paint, making an ugly smear on the tile. ‘Oh! I’ve ruined it.’
‘No.’ He smiles, takes the brush from me and, with a deft flick of paint, my mistake is gone. ‘See?’
Then he passes the brush back to me and watches as I paint more of the tiles, badly.
‘I have not seen you,’ he says softly. ‘You are hiding from me?’
I swallow. I inhale. I paint a shaky line of pale brown around the outside of a tile.
