My heart plummets. He is not here.
Then I see the pile of blankets in the corner of the cave.
He is lying on a broken pallet, with old sheets pulled up to his chin. His eyes are closed.
My mouth is dry. What if . . .?
I step fully into the chamber and stand upright, watching him.
He doesn’t move.
Oh, God, I think. I can’t, I can’t . . .
His chest rises and falls; beneath closed lids, his eyes move back and forth, as if, even in his sleep, he’s searching.
Relief tingles through me. I crouch next to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He’s warm. He’s solid. He’s alive.
His eyelids flicker and then he looks up at me. Those dark eyes, which somehow always know me, have somehow known me from the first moment I saw him.
Cesare.
At first, he doesn’t move. His eyes travel over my face, which is more bruised than when he last saw me, and the scratches on my neck, which are new. He will only be able to see me dimly in this light. What if he is angry that I left him? What if he doesn’t understand, or if he, too, has been knocked on the head and has forgotten me?
‘I am dreaming?’ he whispers.
I shake my head, my throat too tight for words.
‘Dorotea.’ he says.
‘Yes.’
I put my hand on his cheek and he brushes his fingers over my lips.
‘Dorotea!’ he exclaims, and he wraps his arms around me, squeezing me tight, whispering something again and again into my hair.
‘Grazie, grazie.’ The word echoes around the cave, like the sigh of the wind, like the reverberation of a desperate prayer suddenly answered.
He kisses me, his mouth hot on mine. His skin tastes of salt and smoke from the fire.
He holds my face in his hands and laughs. ‘I think you are never coming,’ he says. ‘I think I have lost you.’
His face blurs, until I blink, wipe my eyes. ‘Never.’
‘They are looking for me? The guards.’
I shake my head. On the night of the storm, as I jumped into the sea, I saw the boat being carried through the barriers.
The sea takes everything north now.
‘The cave,’ I’d shouted, as I jumped. The wind and water swept away my words, but I thought he might have heard. I hoped he had. I hoped, somehow, he would find his way there.
I don’t know if I truly believed it was possible, then, but we have made it true, somehow.
Sometimes love allows impossible things.
I curl into his body. He wraps his arms around me. And I do not feel whole, but I feel less shattered.
There will be time to tell him of Con and how the sight of her bloodless body on a stone slab had hollowed me out and left my mind feeling like an empty cave, where thoughts and sounds and memories endlessly echo in the darkness. There will be time to tell him about Angus MacLeod.
For now, there is his breath, his voice, his smile. His body, keeping me warm in the dark.
We stay in the cave all that winter, making plans. At first, these are no more than what we will eat that day, whether we will walk or try to swim in the cold water.
We catch fish and rabbits; we gather kelp and bladderwrack. We talk, or we make love, or we sit in silence, remembering.
Gradually, as our bruises fade and our wounds become less raw, we begin to plan for a future, after the war, when we will find his family in Italy. For the moment, while the Italians are still the enemy, a runaway prisoner of war would be given a death sentence and it is safer to stay hidden. If we had escaped to Scotland on that night in September, I’m sure he would have been captured and punished. But the war cannot last for ever: one day, we will be able to travel south together.
Sometimes, when Cesare is restless at night, he walks over the island to the old camp, to the chapel. Sometimes I go with him. The camp is deserted now, falling into disrepair. In a strong wind, the sound of moving metal sings out across the sea.
Behind the barbed wire, the camp looks lifeless, desolate, hopeless. But we know that it never was. A bare concrete yard can be the start of a life; an old metal hut can be a house of God, or a prison, or a place to remember.
Cesare and I walk along the beach, hand in hand, listening to the waves, listening to our shared breath. Beneath the sea, somewhere, are the struts and ribs of sunken ships – the shattered Royal Elm and a hundred others, resting in the quiet darkness. Under our feet crunch empty molluscs and the sloughed shells of crabs – hollow bone clothes. But it is possible to shed your skin and still live.
Cesare puts his arms around me. He pulls me in close and holds me to him until my tears stop. He doesn’t ask me to explain. He kisses my forehead, my cheeks, my lips. He tells some joke to make me laugh. He presses a piece of driftwood into my hand. And then we walk on.
Sometimes, when Cesare and I lie down to go to sleep, we close our eyes, and we can hear the far-off growl of the planes, or we think we hear footsteps or the whispers of people coming closer. We think we hear our past coming to find us.
But then we realize it is the hush of the waves or the thud of our hearts, or our blood in our ears. It is the sound of time, which keeps going, and which is so precious, every moment.
We lie, side by side, holding hands, listening to the water, hearing life. One day soon, we will leave.
