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Agnese patted me on the shoulder. ‘I know you do. And you’re a brave girl – you can’t imagine how valuable you are to our movement. We need you safe and well for the future. Now give me the gun and go find don Anselmo.’ She held out her hand.
Now I felt very small. Obediently I handed Agnese the gun – like it or not, she gave the orders – and went to look for don Anselmo as instructed. I found him in the sacristy, talking earnestly with a young woman in a white kerchief as they counted out rifle cartridges for distribution.
‘Excuse me,’ I said – raising my voice a little to be heard above the organist, who had moved on to ‘Ave Maris Stella’. Clearly he was working his way through the hymnal.
Don Anselmo looked up and saw me. ‘My dear child,’ he said, ‘I’m so glad you’re here. Come, come. I have some very important work for you to do here in our command centre.’ Before I could react, he had taken my arm and was hustling me towards the door to the tunnel, which stood open. ‘Quickly, now. Don Mauro is really more of a pianist than an organist, and I fear he’s reaching the end of his capabilities. Besides, our friends outside won’t be fooled for much longer.’
‘What do you need me to do?’ I asked as we hurried down the stairs.
‘You can assist our medic. Assuming you don’t faint at the sight of blood?’
‘I don’t.’ Papà and Achille were forever hurting themselves, one way or another – I’d got quite used to dressing scrapes and burns and washing gravel out of wounds.
‘Excellent. He’ll appreciate your help. And here he is,’ don Anselmo said as we reached the tunnel, now empty of weaponry and full of blankets and lamps and buckets of water. ‘Perhaps you two already know each other?’
At the mouth of the tunnel, a slender, bearded man in a red kerchief was rooting through a battered army pack. ‘We’re fine for gauze – well, as fine as we’re going to be,’ he said. ‘But we could do with more material for tourniquets. Rip up the altar cloth if you have to. And we need windlasses too, pens or soup spoons or butter knives, anything the right shape that won’t break. Oh, hello, Stella.’
‘Hello,’ I said. I had no idea who he was.
‘Stella’s come to give you a hand,’ don Anselmo said. ‘I’ll see what I can do about tourniquets, but I shall pretend you did not make that suggestion about the altar cloth. Assunta may be able to dig out some old sheets.’
‘Ask her if she can spare more towels, too,’ the man said, and don Anselmo nodded and hurried off through the tunnel towards the parochial house, muttering to himself.
The man sat back on his heels and looked at me, clearly amused. ‘You really don’t recognise me, do you?’
But I did, then. Something in his expression, in the tone of his voice, made me see past the long beard and scruffy hair to the neat and tidy medical student I’d often seen helping his father out at the pharmacy. ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘You’re Davide Gallurì.’
‘That’s right. You worked with my sister Berta – I know she relied on you a lot. Now take these,’ he said, holding out a pair of scissors and a folded sheet. ‘I want long strips, ten centimetres or so wide. If in doubt, cut wider than you reckon. Hopefully we’ll have some more material soon.’
I sat down on a pile of blankets and spread the sheet out over my knees. It was tricky to work like this, but I was glad of the task and I was glad, too, that Davide was the one who had mentioned Berta. It had cleared the air somehow. I cut the sheet in half crosswise and then started to cut the first half into long, wide sections.
‘Let me see,’ Davide said after I’d finished three or four. ‘Yes, good. We’re going to be dealing with gunshots here, maybe the odd knife wound, so we need to have a stock of these. Two for each wound – one above, one below.’
‘And that stops the bleeding?’
‘Yes. Well, assuming it’s an arm or a leg that’s wounded. For anything else we’ll need to use pressure. If I ask you to put pressure on a wound, by the way, I want you to lean on it as hard as you possibly can. Don’t worry about causing pain. It’s much more important to prevent haemorrhaging.’
‘And then we can save the person,’ I said. It was a statement of hope, and it was a naïve one.
‘It’s not impossible,’ Davide said kindly. ‘But what we’re really aiming to do is buy some time. Hang on until the Fascists are gone and old Dr Bianchi won’t be too shit-scared to offer help to a partisan.’
‘Towels!’ don Anselmo cried, emerging from the tunnel with his arms full. ‘Here I am. Towels, and a couple of old sheets, and a whole canteen of cutlery. Will that do?’
‘Admirably,’ Davide said. ‘Give the sheets to Stella. She’s on tourniquet detail. Will you be, uh… will you be nearby if anyone asks for you, Father?’
‘Oh yes, never fear. Don Mauro has undertaken to be present in the field, so to speak, and I shall stay down here with you.’ Don Anselmo’s voice wavered. ‘I think you should know,’ he said, ‘that the organ music has stopped.’
20
Tori
‘You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?’
I snap out of my daydream. I’m sitting with Marco on a stone bench in the courtyard of a palazzo in Siena. It’s not as stifling as Florence or Romituzzo and there’s a pleasant breeze that plays off my skin. But even in the shade it’s still hot, that heavy mid-afternoon heat that drives sensible people indoors. No wonder we have the place to ourselves.
‘You’re thinking about the book,’ Marco says. ‘I can tell. You’ve got that dreamy look on your face.’
‘Oh,’ I say because, for once, I wasn’t thinking about the book at all. I was thinking about him. About how it felt when he kissed me; about what might have happened if I hadn’t pulled away. ‘You caught me.’
