Page 130 of The Stranger in Room Six

Mabel

I have had a lot of time to think here in Italy.

It is wonderful – oh, so wonderful – to have my enormous extended family (as they call it nowadays) around me, but I wish Belinda was here. There is one thing I did not tell her and it’s rubbing on my conscience. Indeed, it scorches my skin.

Not long after we met at Sunnyside, Belinda said that it’s important for stories like ours to be told.

She was right, but it wasn’t the time to tell all of mine then and I’m not sure it is now. But if I don’t, it might become too late.

So I think back further, as if rummaging through an office index of cards, to the morning I’d found the photograph of Clarissa on Mosley’s march.

I went straight up to her bedroom and when she didn’t answer, walked in.

Her bed was still rumpled but no one was there.

Her bathroom was empty. Perhaps she was walking the dogs.

But no. They were sleeping quietly in their baskets.

I tiptoed past, shutting the back door gently behind me so as not to wake Cook, and went out into the grounds.

Where could she be? Eventually, I found her by the lavender bank.

She seemed distressed, walking around still in her nightdress and talking to herself. I caught names. My mother’s name. The Colonel’s. Even my own.

When she saw me, she started like a spooked horse. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I am looking for you,’ I replied.

‘No. I mean what are you doing here?’

‘I live here.’

‘You can’t. I gave you away. I made a terrible mistake. So did Jonty. He should have stayed by me. We could have kept you if we’d been braver. We would have been a family. Now it is too late.’

That’s when I saw it. The gun in her hands.

‘Don’t,’ I said, despite everything. ‘Please don’t.’

‘But I must. Don’t you see? They will find out sooner or later.’

She thrust the gun into my hands. ‘You do it.’

‘No!’ I looked with horror at the weapon in my hands. ‘I couldn’t possibly. I’m not a murderer.’

Then she gave me a look I will never forget. ‘Trust me, Mabel. None of us are who we think we are. Shoot me. They are coming for me. I feel it in my bones. I don’t want to be assassinated like my Jonty.’

‘Maybe you deserve to die,’ I said.

‘But not that way,’ she pleaded. ‘I gave you life. If you have any compassion, please end mine for me.’

‘What about your compassion?’ I demanded. ‘You took my baby away.’

‘That was different,’ she scoffed. ‘The father was a lowly Italian prisoner of war from a country about to switch sides. I wasn’t having a child like that in the family.’

And that’s when I pulled the trigger.

As soon as I fired the shot, I realized I was a murderer. I was no better than the bombers who had targeted innocent civilians. My aunt had been a traitor, but who was I to hand out a death sentence? I should have let the authorities take her.

I knew they would come for me unless I could disguise my crime.

Shaking, I wrote one word:

TRAITOR.

I weighed the paper down with a stone beside her and ran down to the sea, where I flung the gun as hard as I could into the waves.

‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I vowed to myself. Not until my dying day – and maybe not even then.

Then I ran back into the house and told Cook that my aunt was missing.

As the villagers said at the time, almost anyone could have done it. Everyone had a grievance against Lady Clarissa. But no one, as far as I know, ever suspected me of killing her.

This is my story, which I have told no one. No one, that is, except my great-granddaughter, and only her because I know I do not have much time left and she deserves to know the truth.

‘Do you think I’m wicked?’ I asked Isabella as she sat by my side, taking all this in.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Your act was a crime of passion. It was a difficult time and you were young. I would love to write about it. May I?’

My great-granddaughter wants to be a novelist. It’s not an easy profession, but one day, I know, she will make it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just wait until I’m dead.’

‘I hope that won’t be for many years,’ she said, putting her arms around me in the kind of warm, all-encompassing, truly loving embrace that I’d thought I’d never have.

Now I know that if I die tomorrow, I will die happy. Because at last I have a family.

Two Years Later

ITALIAN AUTHOR’S DEBUT NOVEL, BASED ON HER GREAT-GRANDMOTHER’S LIFE STORY, ATTRACTS SIX-FIGURE BIDS IN WORLDWIDE AUCTION