‘Makes me wonder, if Rosalie is even still there, how badly she may have been affected.’ Jack shook his head. ‘I mentioned before Malta’s strategic importance as a British Crown Colony.’
‘Yes, and how it suffered during the bombardment by air.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘What I’m trying to say is there’s a chance Rosalie may not even be alive.’
There was a moment’s silence as Florence considered this. ‘You might be right,’ she eventually said.
‘I really hope I’m not … By the way, changing the subject, Edward told me something about the house in Lipari. You were right about the atmosphere. Apparently three generations of the family were slaughtered there. AMafia vendetta, he thinks. Few of the locals will go anywhere near the place. They believe it’s cursed.’
Florence could believe that. Given how she’d felt there, it made sense.
They sat quietly for a few moments and then the air in the room seemed to grow lighter.
‘There’s something else I’ve been waiting to say,’ he continued and took hold of her hand but then didn’t speak.
She smiled at the way he looked so uncertain and yet so earnest. ‘You can say anything you want to me, Jack. Anything.’
He avoided her eyes by glancing down. ‘The thing is …’
She tilted her head, waiting.
‘I’m not much good at this sort of thing, Florence, but I want to love without fear … and your absence from my life … Well, I couldn’t even contemplate it before, and when you were seeing Bruce, I … well … I wasn’t comfortable.’
She couldn’t help smiling at the way he described his feelings.
He looked up and searched her eyes. ‘All right, the truth is I was dying inside … I need you to understand, I mean really understand, that I am not trifling with you, Florence. That I will never trifle with you, and I don’t want to take advantage in any way—’
He gently stroked the hair from her brow. Then, as she began to speak, he put a finger to her lips before he kissed them.
CHAPTER 40
The next day their host Edward knocked and then called out as he opened the door and entered the sitting room.
‘Out here,’ Florence replied.
He walked out to the little patio she shared with Jack. ‘I found these,’ he said and handed her some newspapers. ‘They’re mostly old Maltese papers. Thought you might find them interesting.’
Florence pored over the papers in case there might be any references to Rosalie but, although she looked carefully, she spotted nothing. She was surprised when she read in a newspaper from 1944 that women in Malta still hadn’t been given the vote, and something called The Women of Malta Association had been formed to campaign for female suffrage. From what Florence had heard Rosalie was the type to stand up for what she believed in, so could she have been part of that?She scanned the names of eighty women who had been involved but found no sign of her.
She read that although the Constitutional and Nationalist parties were undecided about the role of women, the Church was strongly opposed to female delegates being allowed to be included in the National Assembly.Andstrongly opposed to women having any political presence that would affect their traditional role as mothers and homemakers.
‘And they still haven’t,’ she said, throwing down a second more recent newspaper in disgust as Jack came into the room. ‘Even now. Two years later.’
‘What’s two years later?’
She picked up the newspaper again and held it out to him. ‘Read it. Women still don’t have to right to vote in Malta. Can you believe it? They finally have it in France now, but not Malta.’
‘Perhaps before we go haring off on what might well be a wild goose chase, we should think about what your mother told you about her.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Claudette said she was independent and wilful, didn’t she? Maybe Malta is so old-fashioned it really wouldn’t be the type of place she’d want to live. At least not for long.’
‘Let’s go to Noto and have a think about it.’
A little later, as the bus crawled along winding roads passing olive groves, small vineyards and orchards full of ripe pears and apricots, Florence hung her head out of the window and smelt eucalyptus and something else. Wild fennel, she thought.
This bumpy old bus with its metal seats was so different from an English bus to Exeter, with the cheery female conductors, or clippies as they were called, nattering away. This was full of Sicilian voices, and she couldn’t make out a single word. Eventually they arrived in Noto, where the maze of old stone buildings led off from its two main arteries, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and the Via Camillo Benso Conte di Cavour.
