‘Back then he knew the lifespan of a fighter pilot could be brief,’ Addison added. ‘As all of our lives on this earth are.’
It seemed as if Addison had somehow known he also hadn’t got long left. Because the time came just a fewshort weeks later when she went upstairs and found him looking as if he was pretending to have fallen asleep in his favourite armchair. But there was no breath, no pulse, no life. She sat beside him, holding his hand in the silent room, and waiting while his butler called the doctor.
‘Oh Addison,’ she whispered, stroking his lifeless hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘A heart attack,’ the doctor said when he came an hour later.
A broken heart, she thought.
Confronted so soon by this second unexpected loss, she could not bear it. She withdrew, physically and emotionally, and found a kind of solace in absolute silence where she faced the darkest hours of the darkest night. Alone.
And even as the war ground on, it seemed as if she were the only one left alive on the island. She would see no one, not even Otto. And when the war ended, if it ever ended, she would stay on in Mdina, forever wearing only black.
She’d had few black clothes of her own but found Addison’s wife’s clothes – black shawls, long skirts, and silky blouses. All out of date but she didn’t care and wore them, even though they were too big and made her look like a witch. One day she unlocked his wife’s jewellery box too and wore her earrings, long dangly earrings made of gold with precious gemstones set into them. Rubies, emeralds, sapphires.
Meanwhile Otto kept on calling and knocking at her door.
Some weeks later she relented and let him in, and they drank wine together.
‘Well,’ he said with a grin. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I have news about Stanley Lucas.’
‘Oh?’
‘He’s been arrested, charged, found guilty and sentenced to prison for the maximum five years.’
‘For the girls?’
‘No. That would have carried a far heavier sentence. Unfortunately, he appears to have got away with that. But he couldn’t wriggle out of this one. He’s been skimming off army supplies – black market profiteering.’
‘Just as we suspected.’ She knew Lucas would probably never face justice for Anya and the other girls, but this was something at least.
‘Was he still involved with the trafficking of girls?’
‘No. It seems he shifted his focus. For people like Lucas, war delivers fresh opportunities.’ He paused then asked her if she had thought about what she might do next.
She didn’t know. Didn’t have a clue.
‘You could come back to the paper,’ he suggested.
She shook her head.
‘Will you stay here?’
‘In Malta?’
‘I meant Mdina.’
‘Where else?’
This hidden palace,herpalace, had tightened its grip around her, but the meeting with Otto had unleashed something and it made her realise she had to get out before she became even more isolated and forlorn. She began by taking short walks around Mdina itself, gradually recognising one or two of the people who lived there orwere servants to the people who lived there. On her third outing, a grand old lady also dressed in black stopped to talk to her outside the cathedral.
‘Forgive the intrusion,’ she said with a little bow. ‘Please accept these and allow me to offer my sincere condolences.’
‘Thank you,’ Riva muttered as she took the delicate white roses, and the woman passed by. Had the woman been coming to see her, she wondered, or was it just chance that she had been carrying a bunch of flowers?
A whiskery man stopped her the next day in the public square in the heart of the city. ‘If there is anything I can do,’ he said. ‘I knew Addison well.’
Of course, most of these people must have known Addison. He’d lived in Mdina for so long and his wife Filomena had been born there.
