Beyond the Olive Grove: An absolutely gripping and heartbreaking WW2 historical novel Read online

  Beyond the Olive Grove

  An absolutely gripping and heartbreaking WW2 historical novel

  Kate Hewitt

  Books by Kate Hewitt

  Standalone Novels

  Beyond the Olive Grove

  The Edelweiss Sisters

  The Girl from Berlin

  When You Were Mine

  Into the Darkest Day

  A Hope for Emily

  No Time to Say Goodbye

  Not My Daughter

  The Secrets We Keep

  A Mother’s Goodbye

  This Fragile Life

  When He Fell

  Rainy Day Sisters

  Now and Then Friends

  A Mother like Mine

  Amherst Island Trilogy

  The Orphan’s Island

  Dreams of the Island

  Return to the Island

  Far Horizons Trilogy

  The Heart Goes On

  Her Rebel Heart

  This Fragile Heart

  Writing as Katharine Swartz

  The Vicar's Wife

  The Lost Garden

  The Second Bride

  AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

  The Edelweiss Sisters (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Girl from Berlin (Available in the UK and the US)

  When You Were Mine (Available in the UK and the US)

  Into the Darkest Day (Available in the UK and the US)

  A Hope for Emily (Available in the UK and the US)

  No Time to Say Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)

  Not My Daughter (Available in the UK and the US)

  The Secrets We Keep (Available in the UK and the US)

  A Mother’s Goodbye (Available in the UK and the US)

  Amherst Island Trilogy

  The Orphan’s Island (Available in the UK and the US)

  Dreams of the Island (Available in the UK and the US)

  Return to the Island (Available in the UK and the US)

  Far Horizons Trilogy

  The Heart Goes On (Available in the UK and the US)

  Her Rebel Heart (Available in the UK and the US)

  This Fragile Heart (Available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Into the Darkest Day

  Hear More from Kate

  Books by Kate Hewitt

  A Letter from Kate

  The Edelweiss Sisters

  The Girl from Berlin

  When You Were Mine

  A Hope for Emily

  No Time to Say Goodbye

  Not My Daughter

  The Secrets We Keep

  A Mother’s Goodbye

  The Orphan’s Island

  Dreams of the Island

  Return to the Island

  The Heart Goes On

  Her Rebel Heart

  This Fragile Heart

  Acknowledgments

  *

  Dedicated to my brother Geordie, who first gave me a love of Greece on our travels many years ago. Love you!

  1

  Now

  Ava Lancet peered through the unrelenting night as she fought down a growing sense of panic. Darkness had fallen twenty minutes ago and she had no idea where she was—or where she was meant to go.

  She glanced at the map crumpled on the passenger seat of her rental car, wishing that the agent had provided a GPS instead of the seemingly obsolete, old-fashioned fold-out map that he’d assured her would help her drive from Athens to the tiny village of Iousidous. And perhaps it would have if she could have made any sense of the wiggly lines and incomprehensible Greek names. Not that reading Greek even mattered now because darkness had fallen and she could barely make out the road signs on Greece’s National Highway.

  She’d been in this country for just a few hours and already she was completely lost, both literally and figuratively. Spiritually, emotionally, hopelessly lost. A fortnight ago, escaping a cold, wet spring in England had seemed like a wonderful idea, a desperate lifeline, since her own life—and marriage—had been put on hold. That’s how Ava liked to think of it anyway, because to consider anything else was too final. Too much of a failure.

  She drew a deep breath, her fingers clenched around the steering wheel, her knuckles whitening, and she craned her head forward in an attempt to read one of the road signs that loomed out of the darkness. At first the Greek letters looked like so much nonsense, squiggly hieroglyphics, despite her crash course in Greek—ten hours’ worth of online lessons, and countless more hours poring over textbooks. Yet as she continued to squint hopefully through the darkness, she saw the Roman alphabet printed underneath and felt a wave of relief. Iousidous. It would be her home for the foreseeable future.

  Muttering a prayer of heartfelt thanks, Ava flipped on her signal and turned off the highway. The narrow road that now led through the scrubby hills of central Greece was even darker and more alarmingly strange than the far wider highway she’d just left. According to the map, Iousidous was only three kilometers from the National Highway, but already it felt longer.

  The road wound its way through the hills, the steeply rising mountains nothing but jagged black shapes in the darkness. The only turnings were dirt or pebbly tracks that looked as if they led straight into the densely forested heights, and so Ava kept on the little road, hoping that it would lead, if not to Iousidous, then at least to somewhere.

  Three kilometers, she decided, was an unbearably long distance when you were driving through the dark. It was certainly long enough to question whether you were on the right road at all, or even in the right country. It gave her ample time to wonder why she’d decided to leave her life in England and come to Greece—move to Greece—where she didn’t know a single soul and all she had was a set of keys to a farmhouse no one had lived in for over sixty years.

  “Right,” Ava said aloud, the sound of her own voice seeming lonely and yet oddly reassuring in the confines of the car. “If I don’t see something in the next thirty seconds, I’m turning round and going back to Athens.” The thought of driving several hours back to the city was a most unappealing prospect, but at this moment, so was continuing on. She glanced at the clock, knowing a full minute had passed, and yet still reluctant to turn around. Besides, there was no easy place to turn the car round on this narrow, twisting road.

  Then she came round a rather sharp bend and suddenly, stretched out before her on several terraced hills, she saw a village, or at least the lights of a village. A small white sign with black letters standing crookedly by the side of the road told her she was indeed approaching Iousidous. She could make out that much Greek, at least.

  Ava breathed a sigh of relief that came halfway to a shudder. She was here. S
he’d made it. Sort of. Now she just had to find her grandmother’s house.

  The high street of Iousidous, if it could even be called a high street, was lined with low stone houses with tiled roofs, their painted shutters closed tightly for the night. The place looked nearly abandoned, Ava observed as she parked the car along the side of the street. The village seemed much smaller than she’d anticipated, just a few narrow streets of houses huddled on a hillside. She couldn’t even see any shops, never mind the reassuring, boxy solidity of a large supermarket or store. And she was supposed to live here indefinitely? What on earth had she been thinking?

  She hadn’t been thinking, not really. She’d been reacting to the dissolution of both her hopes and her marriage. Too much loss. Escaping had felt like the only option, the only way to stay remotely sane.

  And it wasn’t as if there had been anything to stay in England for any more.

  Forcing such thoughts away, and the accompanying savage twist of pain inside, Ava got out of the car. The air was colder and clearer than in Athens, and it smelled sharp with pine resin. She stretched, glancing around, imagining that her arrival in such a sleepy place would cause something of a stir. But the only movement came from a rail-thin cat perched on a stone wall; the animal glared at her before stalking away, tail bristling high in the air.

  Ava blinked, trying to get used to the darkness, which was only relieved by the light of the moon and the occasional lamp winking from inside one of the houses on the street, its glow filtering between the cracks in the shutters. It was eight o’clock at night, yet the place seemed utterly still, strangely devoid of life, the only sound was the wind rustling high in the pines standing sentry above the sleepy little village. Standing there, realizing she didn’t even know which house had belonged to her grandmother, Ava wondered just how crazy and desperate she’d been to come all this way with no hope and little plan.

  The solicitor in Leeds who had handled her grandmother’s estate had possessed only one photograph of the house, taken decades ago. Ava hadn’t even known that her grandmother had had a house in Greece until the will had been read; Sophia had lived in Leeds since right after the Second World War. Yet gazing at that grainy photo, Ava had been intrigued, almost transfixed, even though she recognized that the solicitor’s words, “charming and rustic,” really meant antiquated and falling down. Still, she’d admired the house’s tiled roof and painted door, the small overgrown garden, the darkness of the mountains in the background, looking like a large smudge of ink.

  “Has anyone been living there?” she’d asked, and the solicitor had shrugged.

  “Not for many years. The house came into your grandmother’s possession after the war. She had an estate agent from a nearby town handle sublets for about ten years. Apparently the area experienced a great deal of emigration, and there was no interest in letting the house after that period, although your grandmother continued to have the minimum amount of maintenance done to keep the place in repair, and pay the property taxes, of course.”

  Ava shook her head slowly, trying to take it all in. A house… a house in a village in Greece, sitting there empty and even cared for—sort of—all that time, and no one had ever even known. “And she never went back?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Clearly he had not been her grandmother’s confidant. Ava wondered whether anyone had. Her memories of her grandmother were of a stern woman, softened occasionally by smiles, briskly determined not to dwell in the past. Why would I want to talk about all that? she would say dismissively if asked, and so hardly anyone ever did. For the last five years she’d been in a nursing home; Ava was ashamed now she hadn’t visited her more, what with her own troubles to bear.

  But why, in all those years, had her grandmother never mentioned a house? Why hadn’t she sold it or gone back? And why, Ava couldn’t help but wonder, had her grandmother given it to her?

  Her mother, Susan, had been pragmatic. “I’m not surprised she didn’t sell it. Who would buy a place like that? It’s in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it? Hardly worth anything, I’d imagine.”

  “Still, a farmhouse—in a village—”

  “It’s not Provence or even Italy,” her mother had reminded her. “You’re bound to romanticize it, I know, but it’s Greece, rural Greece, not some holiday hotspot, and that’s very different. Very old world.”

  “And you know this how?” Ava had returned with a little smile.

  “I backpacked through Europe in the early seventies, before you were born.”

  She’d vaguely remembered her mother mentioning such a trip, irrelevant to her teenage self. “You went to rural Greece?”

  “Not Iousidous, because your grandmother would never even say the name of the place, although I knew she came from near the mountains. But I’m half Greek, Ava, and I wanted to see my own country. I traveled through a few places and, trust me, it was like stepping back in time. In the mountains whole villages didn’t have electricity, even in the 1970s.”

  “But that was fifty years ago, and this isn’t really in the mountains, is it?”

  “Close enough, I should think, and not on any ‘Places to Travel’ lists. I doubt much has changed. And the house certainly hasn’t, if it hasn’t been lived in for that long. It might be close to falling down by now. Are you sure you want to go?”

  “I don’t know if I want to,” Ava had said, her throat turning tight, “but I need to.”

  Her mother had nodded, her gaze turning tender and all too knowing. “It’s been a hard year, Ava, for both you and Simon. It might be good for you to get away, find a little distance.”

  Ava had looked away, a lump forming in her throat. Nearly a year on and she still hadn’t been coping. That much had been obvious to her mother, to Simon, to everyone. Even her supervisor at the primary school where she’d worked part-time as an art teacher had mentioned it. Maybe the budget cuts are a good thing for you, Ava. You could get some rest.

  As if resting would help. As if she was merely tired. It would just give her more time to think. And as for finding distance… how could you find distance from something that still felt so enmeshed in your very soul, tangled up in every part of you, if you even wanted to? Ava wasn’t sure she did. If she let go of the grief, she might lose herself as well. There might be nothing left at all.

  “I still don’t know why she left it to me,” she’d said to her mother, determined to keep the conversation about the house. Her grandmother had five grandchildren besides Ava: her cousins were spread all over the globe, two in England, two in Australia, and one in the States. “She could have left it to anyone.”

  “She always favored you, I think,” her mother said. “She used to say you were like her.”

  Ava thought of the austere-looking woman from her childhood holding court from the plastic-swathed three-piece suite in the front room of her semidetached house in Leeds. She’d visited her grandmother a few times a year as a child and had accepted boiled sweets and a rather firm pat on the cheek, and not much else. When her grandmother had died six months ago, she’d felt sad but not devastated. She’d been dealing with a deeper, more raw grief, and Sophia Matthews had been in her nineties, and had been suffering from dementia for several years. In some ways it had been a relief, the gentle slip into death rather than the brutal tearing away.

  “How am I like her?” Ava had asked, and Susan smiled sadly.

  “She told me once you reminded her of herself, back when she lived in Greece. Strong, she said. Stronger than you think.”

  “Stronger than I think? Or stronger than she thought?”

  “Does it matter?” Susan had asked with a smile. “Strong, in any case.”

  But Ava didn’t feel strong. She felt weak, horribly, pathetically weak, like some spineless, slithery creature, shell-less and exposed, which could not even care for itself. A stronger woman would move on after the loss of her child. A stronger woman would want to. And a stronger woman would be able to save her marriage.
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  “In any case,” Susan said, “she didn’t speak any more of it. You know she never talked about her time in Greece. She hated if we so much as mentioned it.” She sighed, shaking her head, and Ava thought of her mother traveling through Greece back in the 1970s, young and hopeful and yet still somehow lost, trying to rediscover part of her forgotten heritage. Had her mother found any answers on that trip? Would she?

  Ava had never even really considered herself Greek at all; her grandmother had been so determinedly English. As far as Sophia Matthews had been concerned, her life had begun in England, in 1946, when she was twenty-six and married to an Englishman, Ava’s grandfather Edward, who had worked in a bank and died before she was born. Sophia had worked hard at making her children appear completely English, learning the language herself and refusing to speak Greek to them or anyone. As Sophia came from a country with a fierce national pride, this decision made so many years ago now added to the sense of loss. Had Sophia missed the land of her birth, or her family? Had she thought in Greek, or dreamed in it? Perhaps she’d been conflicted in herself, even if she never gave anything away. Ava had felt a prickling of shame that such thoughts had never crossed her mind before.