The House of Whispers

Praise for The House of Whispers‘A creepy, chilling story … Another Anna Mazzola triumph’JENNIFER SAINT‘Chilling and compelling, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, this is a thrilling mystery with many eerie twists and turns to keep you hooked all through the night’ESSIE FOX‘Darkly atmospheric and dripping with menace. Anna Mazzola is a twisted genius’TAMMY COHEN‘Powerful, spine-tingling and beautifully penned, this is gothic historical fiction at its very best’ABIR MUKHERJEE‘Beautiful, chilling, and darkly enchanting. Anna Mazzola is a truly gifted storyteller’CHRIS WHITAKER‘Eerie and unsettling, but perhaps Anna Mazzola’s superbly realised depiction of a nation gripped by the horrors of fascism is the most terrifying thing of all’KATE GRIFFIN‘Absolutely brilliant. Gripping, beautifully written and properly chilling’CAROLINE GREEN‘Robert Harris meets M.R. James in an evocative gothic tale set in a Rome on the edge of catastrophe … Mazzola’s dazzling imagination is at its very peak’DAVID HEWSON‘The sense of place is impeccable, the sense of danger truly chilling’SINÉAD CROWLEY‘The thrilling tale of a woman caught between the pressures of pre-war Italy and the more mysterious manifestations of something amiss in her own household’ALISON LITTLEWOOD‘A delicately told ghost story set in the bright heat of 1930s Italy. Claustrophobic and compelling’AMANDA MASON‘Packed with political and emotional intrigue … historically rich and deeply unsettling’SARAH HILARY‘Gothic, immersive and very, very scary … Set in 1939 Rome against the rise of fascism, injecting a powerful sense of dread’ALLY WILKES‘A gripping, thrilling story which had me hooked from the start, as the terrifying reality of fascism in pre-war Italy is increasingly entwined in an anguished marriage’MARY CHAMBERLAIN‘Tense historical fiction like no other … Dark and mysterious with whispers of a buried past hidden in the walls. I cannot recommend The House of Whispers highly enough’AJ WEST For my father (please don’t read the sex scenes). ContentsPraise for The House of WhispersDedicationTitle PagePart One12: Rome, 19383456789Part Two10: Rome, 19391112131415161718Part Three19Epilogue: Nice, 1945AcknowledgementsCreditsCopyright Part One 1I dreamt again of the burning. The first one, when I was seven years old, the sky above Piazza Oberdan stained blood-red, the flames hissing, the men in black shirts dancing and shouting, ‘Viva! Viva!’ as though the fire were a product of their demented energy, a strange creature come alive to drive the Slavs out of Trieste. I saw again the faces of the people at the open windows and on the balconies – rows and rows of them in the tall white building of the Narodni Dom, the Slovene national home. I heard the jeers of the mob, the scream of the sirens, smelt the smoke that filled the evening sky.Only, in my dream, I was no longer a child clutching my mother’s hand, but the young woman I am now: solid, sensible, apparently capable. Yet I made no movement to help, no attempt to stop the squadristi as they poured on petrol, barred the doors; no attempt to make the police do something, to yell in their faces, to beg them to help, to clear a way for the firefighters who were blocked by the baying Blackshirts. I stood as I did then, transfixed, horrified – only now, as an adult, I understood what they were doing and I knew what would come next. I longed 2Rome, 1938I will begin the story on the day I first saw him. It was the day that Hitler came to Rome.We’d spent the morning in one of the great, echoing music rooms of the school where Ettore and I worked. Supposedly we were practising, but in fact we were most mostly smoking, talking, joking, as we often did in those days. Mirella, Ettore and I had met at teacher training school some years before and formed a trio, more for the companionship than for anything else. We were all, in our way, outsiders, though I wouldn’t have accepted that then.The door to the room opened and Allegra, another of the teachers, peered in: ‘What on earth are you laughing about in here?’‘Eva has a new admirer: the dashing Signor Malinconico!’Ettore and Mirella were almost besides themselves by this point. Signor Malinconico – Mr Melancholy – was their name for one of the maths teachers: a spindly-legged man with a drooping face who seemed always to be out of luck.‘You’re awful, the pair of you. He merely asked me to dinner. The poor man is probably lonely.’Allegra sat on one of the metal chairs, crossed her stockinged legs and lit a cigarette. ‘Poor Mr Melancholy. He’s such a strange fellow, isn’t he? What on earth did you say to