The Snow Gypsy(2)
Her teeth are all she has. The blood is like metal in her mouth. She thinks that she will never forget that taste. Always it will be trapped with the faces of those she loved, in a drift of memory.
She lifts the baby into her arms, tucking it inside her coat. She lowers her head against the blast of the wind, unsteady as she retraces her steps. How can she leave the loved ones lying there? How can she bury them? She sinks to her knees. Offering a prayer is all she can do.
Take my baby.
The goats huddle around as she struggles to her feet. She turns her head toward the mountain, to the fast-disappearing track that winds up to the summit.
Take my baby.
She catches her breath as the cold seeps into her bones.
Take it where?
Chapter 2
England: May 2, 1946
Rose Daniel caught an early train from Waterloo station. It felt good to be getting away from London. Away from the ugliness of the bombed-out buildings and the air of desolation they created. Away from the drabness of the clothes, the shops, the people. There was no color—as if the war had sucked the life out of everything.
Forty minutes into the journey, the train hurtled out of a tunnel into a gully lined with cherry trees. The rush of air sent pink petals tumbling like confetti against the carriages. A few fell through the open window and landed on the gray woolen fabric of her dress. As she brushed them away, the landscape opened out into meadows sprinkled with buttercups, where cows raised curious heads at the clatter of the wheels on the tracks. There was a whiff of farmyards coming through the window—a ripe, wholesome smell, so different from the sour air of the city.
Only another hour and the train would be passing through the wetlands between Chichester and the sea: the place where the Gypsies gathered in springtime to hunt hares and cut willow for making baskets—the place where Rose had once lived in a tent beside a stream for a whole summer and woken each morning to the sound of skylarks.
She slipped her hand inside the pocket of her dress, fingering Nathan’s letter. It had been a day like this, nearly ten years ago, when she had last seen him. A day of bright skies and dark shadows. He had come to find her to say goodbye, passing through Chichester on his way to board a ferry at Southampton. He’d said he hadn’t had the heart to tell their parents—just left a note on the kitchen table, saying, “Gone to Spain.”
The sun slanted into the railway carriage, lighting up the golden fur of Rose’s Afghan hound, Gunesh, who lay sleeping at her feet. Her hand went to his head, stroking the soft place between his ears. He had been a puppy—just eight months old—that summer on the Sussex marshes. She remembered how he had growled when Nathan poked his head through the flap of the tent. And how Nathan had tickled him into submission, the two of them wrestling by the stream, clothes and fur covered in sticky emerald beads of goosegrass.
She had cooked breakfast over a little fire of hawthorn twigs and listened to his passionate argument for joining a war in a country he’d never even visited.
“Fascism is the new Satan, Rose,” he’d said. “Let Spain fall, and the evil will spread all over Europe.”
She had nodded as she slid eggs out of the frying pan onto hunks of brown bread. “You don’t need to tell me about fascists. You know the place where I was living last term, in Paddington? It was just down the street from Oswald Mosley’s headquarters. His thugs in their black shirts used to march right past our front door, shouting, ‘Death to Jews!’”
“Hmm. So that explains why you’re living in a tent surrounded by rabbit shit.” Nathan had been pulling the petals off a daisy as he spoke. “I did wonder.”
“It wasn’t only that.”
“Oh? Don’t tell me—a boy, is it? Who is he? Some farmer’s son you locked eyes with while dissecting a dead cat?”
At that point she’d given him a shove, almost sending the eggs slithering off the bread onto the grass. “Listen, Horse, I came here to learn, not to mess around with men! I thought you of all people would understand.”
With Rose it was animals in general—dogs in particular—but for Nathan it had always been horses. Even their parents used to call him by the nickname he’d acquired as a child.
“And have you?” He’d given her a sly smile.
“Have I what?”
“Learnt anything?”
“Yes: heaps more than I’ve picked up in two years at university. Last week I watched a Gypsy man cure a whole litter of sick puppies. They had distemper. He used nothing but herbs gathered from round here. In London they’d all have died. Any vet will tell you there’s no hope for a dog in a case like that.”
“I wonder what the pet lovers of London will say when you tell them you’ve picked up everything you know from the Gypsy school of veterinary science?” Nathan was still smiling. “Are you even going to bother going back to university in September?”
Rose had clicked her tongue and said, “I suppose I’ll have to. They’ll never let me practice otherwise. But I hate the way we’re taught. Experimenting on live animals is so cruel, the absolute opposite of why I wanted to be a vet. And the drugs we’re supposed to use—I’m convinced most of them do more harm than good.”
And so they had gone on until it was time for him to leave, talking about her life, not his, dodging the stark reality that neither of them could voice: that Nathan might not come back from this war in Spain.