The Snow Gypsy(70)
“This is Pilar.” Nieve dropped Rose’s hand to link arms with her new friend. “Goodbye, Au . . . Mama.”
Rose sucked in a breath. Nieve had almost given the game away. It was so hard for a child of only eight years old to keep up such a pretense. But there was no alternative. Rose felt bad enough about having told Zoltan. No one else must be let in on the secret.
She decided to take the right-hand fork in the track up the mountain—the one that led to Capileira. She would try to find the blacksmith’s forge where Lola had lived as a child. The route took Rose through a very different landscape from the one she had encountered on the walk to Zoltan’s cottage. After a few minutes’ walk through sparse woodland, the track wound along the edge of a deep, wide gorge. The river was far below, like a ribbon of turquoise silk. She almost tripped as she looked at it. There were rocks jutting up along the path. After that, she kept her eyes on the ground. Gunesh was more sure-footed, jumping over the rocks without a moment’s hesitation.
There was something about the gorge that filled Rose with a sense of foreboding. It wasn’t just the thought of tumbling over the edge. The steep, almost vertical cliffs, bare of vegetation apart from the odd clump of thistles, had a stark, harsh look to them. As she climbed higher, it dawned on her that this could be the place Lola had described—the ravine she had scrambled down in the snow. It wasn’t difficult to imagine murder on such a scale taking place in a spot like this. People rounded up and herded along the valley like animals, to be slaughtered in a volley of gunfire. The killing would be heard but not seen, the bodies hidden from view by the great outcrops of limestone on the valley sides.
Rose stopped, crouching down to get closer to the edge of the gorge without the danger of losing her balance. The idea of Lola scaling these treacherous rocks in a blizzard was almost beyond comprehension. And how on earth would she have got back up again with a baby in her arms? Perhaps this wasn’t the place. And yet . . . the more Rose looked, the more intense the feeling of menace became. It wasn’t just her—she could feel the hackles rising on Gunesh’s neck.
Capileira was not far away. The sound of shooting would have traveled miles, up beyond the village to the mountain pastures above. It all fit exactly with what Lola had described. And she wouldn’t have had to climb back up the side of the gorge with the baby—she could have followed the course of the river up the mountain until she reached a place where the valley was not so deep and the terrain easier to negotiate.
Rose’s legs felt stiff as she got up from the crouching position. She walked on, trying to dispel the images that crowded in on her—of Lola lying in the snow between the corpses of her mother and brother, wanting to die alongside them; of Nieve’s tiny blood-smeared body, fighting for life, wrapped in her dying mother’s peacock shawl.
Adelita.
Rose shook her head. She mustn’t allow herself to believe that Nieve’s mother was Nathan’s fiancée.
But what if she was . . .
The muttering inside her head wouldn’t stop.
If she was, Nathan couldn’t be far away, could he? Perhaps they didn’t shoot him in the street. Perhaps they marched him to the gorge with the others, but he tried to make a break for it and they shot him farther down the valley. That would explain why Lola didn’t see his body. His bones might be in the river. What if that river runs into the one beside the mill in Pampaneira?
She clamped her hands over her ears. This must be what it felt like to lose your mind.
It was a relief when the track veered around to the left, away from the ravine and into a broad, gently sloping meadow dotted with scarlet poppies, purple-blue lavender, and amber marigolds. She collapsed onto the grass and lay there with her eyes closed, breathing in the scent of the earth and the wildflowers.
Don’t you believe in heaven, Rose?
Now it was Bill Lee’s voice she heard. Calm and comforting. She could imagine him walking through a place like this, bending down to pluck a flower with his long brown fingers and threading it through his hatband next to the feather. And he would know the names of all the birds, whose sweet, distant calls drifted across the hillside.
Did she believe in heaven? If there was such a place, she hoped it would be like this. A place where the spirits of the dead glided over perfumed, sunlit meadows to a symphony of birdsong. Yes, she thought, Nathan would be happy here. Wherever his earthly body had been left, his spirit would find a home on this mountain.
She raised herself up on one elbow and reached into her bag. Zoltan had given her more cherries as a parting gift, and there were still some left. The juice moistened her parched mouth. She dug a little hole in the ground when she’d finished eating and dropped one of the stones into it. Could a cherry tree grow this high up? She wasn’t sure. But it seemed a fitting way to remember her brother.
After another hour of walking, she spotted the roofs of houses in the distance. Above them she could see the top of the mountain, still dusted with snow around the peak. It seemed incredible that snow could persist in a landscape so far south in the middle of June. She thought of Lola, who would have had to walk right over the top to get to Granada. It would be a difficult challenge in summer—but Lola had crossed the mountains in early April. It was little short of a miracle that she and Nieve had survived.
It wasn’t long before Rose passed a wooden sign with pine trees and the name of the village carved into it. Soon she was among people again—women strolling along with shopping bags and men standing on street corners, smoking cigarettes.