The Snow Gypsy(73)

“Yes,” Rose whispered. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe.

“Such a wicked thing to do.” Maria blew out a wreath of blue smoke. “They killed twenty-five women from the villages around here that day. Dragged them away from their children—even tore a baby from its mother’s breast. The only rule they had—if you can call it that—was that they wouldn’t kill a child that was too young to have taken holy communion. They didn’t care if a woman was pregnant. In their twisted minds that didn’t count.”

Rose could hear a bird calling from somewhere in the rushes on the other side of the stream. It sounded very far away, as if it inhabited some other realm. She felt as if she had floated out of her body and was looking down on the shell of herself sitting beside Maria.

“Your brother wasn’t with Adelita when they burst into her house—but he saw them marching her through the village with the others they’d rounded up. He slipped into the line next to her and pulled her into an alleyway when they were going past the church. But someone saw them. The guards handcuffed him. He was taken to the ravine with all the others.”

Rose was aware of a prickling sensation on her leg. It was a fly crawling over the bare flesh below her knee. She brushed it away. The movement brought her back from the trancelike state that had overcome her. Maria was describing it all in the kind of detail that suggested she had seen it herself. And yet Zoltan had said that she was up here when the shots were fired and had heard only a secondhand account of what happened from the other partisans.

“How do you know?” Rose turned to look at her. “Who saw it?”

Maria brushed a wisp of smoke-stained hair away from her furrowed forehead. “The wife of the comandante. I was treating her for pain in her legs. She was sitting in the window of her house the day it happened. And her husband told her the rest.” The dark irises of Maria’s eyes, ringed blue-white with age, flickered this way and that, as if she were watching it unfolding on a cinema screen. “He told his wife that they’d killed the English partisan they called the Shepherdess. The one who’d evaded them for so long by slipping in and out of the villages dressed as a woman. He said your brother had thrown himself in front of his girlfriend when the shooting started. He couldn’t save her, of course. No one survived.”

The fragment of memory that had been hovering at the edge of Rose’s consciousness suddenly coalesced into a clear image. Bodies in a blizzard. All female, Lola had said, apart from her twin brother. When she had scrambled through the snow, frantically searching for her loved ones, she could have come within inches of Nathan’s corpse and mistaken it for the body of a woman.

“He would have been a wonderful father.” The lines around Maria’s mouth deepened as she puffed on the pipe. “If only they’d got away a few weeks earlier. But Adelita was not strong. He was afraid she wouldn’t make it through the mountains. He was waiting for the weather to change.”

Rose stared at her, clinging on to hope. Because Maria couldn’t know, could she, that a baby had been taken, alive, after the massacre? How could anyone but Lola have known that?

“W . . . what h . . .” She was so choked up she could hardly get the words out. “What happened to their . . . remains?”

Maria held the pipe above her lap, staring at the smoldering tobacco. “They weren’t given proper burials. People were too afraid, you see. The church said the rojos were so vile that even the earth didn’t want them. One man went there a couple of days after the shooting, when the snow had melted. What he saw affected him so badly he died of a heart attack a week later.”

“What? What did he see?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Believe me, whatever you tell me can’t be worse than what I’ve imagined.”

Maria took another lungful of smoke. “He said one of the women must have given birth as she was dying. He saw the cord lying in the snow. But there was no baby. He thought an animal must have taken it.”

Rose felt as if her heart had stopped beating. “Adelita?”

Maria shook her head. “Her little one was spared that fate, at least.”

Tears burned behind Rose’s eyes. With a handful of words, Maria had snatched away the last vestige of hope. Nieve was a stranger’s daughter, not Nathan’s. The child she had fantasized about was gone forever.

“I’m sorry.” Maria placed her pale chicken-claw fingers on Rose’s sun-browned arm. “It’s such a terrible waste of life.”

“Who was she?” Rose murmured. “The mother of the baby?”

“Her name was Heliodora. She was a silk weaver. A Gypsy woman—one of the house-dwelling kind. She was highly skilled—she could create the most amazing patterns in the cloth she made. Her shawls were like paintings, full of flowers, butterflies, and birds.” Maria’s hand returned to her pipe. Pulling it out of her mouth, she tapped out the ashes and stuffed fresh tobacco into the bowl. “She and her husband came here from Morocco. They hadn’t been living in Pampaneira for very long. He was killed in ’37, in the backlash that followed the murder of the local priest.”

“My brother wrote about that in his letter.”

“Did he tell you that they paraded the priest through the village with a horse’s bridle round his neck?”