The Snow Gypsy(78)
“It’s the same with the stars,” Zoltan went on. “I had no idea of the different constellations until I came to live here.” He swept his upturned palm toward the sky. “I don’t think I ever noticed them before.”
Rose had never met a Gypsy who lacked an intimate knowledge of the night sky. She wondered if Zoltan had lived in a city in Hungary. Perhaps his people had lost the sort of knowledge that caravan dwellers possessed. She longed to ask him about his family, but she was afraid to. He hadn’t volunteered more than a scrap of information about his life before the concentration camp, which suggested it was too painful a subject to talk about.
“When you were putting the mule to bed, I was lying like you are now,” she said, “imagining my brother looking up at this exact same patch of sky. I find myself doing it all the time. Even before I knew for sure that he’d died, I’d look at a view, a bird, or a meadow full of flowers and think, Nathan must have seen this.”
“That’s something good to hold on to, isn’t? That someone we loved was part of all this incredible beauty.”
Rose slid back onto her cushion. For a while they lay in silence, both gazing at the night sky. Then Gunesh began to burrow into the space between them, wriggling this way and that until he’d made himself comfortable.
“Gunesh!” Rose tried to move him farther down the blanket. One of the dog’s hind legs was jabbing her neck, and she thought his tail end must be jammed against Zoltan’s face.
“Don’t move him on my account,” Zoltan said. “He’s nice and warm—like a hot water bottle.”
That was the last thing she remembered him saying. They both must have fallen asleep soon afterward. When she opened her eyes again, the hillside was coral pink with the first rays of the rising sun. She felt the warmth of a body against her back and snuggled into it. But what she felt against the bare strip of flesh between her blouse and the waistband of her skirt was not Gunesh’s silky fur. It was the rough cotton of Zoltan’s shirt. Sometime in the night the dog must have moved, and the two of them had rolled together on the blanket.
She lay quite still for a moment. Zoltan was still asleep. She could feel the regular rise and fall of his chest. It was a pleasant sensation, the feeling of being cocooned in the folds of his body. But the pleasure was tinged with guilt. She mustn’t be lying here when he woke up. Mustn’t allow this intimacy to develop any further.
He murmured something in his sleep. Something she couldn’t make out. Then his arm snaked across her waist.
It was so tempting to reach out for him, to slide into something joyful, physical, to blot out the pain of the past few days. The wild side of herself—the side that she had allowed total freedom in Provence—was urging her to let go. But the other half of her nature—the part that came from her straitlaced French mother, not her bohemian Turkish father—had the upper hand now. To lose herself in a moment of passion would further complicate an already complicated situation. And for the first time in her life, she had a child to consider. Nieve needed her undivided attention. Rose simply couldn’t allow herself to get emotionally entangled.
Inch by inch, she shifted away from him until she felt grass beneath her hand. Her ankle was still sore. She didn’t trust herself to try standing up. Instead she crawled across to the cottage on all fours to where Gunesh lay basking in the early sunshine. He licked her face as she pushed open the door and made her way inside. By clinging to the armchair, she was able to pull herself up. Once she was upright, it was relatively easy to hop about on one leg. She managed to light the fire and fill the kettle. By the time Zoltan appeared, rubbing his eyes in the doorway of the cottage, breakfast was almost ready.
“How did you manage that?” He shook his head, his brow creased in puzzlement. “You should have woken me up.”
She felt a familiar surge at the sight of him. It was his eyes. Pale and sparkling as meltwater. Curled up with her back to him on the blanket, unable to see those eyes, it had been easier to resist him. She was going to have to try not to get too close. Otherwise she might not be so strong.
Chapter 28
Four days later
By the next market day, Rose’s ankle was strong enough to walk on. But she didn’t go to the village with Zoltan. They had ridden to Maria’s the previous evening to load up the panniers with the last of the season’s cherries and the first of the ripe plums, and Maria had asked for a favor. There were wildflowers growing higher up the mountain that she needed for medicines she was making, but her hip was too stiff to allow her to go very far from the farm. She wondered if Rose might go and find them for her.
Over the past few days, Rose had spent a lot of time with Maria. She hated to be idle, and while her ankle was healing, there was only so much she could do in the day-to-day running of Zoltan’s tiny cottage. So she had volunteered to help with the milking of Maria’s goats and the cheese making—things she knew how to do and could perform while sitting down.
Zoltan had been taking her over there each morning by mule. And while they worked together, the two women had endless conversations about the various herbal cures they had tried—Rose on animals and Maria on humans. Rose had started writing down everything that Maria told her. It had occurred to her that she could follow up her book on natural veterinary remedies with another one about herbal medicine for people. When Maria asked her to go gathering wildflowers on the slopes of the Mulhacén, she was full of enthusiasm. It would be a chance to find new species—herbs she would never find growing in Britain.