The Snow Gypsy(92)
“The comandante?” Lola stared at the wisp of smoke snaking toward her.
“Yes.” Maria sucked on the pipe. “He wasn’t so high up when your mother worked for his wife. He was just an officer in the Guardia Civil.”
Lola’s fingers clenched around the glass in her hand. Her tongue felt as if it were glued to the roof of her mouth. She brought the wine up to her lips. It tasted warm and bitter.
“Is he still alive?”
Maria sucked on her pipe before she answered. “Still alive, yes. He lives in one of the big houses now—opposite the Iglesia de la Santa Cruz.”
Lola held Maria’s gaze through the smoke. Her eyes began to blur, the old woman’s face morphing into the spectral image of the man with the gun. “He’s my father,” Lola whispered. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
Maria took the pipe out of her mouth. “That was the rumor when your mother left. People said his wife threw her out when she discovered she was pregnant.” She poked at the smoldering tobacco with her thumbnail. “It wasn’t your mother’s fault. Batista was a brute. His wife told me so when I treated her for a problem with her legs. What he wanted, he took. And your mother was so young.”
Lola opened her mouth, her lips trembling. “Are you saying he raped her?”
The tobacco glowed red as Maria inhaled. “I’m sorry. Rose said you needed to know—but this is hard for you to hear.”
“Yes, it is,” Lola whispered. She heard her mother’s voice, crying out through the falling snow. Pleading with a monster who had abused her and abandoned her. A monster who was about to destroy his own flesh and blood. The murderous thoughts that had haunted Lola’s dreams surged through her head with dizzying intensity, driving out the fear. He was down there, in the village. She must have passed right by his house. She could find him. And she knew how to kill a man . . .
She tried to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t obey her. She staggered forward, spilling wine down her skirt.
“Oh—Lola!”
Rose came running across the yard. Lola crumpled against her like a rag doll.
Chapter 34
It was well after midnight when Rose blew out the candles in the cottage. Lola was asleep in the bedroom, worn out by the emotional turmoil the visit to Maria had caused. Rose crept out the front door and sank down onto the blanket spread over the grass.
She blamed herself for the state Lola was in. Finding out her father’s name had unleashed a maelstrom of rage and grief that threatened to tip her over the edge. She had said she wanted to kill him. Moments after tucking Nieve up in bed, she had been pacing the floor of the cottage, fists clenched, ranting about what she would do to him if she got the chance. At one point she had grabbed the knife Zoltan had been using to peel potatoes and made for the door. Zoltan had had to twist her arm behind her back to make her drop it. The shock of that had reduced her to floods of tears. She had lain facedown on the stone floor, beating her knuckles until they bled.
“Thank goodness Nieve didn’t see all that,” Zoltan said as he came to join Rose on the blanket.
“I’m going to have to watch her like a hawk tomorrow,” Rose whispered. “I was going to go with you to market, but I daren’t leave her.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open,” he replied. “I know Batista’s house. She’d have to walk right past my stall to get to it.”
“She told me this morning that she was planning to leave the day after tomorrow. She’s going to go and live in Madrid.”
Zoltan searched her face in the firelight. “That’s going to be hard on you, isn’t it? Saying goodbye to Nieve.”
Rose pressed her face into his neck, tears prickling her eyes. “I can’t imagine not having her here,” she murmured. “I was only supposed to be looking after her. But she’s become so . . . so much more.” She couldn’t bring herself to say what she really meant: that Nieve had become the child she had wished for that night in the tavern in Granada—and that she couldn’t love her more if she were her own daughter. “Lola said she wished I could go with them to Madrid.”
Rose regretted the words as soon as they were out. It sounded as if she were trying to manipulate Zoltan into saying whether he saw a future for the two of them.
“Is that what you want?”
“I’m not sure what I want. I should go back to England. To my job. But . . .” She hesitated, closing her eyes as she felt his breath on her neck.
“I don’t want this to end, Rose.”
She felt his lips move down to her collarbone, pausing to kiss her there before sliding down her body. “Neither do I,” she murmured.
Zoltan had already loaded up the mules and set off for the village when Lola emerged from the bedroom the next morning. Rose was stirring migas over the fire. She looked up warily.
“I’m sorry.” Lola dropped her head, muttering under her breath. Rose heard the word loca. Crazy.
“I don’t blame you for wanting to kill him,” Rose said. “I could murder him myself.”
Lola looked up.
“It’s quite possible that he shot my brother as well as your relatives,” Rose went on. “But what good would it do, going to his house and confronting him? The chances are we’d be arrested before we got anywhere near him. And even if we did, we’d never get away with it. We’d be killed ourselves. And what would happen to Nieve then?”