“I found a gun lying down there.” Zoltan pointed to a spot just below the bush the bird had emerged from. “It was a big old-fashioned hunting rifle with what looked like a bullet hole right through the barrel.”
It was hard to imagine violence in such a place. The thought of Nathan holed up here, ready to shoot enemy troops, made Rose go cold. But he must have been here. It was exactly as he had described it in his letter: a hiding place in the mountains above the village where he had met his fiancée.
A few minutes later Zoltan was leading Rose toward a low stone cottage with a barrel-vaulted roof. As she climbed down from the animal’s back, he said, “Go on in while I sort him out. I’ll make us some coffee. Then we can go and take a look at the sick one.”
Rose pushed open the weathered wooden door of the little house. An enticing smell came wafting out—a savory, salty aroma with a tang of herbs. Fennel and mint and something else she couldn’t identify. It was coming from a metal pot suspended over a smoldering log fire at the opposite end of the room. Above the fireplace was a hefty pair of animal horns, and on the stone floor in front of it was an enormous fur rug. Gunesh went straight over to the rug and buried his nose in it, sniffing all around the edges. The texture of the hair and the color of it—gray speckled with black and white—suggested only one animal to Rose: a wolf.
“I hope you’re not thinking I was responsible for those.” Zoltan gestured to the horns as he came through the door. “I do shoot the odd rabbit for the pot—but I’d never kill a magnificent creature like that.”
“What was it?”
“An ibex. They’re like goats, only much bigger. I see them sometimes up on the ridge above the house.” He dropped to his knees, patting the wolf-skin rug. “As for this fellow, I assume he was making a nuisance of himself. Probably came looking for food, not expecting to run into a bunch of armed men.”
“You think some of the partisans were living here?”
“They were certainly coming here.” He took a poker from a hook on the wall and prodded the fire back to life. “The bunkers were the focus of activity—I think this place was used for preparing food and stabling animals. I found the boxes of documents under a pile of straw. It looked as if they’d been hidden there by someone who’d had to make a hasty escape.” He unhooked the stew pot, hanging a kettle in its place. “Shall I get the boxes? You must be desperate to know if there’s anything of your brother’s there.”
“No—it’s okay,” Rose replied. “Let’s go and see the mule first.” The prospect of searching through what Zoltan had found made her stomach flip over. She was almost afraid to look, afraid of building up her hopes only to have them dashed if there was nothing there.
The sight of the sick animal forced her to put all other thoughts aside. It had a weeping sore the size of an apple at the base of its neck. Rose took a closer look while Zoltan held the animal’s head.
“Yes,” she said, “I can see it’s infected—it smells pretty awful, doesn’t it?”
Zoltan nodded. “The man in the next stall to mine at the market said I’d have to shoot it. He reckons the thing you said it was is incurable.”
“A lot of people think that. But I met Gypsies in England who knew how to cure it—that’s where I got the remedy from.”
“Hmm. There were people in Hungary like that, on my mother’s side of the family. I didn’t have much to do with animals, though, when I was living there.”
Rose hesitated, wondering if he was going to tell her more about his life before coming to Spain, but he didn’t—and she didn’t want to press him. “Have you got the potato and garlic water ready?” she asked.
“It’s in that bucket over there.”
“Okay. He’s not going to like it, so hold on tight.” Rose took a clean piece of rag from her bag and dipped it in the bucket. “Steady, boy!” Between them they managed to keep the mule from rearing up.
“You’re going to need to bathe it four times a day until it stops weeping,” Rose said. “It shouldn’t be quite so much of a shock to him next time. Do you think you’ll manage?”
“I think so.”
“You need to starve him for twenty-four hours—nothing but water,” she went on. “Then give him bran with a dollop of honey mixed in—and a handful each of these.” From her bag she produced two bunches of herbs that she’d picked from the riverbank on the way to Nieve’s school.
“Is that watercress?”
“Yes—and wild garlic.”
“And that’s it? No medicine?”
“That is the medicine.” She smiled. “He should be as right as rain in a week or so.”
The kettle was steaming when they went back into the cottage. Zoltan fetched the boxes from upstairs while the coffee was brewing. Then they both started sifting through the letters, identity papers, photographs, and maps. Rose glanced across the table. Zoltan was unlike any Gypsy she had ever met. He was scanning the documents as if he’d been reading all his life.
“I started looking when I got home yesterday,” Zoltan said. “I went through all the envelopes with British stamps on—but I didn’t find anything with your brother’s name on it.”
“Some of the letters aren’t in envelopes.” Rose held a sheet of thin blue airmail paper up to the light. “Did you look at those?”
Zoltan shook his head. “There are notes scribbled on scraps of cardboard, too. Do you think you’d recognize his handwriting?”
Rose took Nathan’s letter from her pocket and laid it out on the table. Then they both fell silent, scanning each item and piling them up beside their coffee cups. The knot in Rose’s stomach tightened as she read through heartfelt letters from people just like herself. Women who had brothers, sweethearts, husbands, or sons who had left everything behind to join the war against the fascists. And then there were the photographs—images of women, mostly, smiling out with eager, hopeful eyes. Some had messages written in tiny letters at the bottom of the photo or scribbled on the reverse side. To read them was agonizing. Rose wondered if any of these women had seen their loved ones return home.
Zoltan looked up as she was gazing at a particularly moving image of two little boys in Santa Claus hats, waving at the camera. “Not all of them have names on, do they?” he said. “I’ll put any like that over on this side for you to have a look at.”
Rose drew in a breath as she laid the image of the children aside. She thought it a slim chance that any of the pictures belonged to Nathan. He had never mentioned a girlfriend back in England, and he had left in such a hurry—and in such high spirits—it was unlikely he would have thought of packing a family photograph in his rucksack.
“This is a strange one.” Zoltan’s voice broke through her thoughts. “It’s dedicated to an animal, not a person.”
“An animal?”
“Yes. It’s written in Spanish. It says ‘To the horse, with all my love.’”
Rose leaned across to look at the snapshot in his hand. His thumb was over the face of a woman with long dark hair. “Can I have a look?”
Al Caballo con todo mi amor, Adelita.
Rose’s mouth opened but no sound came out.
“What? What is it?”
“My brother,” she whispered. “His nickname was Horse.”
Rose was afraid to believe that the photograph belonged to Nathan. She told herself that a nickname like that could be commonplace in Spain—although Zoltan didn’t agree. It took them another hour of careful searching to find something that corroborated the theory that the girl in the snapshot was her brother’s fiancée. It was a note, written in pencil on the back of a railway timetable. Rose recognized Nathan’s distinctive, sloping scrawl. It simply said “Tell Adelita I’ll be there for Our Lady of the Snows.”
“What does he mean?” Rose pushed the note across the table for Zoltan to see.
“It’s a romería—a sort of pilgrimage they have here in August,” he replied. “There’s a little shrine on top of the Mulhacén called the Ermit
a de la Virgen de las Nieves. It was put there by a traveler who got caught in a summer blizzard sometime last century. The storm was closing in, and the only thing he could do was pray. He begged to be saved, if he was worthy. According to the story, he saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, and he promised to build her a shrine if he came through the storm alive.” Zoltan shrugged. “So now, on the anniversary of the storm, people come from all the villages down the valley to climb up to it.”
Our Lady of the Snows. The name had an ethereal, magical quality. Rose wondered if it had been in Lola’s mind when she named Nieve. Perhaps she had even walked past the shrine on that long, desperate trek over the Sierra Nevada.
“When they get there, the priest performs an outdoor communion service. I went to watch last year. It’s very cold up there—even on a sunny day. Sometimes, even in August, it’s blowing a gale—but they do the pilgrimage whatever the weather.”
“It’s strange to think of my brother doing that,” Rose said. “He was never interested in religion. I suppose it would have been an opportunity for him to meet Adelita without drawing attention to himself.” If Nathan had written that note in August, the relationship would have been going on for at least eight months by the time of his last letter home. If the pregnancy had happened early on, the birth of the baby could have happened as early as April 1938. Rose picked up the photograph, gazing into the big dark eyes. Although the girl was smiling, there was an indefinable sadness about her.
As if she knew.
Knew what? The image began to blur. Rose almost felt that if she stared at it for long enough, the answer would come through some sort of telepathy. She blew out a breath. If only that could be true.
“You said they wanted to get to France,” Zoltan said. “Do you know when they were planning to do that?”
Rose shook her head. “He sent this last letter in March 1938. All he said was that things were going badly and they needed to get out.”
“This is going to be hard for you to hear.” He pressed his hands together, steepling his fingers. “There were people from Spain in the camp I was in. Men like your brother, who managed to cross the border into France, were rounded up by the Germans when they took control of the country. There were women, too. Mauthausen was where all the Spanish prisoners were taken.”
Rose’s throat felt as if it were closing over. She groped inside her bag for the photograph of Nathan. “This is my brother.” Her voice sounded croaky. She watched Zoltan’s face intently, terrified of what she might see, but just as afraid of his covering up to spare her feelings.
“No.” He looked up, holding her gaze. “I never saw him.”
“And what about her?” Rose laid the images side by side on the table.
Zoltan shook his head. “I don’t know. The women were in a different part of the camp.”
“There would be records, though, wouldn’t there? I know her first name and roughly how old she was.”
“The Nazis destroyed all the records when they knew the Allies were coming,” Zoltan said.
Rose stared at the faces in front of her. Part of her was relieved that Zoltan didn’t recognize Nathan. If he wasn’t in the camp, there was a chance that he had escaped somewhere else, that he and the girl and their child were still alive. But if that were true, where were they?
“I don’t know what to do,” she breathed.
“You need to talk to Maria—she knows everyone around here. I’d take you to see her now, but she’s gone to Granada to visit her sister.” Zoltan stood up. “Let me get you something to eat.” He went over to the fire and unhooked the pot that had been hanging there when Rose first entered the cottage. “The Alpujarreños call it puchero de hinojos. Fennel stew. Would you like some?”
Rose didn’t feel like eating, but it seemed rude to refuse the steaming bowl he set down in front of her. And when she put the spoon to her mouth, the taste was as good as the smell.
“Maria gave me the recipe,” he said when she complimented him. “I wasn’t much of a cook when I came here—I had to learn fast.”
“Why did you choose Spain? When you were liberated, I mean.”
“I couldn’t go back to Hungary.” He stared into his soup, his spoon midway between the bowl and his mouth. “Too many bad memories. I was a partisan, like your brother—we carried out guerrilla raids against the fascists when they took over my country.” He huffed out a breath, glancing at the spoon as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. “I wanted a new start—somewhere far away from all that, somewhere far away from people, too, if I’m honest.”
“I can understand that,” Rose said. “You must have seen the worst things human beings are capable of in Mauthausen.”
The muscles of his jaw tightened, as if he’d decided not to let out whatever he might have been about to tell her. Instead he said, “Would you like more coffee?”
Rose watched him as he filled the kettle. Hardly surprising, she thought, if, just like Jean Beau-Marie, he wanted to keep the horror of what had happened in the camp locked up inside. But he wasn’t completely like Jean—he didn’t have that aura of melancholy following him like a dark cloud.
Gunesh was sprawled on the wolf-skin rug in front of the fire. Zoltan crouched down beside him, rubbing the dog’s head. Rose smiled as Gunesh rolled over onto his back, wanting his tummy tickled.
“How long will you stay in Pampaneira?” Zoltan glanced up at her, his fingers half-hidden in Gunesh’s fur.
“I . . . I’m not sure.”
“Does it depend on what you find out about your brother?”
“Partly, yes.” She hesitated, wanting to tell him the truth about Nieve, about the trauma of Lola’s arrest and the danger of returning to Granada. It would be such a relief to pour it all out to someone. She pressed her lips shut, reminding herself that she’d known this man for only twenty-four hours. Yes, he’d been kind and helpful—but could she really trust him?
“Well,” he said, “I hope you’ll still be here at the end of next week.”
“Why?”
“It’s the night of San Juan—a big fiesta in the villages around here.”
“A fiesta?” She echoed his words, her mind suddenly filled with Cristóbal’s face. “There seem to be an awful lot of them—what’s this one about?”
“It’s supposed to mark the beginning of summer,” Zoltan replied. “Although it’s so hot already you wouldn’t know the difference.”
The beginning of summer.
It sounded like a promise of something good to come. She reached across the table for the railway timetable with Nathan’s scrawled note on the back. To be in a room that Nathan would have known, holding something he had written, was more than she ever could have hoped for. But it was only part of the story. How agonizing to learn that the woman who might know the rest was in the city Rose had left just days ago. Now there was nothing she could do but wait.
Chapter 23
Granada, Spain
Every time Lola heard the cell door rattle, she began to tremble uncontrollably, wondering if this day would be the one they came to drag her off to Málaga prison. She had become acutely aware of the different sounds the door made. Even in the dark she could tell if the rasp of metal on metal signaled the hatch being pulled back for the delivery of food and water or the door being unlocked for someone to come inside.
This time it was not just the scrape of the key in the lock that she heard. There were voices. More than one person had come to her cell. What did that mean? Had they come to get her? Did they think it would take more than one guard to get her from the police station to the truck that would take her to prison?
But when the door opened, it was not a guard she saw but a priest. His face was in shadow, and even when he stepped into the cell, it was difficult to make out his features in the gray light filtering through the window.
“Buenos días, mi niña.” Good morning, my child.
His voice sounded young. As he came closer, she heard the door lo
ck behind him.
“Buenos días.” Her own voice sounded ancient. They were the first words she had uttered in days. She hadn’t asked for a priest. Why was he here? Fearful images crowded her mind. Was this what they did when they were about to take you out and shoot you?
“Please, sit down.” He gestured to the bed, which was the only place to sit. “I want to help you if I can.”
“Help me?” she echoed. “How can you do that?”
“Do you believe, child?”
Lola glanced up at the window. A week ago, she would have answered yes without a second thought. In her darkest times she had always prayed to God and the saints for help. The day she had lost her mother and brother and found Nieve, she had spent the night at the little shrine at the top of the mountain. She had got down on her knees to beg the Virgin of the Snows to get her and the baby safely across the mountains to Granada. But the horror of being imprisoned, of losing Nieve, of facing a life behind bars for killing a man who had tried to rape her—how could she go on believing? How could a loving God allow that to happen?
“It’s hard for you, I know,” he said. “But if you keep faith, your burden will be easier to bear.”
“How?” There was a defiant edge to her voice. Easy for him to say, she thought.
“You must be lonely here. They tell me you have family in Sacromonte. Have they come to visit you?”
“They’re Gypsies. You know how the police are with us.”
“Ah.” He nodded. “That must be very hard for you. You have a child, too, don’t you? A little girl?”
Lola’s eyes flashed with suspicion. “Who told you that?”
“Someone who knows you and cares about the welfare of the child.”
So this was what the visit was all about. Nothing to do with her spiritual welfare—just a ruse to find Nieve and cart her off to a convent. “They were telling lies,” she hissed. “I don’t have a daughter.”
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