The Snow Gypsy

by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

  Don’t you believe in heaven, Rose?

  For a split second she felt Nathan was there beside her, lying on his back, gazing up at the stars.

  “You’re not asleep, are you?”

  Zoltan’s voice broke the spell. He’d brought her coffee and a plate of something she couldn’t quite make out in the darkness.

  “Would you like one of these?”

  “What are they?” Rose propped herself up on her elbow.

  “They’re called buñuelos. Sweet fritters—a bit like doughnuts. The bakery only sells them on festival days—I’m not sure why. They’re very good.”

  “Mmm.” Rose felt grains of sugar crunch between her teeth as she bit into it.

  Scenting food, Gunesh lifted his head from the blanket.

  “Can I give him some?” Zoltan asked.

  “Well, he shouldn’t really have sweet things—but I suppose a little bit won’t hurt him.”

  Zoltan crouched down beside her and broke off a morsel of the buñuelo. “Oh look—they’ve started lighting the bonfires.”

  Rose straightened her elbow, raising herself a little higher off the blanket. In the dark folds of the valley below were tiny pinpricks of yellow light, each village marking the beginning of summer with its own towering blaze. “Do you think they all have witches on top of them?”

  “I don’t know. They certainly have some strange customs around here. In one of the villages, they have a procession in winter where they make a huge figure of a fox out of paper and carry it through the streets on the men’s shoulders. Someone dressed as a priest follows behind it, reciting all the crimes this fox is supposed to have committed during the previous year. They call it the Paseo de la Zorra.”

  “Zorra? Feminine?”

  “Yes.”

  Rose grunted. “Witches, vixens—why is it always the female that gets the blame?”

  “I suppose it’s been that way since Genesis, hasn’t it?” He settled back on a cushion. “There’s a vixen living in the copse behind the cottage. Have you heard her?”

  “I did—that first night I stayed here.”

  “She had a litter of cubs a couple of months ago. I used to creep up there first thing in the morning to watch them playing. I tried to sketch them. I’m not much of an artist, but it made me feel good.” He huffed out a breath. “That sounds sentimental, I know.”

  “No, it doesn’t. I feel just the same when I’m out picking herbs for my veterinary practice. I get childishly excited when I see a flower I’m not expecting to find—something that’s bloomed earlier or later than usual or something that wouldn’t normally grow in the place I’m searching in.”

  “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 ask
ed 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.

  “Are you sure you’re okay to go walking up the mountain?” Zoltan asked.

  “I think it’ll do me good,” she replied. “I need to strengthen the muscles that I sprained. Don’t worry—I’ll stop and rest if I think I’m overdoing it.”

  “Well, if you’re sure.” He fastened the buckle on the second set of panniers and gathered up the lead reins of the two mules. “Is there anything you want me to get you while I’m in the village?”

  “Could you call at the post office again?”

  “Do you want me to go to the mill as well, just in case?”

  Rose’s face clouded. “If anything’s gone there, it’ll probably be on the fire by now.”

  “How long is it since you wrote to those people in Granada?”

  “Nearly three weeks. If there’s nothing waiting for me, I’m going to write more letters. If I keep pestering them, they won’t be able to ignore me, will they?”

  “I hope not.” He glanced at Nieve, who was playing with Gunesh on the grassy bank behind the cottage. “She doesn’t talk about Lola, does she? Do you think she’s forgotten her?”

  Rose shook her head. “When we first arrived, she cried a lot. After she started school, I hardly dared mention Lola for fear of upsetting her so much she wouldn’t be able to do the things that normal children do. Talking about it is too traumatic for her. I think she’s buried the pain deep inside.”

  Zoltan nodded. There was a faraway look in his eyes that hinted at pain he, too, had buried. He pulled on the reins, and the mules lumbered forward. “Nieve,” he called, “are you ready?”

  Rose set off a few minutes after waving them goodbye. She wanted to get up the mountain while it was still early, to get to the flowers before the sun parched them of dew. She had water, fruit, bread, and cheese in her rucksack—enough to keep her going for several hours. And if anything happened—if her ankle gave way again—she would send Gunesh back down to raise the alarm.

  She followed the course of a stream, walking beneath trees whose boughs hung over the water. There were maples, junipers, holm oaks, and willows. Elder trees dropped tiny snow-white florets, as delicate as confetti, each time the breeze stirred the branches.

  As she climbed higher, the woodland gave way to a region of gray rock and pincushion plants—cacti the size and shape of the Moroccan leather footstools she had often glimpsed in the dark interiors of Spanish houses. Dotted among them were rockroses, with wrinkled pink petals and yellow centers. This flower was on Maria’s list. She intended to extract oil from it, which she said was good for nervous complaints, and make a brew of the petals as a gargle for ulcerated throats.

  The next plant Rose spotted was a larger cactus—the prickly pear. Maria wanted the flowers that sprouted from the leathery green flesh to make a cure for amoebic dysentery. Picking them was a tricky process. It took nearly an hour to gather enough to fill one of the muslin bags the old woman had given her.

  With two out of the five on her list accounted for, Rose decided to take a break. There was a flat rock just above the place where the prickly pear grew. She lowered her rucksack onto it and settled down to take in the breathtaking view of the valley and the sea beyond.

  Something on the edge of her field of vision made her look up. A huge bird glided noiselessly over her head. It was bigger than any she’d ever seen—its red-brown wings glinting as the sun caught the feathers. A golden eagle. She watched, mesmerized, as it glided over an outcrop of rocks before soaring up toward the peak of the mountain.

  Somewhere up there, where fingers of snow still clung to sunless crevices, was the little shrine Zoltan had described—the one dedicated to the Virgin of the Snows. She wondered how long it would take to reach it from here. Judging by the steepness of the terrain, it was certainly not something to contemplate with a newly mended ankle.

  She thought about the story Zoltan had told her, about the traveler caught in a blizzard on top of the mountain, who had prayed for help and seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. What was it Zoltan had said? He begged to be saved, if he was worthy. It made her think of Lola, who must have taken the same route as that long-ago traveler to get to Granada. If anyone was worthy of being saved, she was. And yet she was locked up in a ghastly prison cell with no prospect of release.

  Rose closed her eyes, summoning up the image of the statue she had seen in the church of Nuestra Señora de la Cabeza, of the Black Virgin in the gold-spangled dress.

  Please, God, if you’re real, set Lola free.

  It was the first time she had prayed since leaving England. She felt as if her faith were hanging by a thread. The sense of peace she had felt in the church at Capileira had been fleeting, swept away the very next day by the grim facts Maria had divulged. Could a few murmured words, however fervent, really alter the course of a human life? Had that traveler been saved from the blizzard because he prayed, or would he have survived anyway? Did the Virgin Mary really appear to him on the mountain, or was he hallucinating as hypothermia began to shut down his brain?

  There was no straightforward answer to any of those questions. The scientific rigor that had been drummed into Rose as a student was of no use in pondering such matters. Faith was not about facts or certainties; otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. Believing was what counted. Even when the odds seemed impossible. Did she believe?

  Her mind’s eye flashed back to that summer, ten years ago, when she had camped out on the Sussex marshes, waking each morning with joy in her heart at the sound of the birds and the scent of the dew-covered meadow. In those days she had sensed the presence of God in every living thing: the birds, the animals, the trees, and the flowers—and in Bill Lee and his sisters. Was she the sort of person who could believe in a benevolent creator only when things were going well? Was her spirituality the fair-weather kind? Too flimsy and ephemeral to stand against a storm?

  She glanced at the cliffs above her head, as if the answer were up there, contained in the little shrine she couldn’t reach. Did the pilgrims who climbed up to it each year find answers to their questions? Was the journey the key rather than the destination?

  She thought of her own journey to Spain—full of unexpected twists and turns, exhilarating highs and miserable lows—ending in nothing but a sense of closure, of something laid to rest. But no—that wasn’t the whole story. Because other lives had been affected by this journey. If she had chosen not to come to Spain—if she had stayed safely cocooned in London—what would have become of Nieve?

  Rose drew in a sharp breath. The sun was high in the sky now—and there were still three more plants to find. With some difficulty she got to her feet. Her ankle felt stiff, and she hobbled the first few steps from the rock to the goat track she’d been following. It was a relief when she spotted two of the wildflowers she was looking for growing just a few yards apart. One was the Sierra Nevada violet—more like a pansy than the violets native to Britain, with pale-pink and yellow petals. Maria said the crushed leaves could be used as a poultice to treat skin cancers and growths. The other herb was called trumpet gentian, with intense blue flowers shaped like the musical instrument it was named after. It was the root of this plant Maria wanted. She used it to neutralize the poison in snakebites and scorpion stings.

  Once she had collected enough of each of these, Rose trudged on up the path. She paused to admire a flower she had read about but never seen: Plantago nivalis—the star of the snows. It had tiny star-shaped petals covered in fine hairs that looked like frost when the sun caught them. She crouched down to get a closer look, and when she straightened up, she caught sight of the final item on her list. Tall, with a halo of ghostly white petals, the opium poppies sprouted in the shadow of a blackened cactus that looked as if it had been struck by lightning.

  Rose had been surprised when Maria had added this plant to the list. �
��Aren’t they dangerous?” she’d asked.

  “Of course,” Maria had replied. “Many herbs are dangerous unless you know what you’re doing. Opium poppies don’t cure anything—and they’ll kill a man if he takes too much—but they’re wonderful for relieving unbearable pain.”

  Maria had explained that it was the juice of the poppy heads she needed, extracted from the plant before the petals fell off and the seeds inside the pod dried out. Rose picked half a dozen and packed them carefully inside her rucksack. Then she started to make her way back down the track. If anything, going down the mountain was harder than going up. The angle of her foot aggravated the soreness of her ankle. When she came to a place where the path ran past a waterfall, she decided to take off her boots and soak her throbbing muscles.

  The water was breathtakingly cold. Even Gunesh, who had lowered his head to take a drink, jumped back in surprise at the icy temperature. But once she got used to it, the effect was very soothing. She sat on a rock, both feet dangling in the gushing pool the meltwater had carved out. The only sound was the splash of the water and the background chorus of cicadas. In such a remote spot, with the sun so hot, she was tempted to throw off her clothes and get right into the pool. But with her ankle still weak, it wouldn’t be sensible. The rocks beneath the surface were slimy with weeds. She could end up stuck in the freezing water, unable to clamber out.

  She thought about the last time she had been out for a swim—in the sea in Provence with Cristóbal. It made her wither inside to remember the way she had felt that night, the wild, erotic sense of being in love in a place where the night went on forever. This mountain wilderness could hardly be more of a contrast with the frenetic atmosphere at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. As different as Zoltan was from Cristóbal.

  She closed her eyes, angry with herself for allowing Cristóbal back into her thoughts. But she couldn’t help wondering where he was now—whether he had taken Juanita and the children to the countryside for safety, whether he had stayed there or come back to Granada to try to see Lola.