The Snow Gypsy Read online

  Rose could feel her heart thumping against her ribs. “Do you know the name of it, Bill?”

  “The town’s named after the two Saint Marys—the ones who first saw Jesus when he rose from the dead. It’s in a place called Province, I think.”

  “Provence?”

  “Ah! That’s it.”

  Rose jumped to her feet, unable to sit still. Suddenly there was a glimmer of . . . what? Not hope—that was too strong a word. But Bill had shone a light into the gloom inside her head. It was almost as if he had given her permission to do what she’d wanted to do for so long. But could she really go? Was there any sense in searching when there had been no communication from Nathan for eight years? Her head told her that there was little chance of his being alive, but her heart wouldn’t let go. What if he was in prison and unable to write letters? She had to know for certain what had happened to him—one way or another. There would be no rest for her otherwise. Not ever.

  “When is it, exactly?”

  “It’s always the tail end of May.”

  “I could go, couldn’t I? There’s enough time.”

  Bill caught the hesitation in her voice. “You’re thinking you might not find him.” He took her hand in his. “You know, Rose, everything that is lost will be found.”

  Tears prickled behind her eyes. “Not if a person dies.”

  “Don’t you believe in heaven, Rose?”

  “I used to, when I was a little girl. My grandfather bought me a puppy when he came to visit from Turkey. I loved it more than anything. But it got sick and died. I wanted there to be a heaven so I could see it again. But . . .”

  “When two creatures pair up—be it people or animals—there has to come a time of parting. Perhaps it began when God separated the earth from the water. Dry land and sea. And the rain that falls on the mountain spends a lifetime finding its way back to the place it belongs.” He tapped his pipe against the step and refilled it, his fingers the same leaf brown as the tobacco. When he’d lit it, he said, “What’s binding you, Rose?”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. “There’s nothing to prevent me from going. The practice can survive without me for a month or two. And I’ve got the money from my book to keep me going. It’s just . . .” She couldn’t put it into words, that sickening fear of what she might actually find.

  “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. That kind of fear kills you without you realizing. Like bleeding inside.”

  Somewhere in the trees a bird began calling, the notes as thin and sharp as icicles in the gathering darkness. It was a sound she recognized from that summer long ago. The plaintive song of a nightingale. She’d heard it the night Nathan had come to say goodbye.

  “You’re right,” she whispered. “I feel like I’m half-dead already.”

  “So you need to do this. Then you can start living again.”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes. Now there was only the warmth of the fire, the smell of woodsmoke and tobacco, and the sounds of the night.

  Chapter 5

  Bloomsbury, London, England: May 18, 1946

  Rose stood by the fireplace, a silver candelabra in her hand. She glanced around the apartment, checking that she had left nothing of her own on the shelves or the windowsills. Tomorrow someone else would be living here: the newly qualified vet who was going to be her stand-in at the practice over the summer. It would save her having to pay rent for the time she planned to be away.

  She carried the candelabra over to the cupboard into which she had crammed her books, clothes, and other personal items. Wrapping it in one of her skirts, she wedged it in and locked the cupboard door. The solid-silver menorah was one of a handful of valuable things her mother, Esther, had refused to sell when she was forced to leave the Georgian house in the Cheshire countryside where Rose and her brother had grown up. The seven-branched candlestick had been lit every Friday night before dinner for as long as Rose could remember.

  Mother, you haven’t been in a synagogue for years—why are you doing that? Nathan’s voice drifted out of a corner of her memory. She saw his face, a teasing smile on his lips. A remark such as this would often provoke a heated debate. Rose had always tried to avoid taking sides. At boarding school she had learned about other faiths and developed her own brand of spirituality. But she hadn’t wanted to upset her parents by telling them what she believed.

  Her hand went to her throat, fingering the pendant her father had brought back from Turkey for her twenty-first birthday. It was a silver-and-gold ḥoshen necklace—a rectangular pendant set with twelve different gemstones, one to represent each of the twelve tribes of Israel. It grieved her to take it off. But it was too precious to wear on her travels. It was going to have to go into the cupboard, too.

  Her father’s death—just three years after that gift had been given—had brought more than one kind of grief to the family. Within days of the funeral, the bailiffs had arrived, demanding settlement of vast debts Rose and her mother had known nothing about. The house and most of the contents had had to be sold. Esther and Rose had gone to live in a rented cottage in Berkshire, near the place the Royal Veterinary College had moved to when the Blitz began.

  By the time Rose had graduated, her mother was seriously ill. There had been no question of applying for jobs. She had cared for her mother and spent what little free time she had writing the book that had been published just before her mother’s death.

  Rose glanced out the window, across Bloomsbury Square, at the blackened shell of a once-grand house. Coming to live in London had been her way of making a fresh start. She had thought that moving to the city would help her to move on from losing her mother. It had worked—for a while. Her new job had been exhausting but rewarding, and her boss was open minded about the possibility of herbal treatments for animals. But outside working hours she found city life stifling. She longed for greenery and wide-open spaces. On days off she would get as far away from the capital as she could on a train or a bus, taking Gunesh for long walks, whatever the weather. It hadn’t helped her put down roots in her new home. Eight months on, there wasn’t a single person in London she felt close to.

  She walked through to the bedroom, where Gunesh was curled up on the rug next to her rucksack. On the bed lay two maps of Spain—one that showed the whole country and one larger-scale version, of the region of Andalucia. She had spent endless hours poring over these maps in the years since Nathan had left England. The second map was held together with tape, so often had she unfolded it, running her finger along black dots on mountain ranges, wondering which of the hundreds of villages could be the one her brother had described in his letter.

  She’d spent whole days in the British Library, going through reference books on Spain, searching for something to go on. But like the inquiries she’d made to the International Red Cross about Nathan, there was nothing. She felt a desperate need to talk to people who knew the terrain and the country personally. But going directly to Spain was not sensible. Andalucia was the size of Ireland. She could end up wandering around for months. She needed a signpost—some clue as to where to start her search. Going to the Gypsy fiesta in France offered the opportunity of talking to people who had lived through the Spanish Civil War and had been on the same side as Nathan. It seemed like her best chance.

  She slid the maps into the front pocket of her rucksack. The only things left to pack were the photographs. One of Nathan and one of each of her parents. It was impossible to look at the faces without welling up. Her mother, plump cheeked and smiling, so different from the frail, broken person she had become at the end. Her father, staring boldly at the camera. He had gone to France nine months into the war, believing that his Turkish passport would keep him safe. But he was a Jew first and a Turk second. The neutrality of his native land had not saved him when the Nazis arrived in Paris.

  Nathan’s picture was very different from her parents’ images—not a formal studio shot but a photo Rose had taken herself at the old house in Cheshi
re. Nathan had been out riding, about to jump off his horse in the stable yard. He looked so young and full of life. It was impossible to believe that he, too, could be dead.

  There was another face she had tried to picture in the years since Nathan had been missing. The face of the unborn child he had written about in that last letter. A child who would be seven or eight years old now, if he or she were alive. She couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to have a niece or nephew. To be part of a family again. How wonderful that would be.

  She slipped the photographs into her wallet, trying to steer her mind toward the practicalities of traveling to France. She mustn’t allow herself to fantasize about finding Nathan and his child. She must prepare herself for whatever this search might reveal. To put an end to the not knowing—that was why she had to go on this journey.

  Chapter 6

  France: May 20, 1946

  Lola crept out from underneath the sheets. She shivered as her feet found the rough wooden planks of the wagon. The early mornings were chilly in the Pyrenees, even this late in the spring. She could hear a magpie—its mocking rattle competing with Cristóbal’s gentle snoring. She glanced at the child. Nieve was still sound asleep, her arms stretched out above her head like a dancer. The peacock shawl was wrapped around her left wrist. It was frayed at the edges now and peppered with moth holes, but the child refused to go to bed without it.

  Lola reached across her to retrieve her own woolen shawl that was tangled up in the blanket Nieve had thrown off. She covered up the sleeping child before pulling back the curtain that screened the bed. There was Cristóbal, lying on the pile of sacks that served for a mattress, his mouth open. She thought how innocent he looked when he was asleep.

  She made her way to the front end of the wagon, trying not to make it creak. Slipping her bare feet into her boots, she lifted a flap of canvas and eased herself onto the dew-soaked grass. She could see signs of life from the others camped nearby. A wisp of smoke from a fire bought back to life from the night before. A man’s shirt and some underclothes hung out to dry on the branches of a hawthorn bush. A gray-muzzled dog cocking its leg against a moss-covered tree stump.

  By this evening they would all be in Provence. After ten days on the road, Lola was more than ready. Unlike her fellow travelers, she was not used to the nomadic life. She and Cristóbal had always been house dwellers, not wanderers. In Granada there were both kinds. The Gypsy population waxed and waned like the moon. Cristóbal didn’t own a proper vardo, like the carved beauties the others in their party possessed—he’d had to fashion one from a wagon borrowed from Antonio Lopez, the mule man. He’d made a roof from bent bamboo and waxed canvas. It leaked a little in the rain, but he’d convinced her it would last for the few weeks they would be away.

  She felt the breeze as she stirred up the embers of the fire. Cristóbal would need strong coffee to rouse him from the wine-soaked slumber he had fallen into last night after accompanying her on the guitar. She had danced beneath the stars for the others in the forest clearing, using a wooden board to stamp out the palos. It hadn’t been easy, performing on a dance floor no wider than her shawl, but it had been good practice for the days ahead.

  She wondered what they would be like—these foreign Gypsies. French, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish. Cristóbal, who had been to Les Saintes-Maries back in the thirties, had told her that although they all shared the same kawlo rat, she would see many differences between her own people and those from other lands—not just in appearance but in character.

  He had said all this as a preamble to advising on the kind of man she should choose as a husband. He seemed obsessed with the business of finding her a mate. It was a side of family life she loathed, this attitude of Gypsy men toward single female relatives of childbearing age. It was so controlling. So patronizing. She reminded him that she had walked across a snow-covered mountain range at fourteen years old with a newborn baby and only a few goats to keep the pair of them from starving to death. If she could survive that, she could survive anything life might throw at her—and she didn’t need any man mapping out her future.

  “Mama!” Nieve appeared beside her, barefoot and rubbing sleep from her eyes. “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Mushroom tortilla,” Lola replied. “And you’re picking the mushrooms.” She smiled at Nieve’s downturned mouth. “I’ll buy you hair ribbons at the fiesta if you can find more than ten.”

  “How will I know when I get to ten?”

  “You can count them on your fingers, like I showed you.”

  The child examined her hands, a frown wrinkling the smooth skin between her eyebrows.

  “One, two, three, four . . . ,” Lola began, starting with the thumb of her left hand.

  “Five, six . . . ten!” Nieve held up all her fingers at once, a cheeky grin lighting up her face.

  Lola rolled her eyes as she handed her a basket. “Put your boots on!” she called out. But Nieve had already vanished, fairylike, into the trees.

  A sudden gust of wind rustled the leaves. Lola shivered, pulling her shawl tighter. It wasn’t the cold, not really. More like an irrational twinge of foreboding. It was only in the past few months that she had allowed Nieve to go anywhere on her own. Cristóbal’s children had been teasing their cousin about being a mama’s girl. And Cristóbal himself had told Lola it was high time she gave the child a bit of freedom. But Lola couldn’t help the creeping feeling of unease that came over her whenever Nieve went off alone. It was the fear of losing her. Suddenly and without warning. The way she’d lost her brother and her mother.

  Rose awoke to the aroma of coffee. A tray had been placed on the minuscule table beneath the train window. The steam from the spout of the silver pot had formed a trickle of moisture on the glass. She wondered how she hadn’t heard the steward bring it in—or sensed the change in the light when he’d pulled up the blind. She hadn’t expected to sleep so deeply.

  She propped herself up on one elbow and craned her neck. Outside was a swirling landscape of lilac, gold, and green. The wind rippling through fields of sunbaked lavender. She retrieved her wristwatch from the narrow shelf beside her bed. In just under an hour, the train would reach Avignon. Then she would board another train for Arles. After that a bus would take her the short distance to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

  She’d never slept on a train before. In years gone by, she would have broken up a journey like this in Paris. But the thought of spending even a single night in the city where her aunt and uncle had lived—and where her father had died—was utterly unbearable.

  She’d pulled down the blind as soon as she boarded the train in Calais. It was the only way to avoid glimpses of places that would remind her of happier times, when she and her parents and Nathan would picnic in the Bois de Boulogne or take a boat trip down the Seine on their annual visit to Aunt Isabelle and Uncle Maurice.

  From the deck of the ferry, France had looked as gray and ravaged as London. Stepping off the boat onto French soil, she had felt like a mourner arriving at a funeral. She’d climbed onto the train that would take her south, weighed down by the thought of the hundreds of Jewish families who had been forced into cattle wagons to travel in the opposite direction, to the death camps. People like her aunt and uncle. People like herself.

  But here in Provence, it was as if the war had never happened. The fields of lavender and sunflowers rolling past the train window were broken only by lines of poplar trees and the odd red-tiled farmhouse. There were no bombed-out buildings. No sense of decay. It was a landscape that looked timeless.

  Gunesh licked her face all over when she went to fetch him from the guard’s van at Avignon, unable to understand why he’d had to spend a night without her. When she’d made a fuss of him, she went to collect her rucksack from the baggage car. It was very heavy. Crammed into the main compartment were a tent, cooking utensils, and a sleeping bag, along with a few basic toiletries and a small assortment of clothes. She had no idea how long this journey would las
t—or where it would end—but what she had in her rucksack would enable her to stay in Spain for the whole of the summer if she needed to.

  She bought food in Arles while she waited for the bus that would take her to the little town where the Gypsy fiesta was being held. She wasn’t sure whether there would be many shops in such a place, and she didn’t want to arrive without something to offer the people she hoped would help her. If these Gypsies were anything like the ones she had met in England, they would be happy with simple gifts of things they couldn’t find or make themselves, such as tobacco, tea, and coffee. She stuffed packets of each of these into the side pockets of her rucksack, along with bread, cheese, and apples for herself.

  On the bus she got her first glimpse of the wild landscape called the Camargue. The wetlands bordering the Mediterranean Sea were nothing like the Sussex marshes. Sand dunes crowned with pink-blossomed tamarisk trees lined the seashore. Coral-winged flamingos stood knee deep in the brackish water, balancing precariously on one leg, and shy white egrets picked their way across muddy banks to nests concealed in swathes of marsh grass.

  Rose caught her breath as she spotted a trio of wild white horses charging through a water meadow, their manes and tails flying out behind them like sea foam. And farther on, she caught a glimpse of a huge black bull lumbering out of a clump of bulrushes, its coat gleaming like polished ebony in the sunshine.

  As the bus neared its destination, she caught sight of the Gypsy caravans. There were whole fields full of them, a sea of painted wagons with lines of washing strung between them, fluttering in the breeze. She saw naked children kicking up clouds of dust as they chased each other under the vardos and out the other side. Dogs snoozed in the shade while women sat on steps, peeling vegetables, plaiting rush baskets, or combing their hair. Men were strumming guitars and saddling up horses. At the edge of one field, she glimpsed two youths, stripped to the waist, fists flying in a bare-knuckle fight.