The Perfect Stranger (38 page)

J
OHN
D
ONNE

“T
HE
O
LD
O
NE
,
SHE WILL TALK TO
S
TEVENS FIRST, THEN
Faith.” Estrellita hovered at the edge of the entrance. The rain had stopped, and watery sunshine lit the valley below. “You—” she jerked her chin at Nick, “You stay out here.”

“I’ve told you,” Nick began, exasperated. “I’m not going to lay a finger on—”

“Everybody must be out here. She want talk to Stevens, then Faith alone.”

“Me?” Stevens looked surprised. “What would she want with me?” He opened the cottage door and went inside.

The old lady was sitting on a bench near the fire. She beckoned him closer. When he stood in front of her, she lifted her hand and laid it gently on his chest, then seemed to listen.

After an interminable silence, she nodded and said slowly, “You find what you search for on hill below cottage. You not see it from here. Go on foot. Take your friends. Send the English girl to me.” Mystified, Stevens left.

He sent Faith in, then told the others what she’d said to him. They looked down into the valley. Below them, a river snaked in a silvery line. Nick stiffened. “I think that might be the Zadorra River. Estrellita?”

She nodded sulkily.
“Sí, Rio Zadorra.”

“Then over there is Vittoria, and below us, in that valley down there is where we fought Boney’s brother and the French.” He looked back and forth, taking his bearings. “If we go down to the river, to that hairpin bend there, I’m sure I can find my way back to Algy’s cairn.” He looked at Stevens. “Shall we go and see?”

Stevens swallowed and nodded. The three men and dog set out. “I come with you,” Estrellita announced. “You maybe get lost. And also…” Her eyes wandered to Mac. “I think maybe I need protect you.”

Mac frowned. “You? Protect us?” His voice was scornful.

“Sí,”
Estrellita said. She cocked her head to one side and examined Mac thoughtfully. “See, I say before you look pretty in dress, Tavish, and you do,” she said. “Verrry pretty. Basque girls like pretty man too much, but don’t worry, I protect you.” And she skipped off, full of cheek. With a mock growl, Mac followed her, a swirl of hairy legs and blue blanket. The bleak look in his eyes had completely disappeared.

Faith entered the cottage cautiously. The old woman beckoned her over with a gentle smile. She pointed to a stool and indicated that Faith was to bring it close and sit down in front of her.

“You are the one who call my little star your sister of the road, no?”

“Yes.” Faith nodded.

She gazed into Faith’s eyes for a long time and then nodded. “It is good. You may call me Abuela.”

It meant grandmother. “Thank you,” Faith whispered.

The old woman hesitated, then said, “The big red bear man—he is good to my little star? Not hurt her?”

“My husband says Mac loves your Estrellita, if that is what you mean. He has known him for years. He says Mac would never hurt any woman.”

The old woman pursed her lips and considered her words. “And your man, he is good man?”

Faith nodded emphatically. “Oh yes, Abuela. A wonderful man.” She felt her eyes fill with tears and blinked them away. The old woman watched, unembarrassed, her wise old eyes, deep in their wrinkled pouches, noticing everything.

“It is good. You great lady, I think. I have short time now to live. Will you be sister of the road to my little star when I am gone?”

“Yes, of course I will.”

“Will you take her from this place? After I am gone it will have only bad memories for her.”

Faith glanced around, thinking that this was Estrellita’s home. The old woman seemed to read her thoughts. “She is last of our line; we have no family left. Estrellita like to call herself gypsy, but in truth in our blood we have Basque, we have Moorish blood, we have Spanish, we have French and Portuguese. This place was my home, and it was good, mostly, but an evil thing happened to my little star in the valley below when she was young girl. It better for her to make home in some new place.”

Faith said, “I understand, and I promise you, I will take care of her. Estrellita can come with me back to England, after…after…” She blinked again, rapidly. They would need each other, she and Estrellita, having lost the two people they most loved in the world.

“Give me your hands, child.” She held out her hands, and Faith put hers into them. Again she felt that tingling sensation. The old woman closed her eyes and seemed to listen.

She opened her eyes, and the old brown eyes seemed to glow. “There will be a child.” She glanced at Faith’s stomach. “Remember that. Do not fear for what must come now. The coming of your husband to this place was foretold. Three foreigners will come; the first, his blood in the earth at my feet, the second a man of fire, blood of my blood, and the third with eyes of ice, whose blood will take my life.

Faith held her breath. The old woman patted her hands.

“This was said at my birth, more than ninety years ago. Remember that, help my little star to remember it, and know that I am content. Now, I must sleep. He have take long time to arrive, your man with eyes of ice.” She thought for a moment and smiled. “I think maybe you melt that ice, Faith. Only the color is same, now.”

“Here it is, the cairn. See?” They climbed up to the pile of stones, about three feet high. Nick had spent the last hour reliving the battle of Vittoria for Stevens’s benefit. He’d pointed out where they’d camped the night before, where Anson’s Brigade, of which the Sixteenth was a part, had been deployed.

He’d shown him the place where Algy died; said it was quick and clean. He would die before he admitted anything else to Algy’s father. Stevens probably knew, anyway. He’d been at Waterloo. Few deaths were quick and clean.

And now they’d found the cairn under which Algy’s body lay. Nick had carried the body up there himself and fetched every stone with his own hands, protecting the shallow grave from predators, animal and human.

He straightened the stick, which had fallen crooked in the pile of stones. On it was scratched these words: “Algernon Stevens, Sixteenth Light Dragoons, 1792–1813. A true friend.” Around the cairn grew one or two weeds and thick clumps of wildflowers.

Stevens knelt down and wordlessly started to tidy around the cairn. Nick put a hand on his shoulder and then knelt beside him and started weeding, too.

When they’d finished, Stevens sat back on his heels. He looked at the horizon and frowned. He stood, looked down at the river and up to the top of the hills. “The old lady was right. You can’t see the cottage from here. But it’s directly above us, hidden by that ledge there.”

He looked down at the small pile of weeds and up at where the cottage lurked, invisibly. “Someone’s kept Algy’s grave tidy all these years.”

Nick frowned. It was true. There were a lot fewer weeds around Algy’s cairn than around any of the normal rocky outcrops scattered across the mountainside.

“And those flowers didn’t grow there by accident.” Stevens called to Estrellita, who was in quiet conversation with Mac. She turned, looking unhappy.

“Estrellita, do you know who planted these flowers here?” Stevens asked.

She shrugged. “Me.”

“Why?”

“The Old One, she tell me I must keep this place nice.”

“But why?”

Again she shrugged. “It is something to do with the prophesy. She know you will come, Stevens.”

“But how? And how could she possibly know it was my son under those stones? She told me, right up there, not an hour ago—she said, ‘You will find what you search for on the hill below the cottage.’” He stared at Nick, mystified, and then at Algy’s grave. “But how could she know? How in the world could she know?”

The wind whistled up the valley. Nobody had an answer.

From his pocket, Stevens took a small gold chain with a cross on it. “It was Algy’s mother’s,” he explained, though no one had asked.

He looped it over the stick with Algy’s name on it and tucked it out of sight, under a rock, then bent his head and said a silent prayer for his son. The men snatched off their caps and bent their heads, too.

The wind soughed through the mountains.

“Your man in pain. Bring him to me.” The old woman addressed Faith. Faith jumped. How could she tell? Faith had only just noticed that faint, telltale tic jumping in Nicholas’s jaw.

Estrellita, coming in from collecting eggs for breakfast, heard her and dropped to her knees, breaking several of the eggs held in her skirt. “No, no, Abuela. No! You must not!”

The old woman cupped her cheek tenderly. “Tend to your eggs, child.”

Estrellita sobbed, “But you know how it will end.”

The old woman kissed her tear-soaked face and repeated gently but firmly, “Bring him to me.” Estrellita started wailing, and she said, almost sharply, “Hush, little star. Be brave. You know it was foretold long before you were born. He is my destiny, and I am ready.”

Sobbing, Estrellita stumbled to the table and started to clean up the mess of eggs. “She want the Capitaine, now,” she mumbled to Faith as she passed.

Faith, puzzled and a little apprehensive, reached for Nicholas’s hand. “Come on, she wants to see you. I think she thinks she can help your headache.”

He snatched his hand away. “I don’t have a headache.”

“You know that’s not true,” Faith said quietly. “Come.”

But Nick refused to move. “There’s nothing she can do. I don’t believe in superstitious mumbo jumbo!”

“That does not matter!” Faith exploded. “Please, Nicholas, do it—if not for yourself, then for me and for the old lady.” She held his hands tightly and tried to explain her feelings to him. “Before, when she held my hands in hers, I felt the oddest tingle. And it was as if…I don’t know…something flowed from her to me, something good. I don’t know if she can help you, but you said yourself the finest doctors in England could do nothing for you, so why not let Abuela try?”

“Abuela?”

“She told me to call her that. It means grandmother.”

“I know what it means,” he said impatiently. “You seem to be mighty chummy all of a sudden with this old witch.”

She gave him a reproachful look. “Nicholas, that’s not worthy of you.” She squeezed his fingers. “I don’t know why, but I believe in this old woman. And she believes she has been waiting all her life for this moment.”

He snorted. “You want to believe.”

“Don’t you? Don’t you want to have faith?”

“I have Faith.” He put his arms around her. “And you are all I need.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Not for much longer if your doctors are to be believed. Please, Nicholas, let her try.”

Mac stepped forward. “Cap’n, if she tries and fails, what have you lost?”

“Mac? Don’t tell me you believe in this nonsense, too!”

The big man shrugged. “I don’t speak of it much—most folk think it superstitious nonsense—but my mam has The Sight. She sees things sometimes, in dreams, that come true. So I say try, Cap’n. I dinna ken what the old woman has planned for ye, but if it doesna work, what have you lost? And if it kills you the quicker…” He shrugged again. “No loss there either.”

Faith was horrified at his words. No loss, indeed! But before she could spring to his defense, Nick stopped her. “He means a quick death would be a merciful one. What the doctors told me would happen was—”

“I know. Morton Black spoke to them, and he told me.”

“Did he tell you one doctor recommended having me tied to a bed in a madhouse?”

“I would never let anyone do that to you,” she said fiercely. “Never! No matter what!”

There was a long pause.

Stevens added his mite. “That old lady knows things. Like why I was here and exactly where Algy’s grave was. And I felt that tingle, too, when she pressed her hand to my chest.”

“She’s never so much as touched me, so I wouldn’t know,” Nick said.

“There might be a good reason for that,” said Mac somberly.

Nick looked at each of them in turn, the people he trusted most in the world, then threw up his hands in defeat. “Oh, very well, if it will make you happy, I’ll let the old woman have her way with me.”

The old woman held out her hand to Nick.

“Nooooo!” Estrellita screamed and flung herself in between them.

The old woman turned to her, took her face in her hands, and spoke in a language no one else could understand. Gradually Estrellita calmed, though tears still poured down her cheeks. The old woman blessed her, making the sign of the cross on her forehead. She pulled a cross on a silver chain from around her neck, placed it around Estrellita’s throat, then kissed her three times. Her hands caressed Estrellita’s face, smoothing tears away.

It was obviously a farewell.

The old woman looked up and gestured to Mac to come to her. She said something to him the others didn’t catch and placed Estrellita’s hand in Mac’s. Mac said something in a low voice; it sounded like a promise. Estrellita glanced at Mac, shook her head vehemently, and snatched her hand away. She kissed her great-grandmother again, three times, then stepped aside with ragged dignity, tears still streaming from her eyes. The old woman gave an approving nod.

The people watching exchanged uneasy glances. “Is this going to be dangerous?” Faith asked. “I thought you were just going to try to heal him.”

The old woman turned and said gently, “All healing dangerous, with result uncertain. We are in God’s hands.”

It was not a reassuring answer.

Nick stared into the old woman’s eyes and shivered with prescience. He turned and kissed Faith hard and possessively. “Never forget that I love you.” Then he stepped forward and knelt at the old lady’s feet.

The old woman glanced around the cottage one last time, then took a deep breath and reached out her hands to Nick. Estrellita’s gasp was audible; she pressed her knuckles to her mouth and watched with agonized eyes. The old woman placed her gnarled old hands carefully on either side of Nick’s head, the long fingers cupping the back, her thumbs pressing just behind his ears.