The Perfect Stranger (39 page)

She closed her eyes and for a long time didn’t move at all, then she started to move her hands slowly around and across his head, as if feeling for something. It went on for long enough for Faith to start to wonder if it was all an act; then suddenly the tiny body arched back and gave a huge, terrifying shudder, as if an invisible bolt of lightning had passed through her.

She arched again and again, her frail old body seemingly racked with pain. Then Nick began to shudder in the same way, as if waves of pain rocked through the old woman into him. His hands came up and tried to pry her fingers away from his head, but he didn’t seem to have the strength.

Faith stepped forward, sure this could not be right, but Mac stopped her. “Once it’s started, ye canna stop it or they will both surely die.” With a whimper of fear and distress, Faith buried her face in his coat sleeve, but then Nicholas groaned, and she pulled away. It was unbearable to watch but worse not to watch.

The old woman started shuddering uncontrollably, bucking and writhing, and Nick did the same. Suddenly he gave one last, terrifying arch, then slumped at the old woman’s feet, apparently insensible.

Or dead.

His collapse pulled the old woman off her chair, but she never let go. They lay together curled on the floor, Nicholas unmoving, the old lady quivering and shuddering around him. Her fingers clung to him like talons, and suddenly Faith saw…

“Blood!”

She wanted to run to him, pry him loose, but again Mac barred her. “It’s too late to have second thoughts. Ye must see it through to the end, lass, good or bad.”

Eventually, with an unearthly shriek, the old woman pulled back from Nick and dropped her hands. Faith stared at the bloody talons, sick to the heart at what she’d talked him into enduring. A trickle of blood ran down the side of Nicholas’s face.

Faith flew to him. He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe. His head and hands were covered with blood.

Mac bent over him. “Dammit, old woman, I think ye’ve killed him.” The old woman didn’t move. Her hands and breast were red and sticky with blood.

Stevens laid his head on Nicholas’s chest. “No, he’s alive! He’s still breathing. Here, Mac, help me lift him onto the bed.”

They lifted him gently onto the bed.

“The Old One, too,” instructed Estrellita, so Mac lifted the tiny, shrunken body and placed it next to Nick in the bed.

Faith saw with enormous relief that Nick was still breathing, though very shallowly. But blood flowed copiously from his head.

“Head wounds always bleed a lot,” Mac told her in a matter-of-fact tone that made Faith want to scream. How could Nick get a head wound from an old lady’s fingers?

Stevens took a cloth, splashed it with brandy, and pressed it to the wound on Nick’s head. “I’ve seen worse in the field, missie,” he said, meaning to be of comfort. “In fact, Capt’n Nick has survived worse head wounds than this.”

Faith shoved her fist against her teeth. All this calm matter-of-factness was driving her to hysteria. Her husband hadn’t come from a battle; he’d been wounded by an old witch! And she—Faith—had convinced him to do it. And there was nothing—nothing!—she could do to help!

“She nearly killed him!” Faith said.

“No. She kill herself for him.” Estrellita bent over her grandmother and cleaned the wrinkled old face and hands lovingly. “Look!” she exclaimed.

The old woman’s palm fell open. There was something in it, covered in blood. Something sharp and metallic.

Mac took it from her and wiped it clean. “By God, it looks like—”

“A piece of shrapnel,” Stevens finished for him. “Well I’ll be damned!”

“Did that come out of Mr. Blacklock’s head, then?” Morton Black asked.

“Sí,”
Estrellita said shortly. She was bent over the old woman, who now resembled a frail bundle of rags. She instructed Faith in a preoccupied voice, “When bleeding stops you must put that stuff in pot on his wound and wrap his head with clean linen. And keep him warm. You, Tavish, build up fire and move bed close to the window. The Old One will die with the fire behind her, but she must look out to the stars and moon.”

Faith blinked at the girl’s calmness. She stared dumbly at the jagged sliver of metal lying on the table.

“How could that possibly have come from Nicholas’s head?”

Stevens explained, “Shrapnel’s like that, missie. They pick out what they can, and the rest either stays there or works its way out. This bit must have escaped the surgeons when Capt’n Nick was wounded at Waterloo.” He shook his head with wonder. “Though how the old lady knew about it, let alone got it out, beats me.”

Stevens and Faith cleaned Nick’s head wound. With a dubious expression, Stevens picked up the pot the girl had indicated. He opened it and sniffed cautiously. His brow cleared. “Smells right,” he murmured and smeared the strong-smelling salve over the ragged wound. He covered it with a pad and then wound a bandage of clean linen around Nick’s head, as instructed.

Mac, having set up the frail old lady as Estrellita ordered, returned and helped Stevens make pallets of hay for them all to sleep inside. The cottage was tiny, and they would all be cramped, but there was no way any of them wanted to remain far from the two who slept.

Faith slept on the floor beside Nicholas, reaching up to hold his hand through the night. On the other side of the bed Estrellita did the same with her great-grandmother.

For two days and two nights Nick and the old lady lay still and comatose. They were long days and very long nights. Nobody slept well.

On the second day, Stevens and Mac went hunting. Food for the pot, they claimed, but in truth they were quietly going mad, living in such cramped quarters, listening to nothing but the almost inaudible breathing of the two on the bed.

On the evening of the second day, Morton Black reminded Faith he had brought letters for her from her family, and she took them gratefully. She read and reread them, smiled a little, wept a lot, and read bits of the letters to the others.

In some ways the letters were comforting, but in others they made her feel so distant. Their concerns were from another world. Faith’s world lay in a bed, silent and unmoving.

Then at dawn on the third day, Nick woke for a few moments. He muttered something, and Faith flew to his side.

“Nicholas, can you hear me?”

His eyes fluttered open again, and he stared at her as if trying to think. Then, “Good morning, Mrs. Blacklock,” he muttered and, closing his eyes, he fell into a natural sleep.

“Good morning, Mr. Blacklock, oh, a very good morning to you, my darling Mr. Blacklock,” Faith sobbed, kissing his face and his hands and his face again. She stayed with him the rest of the day, watching him sleep. Finally, exhausted, she fell asleep, her hand curled under the covers with her sleeping husband’s hand in hers.

At dusk on the same day, the old lady died.

The first anyone realized it was when Estrellita gave a low moan and started to rub her face with ash from the fire.

Faith hurried over to her. “Oh, Estrellita,” she began.

Estrellita looked up, her face wild and pagan-looking in the firelight. “You promise me he would not kill her, but he did. He did!”

Faith did not immediately make the connection.

“In my dream I see them, blood on her breast, blood on his hands, you remember, Faith?”

Her words hit Faith like a blow. She had promised her that Nicholas wouldn’t kill the old lady, but there was no denying, Nicholas was alive and getting stronger by the minute, and the old woman was dead. The gypsy girl’s dream had been right after all.

And the worst of it all was Faith could not regret it.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t know how it would be.”

“Nay, lass,” Mac interrupted. “Look at your great-granny’s face, Estrellita. Tell me what do you see.”

They all looked. The old woman’s face looked smoother, as if the cares and vicissitudes of her ninety years had been wiped away. On it was an expression of great peace and happiness, as if at the moment of death she’d been exalted.

“Ye said when ye first saw the cap’n that his arrival had been foretold. Your granny said it had been predicted at her birth. She knew what was to come, and she wanted it to happen.”

Estrellita made a vehement gesture of denial. “How can you say that? Who want to die? Not you! Not me! Not nobody!”

Mac smiled wryly. “Aye, but we are young, my bonny. We have our lives ahead of us. But if ye were old, and had only a short time left to live, how would ye prefer to go? Slowly, your powers fading, eaten away by pain and illness until you are helpless and dependent…” He paused to let his words sink in. “Or quickly and magnificently, in a blaze of eternal glory such as we saw here three nights ago?”

Estrellita looked up, her expression arrested.

“She died like a warrior queen, lass,” he said softly. “She chose her death, and ye must honor her choice, and her.”

Tears poured silently down Estrellita’s face, making tracks in the gray ash smeared on her skin. She whispered, “
Sí,
she die like warrior queen.”

Estrellita sent everyone away while she washed and dressed her beloved great-grandmother in her finest clothes.

Nick was still unsteady on his feet, so they made a bed of straw for him in the shelter of the cave, and he lay there, sleeping on and off, Faith never far from his side.

Mac paced helplessly outside the cottage, respecting Estrellita’s wish for privacy, wanting to offer support and comfort and love, but the girl held herself aloof from him, from everyone, her face drawn, her eyes swollen and red from weeping.

She spoke to him only once, and then it was indirectly. “Faith, please tell Tavish and Stevens to dig grave for Abuela. There.” She pointed down the hill. “Next to Steven’s Algy.”

Stevens looked up, startled. “Next to Algy?”

Estrellita said to Faith, “
Sí
, she tell me this long time ago. And four days ago she tell me again. So dig.”

Estrellita sat watch over her grandmother for three days and nights. On the morning of the next day she emerged from the cottage dressed in a brilliant red outfit, its cheerful effect ruined by the ash smeared over her face and hands and hair. “Is time to lay The Old One to rest.”

It was a very small funeral; only Estrellita, Faith, and the four men. Mac was disturbed by this realization of how isolated they were. “Do ye not want a priest, Estrellita love?” Mac asked. “I’ll go down to Vittoria an fetch one if ye wish.”

She addressed Faith. “No priest. Abuela and I, we are—were part of the village, but not belong in same way as others. The priest, he will come after, and bless grave. And village women will come after and pray for her.” She scrubbed at her swollen eyelids with her fists. “Is why Abuela say to put her in ground next to Algy. Village women much respect Abuela. She help with babies, sickness, everything. Women will come every week, keep grave clean, bring flowers, leave food, say prayers, talk to Abuela. Stevens’s Algy and my Abuela, they never be lonely now.”

Stevens pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew into it loudly. “Thank you, my dear,” he said.

The old lady’s funeral was quiet and very poignant. They carried Abuela down the hillside, wrapped in a rug and carried on a wooden pallet by the men of the party. Nick had almost fully recovered by then and wanted to do his part, to pay his respects to the old lady who died to give him life.

They laid her carefully in the deep hole beside Algy’s cairn. Around her Estrellita placed a pair of fine leather boots, an embroidered shawl, a skirt, a black cooking pot, a copper kettle, a bowl, spoon, and cup, a string of jet beads, and a fistful of coins. Then she covered them all with a white woven cloth.

Estrellita made a long speech in the language she and Abuela shared, then bent and threw a handful of dirt into the grave. Soundlessly, racked with grief, she gestured for the others to do the same. They came forward one by one, each person saying something, a prayer and something personal. Each of them threw a handful of dirt in.

Mac went first and disappeared soon afterward. Nick was the last to stand beside the grave. He stared down into the hole at the small figure wrapped in the rug. This could have been his grave, here, on this stony, foreign hillside, along with Algy, his lifelong friend. What did one say to a woman who’d given her life to heal him? He could think of no words sufficient to thank her. He simply recited the twenty-third psalm.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures…”

As he spoke, the English members of the funeral party joined in, reciting the beautiful prayer.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

Estrellita started sobbing, and Faith’s arms went around her, as Faith recited the prayer and gazed sightlessly out over this valley of death below. This was for Abuela, and for Algy, and for all of the young soldiers who’d died here, far from home and their loved ones.

And as the last words of the prayer were blown away on the wind sweeping up the valley, a low moan came, followed by the sound of an unearthly tune.

Estrellita looked up, shocked, wondering. “What—?”

Nick explained. “It’s Mac, he’s playing the bagpipes for your gran. It’s a Scottish tradition.” He listened. “The song he’s playing, it’s called ‘The Flowers of the Forest.’ It is a traditional lament—that means song for the dead.” He softly spoke one of the lines in time to the music,
“The flowers of the forest are all withered away.”

“Is beautiful,” Estrellita sobbed. “I not expect this. Abuela, she would love this. My people also play these pipes.”

They listened. The music was poignant and hauntingly beautiful. The strains of it echoed down the valley and faded away into the mountains.

“He brought the pipes thinking it would be Capt’n Nick’s funeral he would be playing at,” Stevens said softly in Faith’s ear, and the information made her hug Estrellita all the tighter.

Chapter Sixteen

O, thou art fairer than the evening air