Anne Gracie - [Merridew Sister 03]

by The Perfect Stranger

  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 her
self 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.

  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!”