Bride of the Wilderness
Page 55
“Fanny!” he cried. “Fanny!”
In her helplessness, Fanny thought that she was imagining the sound of his voice. She knew that he could not possibly be speaking to her.
“Fanny!” Philippe said again, as if pronouncing her name in his old precise voice was the most unsurprising thing in the world. “Do you know what’s happening?”
Shouting wordlessly, unable to stop herself, Fanny crushed her face against Philippe’s. Each time she screamed, he answered with her name. At last the second of her twins swam into its father’s hands. Philippe held it aloft, the bulging cord still attached. It was a girl.
Philippe wrapped the babies in wool and gave them to Fanny. They nursed dreamily; the boy was warmer to the touch and a stronger feeder than the girl. Fanny went to sleep while they were still drinking. The faint sweetish odor of milk rose from their quiet forms. All around them in the forest, trees splintered and fell under the weight of the rain that had frozen on their branches.
In the morning, which was lit by a brilliant white sun, Fanny and Philippe took the babies outdoors. The ice storm had transmuted the forest from wood to crystal. Every twig and branch, every rock, the earth itself, were coated with ice and filled up with dazzling light. There were no shadows, only reflections.
Philippe melted ice in his hand and dripped it onto the twins’ foreheads. Each uttered a sharp cry of surprise. A black bear, awakened from its hibernation by the thaw and attracted by the scents of birth, bounded out of the grove of beeches and skidded to a stop on the icy ledge at the rim of the Gorge. There it rose on its hind legs, putting its head to one side and dreamily regarding the little group of human beings at the mouth of the cave. Fanny recognized the bear: it was the same one-eared animal she had encounted the summer before.
The bear coughed hoarsely and chattered its teeth, then staggered clownishly in its dark coat along the edge of the cliff as it lost its footing on the ice. The sun was directly behind the bear, so that the bent light, shining through the prism of the ice, flashed red and blue and yellow all around its whirling figure.
“Say good morning to Bear,” Philippe said to his children.
Without fear or surprise, Henry Philippe Oliver de Saint-Christophe and his twin sister Lily Genevieve Edwige, the first Christophers born in the New World, opened their eyes and gazed at the bear, which seemed to be dancing for them in a forest of jewels.
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copyright © 1988 by Charles McCarry
cover design by Michael Vrana
978-1-4532-3252-1
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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CHARLES McCARRY
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