The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,43

second time, when she returned to administer a second draught of the bitter white medicine. Some kind of traditional remedy? I never knew and hardly cared.

‘What time is it?’

‘Late,’ she replied, placing a cool hand on my forehead. Why she should take so much trouble over a stranger, I did not think to ask. She felt some kind of responsibility to me, I could see, as a guest in her establishment. Even so, this was over and above the call of duty.

But Madame Galy’s maternal ministrations were not enough to stop the fever from taking hold. Some time in the evening, my temperature began to rise dangerously. Every muscle, every sinew flexed and tried to fight it, but my natural defences were too weak and I was powerless to do anything other than hope to ride the fever out.

My skin was alternately burning and clammy with sweat. I tossed and turned in the bed, like flotsam on a storm-wracked sea, plagued by dreams and delusions. Angels and gargoyles, ghostly apparitions, long-since deserted friends waltzed in and out of my head, to the sounds of a fairground carousel, then Für Elise, then a ragtime step.

For hours, so Madame Galy later told me, things hung in the balance as my temperature climbed higher and higher. Certainly, I oscillated between beauty and horror. A skeletal hand pushing up from beneath freshly turned earth, blossom dying on the bough. The backs of my parents’ heads, impassive and deaf to my need for them to love me. George smiling at me, in the orchard and by the stream, but then stepping just out of reach and turning away when I called out to him. Barbed wire and mud and blood, chlorine gas, a world of unimaginable pain.

The fever broke at about three o’clock in the morning. I felt it slink away like a mongrel with its tail between its legs. My temperature dropped. I stopped shaking and my skin, sticky with fever, returned to normal. For the first time in hours, I found myself surrounded by the reassuringly mundane features of the everyday world. A chair, my trousers draped over a clothes horse, a table, the last lick of flames in the grate and Madame Galy snoring quietly on the chair beside me. Wisps of grey hair had worked their way loose from her severe plait, and I caught a glimpse of the pretty girl she once had been. I could think of no occasion when my own mother had taken such care of me. Without waking her, I reached out my hand and laid it briefly over hers.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered.

Then a kind of peace fell over the room. In the still and sleeping house, I could hear the whirring and chiming of the clock in the hall downstairs. I placed my arms above the counterpane, a stone knight on a tomb, and turned to the window. I wondered if Fabrissa looked out into the same night. I wondered if she might have come to enquire after me. I had set at her feet what little of myself I had to give, ragged fragments, and yet hoped that she might love me. Had it scared her off? Was she lying awake now in the dark, thinking of me as I thought of her?

A ribbon of moonlight made its way between the shutters and painted a line across the floor. I watched the moonbeams dance, slowly shift, as the hours passed and the world continued to turn. I thought of what I would say to her when I found her. Of the beauty of small things. Of the way a bird takes flight, its wings beating on the air. Of the blue flowers of the flax blossom in summer and a parish church decorated by plough and corn at harvest time. Of notes climbing a chromatic scale. Of the possibility of love.

Later, I fell asleep. And this time, when I slept, I did so without dreaming.

When I woke again, it was morning. Madame Galy had gone. The chair was back against the wall as if it had never been moved. Physically, I was done in, but I felt all right - in fact, better than I had for some time. And I was ravenously hungry.

I sat up, debating whether to get up or wait a while longer. I wasn’t certain of the time. Just as I had decided that I would wash and dress, there was a light tap on the door.

‘Come in.’

Madame Galy came