The Winter Ghosts - By Kate Mosse Page 0,54

I heard her, dazzling in the darkness, speaking to me and me alone.

‘Freddie . . .’

‘I’m here,’ I said, half weeping, half laughing. I knew she could hear me. ‘I kept my word. I came to find you.’

Did I hold her to me then? I cannot have done, for I knew she was shadow and dust. And yet, I have the memory that, for an instant, I felt her warm in my arms and that I sighed. I had come for her and so she had returned to me. Come to take me home.

I could feel myself slipping further into the darkness, but now I welcomed it. And she started to talk, finishing the story she had begun. I laid my head in her lap, I am sure of it, as I listened, entranced once more, by the beautiful rise and fall of her voice telling the end of her tale of the mountains and the ghosts that dwelt within them.

My eyes slowly closed, lulled by the rhythm of her words, until finally all was silence. And in that silence she slipped away. I felt her go. I cried out, but her ghost, spirit, emanation, whatever it was - whatever she was - was gone. And this time, I knew she would not return.

I was slipping further into unconsciousness. I did not wish to wake. As the light dimmed and dimmed again, I thought of the lights going down in the auditorium and the hush of that Christmas Eve in the Lyric Theatre. I thought of Neverland and Pan. Of George and me eating jellies and giggling. Of how we were both wiser now and knew dying never was an awfully big adventure. And then I was smiling to think that I might see George again, and Fabrissa, and that that would be all right.

Then, suddenly, I was struggling. I couldn’t join them, not yet. The thought was as sharp as a splinter under my skin. Although I had found her, I had not brought her home. Just as I had never brought George home.

‘Fabrissa . . .’

But the word died on my lips. I was floating down through the darkness, lower into the ice floes of the Antarctic, into the impenetrable silence. The silence of the end of days.

The Hospital in Foix

White faces, white walls, white sheets on the bed.

When I came round, I was in the hospital in Foix. I wasn’t sure what day it was, nor how long I had been in the hospital, nor how I came to be there. I had been unconscious for two days, they told me. The fever I’d so foolishly thought to have shrugged off had returned with a vengeance, brought on by the exertions of the climb and hypothermia. For a while, my life hung in the balance.

For forty-eight hours, I drifted in and out of consciousness. Time had little meaning. How could it, after what had happened in Nulle? Now, then, in the past, in the present, all just words. The passing of days, as measured by the accretion of seconds and minutes and hours, was too rigid.

Madame Galy made the journey down the valley of the Vicdessos to sit with me. Though unconscious, I was aware of her gentle presence, her soothing hand on my brow. And in the seclusion and privacy of the night, when she did not think I could hear, she whispered of her son who had gone to war, like George, and never come back. Of his name, Augustin Pierre Galy, carved with those of his friends on the memorial in the corner of the place de l’Église. When the fever had worn itself out and finally I woke up, she was no longer there.

At first, I couldn’t remember what had happened or how I had come to be there. I looked down and saw my hands were bandaged and felt pressure on my temples. I realised I had a dressing on my head, too tight for comfort, and my throat was sore. As if I had been shouting. Or possibly even crying.

Little by little, my memories started to surface. I tried to piece together the sequence of events, all of it, from the point at which the car went off the road. There had been a storm and I had crashed, that wasn’t in doubt. Nor that I had found my way to Nulle and Fabrissa. But everything from that point became blurred, indistinct.

I did remember climbing up into the cave and dismantling