I grinned at her. “More than a bit, I should think.” I felt my smile fade as I thought of something else I had long wanted to ask her. “Fleur, when Brisbane came here to you to convalesce—that is, I wondered if his health—I mean, his headaches…”
She gave me a pitying look, understanding, I think, what I was trying to ask and why I wanted to know.
“I only ask because he seems to suffer so, and his man, Monk, said he has been to doctors. His remedies are unorthodox, dangerous, I fear. I hoped something could be done for him. Please do not tell him I spoke to Monk. He does not know. I just thought that if I knew more about them, if we could discover the cause, perhaps I could help,” I finished lamely.
“My poor child, you really do not know?” Her eyes were warm, pitying, the same expression I had seen in Father’s eyes when I was nine years old and he had to tell me that my favorite cat had been struck by a cart. “There is no help for Nicky because he does not wish it. He knows perfectly well what causes them.”
I put down my glass, careful not to shatter it although my hands were shaking. “He knows what causes them? Then why does he not take steps? Surely something can be done.”
She was shaking her head, resigned. “No, for Nicky the cost is too high. To fight the headaches would mean embracing what he truly is, and this he cannot do.”
“Fleur, you mystify me. Stop speaking in riddles!” I demanded, angry and a little frightened now.
Her eyes were fixed on my face, still pitying, but now I found it condescending rather than kind. I was growing tired of Fleur and her enigmatic conversation.
“It is very simple, my dear. Nicky has the second sight.”
Out of kindness I did not laugh. But I did smile.
“Fleur, surely you are jesting.”
Her face was composed and serious. “I am not. Nicholas has the sight. He comes from a long line of Roma with the same gift. Or curse, as he calls it.”
I shook my head. “I cannot believe it. The second sight! That is a fairy story for children. Surely you do not believe it.”
“But I do. I was as disbelieving as you at first,” she assured me, “but there is no other explanation.” She hesitated, weighing her words. “I will tell you the truth now, my dear, about why Nicky had to leave Buda-Pesth. It was not because he spoke Romany in front of someone he oughtn’t. The truth is much worse. There was a child, a little boy, perhaps five years old. His father was a very important man, a count—very wealthy, very well connected. The boy disappeared one day when he was in the park with his nurse. She looked away for a few minutes, andpoof—” she snapped her fingers “—he was gone. The father was in agonies, he drew upon all of his influential friends. The entire city was searched, but they did not find him. Two days went by and still he was not found. That night Nicky had a dream, a terrible dream. He woke screaming, bathed in sweat—he was wild-eyed, like a child waking from a nightmare. He did not even know what he was screaming.”
My mouth had gone dry, but my palms were wet. “What was he screaming?”
It might have been a trick of the light, but for a moment her face fell and I could see every one of her sixty years. “He was screaming, ‘No, Father, don’t let him kill me.’ He was screaming in a child’s voice, you see.”
“A nightmare,” I said firmly. “It proves nothing. Anyone might have dreamed it.”
Fleur went on, her voice flat now. She told the rest of the story plainly, without emotion. “Nicholas was getting by in Hungary with his excellent French and a bit of German. He never bothered to learn Hungarian,” she said, watching me closely.
I swallowed hard. “And that night—”
“He spoke perfect Hungarian. In the voice of a child,” she said softly. “When he woke, he was able to give a perfect description of where the boy had been taken—a place he had never been and did not know existed.”
We were silent a moment. “That is extraordinary,” I managed finally. She smiled thinly.
“That is not all. His description was a child’s as well. He told of what a child would see, what a child would remember. It was as if hewasthat child. When they followed the directions he gave them, they found the boy. He had been murdered, savagely, at the hands of a madman. And the first person they suspected—”
“Nicholas,” I breathed.
She gave a Gallic, offhand little shrug. “Of course. It was only logical. Who else could have known where the child would be found but the man who put him there? It was all I could do to get him out of the city before they came for him. It was another fortnight before the true murderer was discovered in the act of attempting to take another child. It was proved beyond doubt that he killed the first boy. He even confessed to it before his execution.”
“They might have hanged him,” I commented softly.
Fleur shook her head, her expression profoundly sad. “It was not that which nearly destroyed him. It was the dream itself. It was real to him, as real as if he had lived it. Hedidlive it. He was as terrified, as tormented as that boy had been. He told me that he had had such dreams, sometimes while sleeping, sometimes awake, for many years. He had tried to control them, to push them away. He took things—sometimes to make him sleep too deeply for the dreams, sometimes to keep him wakeful for days at a time. He always felt them coming on, often days in advance, he told me, like storm clouds gathering in his brain. Sometimes he was successful in keeping them at bay. But there were other times…the dreams were simply too strong. And when he was fighting them, pushing them down, the headaches would come. Solomon’s choice, no? The vicious headaches, or the horrible dreams. He hates those dreams. They are a legacy of his Gypsy blood. His mother’s people are famous for them. Perhaps that reason, more than any other, is why he has turned his back on his own kind.”
I sat, feeling limp and exhausted by her story. I could not imagine what it must be like to live such a life, seizing any means of escaping from one’s own mind…like a wounded animal gnawing at a trapped leg.
“That was what was wrong with him, when he came to you. He was recovering from one of those dreams.”
She nodded. “It was. He had tried desperately to keep one of those visions at bay.”
“Was he successful?”
