Free Catherine: One Love is Enough (Catherine Series Book 1) by Juliette Benzoni Page A

Man
     
     
    Many days passed; long days in which dawn and twilight and night and day were all one to Catherine. She hung between life and death, consumed by a brain fever that threatened to remove her from the land of the living. She was in little actual pain, but her spirit seemed to have left her body to join in long and wearying combat with the phantoms of fear and despair. From the depths of the abyss where she seemed to lie, she continually saw re-enacted the appalling scene of Michel’s death and the distorted faces of his killers weaving a fantastic saraband around the corpse. And when, as sometimes happened, light and peace of mind seemed on the verge of returning to her, suddenly unknown and often hideous faces would appear, which the child tried with all her feeble strength to push away.
    Sometimes she seemed dimly to hear someone weeping, far away down a long, dark tunnel at the end of which shone a faint speck of light. Catherine dragged herself along this endless tunnel in search of that speck of light, but the farther on she stumbled, the longer the tunnel stretched in front of her.
    Then one evening the mists parted, the things around her settled into place at last and took on clearly-defined shapes. She had emerged at long last from the shadowy regions of unconsciousness. The surroundings in which she found herself were so strange that at first she took them to be merely an extension of her nightmare. She was lying in a dark, low-ceilinged room, the roof of which was a stone vault supported by rough pillars. The only light came from the fire that leapt high in the crudely-fashioned chimney. A black cooking-pot, suspended from a hook over the flames, simmered away, giving out a tantalising smell of cooking vegetables. A skinny, ragged man sat on a three-legged stool near the fire and stirred the contents of the pot with a long wooden spoon. It was Barnaby the Cockleshell Man.
    Hearing Catherine’s sigh, he leapt to his feet and bounded across the room, still holding the spoon. He bent over her anxiously, but the look of anxiety faded and the two deep lines either side of his mouth cracked in a smile when he realised that the child’s eyes were not only wide open but apparently seeing clearly at last.
    ‘Feeling better, eh?’ he whispered, apparently fearful that he might bring on a relapse if he raised his voice.
    She smiled at him in reply and then asked: ‘Where am I? Where is Maman?’
    ‘You are in my house. Your mother is not far away. She will be here soon. As for how you come to be here, that’s rather a long and complicated story that can wait till you are quite well again. The important thing for the moment is to rest and get back your strength. The soup will be ready in a moment.’
    He went back to his cooking-pot. Stood over the flames, he cast a bizarre shadow across the smoky room, but it no longer frightened Catherine. She made an effort to work out what she was doing in this cellar and how Barnaby had come to be her sick nurse, but her head was weak still. Falling back on the bed, she closed her eyes and was soon fast asleep.
    Barnaby had just finished skimming the soup when a woman appeared at the top of the flight of steps that went up to a narrow little door.
    She was young and would have been beautiful had her skin not been so dark and her costume so strange. Her lithe, slender body was dressed in a sort of dress of coarse stuff, anchored by a length of material draped round her hips. This material was of red and yellow striped wool. A sort of shawl across her shoulders protected her from the cold, and her dark head was covered by a turban-like arrangement of coiled bands of cloth, one end of which passed under her chin. Two heavy plaits, dark as night and thick as a child’s arm, hung below her turban.
    Once more awake, Catherine regarded this strange apparition with astonishment. Her face was so dark-complexioned that when she smiled her teeth flashed dazzling white. Catherine