The last day of harvest was the day of our wedding. Inside our vardo my mother strung a string with acorns over my head and unloosed my hair, before she crowned me with a wreath of iris. She anointed my wrists, neck and throat with attar of rose and led the way out of the vardo. Each of her gestures was slow and deliberate; I couldn’t tell if it was because she was trying to delay me, or her actions held more meaning than I understood. She brushed my cheek with the back of her hand.
I took one last look at everything familiar – the old Persian rugs that decked the floor; our bedding that was rolled away; the pictures of the Virgin, Saint Sarah and Saint George that my mother kept dust-free even in the driest of summers; the hanging herbs of rosemary, yarrow, foxglove and rosehip all strung up to dry.
Outside on the fire a pig was on the spit, its flesh crackling to the flame; a barrel of scrumpy was open and ready to spill into the cup; and Amberline stood in the distance scuffing his boots and I knew he was nervous.
The other Rom from the camp came and gathered around then someone plucked a few notes on their fiddle and the notes spun around me. I felt disoriented, not being able to see Amberline amongst the throng that parted and clapped as I passed. The blood surged to my face, and I was grateful for the bluish twilight concealing my blush.
In a clear spot my father and Amberline waited and I moved towards the chairs meant for us. My father tore two pieces of bread and placed one on my knee and one on Amberline’s and then drew his knife. Amberline looked at me and my father guffawed, before he took my finger and then Amberline’s to be pierced by the tip of his knife so that a bead of blood ripened, a perfect drop, to be sopped by the bread.
“Now eat,” my father commanded and I bent to Amberline’s knee and ate the bread and he did the same with mine, I felt his face tickle my knee through the weave of my skirt. My father bid us rise then, the necklace of coins jingling, and he tied a scarf over my hair, a diklo, the badge of all married women.
“Welcome, Patrin and Amberline Stark,” my father cried, crushed us in his arms and all around us the other Rom let out a cheer. The firelight struck the world golden – Amberline’s face shining most of all. Someone threw salt over us and it caught in my lip just as Amberline kissed me so it was like swallowing the sea.
Around us the dancing started. We were swept up into it and I danced in and out of so many arms, my face growing hot, until I landed back in Amberline’s arms. As soon as we were near the outskirts of the fire, he pulled my arm and we were off over the fields, our feet hitting puddles and disturbing the songbirds in the hedgerow, skidding in the mud and laughing, but not falling. The sound of the river was like a voice calling and I stopped in my tracks and Amberline followed suit.
“Second thoughts or second sight?” he said and the scrumpy roiled in my stomach, but still I felt the voice of the river in my ears and I tried to quell my dizziness.
“Neither,” I lied, for the river was calling to me, speaking, but I did not understand the language of water. My breath was lost. Amberline clutched me under the arms, then took me towards the water and sat me down on the damp grass. He took the scarf from my hair, dragged it through the water and placed it on my eyes yet I heard the voice louder than before in my own ears, all vowels, before I vomited on the grass.
When I woke, Amberline was resting by my side, one of his arms beneath my head as a pillow, the other thrown over me, his jacket covering us. I sat up, but we were no longer so close by the river and the voice had vanished.
Amberline sat up beside me and his hands moved through his jacket before he extracted something. Light flared in the darkness; he had a candle and it lit up the green of the tree branches we sheltered under. We sat on a blanket, but beneath that we were cushioned by moss, and he held a skin of water to my lips and I drank deep.
“That scrumpy is rough,” he said and I laughed.
“I’d be glad never to taste it again,” I said and drank once more.
“Come, give us a kiss,” he said and suddenly I was exposed, shy, all the darkness watching. His fingers beneath my chin drew my lips to his and then his hands were on my blouse lifting it over my arms, my head. The cold tip of his finger outlined my breast and I slid his shirt off his shoulders. Gently he pushed me backward and rucked my skirt to my knees. The warmth and sweetness of his skin pressing on mine, all our breath together. Amberline’s hands twined around my back and drew me towards him; my blood hummed like spring sap as the leaves brushed over our faces like fingertips, the putsi around my neck squashed between our chests, a third heart beating between us. “What is this thing you wear?” Amberline said, slight irritation in his voice.
I sat up. “Why are you frightened of a pouch?” I smiled, but he didn’t smile back. “It’s a putsi, to keep herbs and charms in, it can only do good,” I said.
“Why, my love, I’ll be your luck now,” he said as he went to lift the putsi over my head, but I stayed his hand.
We remained in our green canopy until the morning came and pushed at our eyelids and then we straggled back to camp, not knowing if Amberline would come inside my parents’ vardo or if I was expected now to sleep under it. The vardo wagon my father had secured had no roof nor bed yet, it was just bare wood, as unseasoned as I was to life as a married woman.
As we entered camp I saw Jupiter had returned, Amberline’s eyes flicking warily between the dog and my father who had his back to us, the strike of his axe echoing out around us, a sickening thud. Jupiter was drowsing across the threshold of my parents’ vardo, barring the step to anyone who’d dare enter. All his fur was matted and covered with burs and grass, his paws coated in mud. As soon as he saw Amberline he lifted his head, alert, his eyes following Amberline’s every move.
My father strode towards us, his arms outstretched, when I saw it. Beside my parents’ vardo was hitched another with a white horse tied by a rough rope. My father grinned at me and Amberline and I saw all the love in his face and realised that this was a gift for us, my darro, a home for Amberline and me, the wagon base now transformed.
“What do you think?” he said. I threw my arms around his neck and he lifted me off the ground with his strong arms and twirled me as if I was nothing more than a wee girl.
“Thank you, Papa,” I said, all my feelings welling to the surface, an anxiety falling over me so that I didn’t want to let him go.
Amberline’s face was blank, I couldn’t read him. “Thank you, Josiah,” he said, parrot fashion, shaking my father’s hand.
“You’ll see it’s all new. I hope it is to your liking?” my father said, but Amberline just nodded. My mother saw what I saw, but I would not keep her gaze. I stepped up into the vardo and saw how much my father had invested in us, beds and cupboards fixed to the walls, with new fine china just waiting to be used. The little windows had curtains made of calico and there was a small woodstove with cast-iron rail. Amberline followed up behind me and kissed my cheek.
“It is modest,” he said. I looked at him in disbelief at his ingratitude, his hands reaching up to touch the ceiling, stretching out to touch each of the walls, filling all the space with his dissatisfaction.
And so it was that Amberline and I began our married life, wrapped in each other’s arms in our vardo as we travelled across the country with the rest, from farm to farm, bringing the harvest in, Amberline’s body growing more muscular, beneath my touch. After the hops were in it was harvesting time for onions, and come November it was time to bring in the potatoes. When winter came we’d make do with whatever work to be had. For my father, it was rat-season.
My father, Josiah Scamp, came from a long line of royal ratcatchers. It was a title he had bestowed upon himself and no one complained, for it was a job that no one else cared to do. Jupiter sniffed them out or caught them by the tail or throat if the opportunity arose and my father would thwack the rodent across the back of the head with a small club. His father before him used to lay them out one by one, whiskery corpses all in a row upon the fine Turkey carpet, to the horror of the head housekeeper, who would pay him double to remove them quickly; my father didn’t follow his father’s example, however. Instead he placed the dead animals reverentially inside an old hemp sack and sold them to the neighbouring households who kept hounds for the hunt, the rats used as dog feed. Some ratcatchers preferred just to stun the rats and be left with a writhing sack to use for sport – dog versus rat – but at least with my father’s method the rats were out of their misery before the dogs pierced their flesh. He was in demand at all the big houses.
We set off, the horse’s reins in my hands, Amberline’s leg pressing into mine, my mother walking behind to pick meadow herbs to sell as posies, gathering them up in her skirt so as to not damage the petals. Amberline grew bolder when he thought my mother was obscured by the vardo and leaned over and tried to steal a kiss; even though we were husband and wife, I was conscious of my mother being nearby. I turned my head and let him kiss the whip and rein of my hair.
My father had already set off while it was still dark. It was an honour to go to the big houses and my father liked to arrive as soon as the house awoke to take advantage of the last of the lingering darkness to set Jupiter amongst the hallways, the dog’s finely tuned nose on the scent of the rats.
My father had left a patrin on the side of the road, a low-lying branch tied with a red thread, a sign that we were on the outskirts of royal lands and had free passage through the fields. Mother caught up with us and sat inside and tied her simples in ribbon. With a click of my tongue I directed the horse off the track, the low-lying branch tangling satisfyingly in Amberline’s hair.
“What are you doing?” he said, flicking leaves from his hair, the horse easily pulling the vardo through the mud.
“Didn’t you see my father’s signs? His patrin?” I replied as we pushed forward through the woodland, a short cut to the big house where we’d been given permission to camp. Not all were so accommodating to our ways.
“Patrin,” Amberline said, “it’s your name.”
Had his mother taught him nothing of our ways?
“It’s more than that. It means leaf but is also the word for signs, for messages, for our people to communicate the way of the path ahead – my father’s branch tied with string means to turn here, a branch broken in two, notched bark, a rag tied to a stick – all are patrin.”
The horse’s hooves kept a steady strike and I heard my mother whistling behind me. Somewhere in the treetops above me a cuckoo called, a fraudulent orphan for its devoted mother.
Amberline swept my hair off my face and I was compelled to look at him, those eyes that were promises. He cupped my face in his hands and breathed me in with his kiss. My breasts ached beneath my shift with each jolt of the wagon.
“You are my sign, my own patrin,” he whispered, and the sunlight seemed to agree with him for the light burst through the leaf cover, sending tiny diamonds of light dancing across my face and hands.
On seeing my parents’ vardo, we pulled into the field on the other side of the woods and watered the horse, before leading him up to the big house, his brasses polished bright and chiming together, his teeth ready to crop the royal clover. We walked up through the fields, passing a windbreak of elm trees; the house seemed to hide behind them like a blushing lady behind her fan. It was the largest house I’d ever seen. Father usually went up to the big house without us, while we waited out of sight in the woodland and made camp. But the last time we were at this house the maids had begged him to bring Mother, someone who saw a sweetheart’s name written in the tea leaves, a fortune found in a palm, the face of a lost one gesturing in the surface of a mirror. My mother was only too glad to oblige, any extra money to get us through the winter was a blessing. Not that she didn’t have the gift. She was able to read the signs of the faces of the clouds, the flight of birds, the broken stalks of a wheat field, but what was an art and what was a gift? She’d twine the two skills together. But what had she seen with Amberline? She would never tell me.
The building loomed ahead, solitary as an island. As we neared a low fog concealed our footsteps and rolled thick on the ground but didn’t even touch the first floor of windows. We walked through the silhouetted trees and closer to the building but could not tell which was the front or which was the back, the whole facade grey. My neck strained to see where the building ended and the sky began. The house was leviathan. Our horse paused to snap a dandelion with his teeth before stepping onward. The morning light slashed across the windows of the building, hitting a sea of glass, each window as bright as a jewel, and I heard Amberline count quietly beneath his breath. My mother raised her eyes at me.
“I hope you are not counting how many silver spoons you can cram into your jacket pockets and how many ways you can run,” she said. That stopped Amberline’s counting.
“I’d never do such a thing, I’d never bring shame on your family after all the hospitality you’ve afforded me,” he said, earnestly. But it was our family, he still held himself at one remove, and I saw my mother’s expression: she was already tallying his would-be misdemeanours in her mind.
“Well, what you be counting for?” my mother asked suspiciously, sensing something of the lie in his voice.
“I’m counting windows, Aunt, I’ve never seen so many. They are made of sand and fire, to think of it, and here they all are clearer than a mirror. The marvel of it,” Amberline said, his face lit with the morning sun as if the Lord had special favour for him.
My mother rolled her eyes for my benefit. “Dinneleskoe or diviou.” Foolish or mad. Amberline avoided her eye, he knew a Romany insult when he heard one.
As we walked around the outskirts of the rest of the building I caught a face looking back at us from the prison of glass. Was it a bavol-engro, a wind fellow, a ghost? A slim hand shielding her eyes against the piercing light proved her human after all. The horse’s ears swivelled and the face disappeared back behind the golden surface.
Father was at the entrance on the other side of the house, retrieving a stunned rat from the confines of Jupiter’s jaw, the white hair around the dog’s mouth starting to stain. My father wrung the rat’s neck and tossed it into the sack. Already two full sacks had been knotted and leaned head to head in condolence. My father gave Jupiter a joyful rub of the ears and wiped his hands upon his apron, before greeting us, his hands covered in fine red-thread scratches. The smell of the rats made my stomach roll and I willed myself not to be sick.
“Come now, Amberline, time to roll up your sleeves.” My father slapped him across the back and Amberline laughed, thinking he had made a joke, but I knew my father. He stood patiently waiting until Amberline’s expression changed from one of humour to one of disgust. Eventually Amberline carefully rolled up his fine shirtsleeves as high as they would go, and I feared Father would find him an unworthy accomplice.
“Patrin, lead your mother around to the door near the kitchen garden, but tie the horse up first, we don’t want him eating his fill of their patch,” my father said and walked off, Amberline following unhappily behind.
I tied the horse with a double knot to a gate and he was happy enough with the plush clover at his hooves, then Mother and I made our way to the kitchen door to find the cook red-faced and hot with a bunch of thyme in her hand.
“Come along, ladies,” she said, standing back to let us through. She smelled of onions and butter, as did the whole kitchen – a whole tribe of women in starched aprons stirring, serving, frying, slicing, more food than I’d seen in a lifetime. She led us through the servants’ dining room where another group of women sat, elbows on tables, hurriedly eating their dinner in a forced silence. All their eyes turned towards Mother and me, and I felt our strangeness in our long red skirts and jackets, our pierced ears, the mud on our boots. I touched my putsi instinctively before I noticed the dirt beneath my fingernails. I hid my hands in my skirts.
A chair was found for Mother and she sat down upon it, her skirts falling over her mud-caked boots. I stood patiently behind her as each servant waited to see who would be the first to thrust a coin in her hand and give their open palm. The herbs of her favours sat upon the table next to a posy grown in a hothouse, the smell of dog-rose scent twining into the air. But before Mother started, all the servants rose up in their chairs at the entrance of the head housekeeper, Mrs Davey, her skirt alive with keys.
“Would the young one please come with me,” she said bluntly and I felt my blood run faster. What did she want with the likes of me? Mother gave her a piercing stare and nodded. I went with the head housekeeper, half expecting her to escort me by the elbow back outside or ask for me to empty my pockets, but she said nothing. And I followed.
The keys about her person jingled like a bit between a horse’s teeth and she kept a steady pace, leading me through a door into a staircase that climbed upwards so that if she were to leave me there I’d have no idea of my way back to the kitchen. Questions flung around my mind but I knew better than to ask.
She led me through a door into a large draughty room, not at all what I imagined a room in a house like this would be like; it looked forgotten, abandoned. An old gilt mirror held the whole room in its reflection; in it I saw the face of the lady in the window. She was lying back against the sofa, her poor swollen feet pushing against the confines of her stockinged toes, stretching towards the small fire, the chimney barely able to suck. The housekeeper coughed and the lady’s eyes snapped open – disoriented, half in the room, half in a dream, the sewing in her lap falling to the floor. The housekeeper had already turned on her heel and tinkled away, leaving us alone.
The lady rubbed her face with her hands, the dark curls gathered at her temples falling over her pale face like a bunch of grapes. She struggled to retrieve her sewing, her cheeks flushed from sitting too close to the fire, but I swooped in and gathered it up for her – a fine little red velvet gown, a pattern of stars picked out in golden thread at the hem. The touch of the fabric beneath my fingers was a revelation – softer than down, the colour richer than wine. Instinctively I touched it to my cheek, forgetting myself and where I was. The lady’s outstretched hand waited patiently for me to return it.
“Wilkommen,” she said and gestured for me to sit upon the stool in front of her. As I sat I saw the cause of her immobility: a baby in her belly, pushing against the fabric of her dress. Propped beside her a small doll, the glimmer of her black hair rippling with the firelight, little feet pointed towards the hearth.
The lady held out her palm to me and it hung in the air heavy between us. I was startled by the fineness of her skin, the diamonds upon her finger, the imploring expression upon her face. With great effort she reached further, and I leaned closer, taking her gentle hand in my calloused one, and touched all the roads, pathways and holloways of a life. I may not have had my mother’s surety but I saw in her face as much as her palm what she wanted to hear.
“You will give birth to a bonny baby,” I said quietly.
“Kind,” she said and nodded. I lay my hands on her belly and felt the smooth tautness, the balloon of flesh and the life it held. Without warning, the unborn baby’s hand struck out at my own and I drew my hand away faster than was polite, afraid, a cold thread of recognition twisting in me. The lady laughed and reached for my hand again and I submitted to the pressure of her soft hand guiding mine. Then I was struck with an image in the corner of my eye – the luminous glow of a golden ring, a crown, burning.
“Madam,” I said hesitantly, “I think your baby will be a queen.”
The lady peered earnestly into my face and, seeing no insincerity there, smiled.
“Königin,” she said quietly to her belly. “My kind, my schoen.” The way she patted her belly, the soft caress of her voice, made me uncomfortable, as though interrupting the enclosed circle of mother and child. The doll and myself were outside of it and together we stared into the distance, the poorer for it. Beside the lady’s sewing was a tiny matching velvet gown the perfect size for the doll’s little wooden limbs. With great effort the lady rose from her chair, taking my proffered hand for support.
“Für gluck,” she said, folding a coin and a small piece of fabric into my hand. Could she tell? Did a life leap inside me like a salmon against the current?
The housekeeper quickly reappeared; perhaps she had been eavesdropping. I left the confines of that once grand chamber and followed the housekeeper down the maze of stairs, touching the softness of the nap of velvet all the way to the bottom where I concealed both coin and cloth in my putsi.
When my father had finished his work we walked back to the vardos, carrying the sacks slung over our shoulders, the sharp smell of them filling my nostrils and making my stomach whirl. Jupiter ran between my legs and barked, excited by the scent. I’d carried such sacks before and never felt such revulsion churn through my stomach. Amberline’s footsteps fell in with mine as my mother and father walked on ahead, eager to get the camp struck before nightfall, the fire laid and roaring.
“Did you see it, Patrin?” he said reverentially.
“See what?” I looked over my shoulder at the night falling, the sky flushed as a baby’s cheek, the first star sweet as a dimple.
“That house, that palace. The rooms, the damask, the silk, the silver plate, the carpets, the marble, the grandeur,” he said breathlessly.
What could I say? All I’d seen was the rabbit warren of the staircase and the shabby interior of a once grand apartment that let in more of a draught than our humble vardo. I rubbed at the piece of rich velvet that the German duchess had given me, afraid.