by Anne Renwick
The path turned. Ten more steps and she would be out of view of the windows. She waited until she passed the moss-covered statue of Pan, then hiked her skirts to her knees. Running as fast as the steel-boned corset beneath her bodice permitted, she raced under an arch of stone and dashed out into a field of astonished sheep. Hair fell from her braids, tumbling about her shoulders as she followed a dirt track that led toward the gypsy encampment, where forest met field, where the dying embers of a campfire was just visible.
Lungs burning, she sprinted the final distance.
Only one vardo remained, a yellow one with a red door and green shutters. Nadya’s. Pots and pans and cages holding clucking chickens were strapped to its side. Baskets hung on hooks, securely tied. All in readiness for departure.
All but Luca who slumped against a wheel, his dark eyes full of anguish, his face pale and bloodless. Panic welled in her throat as she fell to her knees beside him, pulling his damp brow against her chest to kiss his dark hair. Her worst fears realized.
Rayka had poisoned him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Chapter Two
Luca inhaled her sweet, honeysuckle scent, silently thanking every god that ever was she was unharmed. He’d dashed from the vardo only to feel his heart give a great thud, and then the ground had rushed up at him. He’d dragged himself back to lean against a wheel, while his grandmother scrambled from the vardo to look after him.
Him, fainting. So much for his belief it was a drama reserved for ladies in over-tight corsets. Impossible to mock himself for it took his every effort to steady his breath.
“Rayka?” Emily whispered the question.
He nodded. “A tin rose aiming for Nadya. I reached it just in time.” He turned his hand over, raising his bandaged palm to her view. “Its thorns were razor sharp, its stem hollow.”
“Hollow?”
As designed, capillary action had pulled the fluid upward through the stem, a feature she’d exploited. “A liquid oozed from their tips, from between the joints of the metal vine as it grew.” He took a deep breath, as deep a breath as he could still manage. “Poison. Revenge upon Nadya for accepting you as an apprentice, for supporting your bid to marry me. Doubtless she will be satisfied by my death as well.”
She gave an emphatic shake of her head. “Absolutely not, I will not permit you to die.” She pressed her hand to his throat, taking note of his slow and erratic pulse.
“My heart cannot decide if it wishes to pound or flutter, and I can no longer feel my fingers. I love you, Emily. Never doubt that.” If he could give her nothing else, at least he could leave her with the certainty of his devotion.
“And I love you,” she said, brushing the hair from his forehead with her fingertips, a curious expression upon her face. “But you must fight to live, Luca. I do not wish to raise our child alone.” Her voice cracked upon those last few words.
A child?
At that announcement, his heart did its best to beat faster, but failed. Alone. No, that was not what he wanted for her. His Emily deserved better. He wrapped his arm about her and pulled her into his lap. “How long have you known?”
“A few days. Perhaps a week. Don’t look at me like that. We spoke our vows a month ago, that night we spent under the stars.” Her slender fingers tugged her necklace forth, the coins flashing brightly in the fading light. “This was mere formality.”
It was true. A formal marriage ceremony was unnecessary among the Roma; a private commitment to share their lives was enough. Either way, however, he would not be permitted to call her ‘wife’ until their first child was born, a chance he might never have.
“Destiny,” he whispered, recalling how she’d glowed with happiness, her chestnut hair spread out upon their bed of clover. “Inevitable that the heat and passion flaring between us would spark a new life.”
Her eyes warmed as he tucked a lock of her dark hair behind her ear and pulled her face to his. Their lips touched and he was swept away on a dream. In that sweet and all-too-brief kiss, he lived a whole life. He slept beside her under the stars as she grew round with their child, held a swaddled newborn in his arms, lifted a bright-eyed toddler onto the back of a clockwork pony.
When he pulled away, a silver tear escaped her glistening eyes. He brushed it away. Happiness and despair collided, and though his heart fractured at the thought of leaving her behind, he could not regret making her his own.
“Child!” Nadya snapped from above, leaning out through one of the many windows. “Stop nattering and give him this.” She held out a battered tin cup. “This will strengthen his heart. It was too fast, then too slow. Now it staggers and trips.”
“Foxglove?” Emily asked as she lifted the cup to his lips.
“Yes.”
A foul odor rose with the steam as leaves swirled in its depths, but one didn’t argue with his Puri daj. Well, no one except resentful and murderous ex-apprentices. He downed the bitter brew.
“Rayka came to the manor.” There was a catch in Emily’s voice as she addressed his grandmother. Never before had he felt more murderous, or more helpless. “Her words were vague and sinister, but she mentioned a bane.” She swallowed hard. “His symptoms—bradycardia, arrhythmia—are consistent with Aconitum, also known as wolfsbane.”
“Or monkshood.” His grandmother nodded. “And queen of all poisons.”
His wife closed her eyes and fresh tears leaked from beneath the lashes fanned across her cheeks. “With no known antidote.” His heart nearly tore in two, reading his doom upon such a lovely face.
“Ah, but there is hope. No direct antidote, but it can be treated. Digitalis is a beginning. We must travel for the next. Hurry.” Grandmother crooked her gnarled fingers, wanting him to return the tin cup. “Can you help him up? Like his horse, this grandson of mine is built of leather and steel.”
“I can still drive,” he insisted, as his bride helped him struggle to his feet. She was stronger than she looked… in so many ways. He pulled himself—one-handed—onto the driver’s seat of the vardo. He didn’t require both arms to drive. Arm. He cursed softly. The numbness was spreading. He couldn’t feel his right elbow. “But I’d best show you how.”
Puri daj handed Emily a rope over the sill of the open half of the divided door, and she lashed him in place, asking, “Where are we going?”
“The cliffs,” she replied. “There is a plant…”
Of course there was a plant. There was always a plant. A flower. A stem. A root. All that could hinder her was distance, time and season. Dark rain clouds threatened in the west, blocking the golden-orange light of the setting sun. And, perhaps, deteriorating weather.
“Any cliffs?” Emily asked, frowning at the oncoming storm.
“The nearest ones.”
His wife’s hand clutched at her skirts. He unfurled her fingers, pressing the reins into her hands. With each passing moment, it grew harder to draw breath. “Pull like so,” he demonstrated, “and Tesio will move forward. Push here, he stops. This movement will coax him backward.”
The ground tilted, and he closed his eyes. Opening them, he found the clockwork horse sported eight legs, much like one in the old Norse poem. A pounding—hammer against anvil—began inside his skull. He couldn’t remember why, but he recalled that the horse—Sleipnir—often carried riders down the road to Hel.
Appropriate somehow.
A cool hand pressed against his brow. “Luca?”
Worry in her voice brought him back. For Emily, he would willingly ride through the gates of hell itself. “Hold tight,” he managed. “I’m no longer fit to drive the vardo. Add dizziness to my list of symptoms.”
She gave a tight nod, and he pulled a lever to release the chronospring. Tesio’s head tossed, and his steel hooves lifted, propelling them from the field toward Dover.
Like an ill omen, thunder cracked and lightning forked through the clouds that rolled and tumbled overhead. Wooden wheels met the packed dirt of a road, and
he flipped another lever, increasing the tempo of the clockwork mechanisms to propel them forward faster. When the skies broke, a deluge of water would turn the roads to mud, and reaching the Dover cliffs would become an impossibility.
Every moment mattered.
They approached a fork in the road. Which was it? “Right. No, left.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“I know the direction,” her voice reassured. “You have no need to apologize.”
“But I do.” He ought to have suspected Rayka. “The tin rose was mine.”
“Yours?” Eyes wide, her voice rose in confusion.
“A bridal bouquet.” She would find them later and wonder, but he wanted her to know. The light-headedness grew worse, and yet he felt as if he was sinking. What if there was no later chance to tell her? “Each flower different. A rose for the soft petals of your skin. A poppy to remind me of your blushing cheeks. A thistle, for the pointed stares you throw when I prick your ire.”
“Hush now,” she said, soft and sweet. “For I am wooed and won. Lean back and concentrate upon breathing. There’s a quiet field a mile past the Oglethorpe’s boarding towers. We’ll be there soon.”
His wife, a woman who could be counted upon. He desperately hoped to live long enough to show her how to trigger the concealed mechanism within the flower and activate its magic. But given the numbness had now reached his shoulder, he wasn’t at all certain he would have the pleasure.
Lightning cracked, and Emily glanced at Luca. She wasn’t at all encouraged by the way his head lolled against the vardo, his breaths increasingly shallow. His face was drawn and his skin had taken on a yellowish-gray tinge, though perhaps it was only a trick of the light, the sunset filtering through the edge of angry rainclouds and drained of color.
There was no hope of catching the other vardos, for plans had been made to head north, to find the next landed gentry willing—or resigned—to trade with gypsies in exchange for both labor and their expertise in repairing the ploughing engines that would prowl the fields come harvest.
Snapping the reins as Luca had demonstrated, she urged the clockwork horse to shift gears and increase his pace. Though they took aim at a specific field, they were in pursuit not of the carefully cultivated, but of those plants that grew wild and unrestrained, this time in the tumble of overgrowth that flourished at the edges of the great white cliffs, perhaps even cascading over.
“What plant do you have in mind?” Emily called over her shoulder.
“Belladonna.”
“Deadly nightshade?” Her arm tensed and the horse—and caravan—nearly ran off the road. Another poison? Think. Nadya always had a reason and was forever challenging her apprentices—apprentice—to find the reasoning underlying her verdicts.
The shrubby plant favored calcareous soils, and the cliffs were white because their chalk deposits, calcium carbonate. As belladonna would not yet be in flower, the roots would contain the highest concentration of tropane alkaloids.
Useful for pain relief—and by women wishing to dilate their eyes for a certain come-hither brilliance—she and Nadya had used the last of their tincture when a man’s hand was mangled in the gear shaft of a winding drum. The wait for a doctor willing to set the bones of a gypsy had been long.
There’d been side effects: delirium and terrifying hallucinations. The poor man had believed himself hunted by horned demons riding upon the backs of red-eyed, savage boars.
Her heart leapt into her throat as she glanced again at Luca. She ought to have slipped away earlier. These were not symptoms she would wish upon anyone, let alone her beloved, father of her unborn child. For days now she’d held the secret close, imagining a baby with Luca’s dark flashing eyes beneath a mop of raven-black hair, a child whose smile would be radiant, but hard-won, much like Luca’s. She’d planned to share the news on their wedding night, to pull him close and whisper her secret into his ear the moment the first star appeared in the velvety, night sky. Pain stabbed into her heart at the thought of raising their child without him.
“The vine kept unwinding and twisting,” Luca muttered, his pupils dilated wide. “No sooner did I stuff it back into its box than it sprang away like a nightmarish child’s toy intent on destruction.”
The tin rose was mine.
And meant for her.
Rayka’s anger and frustration was understandable, but murder? Impossible to justify such an action.
The summer Emily had turned sixteen, Luca gave her a single, red rose. From that day forward, Rayka had sharpened her claws, digging them into her at every opportunity. Yet within their encampment, she’d found all she’d ever desired and refused to let one bitter girl keep her from her goals. Or Luca.
Her cheeks heated at the memory of their first kiss, stolen in the shadow cast by a threshing machine left to rust in a field where she’d been sent to collect chamomile flowers. He’d been salvaging parts, and it had been impossible to look away from his linen shirt, damp and stretched tightly across his muscular chest, its sleeves rolled up to expose his powerful arms. Alone, months of smoldering glances and accidental brushes of his hand finally set a match to tinder.
Her blushes had given her away. Rayka took one glance, and the knife she used to strip bark had slipped dangerously close to Emily’s fingers as she deposited the delicate blooms upon the table.
A fatal error, ignoring Rayka’s seething anger.
Fatal.
No. Not fatal. Her mentor had a plan.
“Emily!” Nadya’s sharp tone snapped her attention back where it belonged. “Focus. Think.”
If she wished for more of Luca’s thrilling kisses rather than a pale ghost of their memory, she’d best focus. She glanced again at his drawn face, noting the sharp pinpoints of his pupils. A moment ago they’d been widely dilated. Moreover, his breath grew more shallow and labored with each passing minute. What heart stimulant did belladonna possess that could save him?
“Atropine,” she concluded, pleased to hear Nadya rumble with approval. “It can have unpredictable effects, but a tincture of belladonna will help his lungs draw air and both strengthen and steady his heart rate.”
“Precisely,” Nadya said, her voice carrying notes of both pride and worry. Relief swept over Emily. “If we can support his heart and lungs until the effects of the wolfsbane begin to fade, he has a chance.”
And that was why they were they racing for the cliffs. In the distance, Dover castle appeared, its outline dark against the sky.
A flash of lightning. A crash of thunder. Wind rocked the vardo. A fat drop of rain fell on her arm. Another on her shoulder. If they did not reach the ledge soon, all would be lost to a new enemy—mud.
“Faster, child,” Nadya urged her, the lines of her face deepening with concern. “When you see water, begin to look for a stone farmhouse. Pass to its right, then stop. There is a path. The plant grows there.”
Prodding Luca from his stupor, she asked, “Can Tesio go any faster?”
A wobbly nod. “Am I that close to death’s door?” A finger pointed. “Dial that to ten, then notch the lever one level higher.” A faint smile pulled at his bloodless lips. “He can run like the devil.”
“Hold tight,” Emily ordered, steeling her spine.
A twist of the dial and a great grinding shuddered inside the clockwork horse’s chest. With a loud clunk, a heavy gear fell into place. She shoved the lever upward, to the notch marked eleven. The beast stretched its neck forward, strips of its leather mane flapping in the wind, its iron hooves pounding furiously down the lane. Behind her the vardo rattled and shuddered; chickens in their baskets squawked and brass pots and pans clanged.
Fingers tight on the reins, Emily’s heart matched the horse’s furious pace, racing first with both determination and fear.
“A turn!” she yelled, panicked.
“Ease up on the throttle,” Luca directed. “Pull harder on the right strap.”
On two wheels, they careened around the corner, ne
arly tipping into the hedgerow. In fear for their feathered lives, a resting flock of birds abandoned their rest and took flight.
Almost there. A stretch of field, the farmhouse and, at last, the tangle of growth at the cliff’s edge where the ground dropped away to the sea. Beyond, storm-whipped waves tossed and threw themselves toward the cliffs. She would need to take care the wind did not cast her onto the rocks below.
Too late she caught sight of the path Nadya had specified and yanked on the reins. They careened off the road and into the field. Fast, too fast.
“Shift down!” Luca yelled, as they careened toward the edge of the cliff.
She reached out and pushed the lever down to five. The clockwork horse shuddered and lurched, but it slowed, struggling mightily against the momentum of the vardo.
Crack!
The seat below her gave way as the vardo groaned, its front left corner dipping and twisting, throwing her against Luca, tumbling them to the ground in a heap.
Heart in her throat, she looked down at his limp form beneath her. “Luca?” she cried, a hysterical edge to her voice as she patted his face. He wasn’t moving. They were so close, so close. “Luca?” Water filled her eyes blurring her vision. This couldn’t be how it ended. Ear pressed to his chest she listened. There, a slow, irregular heartbeat. One shallow breath following another.
And then he whispered. “Did we make it?”
Chapter Three
He woke to the cry of his name, to Emily’s face pressed to his chest. He lifted a shaky left hand to her soft, tumbled hair and drew his fingertips through it.
“Did we make it?” he whispered. One moment his eyes were focused on the gray stretch of the English Channel, the next moment metal and wood screeched and a field of barley rushed up at him. Then darkness.