Julie Anne Long

by The Runaway Duke

  Leonora settled a square of muslin over the mouth of the pitcher and poked it in the center to tuck it in, then tipped one of the dark bottles over it. A dark broth dotted with shreds of herb gurgled out slowly over the muslin, sending a greenish stain spreading across it. The little shreds of herb were caught as the liquid passed through.

  When she had emptied the bottle, Leonora gave the muslin square a hard twist to extract as much liquid as possible. Then she placed the stained muslin aside and poured the contents of the pitcher back into the dark bottle.

  “Shepherd’s purse,” she announced with satisfaction as she stoppered the bottle. It was already labeled; clearly, it was a bottle she had used for shepherd’s purse time and again.

  “Now, Rebecca, if you would wipe the pitcher with this muslin, then strain each of these bottles as I have done. Use a different piece of muslin for each herb, for it is not good to mix them.”

  Martha knelt down next to her mother with her own packets of herbs, settling into the work as if it were something that took place every evening.

  For several minutes, Rebecca and Leonora and Martha worked side by side in absorbed silence, Leonora shaking herbs from the bags and examining them carefully, mea-suring them in her palm, sorting them into little piles. Rebecca felt quietly powerful as she pressed the herbs through the muslin and poured the fresh tinctures back into their bottles. Aside from extracting a musket ball from Connor, everything else she knew of healing was theory, information derived from her father’s journal and books. But this . . . an ailing person would someday taste the medicine she was helping to create, and then they would become, with God’s help, healthy again. It was magic, nothing short. It was a vast, humbling responsibility. Still, all things considered, she felt equal to it; it felt right, more profoundly right than the keys of a pianoforte had ever felt beneath her fingers. She was hungry to learn.

  But there was a precariousness to it, too; she half expected Leonora to announce that it had all been a terrible mistake, tear the muslin from her hands and force her instead to practice the pianoforte. She was afraid to move too abruptly, or breathe too emphatically, lest the moment dissolve like a dream.

  By stark contrast, there was Martha, whose utter indifference to the art of healing was apparent in her every motion, in the slump of her shoulders, in the the stiff, almost angry movement of her fingers as she poked about in the piles of herbs, in the grim set of her plump mouth. In Martha, Rebecca saw herself, hunched glumly over a pianoforte, poking at it apathetically, and she felt an errant twinge of sympathy again. Opportunities to rebel must be few and far between for Martha; her mother was ever-present, and perhaps the Gypsy family group felt suffocatingly insular. Perhaps Martha was simply waiting for someone, anyone, to take her away. And perhaps Connor looked like that someone.

  Rebecca stole a sideways glance at Martha, whose skin was glowing a soft gold in the lamplight. Martha was beautiful in an extravagant, very singular way, utterly convinced of her own superiority, and no doubt accustomed to turning any man’s head. She probably found Connor’s inattention maddening and inexplicable.

  Funny how short-lived her twinges of sympathy toward Martha tended to be.

  Rebecca forced her own concentration back to the herbs.

  “What are you making, Leonora?” she asked, breaking the silence, after she had stoppered her third bottle.

  “Tonight I make a special medicine of many herbs. For dropsy,” she said, gesturing to a little mound of herbs she had collected. “Tansy leaves, dandelion root, parsley, and—”

  The face of an older woman appeared in the opening of the tent, and rattled a few words in anxious-sounding Rom to Leonora, who nodded and gave her a short answer that sounded like an affirmation.

  “I will return in an hour or so,” Leonora told Rebecca and Martha. She tucked the bottle of shepherd’s purse into her apron pocket and ducked out of the tent before Rebecca could say, “Please do not leave me alone with your horrible daughter.”

  It was quiet in the tent for a moment except for the rustle of dried herbs and the gurgle of tinctures as Rebecca and Martha continued their chores.

  She’s like a snake, Rebecca thought, tensing. She’ll wait, and then she’ll strike. Any minute now . . .

  “Rebecca, shall I dukker for ye?”

  Aha! There it was, the strike. Still, Rebecca was curious to know what her palms had to say about her life. Good heavens, she told herself firmly, if you can handle highwaymen, you can certainly handle Martha Heron.

  “Of course, Martha. I would like that. How do we go about it?”

  Martha scooted toward Rebecca on her knees.

  “Give me your hands,” she said.

  Rebecca presented her hands, palms up. Martha grasped them in her own unusually soft hands and smoothed her thumbs over them, spreading them flat. She peered into each one intently for a while, occasionally tracing a line with her forefinger, or tilting one closer to the lamplight.

  “First I will ask of you, Rebecca: do ye want me to be honest?”

  “What would you be otherwise?”

  “The Gorgio who pay to hear their futures read in their palms only want to hear one kind of fortune. But I think you are brave enough to hear the whole truth.”

  “By all means, tell me the whole truth.”

  Martha spent a few more moments examining her hands, as if deciding where to begin.

  “This line, this long line that curves so, here? It means you will have a long life,” Martha mused. “And right here, the fork in this line? It means you will go on a journey, far from your home . . .”

  “Ah,” Rebecca said politely, unimpressed. It would be abundantly clear to anyone who looked at her that she was on a long journey, far from home.

  “It looks as though you have two lovers, one dark and one fair . . .”

  “Mmm.” This was a little more plausible, given the existence of Edelston.

  Martha drew her finger across the line that bisected Rebecca’s right palm, as if following a map.

  “. . . but the dark lover is faithless. He will leave you for another and your life will take yet another turn, one of hardship and confusion.”

  “And it says that where, precisely?” Rebecca didn’t bother to keep the skepticism from her voice.

  “Oh, here and here.” Martha gestured over her hand vaguely. “As I said, the dark lover is faithless, but you will have a happy home with your fair-haired lover when you are . . . when you are . . .” Martha peered closely at Rebecca’s left hand. “Oh, many years older. You and your fair-haired lover will be blessed with child after child after child—”

  Rebecca snatched her hands away.

  “Thank you, Martha,” she said slowly, through gritted teeth. “But I suspect that dukkering actually means ‘nonsense’ in English.”

  Martha stared at her wonderingly. Then a look of pitying comprehension crossed her face.

  “I only tell you this, the truth, because I am concerned for you, Rebecca.”

  “Concerned,” Rebecca repeated flatly.

  “Yes. Concerned. You say you are engaged to this Gadje Connor Riordan?”

  “I am engaged to Connor Riordan.” It was becoming increasingly difficult not to give Martha a good hard shake.

  “But I am confused,” Martha continued, her brow wrinkling. “If Connor Riordan meant to marry you, Rebecca, ye’d travel to Gretna Green, would ye not? But Gretna Green is that way,” she said, gesturing dramatically. “We are going in another direction altogether.”

  Rebecca was speechless. It was her own most subliminal fear given voice.

  And Martha knew it, Rebecca could tell. Martha’s features remained composed in a reasonable imitation of sympathy, but she was having difficulty keeping a gleam of triumph out of her eyes.

  She gently took one of Rebecca’s hands in her own and covered it with her other hand. It was all Rebecca could do not to jerk away from her.

  “I hope, Rebecca,” she said passionately, “
I do hope that you have not . . . given yourself to him. For in giving yourself to him you take away his reason to marry you.”

  Rebecca stared at her, stunned. Slowly, with admirable restraint, she withdrew her hand from between Martha’s.

  “Thank you for your concern, Martha.” Her voice was cool, and only shook a little. “But I assure you that it is unfounded.”

  Martha shrugged and returned her attention to the herbs.

  “Every unwed man in our compania would like to be my fiancé,” she said casually, poking about in a small pile of chamomile.

  “Not exactly spoiled for choice, though, are they?”

  Rebecca surprised herself by actually saying the words out loud.

  Martha only laughed delightedly. Rebecca realized too late she’d just confirmed for Martha how truly the dukkering had hit its mark.

  Chapter Eighteen

  She’d had worse days. For instance, the day she’d caught her hair in the latch of her bedroom window, after Robbie Denslowe had convinced her she could climb out of it down the ivy trellis. She’d been nine years old. She’d spent half the morning twisted at an awkward angle, half in, half out of the window, before her mother found her. They could only free her by snipping off half of her hair. Needless to say, her father had ensured that sitting down had been uncomfortable for days thereafter.

  But she’d never had a day that approximated actual purgatory quite as closely as this one had.

  For hours and hours, down roads leading God knows where, Rebecca’s bones had been shaken atop the Gypsy cart. And though Leonora had taken it upon herself to give Rebecca an ongoing verbal instruction in herbcraft—where to find them, when to pick them, how to grow them, how to harvest them, what they were for—her daughter Martha remained silently bent over her pile of mending. Rebecca had rarely felt a presence as profoundly. She’d glanced at the girl nervously several times throughout, and then forced herself to stop, because she couldn’t bear seeing her knowing, pitying, enigmatic half smile one more time. Odious girl.

  And she hadn’t been able to speak with Connor alone. The morning had been a bustle of packing and leaving, and they’d only been able to exchange looks from across the camp, and absurdly polite greetings when he rode up next to her cart. She was happy to see that he looked well rested. But he also seemed distracted again; he was wearing the inwardly turned expression that was becoming all too familiar. It did nothing to loosen the anxious knot in the pit of her stomach.

  When at last Raphael rode ahead of the caravan to the crest of a hill and signaled the group to follow him, she was unbelievably relieved. It meant they would be stopping for the evening. Perhaps she would be able to speak to Connor, share her worries with him, and —

  What on earth was that noise?

  Puzzled, Rebecca scanned the horizon behind and in front of her; the early evening sky was flawlessly clear, which more or less ruled out thunder. But the dull rumbling noise had persisted for several minutes, and now seemed to be increasing in volume. It was more consistent than thunder, too, in that there was no pulse to it. It simply went on and on.

  Leonora noticed Rebecca swiveling her head about and frowning, and supplied an answer to her unspoken question.

  “Wagons,” she said. “And horses.”

  Rebecca furrowed her brow more deeply. “What—”

  And then they crested the rise they had been approaching.

  Wagons, indeed.

  There were dozens of them, swarms of them. The rumble, Rebecca now understood, was the sound of hundreds of wheels turning over the ground and hundreds of hooves churning the earth, mingled with human voices.

  Thus Rebecca heard the Cambridge Horse Fair before she actually saw it.

  Soon their own cart was swept into the tide of wagons and horses, and they were immersed in a cacophony of impressions: shouted greetings and laughter and arguments in Rom and coarse English, barking dogs, the jingling of tack, the stamp of boots. Colorful tents and booths pitched in orderly rows, stages for pantomimes and Punch and Judy shows, even for Wombwell’s menagerie of exotic animals, red and blue and yellow triangular flags strung between them, flapping gaily in the breeze.

  She swiveled her head for a glimpse of Connor, bursting with questions and the need to share, but he was nowhere in sight. Martha saw her looking for him and smiled knowingly. Rebecca jerked her chin upward and ignored her.

  “We shall be busy, Rebecca,” Leonora said to her, her voice raised over the din. “Every sick Gypsy from miles around will come to see us. I hope you will help.”

  And despite her worries, Rebecca’s heart leaped. Us, Leonora had said. They will come to see us. Not only was Wombwell rumored to travel with an actual lion, which she very much hoped to see, but every sick Gypsy from miles around would come to see them. Rebecca was morbidly delighted at the prospect.

  The fire crackling at her feet was making Rebecca feel a little sleepy. Leonora sat closely, her thigh touching Rebecca’s, chatting to a woman seated to her left. Around her, the firelight picked out the white of eyes and teeth as the Gypsies chattered and laughed in Rom, reviewing their plans for the next day. The squeals and giggles of children occasionally pierced through the adult conversations, but most of the children had either nodded off in the arms of their mothers or had been coerced into going to bed. Beyond their campfire, dozens of other campfires blazed, lighting other Gypsy families. The commerce and festivity that was the Cambridge Horse Fair would begin in earnest tomorrow.

  She glanced across the fire and caught the eye of Rose Heron. She was feeling particularly proprietary about Rose at the moment, because Rose had cut her hand with a knife while preparing dinner, and Leonora had allowed Rebecca to sew it up.

  It had been an odd sensation, but strangely not unlike stitching flowers into a sampler. For one wild moment she had imagined spelling “Bless Our Home” on to the back of Rose’s hand in black thread; she wondered what her mother would think of her happily volunteering to stitch anything at all. While Leonora hovered alertly and gripped Rose’s other hand in her own, Rebecca, hardly breathing, her universe narrowed to a cut, drew five neat horizontal stitches through the very top layer of Rose’s skin, pulling each at just the right tension so as not to pucker the wound or tear it farther. She finished with a tight little knot, and the wound was closed.

  Rebecca had looked up to find Leonora beaming at her. “A steady hand, to be sure, Rebecca, and a swift one.”

  Even Martha, she of the stabbing mending needle and flawless stitches, had lifted her eyebrows in what seemed perilously close to approval.

  So it is not that I have no talent for needlework, Rebecca thought smugly; it is just that I have no talent for useless needlework.

  And then she turned her head from Rose because somehow she knew the moment Connor appeared at the edge of the fire. It was her first glimpse of him since they’d arrived in camp, and to her eyes his shoulders looked rounded from exhaustion. He took a place next to Raphael and pushed his hair wearily out of his eyes, scanning the circle. For me. He’s mine, she thought fiercely, with an ache of love and possession. And something in her, ever since she was a little girl, had always known it.

  He saw her and straightened, took a step toward her. But Raphael put a hand on his arm, gesturing toward the far end of the circle, and Connor paused.

  A long, slow, rich note, a testing note, welled up out of a fiddle, echoing in the clear night air. One of the Gypsy men had risen to his feet, and a fiddle was tucked under his chin. Next to him stood Martha, her hair and skin burnished in the firelight, her hands folded in front of her. She closed her eyes briefly, as though gathering her thoughts.

  And then the song began.

  From the very first, it was a wild shameless thing, plaintive and almost cruelly penetrating. It was wholly unlike anything Rebecca had heard in her life, certainly nothing like the pieces played in English country parlors by dutiful young daughters. Her breath caught; she felt each note as though the bow was being
drawn across her own heart.

  And then suddenly Martha’s voice, as pure and powerful as a river, was soaring above the notes, passionate, teasing, pleading. In no time at all, the men in the Gypsy circle were staring at Martha, glassy-eyed, slack-mouthed, and rapt. Martha must be in heaven.

  But Martha’s amber eyes were fixed on a single point across the fire.

  The bloody girl was singing to Connor.

  Rebecca couldn’t bear it any more. Leave she must, or she would throw something at her. Unobtrusively, gingerly, as though taking care not to jar an inner injury, she stood up and carried herself away from the fire to the edge of the encampment.

  She paused between two tents and covered her face in her hands, breathing unsteadily.

  You will not cry you will not cry you will not, she told herself furiously.

  She longed to tell Connor everything Martha had seen in her palm, just so she could hear him refute each and every one of her predictions. But what if he didn’t refute them? What if he stumbled over his words, or laughed, or . . . ?

  The crunch of footsteps behind her barely registered on her hearing.

  “Wee Becca?”

  She was muttering to herself.

  “I swear I will kill that girl if I have to spend another minute of—”

  Connor put his hand on her arm, and Rebecca jumped.

  “Wee Becca, why are you standing here alone muttering about murder?”

  “Martha,” she spat.

  “Ah. And who is Martha?”

  She turned to him incredulously.

  “Connor! Martha. Leonora’s daughter. Surely you’ve noticed her. She has most certainly noticed you.”

  “Now which one is she? And please do not say ‘dark hair, dark eyes . . .’”

  “She has dark hair, and light eyes, and very large . . . very large . . .” she trailed off.

  “Eyes? Ears?” he suggested, teasing.

  “Breasts,” she said flatly. “She has very large breasts.”

  Well. He should have known that Rebecca would never choose demureness over accuracy.

  “Oh. That Martha. At the moment, she is singing.”