DANGEROUS
OBSESSION
“Are you afraid, Gypsy?” he whispered.
“Will you hurt me, like my uncle?” I asked.
“What if I did?” He buried his fingers in my hair and moved his lips over my throat.
“Would you cry?”
“You know I would not. I am Gypsy.”
His embraces became rougher, his kisses more demanding. I could feel the tension and desire in him and it made me dizzy. The tendons in his neck were like tightly drawn cords. A fine mist of perspiration covered his forehead and upper chest. His lips seared my flesh wherever they touched.
My body was glowing, yearning for him.
Also in Arrow by Natasha Peters
Savage Surrender
DANGEROUS
OBSESSION
Natasha Peters
Arrow Books Limited 17-21 Conway Street, London W1P 6JD
An imprint of the Hutchinson Publishing Group
London Melbourne Sydney Auckland Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world
First published in Great Britain 1979 Reprinted 1982
© Natasha Peters 1978
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow
ISBN 0 09 920500 9
Table of Contents
DANGEROUS OBSESSION 1 Rhawnie
2 The Troika
3 Gypsy No More
4 Becoming Civilized
5 Paris: May, 1843
6 Wisdom Gained
7 Playing Cards
8 The End of a Dream
9 Gypsies in Exile
10 The Sport of Kings
11 Revolutionary Gypsy
12 Gypsy Prima Donna
13 New Orleans Reverie
14 The Prodigal Returns
15 Our Reverie Ends
16 The Chase
17 We Cross the Great Plains
18 The Golden Gypsy
19 The Golden West
20 Two Brothers
21 Two Gypsies
1
Rhawnie
WHEN I was born the Gypsies named me Rhawnie. In Romany, the language of the Gypsies, it means “great lady.”
Lyubov, the leader of our tribe, said that someday I would be Queen of the Gypsies. He was probably drunk when he said it, because everyone knows that Gypsies have no queens, or kings, either. Besides, I was only half Gypsy; my mother was the daughter of a Russian count.
From birth I looked different from the others. Oh, I had my father’s black Gypsy eyes and olive skin, but my hair was thick and blond, like my mother’s. I was a long baby—Lyubov measured me against his forearm—and the women predicted, correctly, that I would grow to be very tall.
They didn’t give me a last name then, although I have accumulated several since then, and a couple of titles as well. Lyubov used to say that a name is like a campsite: you move into it, use it, enjoy it, dirty it up a little, and then move on. If you are unlucky and the police bother you there, you don’t use it again. The gorgio, those who are not Gypsy, expect a person to have only one name, and therefore the Gypsies find it expedient to adopt several, just to confuse them. Names are not important to Gypsies, who disdain anything that constricts and defines their freedom. Freedom is important. Life is important. Being happy today, not worrying about the past or what is to come, finding enough to eat, fooling the gorgio—all that is important.
Even when I was just a few weeks old I helped my family earn a living. My mother would take me with her when she went to beg and I am sure I cried piteously while she asked passers-by for a few kopecks to feed her hungry child. As I grew older, I was encouraged to speak up, and I remember crouching in doorways with my grubby hand outstretched, whimpering and sniffling and saying in a small, starved voice, “Hungry, so hungry. A few kopecks, sir. A few kopecks, madame. I am so hungry.” Sometimes my mother would borrow somebody else’s babies and we would all huddle together, looking pathetic.
A word about begging: it is not as easy as it looks, particularly when you get older and more sturdy-looking. You can’t speak too loudly, because you are supposed to be faint with hunger and almost too weak to stand. And at the same time you have to be heard over the noise of the street. One of the secrets of success is persistence: don’t leave the gorgio alone until they have given you something, even a dirty look or a cross word. Make them notice you! Even as I grew taller I was skinny and emaciated and I always did well at begging.
My education progressed. When I was only three I stole my first chicken. It was almost bigger than I was and I tried to hide it under my skirts as I had seen the other women do, but it kept scratching and kicking and pecking me. I didn’t know you had to wring the bird’s neck to keep it quiet. But somehow I got it back to our camp, and even though I was scratched and bleeding in a dozen places, I didn’t cry. Gypsies admire courage above any other quality, and children are taught from a very early age never to show signs of weakness. Everyone was very proud of my accomplishment and my bravery, and as I recall there was a big feast that night with lots of noise and song and drinking.
You may think that a child’s theft of a chicken is not a very appropriate occasion for feasting, but with Gypsies, any excuse to celebrate is a good one. A child’s first theft is a landmark, and I had shown myself to be rather precocious and ambitious in this area. It was a sign of great things to come. I became a proficient enough thief: good at smuggling goods out of stores under my skirts while another girl distracted the storekeeper; not so good at picking pockets, although I never really had a chance to develop expertise in that field. But if I got caught I always lied like a trouper. No one ever had to teach me to lie: that came naturally.
When I was older still, I learned to tell fortunes. Now that’s a real skill, requiring lots of practice, a shrewd eye, and a glib tongue. A novice fortune-teller learns to read people the waygorgio children learn to read books, and she learns to spin her lies in a mesmerizing whisper, so that the gorgio goes away thinking that Gypsies really have the gift of prophecy and divination, when in fact all they have is the gift of extracting money from gullible people. But I will speak more of fortune-telling later.
My dear mother died when I was five or perhaps six. (I have never known exactly when I was born. Age isn’t important to Gypsies.) I didn’t think much about it then, but now, looking back, I marvel at my mother’s courage and daring. It couldn’t have been easy for the pampered daughter of a gorgio nobleman to leave the warmth and safety of her father’s house for the uncertainty and danger of life on the road. Perhaps she was bored with the life of a lady and wanted some fun. Or she might have had some trouble with her brother, my uncle Alexei, of whom you shall hear more later. In any case, she saw my father and fell in love with him and never looked back. Two years after she died, my father remarried, a Gypsy girl named Gemma who gave him three strong sons in three years. Now that’s a good wife!
I always felt sorry for the children who weren’t Gypsy, chained to their schoolrooms and compelled to attend church and to learn how to work for their livings. None of us Gypsy children could read or write, but we were all exceptionally well-educated, and not only in the fine arts of lying and cheating. As we travelled all over eastern Europe and even into Greece and Turkey, we picked up a thorough knowledge of different peoples and their customs, and a smattering of over a dozen languages as well.
I loved the travelling. Through
rain and snow, in intense heat or paralyzing cold, or in high winds that almost tore the roofs off our caravans. Somehow, the more difficult and taxing the journey, the better the rest afterwards. I remember campsites on smooth meadows and rocky hillsides, in black forests and on the edges of weird marshlands. When Lyubov gave the signal to stop, the caravans rolled into a circle. The horses were put to pasture at once, fires were built. The children played, the women cooked, the men tended the animals and laughed and talked together. We made forays into the surrounding neighborhood for food. Sometimes there was a scrap with the police, or a quarrel with the townspeople, or a fight with an angry farmer. But all that added to the fun.
Almost as important to me as the members of my own family were the horses our tribe owned. I couldn’t stay away from them when we were camped, which annoyed some people because girls weren’t supposed to have anything to do with the animals. That was a man’s province. But I made such a pest of myself, trailing the men around at home and at horsefairs, asking questions, listening to them bargain, learning from all of them and especially Lyubov, that eventually they just gave up trying to make me wash clothes and sew and cook. I learned from Lyubov how to talk to horses, in guttural grunts and whispers. I learned how to groom and feed and doctor them, how to judge their merits, even how to shoe them. Lyubov said that I had a very special talent, but I knew only that the horses were my friends. I loved them and they knew that they could trust me.
And so the years of my childhood and early education passed. So happy, so free. Then one spring, when I was fourteen (or fifteen), the Count Nicholas Alexandreivitch Oulianov, my dead mother’s father, came for me and took me away from the Gypsies. They had to give me up, for to refuse would only bring sorrow and retribution down upon all of them. I was heartsick at first, but I convinced myself that I wouldn’t have to stay with him for very long, that I would return. I even made a solemn vow, but I’ll tell you about that later because it’s tied up with the fortune-telling.
Anyway, the Grandfather was a kind man who had never stopped grieving for his daughter. He indulged me shamefully, much to the disgust of his own children and grandchildren. He loved horses and knew almost as much about them as Lyubov. He never tried to make me into a gorgio. He didn’t force me to bathe or to eat with a fork, and he let me keep my colorful Gypsy skirts and scarves. And even when I threw my schoolbooks into the fire and told him that they were more useful to me as fuel, he only laughed and said that if I wanted to stay ignorant and illiterate and dirty it was all right with him, just so long as I stayed. I did learn French from him though, for in those days most of the Russian aristocrats spoke French exclusively, and some never even learned Russian.
The summer passed. And in September of that year the Grandfather’s heart failed him and he died. His son, my uncle Alexei, swore to his dying father that he would care for me and look after me, and he took me to the great grey house in Moscow with his family for the winter.
Now I hadn’t minded too much living with the Grandfather. I was still Gypsy, and he seemed to accept my strange customs and even to take pride in them. But I hated his son. Alexei was a man of gross appetites, a leering, lustful animal who sank his teeth into this father’s fortune and devoured it in a few greedy gulps, so that in a few months there was hardly anything left of his inheritance. He gambled and he lost, and when he lost he became nearly insane with anger and he vented his rage on his family and his serfs. And on me. He despised me. He hated the sight and the sound and the smell of me. He hated the attention his father had lavished upon me, the scum daughter of his no-good runaway sister. I reciprocated his feelings. I hated all of them—his stupid wife, his pudgy pig-faced children, his cowed, fearful serfs—but Alexei, by his cruelty and savagery, earned a special place at the top of my list of Hate.
I tried to get away from him before we left for Moscow, but he watched me closely and I had no opportunity to escape. You would have thought that loathing me as he did, he would have been glad to see the heels of my boots. But no. He seemed to take pleasure in trying to inflict his will on me and in beating me when I rebelled.
His wife was just as bad. She thought of me as a heathen and she said that it was her Christian duty to civilize me and to make a good God-fearing girl out of me. I had to endure a bath every week. She gave me old ugly frocks to wear that were dark and drab and ill-fitting. I cut them up with scissors. I really got a beating for that. She tried to make me wear shoes inside the house. I refused and they beat me. They even tried to cut my hair! Every Gypsy knows that it’s bad luck for a woman to cut her hair, and I told them so. I fought them like a tiger and I got to keep my long braids, but I still got a beating.
My uncle took a strange delight in beating me, I could tell. His breathing would quicken and he would start to slobber, even before he laid a hand on me. And a few times his gross hands would squeeze my small breasts and grope between my thighs when he was holding me down, preparing to strike me with the birch switch he used. I had seen a lot of things in my fourteen or fifteen years, and I wasn’t so naive or stupid that I didn’t know what he really wanted to do to me, and I was sickened and revolted by him. I suppose I feared him, but being Gypsy I never showed fear in his presence, and I never admitted it to myself.
I had to get away. But how? His serfs were his spies. I was hardly ever alone, and at night the house was securely locked, every door and window, and the keys given to Alexei. Moscow might have been a million versts from Bryansk, where the Gypsies had been camped in the springtime when the Grandfather had found me. Even if I managed to steal a horse, I knew I stood a slim chance of finding them before the winter weather set in with vengeance—assuming that I knew where Bryansk lay in relation to Moscow, which I did not. My sense of direction has never been that good. I knew that I would have to bide my time until spring. But every day my uncle’s behavior became more intolerable and my situation more dangerous. I sensed that I probably wouldn’t live until spring.
And that is when the Stranger appeared. In November of that eventful year. His name was Seth Garrett, and he was an adventurer, a gambler, some said a devil. But to me he was my rescuer, and my tormentor.
I knew my uncle was entertaining a guest. Through the keyhole of the door to the servant’s kitchen, I overheard Vasilly, the ancient family retainer, telling the housekeeper that the master was playing cards in the study with the foreign gentleman he met at Madame Malianova’s soiree, and that the foreigner was winning. This made Vasilly unhappy, and the housekeeper, too. They both knew what happened when the master lost at cards.
And then I heard Vasilly say, “He’ll be leaving from here before the sun’s up. For Paris, I’ve heard. I don’t see why the master made me go to all the trouble of airing and making up the guest room for him if he’s only going to stay in it a few hours. And at the rate they’re going, they’re likely to play until dawn.”
Alexei always played until his luck changed, or until he had nothing more to lose. Before I went upstairs that night I sought out Vasilly and asked him, “Vasilly, where is Paris?”
“Paris?” he squeaked. “What do you want to know that for? How should I know where Paris is? How should I know anything—”
“Is it to the south?” I pressed him. Bryansk was to the south. I knew that much. If I could get to Bryansk I could easily pick up the trail that the Gypsies always left when they travelled.
“South?” The old man’s voice quavered. “Yes, yes, I suppose it is. But it’s a long, long way from here, that’s sure. It’s not even in Russia!”
I slept on the attic floor. It was my choice, not my aunt’s, who didn’t see why I couldn’t sleep in a bed, with sheets and pillows, like a normal person. I tried to tell her that gorgio beds were too soft and that her sheets looked like shrouds, and to a Gypsy anything that symbolizes death is bad luck. White is the color of death, and Gypsies never wear it if they can help it. My bed in the attic was a red eiderdown quilt. That’s all. Very portable. All I had to do was unr
oll it, wrap myself up inside, and go to sleep. I liked the attic. Up there I was close to the stars, close to freedom, and far removed from the rest of the household.
That night I had a wonderful dream. I dreamed that I was riding a big black horse over broad meadows. The horse ran so fast that his hooves didn’t even touch the earth. We were actually flying! Higher and higher we soared, and as I looked down I could see little peasant cottages and patches of garden, roads as narrow as pieces of string, and people, like ants, laboring under the hot sun. They looked up at us and the startled expressions on their faces made me laugh.
“Catch her!” they shouted. “Catch her! Rhawnie, the Gypsy!”
I waved to them and spurred my horse on, and we flew Still higher, over the treetops, into the clouds. What a beautiful feeling! I can still remember it, almost, if I close my eyes and concentrate very hard.
Then something jolted me out of that sleep and the wonderful dream vanished.
“Wake up!” Rough hands shook me and an impatient voice said again, “Wake up, lazy one! The master wants to see you at once! Hurry!”
“Go away,” I groaned. I jerked my quilt up over my head and tried desperately to recapture my dream and the sweet sensation of flying.
“Wake up!” A slippered foot prodded my side.
I squinted into the light of the candle that hovered over me. Old Vasilly hissed at me through his sparse yellow teeth. I struggled to sit up. The coverlet fell away and I shivered. I wore only a thin shift that left my arms naked, and the air in the attic was freezing cold. I looked out through the fanlight at the rooftops of Moscow. The cloud-laden sky was pink, reflecting the glow of the city lights. It was snowing.
“What do you want, Vasilly?” I demanded grumpily. I scratched my head “Go away. Leave me alone.”
Dangerous Obsession Page 1