“He has done rather well all things considered.” Jessica, bending down, feigned great interest in a freshly budding rose, trying to avoid the rather intent way Yevgena was considering her.
“He needs a woman; it’s not healthy for him to pine after that half-dead girl who’s shut herself off from the world.”
“He’s accepted Colleen’s decision.”
“How many times have you been married Jessitchka?” Yevgena was all sweetness.
“Four,” said Jessica. As you well know you old harridan, thought Jessica.
“So,” the word was as sibilant as the serpent, “four times it does not work, four times you think you are in love and then pffft, he turns out to be a swine. Sometimes,” her voice lowered confidentially, “it is better to marry a friend and let the rest come and go as it will.” She turned Jessica sharply around a corner, landing them on a small knoll where the festivities below were in plain view. “Jamie is very easy, as you Westerners say, to look upon is he not?”
It was true, Jessica thought, and there wasn’t a woman alive who needed it pointed out to her. Even the sun seemed to bestow him with its last kiss of light, leaving him glittering while others moved about in darkness. Gold hair, merciless green eyes, lean and lithe as a cat, with a mind that could cut razors and occasionally did.
“I’d never want to lose him as a friend,” Jessica said softly, barely realizing she’d spoken aloud. “Besides he’s a dreadful tendency to match me up with his friends.”
“Ah yes the Vietnamese photographer,” Yevgena said.
“Canadian,” Jessica amended politely, “he takes pictures in Vietnam.”
“Well, war can be a very seductive mistress,” Yevgena said, in what, Jessica thought, was intended to be comfort.
“Yevitsa,” Jamie’s voice rang out reprovingly from over a rosebush, “you’re not telling her about your affair with Khrushchev are you?”
Yevgena made a face, “Mind your manners young man, that’s Comrade Khrushchev to you.”
“And darling Nikki to you,” Jamie said with a grin.
Night had descended fully and the skies above bloomed with stars: gold and silver, yellow, blue and red, hot and scorching to the naked eye. The torches threw out long blazes of light, lending pools to the grass here and there, in and out of which small brown feet danced and shimmered. Someone took up a violin and the night air began to furl around the sad, bleeding notes of the mad Hungarian Liszt.
Yevgena, fondly stroking the hair of a man at least thirty years her junior had settled herself in a low slung garden chair, Jamie and Jessica to either side of her. She regaled them with tales of espionage and derring-do in the world of high politics that she claimed to merely dabble in.
“How did you fare at the conference?” Jamie asked, deflecting her attention from the potent liquid with which he was refilling his glass.
Yevgena sighed and ceased petting the man at her knee. She’d recently represented her people at a human rights conference held by Eastern Bloc countries, a group not notoriously famous for their interest in human rights in the first place.
“Could have been worse, I suppose,” she said in that blackly prosaic Russian way of hers. “I have enough problems within the gypsy camp itself, the Hungarians think they are the only real gypsies as do the Romanians, though neither can clearly define for me what that actually means.”
“But Yevitsa,” Jamie chided gently, “you’re Hungarian yourself.”
“Only by marriage, though to be a Russian Jew is just as complicated and without definition these days. The conference wasn’t going too badly once I got the Polish contingent off the booze,” she looked pointedly at Jamie’s half-drunk tumbler. “But then there was that terrible incident where four Roma were killed by a gas bomb. Someone had booby-trapped a sign that said ‘Gypsies go home.’ Which is difficult to do considering how hell-bent everyone is on ridding their countries of gypsies. After the news came in about the bomb it was a little hard to get everyone at the table to talk.” She took a breath and then let it out all at once. “Germany was willing to pay reparation money from the war but it was to go towards building settlements. Try to explain that settlement and concentration camp are not so far apart in the gypsy mind and those grim Teutonic types go deaf. Besides Germany and the rest of the world would just as soon forget the gypsies that were exterminated, what are eighty thousand homeless riffraff compared to six million Jews.” She drank broodingly from her glass, “Understand that I say this as a Jew. Jewish memory,” she tapped her head, “is very long, maybe too long, I think sometimes. But gypsies,” she gestured broadly towards the encampment, “gypsies act as if there is no memory at all. The world has forgotten too, there is no mention of us in the records and rarely in the history books that seem to be springing up like mushrooms. Perhaps it is our nature to forget though, all our tradition is oral and moving from place to place we shed our stories, change them, kaleidoscope them in and out to suit our purposes. Of course,” the prosaic Russian was back, “illiteracy does not help.”
She sighed and shifted her position, hair gleaming like polished obsidian in the firelight, strands of it falling and catching in the folds of her crimson scarf. Courtesan, queen and mother were tired.
“Perhaps is best what is easiest, to forget. Remembering only honors the dead; it does not bring them back. And so, you have more babies,” she watched a pretty pair of boys scamper past, “and you build a future for them. Ah, Jemmy,” she sat up abruptly and clapped her hands together, “I am too silly being sad, I am forgetting your present.”
Jamie groaned. “Yevitsa, I would think after last time you’d give up on the gift giving.”
Yevgena shrugged her shoulders expressively, “You give a man a camel one time and he never lets you forget it.”
“You didn’t really—” Jessica said, beginning to laugh.
“She did,” Jamie said exasperatedly, “for my thirtieth birthday. Bertha the Camel, she of two humps and great spitting ability.”
“Ah, but she came in very useful did she not?” Yevgena waved an index finger in his direction. She turned to Jessica. “He gave her to an Arab minister of trade in exchange for being allowed to export that poisonous Kilkenny Fog he makes.”
John, looking very relaxed and happy, slid bonelessly onto the edges of their small group. “Talking about Bertha are you?” He grinned, “Dear God, don’t tell me you’ve brought him another gift, Yevgena!”
“But of course I have,” she leaned forward and pinched Jamie’s cheek affectionately. “Would your Yevitsa forget your birthday?”
“I rather wish you would sometimes,” Jamie said dryly.
“Well then what is it this time?” John rubbed his hands with relish.
Yevgena smiled slowly, gleefully, mischief abounding on Levantine shores now.
“I’ve brought you a girl,” she said.
Chapter Two
Gypsy Girl
“In the old days,” Yevgena said to the shocked faces around her, “there was a group of rather lovely young men of diverse talents, who, in return for food and gifts, would go about dispensing poetry, music and,” her voice tilted towards a lower register, “love.”
“The Pilgrims of Love,” John said, amusement beginning to overtake shock.
“For lack of a better term,” Jamie interjected acidly.
“Nevertheless,” Yevgena continued undeterred, “history is there for us to improve and expand upon, so I’ve found a female pilgrim.”
“Rings on her fingers and the requisite bells on her toes, I presume,” Jamie said sarcasm liberally lacing his words.
“Quite a lovely set of each, actually,” Yevgena said mildly. “I think perhaps it’s time for you to quit hiding behind that glass and just finish off the bottle.” Inky eyebrows arched and verdantly green eyes refused the challenge.
“One supposes y
ou will have your own way regardless,” Jamie said, the bite rather missing from his words, the bottle in hand.
“One supposes correctly,” Yevgena’s words, unlike Jamie’s, had teeth.
A clap of hands, a word or two and a sudden hush like dropping snow covered the crowd. Then, like a Siberian rose rising from winter’s blasted ground, rare and surprising, a girl emerged walking into the circle of fire. Smooth, slender, ivory-skinned and fine-boned with hair tumbling like bruise-black silk down bare and blameless skin, she was enough fuel to bank the smallest of flames. Exotic eastern winds, freshly sprung, tinkled the bells strung silver and delicate around her ankles.
Joints turned and shifted, became the support of elegant arabesques of arm and leg. Eyelashes, wondrously thick, hovered demurely over eyes. Hips and flank were swathed in a purple silk that flickered between opaque and transparent in the uncertain light.
“My, my,” breathed John. “Are those ostrich feathers?” he indicated the upper body attire the girl held in front of herself, fluttering and furling in the breeze.
“Mm,” Yevgena mumbled distractedly, watching with interest the interplay of firelight and lust on Jamie’s face.
Jamie, robbed of speech again, was finding even rudimentary functions such as breathing quite difficult. Other things, of course, seemed to be in fully working order. A flicker of smooth hip there by the fire, and the smell of strawberries and amaranth, dizzying, overwhelming and dissipating into the night. Music began to flow, designed for the baser senses it was heavy, thrumming and sliding through veins, blossoming in blood, redolent with salt and musk.
Berry-stained feet moved in rhythm, hands, sweetly sealed about feathers, undulated carefully, rounded parts dipped and circled and eyes remained downcast, lashes thickly fanned against flushed cheeks. The air became laden with sighs of two variations.
“Imagine,” John’s voice was somewhat strangled, “all that and a command of Persian love sonnets.”
“What?” Jessica asked, uncertain of what she was querying.
“Part of pilgrim lore, amongst other things those boys were never without an arsenal of Ottoman words of love. One never knows,” Yevgena stretched, the picture of a Turkish odalisque in profile, “when these things may come in handy.”
The music wound down and the girl disappeared, sighs gathered, collected and blew across the onlookers like an African sirocco.
She reappeared a moment later, ostrich feathers replaced by a length of crimson cloth. The music pulled hard from the strings, poured down from Spanish steppes, steeped potent in hot Cordovan suns. The dance was the dance of the Andalusian gypsies, the flamenco. Heel and toe moved in ancient and instinctive patterns. Hair whirled like silk around a tornado. She seemed all movement, skin and bone of a dissoluble piece. She seemed, Jessica thought in inexplicable despair, as if she were desire incarnate. The girl moved to the edge of her circle of fire and held out a hand to Jamie. Lashes tilted up and green eyes met their like.
“Dance with me,” she said quietly, “if you can.”
Gone beyond the space where madness and propriety were salient points Jamie, golden, reckless, rose in answer to her challenge and took her hand before anyone could think to stop him.
Despite the handicaps of inebriation, exhaustion and grief, Jamie could dance. He also knew, from a variety of experiences, how to hold a woman. Skin followed skin, blood beat in time and they whirled, spun, stamped and wooed there in the lost world of flame and body. Jamie was a spangled djinn in counterpoint to the girl’s dark melody.
Jessica, feeling as though she had a shard of glass caught in her throat bid her goodnights to John and Yevgena who absently replied without once taking their mesmerized countenances off the dancing pair. She fled for the security and comfort of the room Jamie kept for her occasional visits, the music in pursuit. Her suite, as misfortune would have it, looked out over the gardens. Fire and shadow flickered on the walls and Jessica, drawn against her will, looked down into the scene below.
The music had taken a brief respite and she hoped Jamie had regained his senses enough to ask for it to be silenced. But then the lone, shattering note of a Celtic pipe began, wounding and strangling, killing ivy hidden within the couch of deceitful jasmine. The music of blood and winter and endless grief, purely, tragically Irish. Jamie, shirt half undone, leaned in exhaustion against the girl, pearls of sweat gleaming in his hair, eyes glittering in a way that spelled disaster. She saw his cheek move restlessly against the girl’s, hands in a hard caress with the bones of her face. She could feel the words he spoke then, knew them as they slipped the breach of tongue and lip, “Take me to bed for god’s sake,” he said, “take me to bed now.”
Jessica, closing the draperies, felt the beginnings of a crashing headache.
“God’s teeth, is this what you had in mind?” John asked as Jamie, sparing a glance for no one took the girl by the hand and went into the house, shutting the door with firm intent behind them.
“John,” said Yevgena, “Jamie is not a man that should be without the company of a woman for long, particularly not,” she gave him a pointed look, “with his temperament. That silly girl he insisted on marrying has managed to tie him up so badly with guilt that I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t taken a woman to his bed since the last time she deigned to allow him into hers. That being said there are more practical reasons. In the last ten years, he’s lost three children, a wife and now a father. He’s carried the weight of Kirkpatrick Industries since he left Oxford and now he’ll have to decide whether to take up the political legacy his father’s left behind. And there are things,” she sighed deeply, “that even those of us who love him best don’t understand about his life.”
“I don’t quite see how a half-naked gypsy girl fits into this picture,” John said peevishly.
“Oh, I think you do John, besides there are reasons other than physical that she is here.”
“Such as?”
“You old curmudgeon, try to remember all that poetry you used to believe in before you took such glee in dissecting it for children.”
He gave her a look of utter mystification.
She leaned over and kissed him soundly on the forehead, “Destiny John, destiny. Now you old terror let’s go get good and drunk.”
John thought that was, perhaps, the best idea anyone had had all day.
“My kingdom for a button,” Jamie laughed in exasperation. He was trying without success, to locate a clue, however minute, on where to begin unwrapping his gift.
“Scissors,” said the Gypsy Girl or Destiny if you preferred whose name was actually Pamela O’Flaherty.
He groaned with feeling. “Bottom floor, don’t think I can negotiate the damned stairs again and I wouldn’t know where to find them anyway.”
“Pathetic,” she said.
“It is,” he agreed, pondering the feasibility of simply biting through the knot end.
They were in his room now, a room done in all the shades of the sea, from deepest murky green to silver-shot blue and the white of sun-bleached sky. The effect of it was a bit, he’d been told, like drowning.
“Well there’s only one thing for it then,” she said with equanimity.
“Yes?”
“Patience.”
“Not my favorite virtue,” he said, black hair slipping and sliding between his questing fingers.
“You keep searching,” one fine-fingered ivory hand pulled her hair aside, “and I’ll find a way to amuse you.”
“Unless you’re acrobatic by nature I don’t quite see how to manage that,” Jamie said doubtfully.
She cast a withering glance over one shoulder.
“Music then?” he suggested humbly.
“Left my harpsichord at home,” she said blithely, “and my singing voice is likely to be less than conducive to,” she paused delicately, “the mood.”
“How are your Persian love sonnets?” He asked and she considered and then dismissed the idea that it was perhaps wrong to seduce a man so drunk.
“The mind is willing, but the memory is weak. However I’ve a head filled to the cusp with blue Elizabethan ditties.”
“What an interesting education you must have had,” he commented mildly, “perhaps you’d recite for me.”
She accordingly cleared her throat, straightened her slim carriage and began:
Mine’s the lance
To start the dance
Yours the lips
For Cupid’s pips.
Blushing melon
Makes a felon,
Sheathe the blade
Sweetling maid.
Push asunder
Nature’s thunder,
Maidenhead
Sweetly bled,
Honey mead
For the seed.
Turtledove,
Take my love.
“Blue indeed,” Jamie said in admiration as she finished. “A-ha,” he held aloft an unraveled end with triumph akin to the first man to set foot in the New World.
“What did they read to you as a child, precocious infant?” he asked as the unraveled end led into a labyrinth of tucks and folds.
“Everything I could get my hands on, my father used to say I ate books rather than read them. But my favorite—”
“Yes,” Jamie prompted, hands carefully navigating frontal delicacies.
“Was The Velveteen Rabbit.”
“Might I ask why?”
“Because it’s a very true story, isn’t it?”
Confronted with an alarming amount of bare flesh, Jamie wondered if it was wrong to sleep with a girl who believed in stuffed bunnies springing to life.
“What I mean is,” she warmed to her topic, “that you aren’t real until someone loves you.”
The crimson cloth, released at last, drifted then settled with a sigh around her hips.
The air became pregnant with the lack of touch.
“Is something the matter?” she turned around on the bed to face Jamie, who quickly cast his eyes heavenward.
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