The Gypsy Bride

by Katie Hutton

  ‘Sam, I can’t go further. He thinks I’m in the back yard!’

  ‘Let him think what he likes! I shan’t let go of you again. Let me hold you, to know that everything of you is still where it was . . . My lovely girl. Kiss me, Ellen.’

  ‘I have to go!’ she whispered, twisting her face away, but letting him lean his weight into her, pressing her against the wall, nuzzling her neck. ‘I can’t be your girl!’

  ‘You are, and I want you, my love, but not here, not where I can’t see you. Not in a rush.’ He raised his mouth from her neck and kissed her – all her loneliness, pain, humiliation, tears wiped out by his nearness.

  Eventually he said, ‘Best get you home – for now.’

  ‘What beating, Sam?’

  ‘The one that stopped me coming back for you. I’ll tell you next time.’

  ‘How can we have a next time, Sam?’

  ‘Trust me, we’ll have one. I knew that when I kissed you just now. You as good as told me. I’ve left them, Ellen. I walked off and came back here – don’t go all stiff like that! I’ve got work; the farmer trusts me enough to go and buy that little roan for his daughter . . . Just tell me, though, I want to hear it from you. Your dark boy, the one you called Tom. He is mine, isn’t he – ours, I mean?’

  ‘He treats Harold as his father. He’s been told his real one is dead.’

  ‘Let me see him at least. I’ll be where those children’s swings are, Wednesday afternoon.’

  ‘Are you mad? It’s always full of people there.’

  ‘Best way to hide.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything. And don’t come back with me!’

  ‘Just to the corner. I saw you didn’t like going past that pub.’

  ‘Oh!’

  *

  Harold looked up, fishing in his waistcoat for his watch.

  ‘You’ve been a while. Is your head better, then? You’re all flushed, Ellen, and your coat undone – you look feverish. It’s not wise to go catching a chill when others are relying on you!’

  ‘It’s still mild out, Harold. All I wanted was air and a chance to gather my thoughts.’

  ‘Well, if you think you’ve gathered them sufficiently, perhaps we can go upstairs and say our prayers.’

  *

  The seesaw and the swings stood abandoned. Tom and David squatted intently over an ant hill. Ellen turned round suddenly.

  ‘How long have you been there?’ she demanded.

  ‘I bin in amongst them trees over there watching you three,’ said Sam. ‘I bin there a while – I wanted to see who he is like.’

  ‘For me he is like you, in all his little ways. From the first smile he gave me. In the length of his fingers.’

  ‘It’s like seeing my own face in a pond for me. And he has my father in him – that little gesture he makes with his hair. I wish my old mother had known him. A fine Gypsy chavvi. No need to look scared, Ellen. It’s what he is,’ he said. ‘Did you think I was going to take him away? They say we steal children, but we don’t, never have, though it’s easy to blame us for the horrors others do. It’d be too tough a life for a child what hasn’t been brought up to it. We love our own, though, and all of us bring them up. I have nephews and nieces I love – I’m forgetting myself. I should say I did have, for I’ll not be getting to see them again. But it’s not the same as one of my own. Without a child, I wasn’t a proper man.’

  ‘He’s a bright, quick boy, and a loving one.’

  ‘I can see that. I can see how he talks to the little fellow. Does Chown love him?’

  ‘He’s most of the time with me, not with Harold.’

  ‘He provides for him, but he dunt love him, then. Why should he?’

  ‘That’s not fair on Harold.’

  ‘You’re right, it ain’t. It’s just he’s in my way, that’s all.’ Sam walked across to the children. She followed him slowly. Sam crouched down beside them. He laid one hand gently on the top of Tom’s head, and with the other was softly stroking David’s back.

  ‘Now tell me about this little fellow,’ he was saying to Tom. The boy looked to Ellen for reassurance and said, ‘He’s my brother. I look after him for Mother!’ David gazed wide-eyed at Tom, his mouth open in an effort to understand.

  Ellen saw that in the arc of Sam’s arms there was no place, no hope for Harold Chown.

  *

  Harold and Ellen kneeled either side of the high bed, intoning the Lord’s Prayer in unison; she pressed her hands together and let the familiar words run their course, but the plea she sent to heaven was: Don’t let him touch me tonight! Harold didn’t – he hadn’t done since she had repulsed him that time – and Ellen lay in the darkness remembering over and over Sam’s mouth, Sam’s hands.

  *

  They stood in a corner of a churchyard, hidden from the road, by the most recent graves. ‘If someone comes, we’re visiting family,’ said Sam.

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘No more do I. Because I can’t kiss you here.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have let you anyway.’

  Beginning to cry, she pushed his hand away and rummaged for a handkerchief. ‘Try to understand what my life has been. My marriage is a sham – right from the start. I’ve not even tried to fool poor Harold. I’ve gritted my teeth when he’s been . . . with me. I couldn’t, I daren’t, think of you. I’ve been driven out of the village I’d lived in all my life and cannot ever go back there. The only person I trust in the whole world is Judith – and my brother John, but I hardly ever see him. I love my mother but she goes through life afraid of everything and everyone. My grandfer says he loves me, but not near as much as his principles. My two boys are what saves me. I don’t understand the law, and can hardly ask Harold to explain it to me, but what would happen to them if I threw all that pretence aside and took your hand and went with you? Believe me, Sam, when I tell you every nerve in my body wants to do exactly that. But I can’t abandon them.’

  Sam looked down, scuffing the toe of his boot in the grass. Then he said, so quietly that she strained to hear him, ‘I’m uprooted too, so believe me, I understand you. I’ve no business calling myself Romani now, though for everyone else I’ll always be a dirty Gypsy all the same. I’ve left the travelling life, and there is no way for me back into it, even if I gave you up – which I won’t. I can’t do anything but come after you. You were all I thought about when I was lying in the gaol. You’re all I have, and all I need – and without you I’d be nothing. And there’s our son. Nothing changes that fact. We mun do what we can with what we have, though what I want is to have you with me always. An’ you love me, an’ I you.’

  ‘Oh God!’

  ‘Our Tom, whose name does he have?’

  ‘Whose do you think? Chown’s, of course, that poor fool of a husband of mine.’

  ‘It was Horwood tole me you’d a husband. An old man, he said. I knew I’d reason to be jealous of that old mush.’

  ‘Jealous? He was my only chance to keep your child, Sam! And he’s not old, only older. He strives to be a good father in his own way. The boys are fed and clothed and educated. Harold wants them to have a profession. He doesn’t want them to have to work with their hands.’

  ‘He wouldn’t, would he? And you, Ellen? You only tell me how good Harold is. How do you live with a man you don’t love?’

  ‘Because I must.’

  ‘I don’t know how much he loves you, but even supposing he does, he doesn’t know how to show you he loves. Was it him as made you cut your hair?’

  ‘Harold asked me to. He said long hair was for girls, not wives.’

  ‘At least let’s make the best of it.’ Sam carefully took out her hair-grips, Ellen holding her breath as she felt the warmth of his fingers near her skin. Then with both hands he tousled her hair about her face.

  ‘There, that’s a bit softer. Your face looks happier now too. Beautiful hair and your eyes brighter for your crying.’

  ‘They’re not. They’re r
ed and swollen, you know they are.’

  ‘Chown’s never told you that you’ve lovely hair, has he? How could he and then cut it all off? Ellen, remembering you that day at the stream with your hair all over your shoulders has kept me going in my blackest moments. Does that man know how lucky he is?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s lucky at all. And anyway, he’s never even seen my shoulders, Sam! He’s not seen any of me uncovered. He just pushes up my nightgown in the dark.’

  Sam winced.

  ‘That’s not how to treat my poor girl, but I’m glad he hasn’t just the same. I know you better than he, Ellen.’ He took her hand and kissed her palm.

  ‘That woman who was on the wagon with you – that’s your wife, is it?’

  ‘Yes, that was Lukey.’

  ‘She came looking for me, you know.’

  ‘I do. Tole me after I got taken off.’

  ‘Then I went looking for you, and you were gone – no message, nothing! I was done for. When poor Harold offered me a way out, what else could I do? Believe me, it has not been easy being his good deed!’

  ‘I did leave you a message. But I was afraid you wouldn’t see it nor understand it if you did, but it was all I could manage. We leave pattrins when we move on, so other Gypsies know which way we’ve gone. They’re sticks and leaves arranged in a certain way, but for us they’re signposts. Caley was having a new wagon made for him in Reading, so we were due there next—’

  ‘The beer bottle!’

  ‘So you did find it? I got Mother to put it there, for I couldn’t do it myself, I was in such a bad way. All them little stoneware bottles are a bit different one from the other, and I knew where that one had come from by the shape and the colour and the way the letters were made out on it.’

  ‘I kept it, Sam. I have it still.’

  ‘They gave me such a whopping that day. Her brothers laid into me so hard that I was bruised for weeks; they cracked two of my ribs and bust my hand – it ain’t so strong as it was. If poor old Mother, God rest her, hadn’t nursed me, I don’t know as I would have made it.’

  Ellen wept. ‘I’d thought you’d abandoned me. Oh Sam!’

  ‘Sssh! It’s over now.’

  He held her, unresisting.

  ‘The beating finished what little was left between Lukey and me but they went on making me pay for making a fool of her. She took to passing between me and the fire whenever she liked. No Gypsy woman should do that to her man – we think that a great insult. And then there was Winchester – lost a year of my sweet life in Liberty’s place, a year I should have spent with you, being by you when our son was born. Winchester was a worse place than Dartmoor, and that was damp and cold enough – though it was better than Lincoln. Perhaps any gaol is better than your first. But this time I had you to remember, and time to remember you better. I used to dream of holding your face between my hands – and a bit more besides. It was in there that I learned to read and write a bit,’ he said shyly. ‘There was a parson in there for stealing to feed his gambling. That man kep’ me from jawing diviou – from going mad, I mean. I couldn’t do much to pay him back except to tell him not to place another bet on the nags unless he could get my advice first. There, after all this time, I’ve made you smile again. I thought I never should!

  ‘But prison stopped me going to look for you and that was the worst of all. So when I was let out and Vanlo tole me the wagons were all in Oxfordshire again for the harvest, I went asking for you. I was treated with silence or curses – I think I liked the curses better. There was only two people took pity on me with all my bothering – Horwood and the widow lady, Grace. He sent me to her to see if she might know more, though he said she’d mebbe not welcome the sight of me. I went all the same, for I couldn’t not do. Yet she was very civil with me. She said the chapel people made much of your Harold for what he’d done, being all holy and everything and forgiving the sinner – like he was a reg’lar St Joseph! But he went away in the end because the other villagers laughed at him for a fool and a gull.’

  ‘He at least could take their sniping for proof of what a good, suffering Christian he is . . .’

  ‘Don’t cry. I am never going to let you go now!’

  ‘That was Charlie’s mother you spoke to. Of all the people . . .’

  ‘She’s your friend, Ellen. She asked to be remembered to you if I ever found you.’

  ‘Poor, kind Grace. What you had should have been Charlie’s, Sam. He and I should have been living quietly with our babies alongside her in that cottage, not hiding in the corner of a churchyard hoping none of the chapel people see me and getting my husband’s own daughter to lie for me!’

  CHAPTER 26

  Frederick Anderson, a publican, was summoned at St Augustine’s petty sessions at Canterbury on Saturday to show cause why he should not contribute towards the maintenance of the illegitimate female child of Jane Jarvis, of which he was the alleged father . . . the defendant keeps the “Flying Horse” public-house at Canterbury.

  Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald,

  14th October 1905

  The Flying Horse

  ‘We’ll go in the back way. No one will see us.’

  Ellen hung back. ‘I’ve never been in a public house, Sam.’

  ‘You won’t be in one. We’ll go up the back stairs and you’ll be nowhere near the tap-room.’

  ‘The room must cost you a bit.’

  ‘What have I to spend my money on? I get it cheap for helping the landlord unload the dray on Wednesdays. I’ll go up first, so if you want you can run away and I won’t chase after you.’

  ‘Go up, Sam. You know I won’t.’

  The room was small and shabby, but clean. He drew her in and closed the door, locking it and leaving the key in the hole. Flimsy faded curtains hung at a window overlooking the yard. He crossed the room quickly and closed them. They kept little light out but he sensed Ellen felt safer that way, even though they were not overlooked. Dark green linoleum covered the floor, and where it had cracked over an uneven floorboard, someone had repaired it by glueing over another piece that didn’t match. To the left of the window stood a rickety wash-stand, one leg propped up with a folded beer-mat. On this stood a dented tin jug and basin with an ironed tea-towel covering the mouth of the jug. There was a small smudgy oil painting of an oast house hanging from the picture rail on one wall, whilst opposite, on the fireplace wall, was an old spotted engraving of Canterbury cathedral. The only other furniture was a narrow iron-framed bed.

  Ellen stood by the door, irresolute.

  ‘It’s not much, but it’s ours when we want it,’ he said.

  ‘I like it. It’s simple. It’s clean.’ She thought of the little front parlour of her house, and how Harold’s pretentious Victorian furniture crowded its narrow space. Then she asked, ‘Does anyone else use it?’

  ‘I don’t think so, unless the landlord has given out other keys.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘Nothing. I didn’t need to. I just asked him if he had a room I could use sometimes and he took me up here. He just patted me on the back and smiled and wished me luck. Old Percy’s all right.’

  ‘Oh Sam, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘I’ll do no more than hold your hand, if that’s all you want. That would mean a deal to me, you know, just for you to put your hand in mine and no one to tell you not to. And if we hang our coats on the back of the door here, it will be as if we’re at home.’

  Ellen fumbled with the buttons of her coat. Sam eased it off her shoulders, hung it up and lifted off the little bell hat shadowing her face. Then, as he had done in the churchyard, he took out her grips and fluffed her hair round her face. His jacket followed Ellen’s coat, and the cap Farmer French had offered him in place of his old fedora, with the kindly meant words, ‘Take it, lad. You’ll look less of a Gypsy than with that other one.’

  ‘Oh Sam! Your hair!’

  ‘I’m doing my best to be respectable,
you see! First time at a proper barber since the prison . . . I’d to get up the courage but it wasn’t so bad in the end. Him not being another con helped. He even called me sir.’

  She ran her hands over his head, and up the stubble at the back.

  ‘You’re quite different. You’ve even a bit of grey here.’ He looked poorer, denuded somehow of more than his hair, but she didn’t say so.

  ‘Do you like me less for it?’

  ‘Oh no, Sam. It makes me think I’ve known you for longer – because you look a bit older, I mean.’ She lifted her face.

  ‘What a tender way you have,’ he said, and cupping her face in his hands, he kissed her, pressing her against the coats hanging on the door. Finally he drew back, and held her at arm’s length.

  ‘Ellen, I want to court you all over again. I want to be sure – of you, I mean. There is nothing I’d like mor’n to strip you of every stitch and lie you down on that bed and love you as if our lives depended on it – well, mine does, at any rate. But I want to win you.’ He took her hand and led her over to the bed.

  ‘Sit down, my girl – it’ll have to be here as that’s all there is, and you weren’t brought up to sit on the ground like me.’

  Ellen sat meekly, but then turned away from him to pull the thin bedspread back from the pillow and bolster.

  ‘You don’t need to do that! I said I wunt going to make you—’

  ‘No, I just wanted to be sure the sheets were clean. They’re old and mended, but yes, they’re clean.’

  ‘Oh Ellen,’ he laughed. ‘You could be talking about me! But what would you have done if they hadn’t been?’

  ‘Brought some from home, of course . . . the next time. And you’re not old, Sam.’

  ‘Not as old as poor Chown, you mean?’

  Ellen leaned against his shoulder. ‘Don’t let’s talk about Harold. Don’t let him come between us – not here.’

  Sam stroked her hair.

  ‘We’ll have to talk about what we’re going to do – sooner or later,’ he said. ‘What I mean is I’m trying to get used to staying still – and with stopping, decisions have to get made. Now I’ve fixed myself in this place, it feels like the world is rushing on round me faster than it ever did before. I mean, when you grow up always moving from place to place, you feel as you’re keeping pace with time. You know what season you’re in because you’re bent over picking peas, or you’re selling a horse at St Giles. When the harvest is over, up you get again and come down here to Kent. It’s like being a bird that knows he must take wing on a certain day, with all his pals, even if he don’t know why. And now I’ve done the strangest thing. I’m in Canterbury when most of me thinks I’m supposed to be somewhere else by now. I’ve stopped for two months or more in one place before now, depending on work or weather, but in Farmer French’s hopping hut I’ve got a little home that’s rooted to the ground and won’t move. The couple of sticks I have in there that are mine might as well be nailed down. No, Ellen, don’t draw away from me – I’m not complaining. I have only to get used to it. When I met you in the corner of that field, you were part of the turning world just like Horwood’s cows. I saw you and thought you were the best thing my eyes had ever lit on. When you live in a wagon, you’re always moving on, either because it’s time to go, or because the gavvers make you, or because there’s trouble – a gamekeeper usually, or the attendance man wanting to know why the biti chavvies ain’t in school, even if when you send ’em the teachers don’t want ’em, and no more do the other children nor their parents. So you hitch the horse to the shafts again and off you go. That little world of mine stopped turning the first time I kissed you, though I didn’t know it at the time. I wish I had, for I’d’ve got you to come away with me then and there and we’d have had a settled life somewhere – might even have been here – and nobody any the wiser. Tom might have got names shouted at him at school but he’d have had a father to defend him. Instead his father is this dead fellow nobody knows the name of.’