“It is mahrime,“ Jetta explained when they were alone in the wagon—the vardo the Gypsies called it—except for Little Bek, who was sleeping on his mat.
“But I washed it,” Anna said, hearing the indignation in her own voice.
The old woman shrugged. “It has been worn by gadje. To Lela it is unclean. You might as well keep it. She will not wear it again. You should not be offended. It is the way of the Romani.”
Anna bit back her reply as she looked around the dusty, cluttered confines of the wagon. She longed for the polished floors and neat, sunlit rooms of the little town house she’d left behind in Prague. She was like the little Jewish boy outside the walls of Judenstadt, standing alone and frightened in his silly peaked hat. How she had pitied him in his otherness. But even he had his Jewish tribe. His Jewish family. What did she have? She was gadje in a Romani world.
Her eyelids pricked, but she would not cry. What was the point? Who was there to care about her tears? Not Jetta. She would just look at her new charge out of empty gray eyes and mumble to herself. And Little Bek would cry with her, bek, bek, bek, reminding her that others had worse crosses to bear.
The tinkling of the beads in the curtain at the end of the wagon, a shift of light, and then a soft thump: Jetta leaping from the moving wagon onto the carpet of pine needles. She would be on her way to another wagon filled with Romani women, women with whom she could gossip, maybe even about the red-haired gadje who added more burdens to their daily lives. As they scolded Jetta for pulling the strange woman from the river, they would laugh. Anna had heard their laughter, though they were always somber when she was around.
As the caravan snaked its way through heavy evergreen forests where it seemed they traveled in perpetual twilight, Anna blinked hard and, closing her eyes against the jarring of the wagon, tried to escape the boredom of her loneliness through napping. But her thoughts made sleep impossible. She wondered why she had come with them. But she knew why. The very night she’d been put out of her home, Bera had showed up at her door and offered escape. He’d said they were going west.
“To England?” she had asked, thinking perhaps here was some savior God had sent her—or even her grandfather from beyond the grave.
“Is England west of Prague?” he’d asked.
“It is a great distance, but it lies west,” had been her reply. His gaze had traveled around the room and then he’d flashed his glistening smile.
“Then we go to England. And you are welcome to come. But bring with you the holy book.”
She wondered now if she had made a mistake. But what choice did she have?
She wondered too when they would stop for camp, wondered why the women would not let her help with the laundry and the cooking, wondered why they insisted on bathing her, dressing her, preparing her food and serving it as though she were some princess even though these reluctant ministrations added to their endless chores.
But she’d given up asking why.
“It is the Romani way,” Jetta would say, shrugging, “If you want to help, you can wash Little Bek. He is gadje too.”
Little Bek stirred on his mat and opened his eyes, blinked at her as if he understood her sadness. He offered her his crooked, slobbering smile in consolation.
“Let’s sing, Little Bek,” she said.
And as she pitched the tune, he joined her with a wordless harmony. Their plaintive melody drifted from the wagon and melted into the heavy green canopy shutting out the sky.
By Michaelmas, Anna and her Romani companions were camped in the shadow of Strasbourg Cathedral. The band had grown so that, by the time they crossed the Rhine River, they were five wagons and several single travelers on horseback, numbering a group of, more or less, forty pilgrims on any given day. But Anna noticed that when nightfall came, the group divided into two separate communities. The little clutch of painted wagons always found shelter in the nearest wood while the others, the “real” pilgrims—as Anna had come to think of them—spread their bedrolls in a nearby clearing around a communal campfire. If they were close to an inn or a town, the pilgrims sought out the comfort of straw mattresses beneath real roofs. Anna, alone of the gorgios, the outsiders, was allowed to camp within the bosom of the community. Only Anna—and Little Bek.
For that inclusion Anna was grateful, though she sometimes wondered why. True, she paid for her passage with the little horde of shillings and nobles and florins hidden in her wooden chest, but she suspected that the “pilgrims,” whose faces changed with each new town, also paid Bera for the right to travel under the Holy Roman Emperor’s writ of safe conduct. This document Bera often bragged about. If they were challenged on the road or denied entry to a walled town, he would take the rolled-up document from his pocket, presenting it with a grand flourish. “See,” he would say, sometimes in Czech or German, even mixing in a few English words that Anna had taught him. “Right of free passage.” Then he would point to the seal of Emperor Sigismund as though he could read every word of it.
Anna never knew how he had obtained it, though it certainly looked official. And it always worked. Even the most reluctant mayor or alderman would relent, letting them enter the town or castle yard, even allowing them to set up their little booths close to the cathedrals and pilgrim shrines so they could sell crude tin copies of the “official” pilgrim badges sanctioned by the Church. Anna suspected Bera charged the pilgrims for such free and easy movement among territories, hence the way the Gypsies’ numbers—and their fortunes—ebbed and flowed.
Today, they were set up at the Strasbourg Michaelmas Fair, and it showed every sign of being a good day. Late September sunshine poured down. The roads were clogged with pilgrims journeying to the several shrines scattered around Strasbourg.
Anna hoped it would be a good day. They needed a good day. Bera said the provender for the horses that pulled the wagons had just about dried up in the late summer drought. They had been forced to buy hay. Last week he had even come to her for a few extra shillings and outright asked, a thing that he had never done before. Before, he had always merely hinted that the company was in need of this or that. And she would contribute a few coins. Mistress Kremensky had been generous in her refund of the rent, and had paid Anna for the furnishings she abandoned, but by now Anna had only a few gold coins left and none of the silver. This little horde she was determined to hold on to. At least until she got to England.
Anna didn’t think the Gypsies would put her out; at least, she hoped they were superstitious enough to think that they bore some responsibility for her because one of them had saved her life. Though there was certainly one among their number who was ready enough to send her packing. The bigger Lela’s belly grew, the more hostile toward Anna she became, and the more uncomfortable Anna became with Bera’s openly appreciative stare. Anna had heard them arguing last night, with Lela crying and saying she would go crazy cooped up in the wagon, unable to enjoy the fair, and him shouting back at her that she should keep herself hidden away until after the child came. It was the Romani way.
And now Anna had taken Lela’s job behind the table at the fair, another item to add to the list of Anna’s imagined injuries and insults that Lela kept in her head. Though Anna had to admit she was happy to have something to do at last. She liked arranging the little tin badges for sale, lining them up in neat rows, trying to place those that represented nearby shrines closest to the front, placing a tiny bouquet of wildflowers in the center of the display table to draw customers. Even the Romani women could not object to her labor here, since it didn’t involve touching their food or their water, or even their dirty clothing.
Anna placed the medal with the picture of Madonna cradling the infant Jesus in front of the wildflowers. This badge was her favorite. The expression on the Madonna’s face, even in this crude tin copy, evoked in Anna a longing that was so intense it was almost a physical hurt. She didn’t know how to interpret the longing. Was it for the mother she never knew? Or was it for the child she would
probably never have?
She looked up and saw Bera watching her, his expression thoughtful, calculating. She’d seen that look on his face before—whenever he was making, or about to make, one of the shrewd horse trades he often bragged about. She pitied his victim.
Then she realized there was nobody else around. That cunning look was for her.
She pretended not to see him, pretended to be absorbed in laying out her merchandise.
She’d been thinking about how she could earn her way, maybe make a better pilgrim’s badge, something less obviously a copy, an embroidered cross that looked like the cross hanging from a silver chain inside her shirt, the one that Ddeek had given her, the one that had belonged to her mother. She could make the pearls encrusted on the cross arm with little French knots of silk thread. She had one blue silk bodice that she could cut up into little square pillows. She had seen some cream-colored silk thread at a nearby booth. A ha’penny’s worth would do. Though the look on Bera’s face as he approached told her, if she was not careful, she’d not have a ha’penny left.
She watched him from below lowered lids. The collar of his red silk shirt was frayed, and he had a split in the seam of his blouson sleeve. She knew he would wear it until it was in tatters—that was something else she’d noticed about the Romani way; they did not mend—and then discard it for another one just like it. She’d never seen him wear anything else.
He was close enough now that she could smell the strong scent of sandal-wood, his trademark scent. His eyes narrowed. He appeared to be squinting against the sun. But she knew better. It was a look of concentration. At first he did not speak to her but leaned against her tent pole, picking his teeth with a piece of straw in a pose of studied casualness.
She pretended busyness with the icons. Finally he spoke.
“The horses need hay,” he said.
“I know.” She felt herself flush but was determined that she too should be direct. “Unfortunately I have no money left. I cannot help this time.”
She took a deep breath to hide the lie, flicked an imaginary speck of dust from one of the tin badges. Now he would tell her she had to leave if she could no longer pay. What would she do? Where would she go? But that was why she could not spend her gold coins down to the last farthing. She had to keep a reserve, so she would not be totally destitute should he decide to turn her out.
“A shame,” he said. But he appeared to be waiting.
“I have a plan to earn some, though,” she said. “A pilgrim badge, not metal but made of fabric. An embroidered cross. I—”
“I have a plan too. I know how we can get enough hay to get us to France.”
We. He had said we. Not a good sign. “But don’t you want to hear—”
“Do you still have the English book?”
So. That was his plan. He knew she had brought “the book” with her. Knew it was in her traveler’s chest, had helped her load it the day she escaped from Prague. But he had never mentioned it.
Until now.
He could steal it from her, but somehow she did not think he would. He would have already done it. Though she knew the Roma pilfered small things: mostly food, pies left in an unwatched window to cool, melons growing in the field. Anna had watched Bera steal a chicken once right out of a cottage yard. He’d attached a string to a bit of grain, then flung the grain into the yard as he sauntered by. When the chicken swallowed the grain, Bera drew the chicken by his gullet into a nearby wood. Anna figured she’d eaten hearty chicken stew, thus procured, on more than one occasion. And she’d been grateful for it.
The men of the company considered such paltry crimes payment for their cunning. Indeed they bragged about them, as though whatever the earth produced should be equitably dispersed, and they were just righting a wrong. They were proud of their shrewdness too. Bera might sell the same old horse over and over, putting tar in the worn-down hollows of a tired old nag’s teeth so they looked like the black centers of a young horse’s teeth. When the trick was discovered, another of their company would commiserate—”Tsk, tsk. Don’t the world hold too many scoundrels?”—and offer to buy the old horse back for a cheaper price. “Just to take it off’n your hands.”
This was just part and parcel of the horse trader’s skill as far as they were concerned. But she had never known them to outright steal money or valuable goods, and certainly not from one to whom they were offering hospitality.
“The English book,” Bera said, scarcely hiding the impatience in his tone. “The Bible that you showed me in Prague. Do you have it?”
“Yes,” she answered because she knew it would avail her nothing to lie about it. Indeed, in his skewed moral world, he might consider her denial as giving him some kind of just grounds to steal it. “I have it. But as I told you once before, I will not sell it.” She said this as firmly as she could, so there could be no mistaking her resolve. “Not while I have a breath in my body.”
He laughed. “Easy, little mare.”
She’d heard him say that exact same thing to Lela when she berated him for his inattentiveness. Anna despised it and was about to open her mouth to tell him that, king or not, he could not talk to her that way. She would not be compared to a horse.
“I’m not asking you to sell it,” he said. “We only have to take it out and open it. That man over there, the yeoman waiting beside our smithy’s booth”—the Gypsies had set up a booth to shoe horses, another of the many ways in which they earned a few pennies as they passed through towns—”he has promised us a load of hay just to spend some time with the book.”
“But surely he speaks German or French. He could not read it.”
Bera picked a ragged cuticle, frowning. “It does not matter. He probably can’t read in any tongue. He will pay just to see it. He has heard about it, says he wants to see it. Wants to touch it.”
Some stranger touching the pages her grandfather had copied, laboring for years in snatched moments by candlelight, moments left over from the long hours of decorating manuscripts. She could still see him, rubbing his gnarled fingers to relieve the cramps and then going back to the page, time and time again.
“All the Scripture we have copied over the years, Anna. This one is for us. This one we will not sell. This one we will not give away.”
“No. The book is not some cheap tin badge or saint’s fake finger bone. There’s no Roman magic in it. Touching it will not heal the body or give a sinner a pass out of purgatory.”
Bera shrugged. “As you wish. But without hay, we will not be able to leave Strasbourg. You said you wanted to go to England. If we have to sell the horses, we will have to stay here.”
“I cannot let the book out of my sight,” she said.
“The yeoman understands. You may sit with him while he looks at it. You may even read it to him. I know you like to read the book. I have seen you with it.”
He had been watching her when she did not know he was there! What else had he seen? She would need to be more careful of her privacy in the future.
“Besides, you should not be so free to mock others who treat the book as though it were magic, when you yourself treat it as though it is some great holy thing.” He waved his hands about in exasperation. “It is only made of paper and ink.”
He was right, of course. Ddeek would certainly have agreed with him there. The book was not holy in itself. It was the meaning, the words that were important, the truth of the words, not the paper upon which they were scratched. And yet that paper, that ink, was sacred to her because it was her grandfather’s legacy to her.
But his last words to her had been “go to England.” She could not stay with these Gypsies forever. She looked nervously at the yeoman, who was watching their conversation intently. He looked harmless enough, a man of medium build; his clothes were clean and respectable, and his hair and beard had had some acquaintance with a comb, albeit a passing acquaintance.
“No more than two hours,” she said. “And he must come to Jetta’s wagon
and Jetta must be present.”
Bera flashed his smile at her, approving, arrogant in the success of his persuasion. He was a cunning, conniving scamp, and she knew it. And he knew she knew it.
“He will be pleased. I had only promised him one hour,” Bera said, motioning for the yeoman to come forward, which he did with such haste that he rushed too close to the smithy’s hammer and a spark from the anvil caught in his hair. He had to beat it out with his hands in a fool’s gesture that made Bera laugh out loud.
“Tonight our horses will have hay,” he said. “Tomorrow, we will leave for Rheims.”
“But what about the booth?”
“I will watch the booth, Anna from Prague,” he said as his hands busily rearranged the badges in a helter-skelter fashion. Apparently he had no liking for her well-ordered merchandising technique. “You have more important things to do. After you have finished reading from your magic book, you must scour the market for the materials for your special pilgrim badge.”
She had not even known he was listening.
FOURTEEN
If priesthood were perfect, all the people would be converted
Who are contrary to Christ’s law and who hold Christendom in dishonour.
—WILLIAM LANGLAND IN
PIERS PLOWMAN’S PROTEST (14TH CENTURY)
I was well past prime by the time Brother Gabriel had finished with his own private devotions, donned his hair shirt, and sought out Brother Bartholomew. He’d confronted the stern-faced disciplinarian with the truth of Christ’s gentleness for children and reminded him of the fragile nature of a small boy. This had at least gained the boy a reprieve from one beating. By the time he’d finished, the rain had ceased and a weak sun was threatening to tear away the gauzy film of morning fog. The same austere woman who had turned him away the night before answered his knock, unsmiling, nodding only a curt welcome.
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