Gypsy Heiress

by Laura London

  It hurt me to leave Kory and Yojo, but I didn’t dare risk going to the stables for them. My only solace was that I knew Lord Brockhaven would see to it that they were well cared for, and I hoped that someday I would be able to send someone to get them for me.

  As I walked, I considered the gypsy tribe that I would soon ask to join. Did one join a gypsy tribe? Never had I heard of such a thing. Admittance was strictly by birth or marriage. In the years I had traveled with my father and grandmother, our wagon had been avoided as Outcast, and the only hope I had of being received was the apparent friendliness of the gypsy youth I had seen tonight in Brockhaven’s home. The young man’s manner toward me had been warm, almost familial, and why I could not for the life of me guess, as it was in such marked contrast to the contempt that gypsies usually accord a half-breed, he had given me a love sign, one that indicated he would see me again. I might easily have misunderstood its meaning, though. He might be from another tribe; the sign might have different nuances. I half-smiled wryly. What if his sign had meant “go to the devil, she-fox”? He would be very surprised when I arrived at the wagon of his people, begging for sanctuary!

  I knew it would be an imposition and an impudence to ask them to have me. What would they do with me, a young single girl? I couldn’t marry. What elder would want his grandchildren tainted with my mixed blood? Perhaps there would be an older woman there, a widow crippled with gout, without children or sisters to do for her, who could use me to help her in her work. They might let me stay and do the heavy chores for her. And I could help take care of the young children and babies, make fires, and haul water. If I worked very hard and was always obedient, maybe they wouldn’t care that I was another mouth to feed. I prayed and prayed that was how it would be, because if I had to be some menial, misplaced thing, it would be better among the gypsies, where at least I could be close to the wind and the road and the earth.

  The full moon was encircled by a rainbow-tinted ring, and long white tendrils stretched from it to curl like pale fingers around the trees. The silver light laid a frosty border where it fell, and the world lost its colors, to be etched sharply in black and white. The tall grass in the meadows bent and rose in sections as though from the passage of unseen beings, with spiky weeds sticking up like sentinels. The day had been mild, but had now become cruelly chilly, with a close dampness, and I was glad for the warmth of my many skirts. Now and then I heard the rustle of the small, hunting night creatures disturbed by my human presence as I moved through the dark shadows of the trees.

  The ruins were an hour’s ride from Edgehill, if you didn’t hurry, but were a long walk when alone in the dark. Goudette had done too good a job in softening the soles of my feet. The stones and weeds bit harshly into them. Many times I winced, and when I lifted my foot, I saw that it was wet with blood, little though I cared. It was nothing beside the mammoth emptiness of my longing for Brockhaven and those at Edgehill that I had come to think of as my family.

  I wondered if Lord Brockhaven had returned to Edgehill from Lord Bredon’s house, and if he’d gone to bed; and then I wondered how long it would be before I would cease speculating, at a given time of day, whether Brockhaven was eating, or sleeping, or riding. As time passed, would I wonder if he had married, and see him in my mind with children, bending down to scoop up a little boy to carry him on his shoulder, or kneeling to straighten the stockings of a small daughter with dark curls and haunting blue eyes like his own? I wondered if Ellen would tell them about me—the wild gypsy girl who had come to stay for a short while one summer—and pass on to them my legends and the Romany lullaby I had taught her, which she sang with such amusing pronunciation. I vowed to sing it every evening as the sun set, and remember our times together.

  It was cold and quiet as I climbed the tree-lined path toward the ruins, and as I reached them, it struck me how cheerful they had seemed on May Day, and how desolate and lonely now. The charred logs from the bonfire lay in wide lumps of white ash and sand, and hiding among the weeds and rubble were scattered shards from broken bottles. A sharp pang in the bottom of my foot told me that I had stepped on one, and I sat on the edge of a broken wall to pick the dark, jagged glass from my heel.

  As I sat, I listened for the noises from the gypsy camp. It was damp, and peaceful, and any sound would have been audible, but there was no sound—not the distant creak of a wagon shifting on its axles, not the bark of a dog. The smells were not there either. The strong scent of horses would have carried far, and if there had been a camp within the mile, I would have smelled cooking grease and wood smoke. I fought panic that perhaps Betty had heard the wrong location for the camp, or that Brockhaven had indeed made the gypsies move on. If they were still here, they must be on the other side of the rise, where the bulk of the hill would conceal evidence of the camp from where I sat.

  I stood up, limping from my sore foot, and walked through the ruins toward the brow of the hill. The sound I was listening for, in the darkest corner of my imaginings, was the strangled cry and heavy paw tread I had heard before in these ruins. But there was nothing, nothing at all, not even the fall of a leaf. The echo of my own step was muffled by a dark carpet of moss.

  There was no real path to the hillcrest, only a twisting series of spaces where erosion had washed the hill to bedrock, covered lightly in places by a layer of sand. I left the moss, and the slap of my soles on rock was reassuring and solid, more like I was rooted in the world instead of floating in a misty limbo.

  Toward the top of the hill, the rock gave way to a soft, acid sand that burned the bottom of my wet feet and waffled up between my toes. With dreadful suddenness, my next step plunged my foot ankle deep. I started, and my other foot came down hard in the sand, up to my ankle and then to my knee, sucking at my legs like the hideous mouth of a giant subterranean reptile. The rubble of sharp stones and dirt tore at my skin as the sucking maw of sand swallowed me to the waist. A scream of terror rose from my throat as the savage rupture took me down, and covered my shoulders. Sand was pouring into my nose and mouth, blinding me, trapping the air from my lungs, suffocating my screams for help.

  Suddenly, I felt my feet below me fight free. I kicked them, struggling wildly. There was a crash of falling dirt, and I was surrounded by a hard floating stream of moving earth and stone. For a second I was dropping free through a dark band of still air, and then I landed hard on a jagged surface of rock, receiving on top of my bruised body a pile of debris from above.

  Moments passed before I was able to begin to cry in an exhausted, futile way. Lifting one numb arm, I wiped feebly at the grit that clung to my eyelashes and pebbled over my face. Even this effort too greatly taxed my battered limbs, so I laid my arm back across my chest and lay, my eyes closed, in the quiet of this underground prison.

  I sensed its black, nightmare presence before I heard it. The shadows were waiting, and I was not alone. My skin tingled with awe, and my teeth met as before a lightning stroke. I knew its voice before it spoke. Low and close to me, I heard the sick, hoarse howl that had so shocked my ears before by the Roman ruin. It was in here with me.

  I lay in a terror deep and primeval with my eyes tightly shut, waiting for unimaginable horror, pain, and death. The blood rushed and pumped in my head as I heard the sound of its rough, lung-wracking breath inhaling and exhaling in long, excited gasps.

  I didn’t want to see the creature, only to let it do its dreadful work and bring me quickly to oblivion, but it hung back so long, so inexplicably that at last it took more courage to keep my eyes shut than to make them open.

  Above me was the long, forked rip that had been my entrance into this black cavern. Through it I could see the stars, and the sky shining purple against the gloom around me. My eyes drank in the starlight before I turned them to the side to gaze into the darkness, into a pair of slanting silver eyes that watched me with unwinking eagerness.

  I became slowly aware of form and line, contour and texture, and at last I knew that the tormented creat
ure that stood close to me in this hellish place was not a werewolf, not an underworld ghoul, but an aged and starving wolf. And mad; from its eyes I knew that some dreaded existence had left the creature insane. It moved with a sharp restless gesture of the shoulders, and when I heard the metal clank, I knew that it was chained.

  On the heels of this discovery came another; there was a scrape of wood, and another starlight opening appeared far off in the gloom, followed by the lowering of a lantern. A pale light fell on an ancient set of stone steps. I was in a long-abandoned root cellar, from the looks of it, used only as a prison for the wolf since its Roman builders had evacuated their villa two thousand years before. The human keeper of the beast, who had made the poor animal into an instrument of murder, was about to descend into the chamber with me. I had a sudden fear that it would be Brockhaven—followed by a wash of sick relief when Vincent Randolph picked his way down the stone steps.

  It was a long time before he saw me. He set down the lantern and came to stand before the wolf, feet apart, talking quietly. The wolf paced on its chain, rubbing nervously against Vincent’s leg from time to time and whimpering. Vincent saw the hole in the roof first, his vision traveling down slowly to where I lay helpless in a pile of sand and rock. His quick shocked movement caused the wolf to howl and cringe pathetically. Indifferent to the beast, he came and crouched by me, lifting my head, and saying softly, “Liza… what’s happened to you? Where are you hurt?”

  My lungs were collapsing so rapidly that I couldn’t find the breath to answer as his hands brushed gently at the sand and leaves in my hair.

  “You’ve run away from Edgehill,” he said, making the words a statement. “Were you coming to me, by any chance?”

  There was little point in lying. I shook my head weakly, no.

  “That’s too bad,” he said. The regret in his eyes was real. “It would have made things easier.”

  “I know about the wolf now,” I gasped.

  “Yes. It’s a problem.”

  “Was it”—so great was my dread that I could hardly say the words—“was it this creature that made an end to Isabella’s brother Frederick?”

  The answer was an obvious one, and yet still I was surprised by his candor. “Yes, this one.”

  “You sent him after me, that day in the ruins…” I hated the whimper in my voice.

  “It was the red riding habit that I made Isabella send you,” he explained, his tone not unkind. “Red. Bella’s favorite color. But it’s this row of handsome gold buttons that makes it so different. So… useful. The wolf’s been trained to watch for these gold medallions and to kill anyone wearing them. I found you there, when I went to feed him. You were sleeping under a tree, your hair spread shining in the grass like black satin, your eyelashes dark against sleep-pinked cheeks, and your soft lips, so sweetly, so slightly open.”

  The dreamy detachment of his voice made it nonetheless frightening. “Caesar stopped him!” I said, to halt his slow catalogue of my features.

  Placidly he said, “The wolf could have ripped Caesar to pieces. I called him back, because…” He placed his lips on my forehead.

  I drew back, revolted beyond measure by his touch. These wide-boned, graceful hands that touched me had for years fixed the chain that held the wolf, and had released that chain, once for Frederick, once for me. I lay cowering, staring at him, fearing him while he watched me through searching gray eyes.

  “Is it Alex? You’ve fallen in love with him, haven’t you?” he said with surprising compassion. “He’ll never love you back, you know. He isn’t capable of it. His own parents treated him brutally when he was very young, and mine were little better toward him. I could tell you stories—no, what good would that do? But he has a heart of iron. He can bring women to their knees—crazed with love for him—and hold them like that for years. Isabella has loved him since she was sixteen, and you see what it’s turned her into.”

  I couldn’t bear to hear more. In a pitiful scrap of a voice, I asked, “Are you going to give me to the wolf?”

  “No—no, I’m not. Alex has been afraid of that, but he’s wrong.”

  “He knows?”

  “He suspects. But this place is so well-hidden, it has defied his every effort. Can you stand to be in here a few more moments? I’m going to take the wolf outside.”

  The thought of being alone in this cavern was infinitely less frightening than the thought of being here with Vincent and his pet.

  “I’ll leave the lantern here,” he said, and untied the wolf, which followed him up the steps, heeling like a dog on its chain leash.

  It was impossible that he would let me go, knowing the things I did about him. He had not let the wolf attack me, he had said, “because…” He had let the pattern of his lips and the well-regulated desire in his eyes tell me the rest. I had thought only minutes earlier that there could be no horror worse than to lay in the dark with the wolf, but I saw now that I had been wrong.

  Standing on my feet, I would be no more of a match for the man than I was lying flat. I tried to get up anyway. Throwing myself upright, I let my feet take the weight of my body, but my right leg crumpled under me as though it were made of paper.

  He had returned, probably having quickly tied the animal somewhere near the door. I suppose that he saw me fall, for his feet ran down the staircase, and he stood tall above me, looking down to where I lay in a pool of searing pain.

  “You shouldn’t have tried to get up,” he said in a way much too matter-of-fact to be critical. “I’m sorry. Later, I’ll have the injury in your leg seen to. I can’t right away; there isn’t time.”

  Kneeling beside me, he tried to slide an arm around me. Quailing violently from him, I brought up my knees and tried to roll on my side, over the dense, coarse rocks that littered the cave’s cold floor, my heartbeats cutting like flint into the side of my chest.

  “Liza, don’t,” he said. “Please don’t! You’ll hurt yourself! It’s useless anyway, can’t you see that?”

  He caught my arms fast, holding them at the wrists as he leaned over me, gathering me to his chest. The cave’s thick air hit my back as I was lifted. Vincent was carrying me toward the stone steps.

  “I promised I didn’t want to harm you,” he said. “Even now, I mean it.”

  We reached the surface, and the fresh night air poured into my lungs, a deep relief after the stench underground. Yet there was no relief from the horror of Vincent’s hands spreading desolation through me like a cancer. I was set on earth against the smooth bark of a low bushy hazel, at the edge of a curtain of pale color from a second lantern. Ten feet before me was the wolf, his chain hooked to the cellar rim.

  Vincent took my hand and I looked at him with tortured, aching eyes, as he said, “I know you’re shocked and afraid. I hate to move you like this, but I have to get you out of here. It’s better that you aren’t here to watch what’s going to happen. There’s an inn not far from here, and the innkeeper won’t ask questions. I’m going to keep you there for a while.”

  “Why? What’s going to happen? What are you going to do?”

  “I have to make it so we can marry, Liza. I have to be free; it’s the only way. I didn’t want it to be like this. But it must either be this, or you would have to die.”

  I didn’t think then what he must mean by marriage and freedom. It never occurred to me that there might be a threat to anyone except myself.

  “I’ll give you the land—I don’t want any of it,” I said. “Please—I don’t need it!”

  “Liza. Liza. It’s more than the land, my pretty one. It’s you I want—” He caressed my cheek. My flesh felt discolored where his fingers passed. “And you I shall have.”

  Misliking a sound he heard in the distance, the wolf gave a strangled cry. Haunted by the fear that Vincent might try to kiss me again, I said, clumsily trying to distract him, “The wolf’s voice—”

  Vincent glanced to where he had tied the animal. “I bought him from a bankrupt menage
rie. The trainer controlled it with a tight collar, and its voice has been damaged.”

  The crisp sound of horses’ hooves interrupted him; it was an irregular noise denoting a hesitant rider. Vincent listened as the wolf cringed and slathered in the dirt at his feet.

  “Damn,” he said through clenched teeth. “She’s early.” He left my side, picked up the lantern, shuttered it, and walked out to the middle of the field, to stand under the boughs of a large single oak.

  The horse and rider came into view and stopped at the forest line. The rider sat alertly, peering into the clearing, as the horse shied nervously and twitched its tail. Sighting the male figure under the tree, the rider slipped gracefully to the ground.

  “Alex!” It was Isabella’s voice. She half-ran joyfully across the clearing, and halted in the open, as if not believing her good fortune. Vincent left the shadow of the tree. They looked like silhouette figures in the dark, inconclusive human shapes, tentative in the moment of misunderstanding and deception. He advanced on her until he was close enough for her to recognize him as her husband. She gave a soft cry of surprise.