My name is Arielle. To begin where I began, I will write that I was born in 1846, the year of the depression, in a tiny village twenty miles south of Paris. I was the fourth child of my family, and the only girl. My family were poor but honest - my father was a carpenter and my mother a seamstress. Nothing about me was particularly odd, until one July day when I was six years old. I was playing with Jacques, the youngest of my brothers, in the fields near our house that belonged to our nearest neighbour, Monsieur Dupont. We were chasing each other, throwing sticks, that kind of thing - I was such a wild girl, almost like a boy in my attitudes.
"You can't catch me, you can't catch me!" Jacques taunted me, laughing, running away from me across the great green expanse, which seemed to me to be as vast as the sea, which I of course had never seen.
"I can, I can and I will!" I called back running after him as fast as my legs would carry me.
He ran towards a clump of trees on the far side of the field, and I followed, breathing hard. He was two years older than me, and much faster, but I ran on and on, with the sun beating down on my dark little head, kicking up my heels and muddying my frock. Faster and faster I ran, and I followed him into the small glade, keeping my eyes on his fleeing form. I did not see the tree root that rose up from the soil. The last thing I remember is the ground rushing up to greet me, and my own scream in my ears.
Jacques told me afterwards that he heard that scream, and turned around. He found me lying at the foot of an aged oak, with blood pouring from my right temple. The cut was deep, and I still have the scar from that day. Jacques fetched our father, who carried me home in his arms. I did not wake for a month, and lay as if dead, barely breathing. My mother tended me all through that time, Jacques told me, barely leaving my side even though she was with child. She loved me best, as although she was proud of her sons, she had always wanted a daughter. I was the image of her, too. I was dark haired, and tall for my age, with eyes so deep a brown they were almost black. My mother's family had been gypsies, but this was not something I knew then. I did not know how my looks announced my origin.
So, I lay for a month in my living death. I woke one morning to see the sun streaming in through the window, and my mother, my beloved mother, sitting in a chair by my bedside. Behind her, as clearly as I saw the sunlight, I saw a dark angel. They never let me forget the first thing I said.
"Mama, the baby is dead."
My mother jumped up in shock at having heard my voice. "What did you say?"
I burst into tears. Then she held me, and hushed me, and prayed aloud thanking God for my deliverance, and forgot that I had said anything at all.
She remembered, though, barely two weeks later. My little sister was born pale and cold, and never opened her eyes on this world. From then on, my mother avoided me. The superstitious gypsy was still within her, and she was afraid.
It happened again, and again. Once, in a dream I saw my elder brothers Pierre and Louis weeping blood over an upturned cart, which had been filled with things my father had made but which were now strewn all over the road. The next day, on their return from market, they were accosted by bandits, who beat them and then when they tried to fight back held them down, and blinded them both with a knife. They could no longer work, and we came closer and closer to starvation. Another time, I told my father that he should say goodbye to Monsieur Dupont, our nearest neighbour. He shook his head and ignored me. In three days time, Monsieur Dupont's house was ravaged by a terrible fire.
These things drove my mother to turn from loving me as a cherished daughter to hating and fearing me as bad luck, or a worse, as a witch. She could not bear the sight of me. She spoke to my father, and turned his heart against me. He had never treasured me so much; he had three sons, why should he?
One night, my parents came to me and told me I was to leave. I was to live with a relative of my mother's, a lady who would come for me in the morning. I was to pack up my few things, and go with her. They showed no emotion, these people who I had thought loved me. It was so matter of fact, so quick; I barely had time to take in that I was to leave the only home I had ever known.
The lady who came to our door before dawn the next day was not what I had imagined. Instead of being like my mother in the days before my visions came, as I had prayed for all through the night, she was older, with bad teeth and strange clothes. My father gave her a small bag that clinked, and she took me under her arm and pulled me away. I did not see my brothers to say goodbye, and my parents simply went inside the house and shut the door, not even waving to me.
It was not long before I realised what had happened; it was what I never could have foreseen. I had been sold to the gypsies. I was barely seven years old.