xXx
The room was dark and heavy, lit solely by sputtering candles, and across the round table was set hand written letters spread evenly and alphabetically about an upturned tumbler glass. In the centre of the table a paraffin lamp burned its sickly, sweetly smelling light. Around the room, shrouded in dark shadows and too bright fire-light, flashing in and out of focus, were paintings and statues of Christ and the Mother Mary, and Polly Shelby thought she saw there faces in the candle drip.
At the head of the table, at the heart of the attention and the theatre and the sickly-sweet light, a woman in her fifties presided over the rag-tag group of listeners, mostly women, mostly in their thirties, mostly widows of soldiers dressed all in black, their pale, ashy faces as waxen as the candle sticks themselves.
Apart from one man, in his fifties too, in a smart suit and tie. The cuckoo lost in a nest of mourning ravens.
Polly Shelby reached up and slipped off her broad brimmed hat, settling it on her lap while she claimed her seat. She perches there, on the edge, half in and half out the circle made by grieving widows and the man she can't pin down, unsure she should have come there that night at all.
"Let's begin. Hands on the table."
xXx
The women instantly followed the order from the eldest woman, puppets with strings being made to dance to an invisible song, palms face down on the table, but Polly watches, Polly hesitates, Polly eventually follows suit. The medium, the gypsy witch surrounded by Catholics, peered through the lamplight.
"Tonight we have two new pilgrims joining us. So let us welcome them."
Polly doesn't speak, suddenly struck with an abnormal surge of apprehension, but she did nod her greetings. The other 'pilgrim', a skinny, frail woman sitting left of Polly, caught the gypsy witches notice first.
"Starting with you. Who is it that you are seeking to reach?"
The frail woman looked around the table.
"My husband. He was taken six months ago by the influenza."
The feeble woman crosses herself, and Polly clicks her tongue on the back of her teeth. The time for mercies and miracles were over for the woman and the man lost to influenza.
"I tried to reach him through Mrs Breach in Sparkhill but she kept getting his middle name wrong."
The medium scowled in the dark, the lamplight making her brow heavy, her sockets deep, skeletal, Polly thought.
"Don't talk about Mrs Breach in this house. She is an un-sanctified charlatan."
And then of course she turned to Polly.
"And you? Who do you seek?"
Polly Shelby gathered her courage like one would gather a handful of dry sand. Quickly, tightly, and hoping she could get through this before the grains fell through her fingers, before the taste of wine could dissipate from her mouth, before she thought better of this.
xXx
"A daughter. My daughter."
The gypsy witch pulled back from the light, bathing herself in the shadows and the shades.
"And when did your daughter pass to the other side?"
Polly, so unlike herself that night, faltered.
"The truth is, I'm not sure she's even dead. That's why I came here. To find out."
The ensuing silence tells Polly the women are waiting for her to get her words right, to clarify, to expound on this sudden riddle. What sort of mother doesn't know if her own flesh and blood daughter was dead or alive?
Polly Shelby.
That was who.
Polly Shelby, gypsy blooded herself, headstrong and impetuous, and a mother-
A mother who doesn't know where her children are.
"You see, my son and my daughter were taken from me when they were very small. Taken by the Parish authorities. I never knew what happened to them."
A pause that lingers, judgement in the widows eyes, the shrouded face of a gypsy witch plying her trade in a small back-to-back house in Small Heath.
"But lately-"
How does she say it? This feeling? This dread? How does one turn that soiled, sour note in the bottom of her belly into words that could be understood?
Not easily.
"I have had a feeling. Like a… Feeling I can't put into words. It's too big for those. Too deep. It wakes me up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, and it burns in the bottom of my tea, and it's everywhere I turn, in the corners and the nooks, waiting to… To leap."
Polly shook her head, as her hand, clasped on the edge of the table, shook.
"And there's this dream I keep having. I see a pretty girl about eighteen years old, and she's sitting on a river bank with a crown of lily's sheltered in her black curls, skirts up and around her bruised and skimmed knees, feet in the dark still waters, and she's humming an old lullaby I used to sing to her, but she only hums it. She's forgotten the words."
The trembling grows stronger, as does Polly's voice. As brittle and black as flint.
"She looks at me then. Looks right over the black river, and she smiles, and she has my nephews eyes, but my smile, and Arthur's dimples-… She looks me dead in the eye with a bleeding crown of lilies, and she tells me she wants to come home. She tells me she's cold. She tells me she's lost. She tells me-… She tells me death is coming."
Polly's sigh is a quivering thing, an autumn leaf caught in a gust of winter wind it has no hope of fighting off.
"My daughter would be eighteen this year. In July. My summertime surprise. And this girl, the girl in my dreams, she has my nephews eyes, and she shouts and shouts, she yells for me to run. Death is coming. He's coming fast. Run. Then the hands come from the water, bone-like and covered in sand, and they wrap around her pale legs and she's-… She's dragged under. The black waters are still again. She's gone."
Polly straightened in her seat.
"I don't even know what name they gave her after they stole her from me. My little Hester, my little Hettie-… Hester means star, don't you know? Stars lead a lost man home… But who leads a star home? I-"
Polly scoffed, and it burns deeper than any of the candlelight.
"So I can't find out if the dream is true. If she has passed away and she wants to talk to me, or if it's a warning, if there's still time-… I thought this would be the place to find out."
xXx
The gypsy witch studied Polly long and hard, her gaze falling an inch, catching the glimmer around her neck, a flicker of recognition haunting in the dark she sat in.
"You're wearing the Black Madonna. You're Gypsy?"
Yes, Polly should say. She's as gypsy as they came, as gypsy as this medium, she has the wild in her blood and the horse hoof impressions on her heart, but, instead, she glances around the room, to the black widows and the black shadows and the black night outside the window.
"The part of me that dreams is gypsy."
The medium nodded, slipping into Romany like a boxer into a warm bath after a long and hard fight.
"I am Gypsy too. May I ask your name?"
The decision Polly makes comes quick and delicately.
"My maiden name is Shelby."
Everyone reacts the same to the name. Everybody knows it. The medium adjusts, slinks forward, back into the light, and Polly thought why not? Why not use the reaction? She glanced to the frail widow beside her-
"So perhaps you could do me first."
xXx
The front door, with its peeling red paint, flew open in the night, nearly coming of its rusted hinges. The sickly yellow light still burns bright from behind, and Polly Shelby was pulling on her broad brimmed hat, leaving the séance in a hurry.
She walks only a little way before she's forced to a stop by her shaky, pathetic knees, and her shoulder catches a lamppost as she tilts, and the world around her tilts, as the air inside her lungs tilt from hot to freezing ice.
She was sobbing, her face hidden in the dark of her hat that could not hide the jarring noise, her body wracked with it, sobs, aching, breaking howls. And they were howls. More wounded animal than tears. Howls in the grim barren streets.
Polly pushed away from the lamppost, stumbles through the mist and the gas light as she makes her slow, broken way home, what the gypsy witch had said swimming through her mind in laps and rounds until even her thoughts become dizzy indistinct shadows.
"She died. Your girl, she died bravely. Better than many a man… But I will tell you this. For you Shelby's death isn't always the end… When you see that black horse, and you'll know it when you see it, follow it. Follow it and don't stop until you get to the river. Then you'll see-… You'll see."
xXx
Polly Shelby sat alone at the typewriter, still and staring, wearing the same clothes from last night. She clearly hasn't slept a night, a hour, a minute.
The key to the bookies door turns, Polly can hear it jingle, and Esme, John Shelby's new wife, arrives for work.
Polly began typing away with a click and a clack before Esme came around the bend, laying down paperwork at her own desk. Esme was a fearless woman, it was the Gypsy blood in her, as hard faced as a mountain side, but even she, that morning, seemed afraid of Polly. Not afraid enough to stay silent, however.
"Have you heard from the boys?"
Polly doesn't look up, simply keeps on typing.
"They're on their way back."
Esme didn't take her seat, neither did she pick up the paperwork she should have been filing away, instead she kicked back on the desk.
"You're against this the same as me, aren't you?"
Polly responded as if Esme had not spoken at all.
"Look out for anyone laying big money on Divine Star in the three-thirty Newmarket. She's one of ours. Twenty-to-one. Anything over a pound, you tell me."
Polly rolled a new, clean sheet into the typewriter, and Esme withdraws, sitting down, finally, but still, still, doesn't hold her tongue.
"Polly?"
Polly sighed but worked on, and Esme, fierce, fiery Esme, took that as all the invitation she needed.
"I don't wish to pry into your business, but you should know something."
Finally, Polly looks up, and she doesn't like the sudden pity marring Esme's face. She doesn't like it one bit. It chaffs against her, like the sandy memories she had been so desperate to hold last night
"That woman is a trickster."
"What woman?"
Esme holds her gaze, but she's fiddling with a bangle, a tell-tale sign of the younger woman's apprehension. It wouldn't stop her. This anxiety. It never did with a Shelby and Esme, now, was a Shelby.
"Her sister was in the wash house early, and she was boasting there'd been a Shelby at the table-"
"What woman?"
Esme floundered, struggled, speaking words like a toddler took their steps.
"Gypsies talk to each other. You know that-"
"What woman?"
Esme, inevitably, under the heat of Polly's dark stare, gave in for trying to find any sense of delicacy.
"You went to see Mrs Price in the Patch last night."
Polly was up in an instant.
"I'm sorry. I just-"
Esme too gets to her feet fast, just in time for Polly to fly towards her, grab her, push her against the wall, pinning her in.
"What do you know?"
Polly was strung out, sleepless, reeling still, and Esme never knew when to let go, when to leave be, when to keep her mouth shut.
"I know they push the glass. The man. He's her cousin. He pushes the glass. It's a trick. They tell you what you already believe. No more, no less. She set up after the war because of all the widows. Polly, I just thought you should know."
Polly let Esme go, but she did not step back.
"So in this fucking wash house did they say why I went there?"
Esme hesitated, and that was enough to tip off Polly about what came next.
A gentle nod.
Polly had the stiletto blade in her hand faster than a blink, and she has it under Esme's chin faster yet.
"You ever tell a soul in this family; I swear I will cut you open right where you stand."
xXx
Esme's face hardened like a fat caterpillar coiling into its chrysalis. Untouched and removed from the outside world. She jutted her chin out, pushing herself into the narrow dagger.
"I don't need a knife to stop me telling secrets given in confidence. It is a matter of honour."
For a while the two women faced off, the knife between them, a heavy secret on a razor's edge. It balanced, this moment, a chance of war or reconciliation.
Polly Shelby wanted neither. She wanted her children. That was all. And she would not have them. The boy was lost, and the girl was dead.
Polly dropped the knife and walked away.
xXx
Polly stood alone on the bank of the canal dock, lit cigarette between her lips, looking out over the dark and motionless water.
Her hand shook as she took a drag.
She sees the dream again. The young girl on the river bank, blood on her brow and death at her feet and a crown of lilies on her curls, and Polly silently cries.
She died. Your girl, she died bravely. Better than many a man.
What did that matter in the end? Whether someone died bravely or died crying for their mother? Death was death, and it took and took, and there was never any taking back.
Polly took one last drag and then flicked the butt into the cut.
Even Shelby blood, with their gypsy sorcery and their gypsy torment, couldn't change that.
xXx
The young girl sat at the bank of a river, bare feet toes twisting and wiggling into the silt as the exposed current lapped white lipped kisses at her ankles, a stick of honeysuckle between her lips. Her skirts, thin, flimsy things, stitched from five different fabrics, were grass stained and mud streaked, and the linen shirt half tucked inside underneath an old men's vest had seen better days. Around her head, holding back the wave of pitch-black ringlets was a red and gold scarf that knotted behind her ear, dangling its tasselled tail across her shoulder.
She was a small thing in between the river reeds, tanned from days spent in the sun, out on the back of a horse under an uncannily bright English spring. It made her cold blue eyes seem impossibly brighter, colder, shocking.
It also half-hid the lightning bolt scar on her forehead.
The girl, eighteen in a few months' time, didn't know how she got here exactly, in these borrowed clothes, on the banks of this river. A year ago, the last thing she had remembered was fighting off Voldemort in the ruin of Hogwarts castle courtyard. The last thing she remembered had been dying. Then she had awoken up here, in this place, in this time.
A group of Romani travellers had found her in a bush, bleeding out and unconscious, dying, again, and they had disentangled the thorns from her torn and blood-stained clothes, brought her into the back of one of their Vardo, and they had nursed her back to health.
She could never repay them for the kindness they had shown her. A stranger.
The young girl had been weak in the beginning, barely able to lift her head from the pillow. She hadn't known where she was, who was with her, how she had come to be there, where exactly there was. It had taken a full moon turn for her to be able to slink down the steps of the Vardo, with the help of Django and Nadya, the old Romani couple that had taken her in, to feel the grass beneath her feet and the fresh air in her lungs-
In 1920's Scotland.
She had originally planned to hightail it out of there. Perhaps find Dumbledore, perhaps find Tom Riddle, perhaps to try and find a time-turner that went forward instead of backwards, perhaps to find nothing at all and to simply run-
But Tem's Vardo wheel had come lose, and it needed fixing for the next ride to the next town or he would have to be left behind, alone, without his caravan. It only seemed fair to help. After that, Drina's horse got sick, and the young girl had known how to fix it, what herbs needing picking, what spell needed secretly casting. Then the sickness came, the high fever that struck the children, little Treju and Patia and Jibben and Danior, and the young woman couldn't exactly leave with the children sick, could she? No. Of course not.
Yet… Yet six months had gone by after being found in a thorn bush, six months the young girl had spent not making a move to get home, if there even was a way home to begin with. She spent it fixing carts, and riding horses, the wild ones favoured her best, would hoof Willy or Dukker if they came too close, and playing with the children, and eating wild hare supper with Nadya and Django, who turned out to have lost their own child six years hence, and-
And slowly, the young girls skin began to tan, and meat began to thicken on her bones, and a smile, small, warm, free began taking up space on her face.
The young girl finally felt free. No more closets, no more wars, no more Tom Riddles. He was dead. She could feel it now.
Tom Riddle was finally dead, and she was finally free, and it was over, and… And she stayed. She stayed for a week, she stayed for a month, she stayed for a whole year, and she didn't really question it, didn't really want to, knew she would have to answer some hard questions if she did, her reluctance to go back, why she could sleep, finally fucking sleep now.
So she didn't question it.
Hermione Granger was smart. Smarter than she would ever be. If there was a way back, if she was really lost here, the witch would find her somehow. Until then-
Until then, here she stayed.
The Romani clan here didn't know much about her, maybe it was better that way, she never really said more than she had to, and they didn't really ask, an orphan who had ended up in the wrong alley at the wrong time at the end of a drunkards anger at losing a bet, and she gave them the name that had been on the adoption papers Aunt Petunia had so very much liked hitting her around the head with, afraid that if she gave her adopted last name it would create some wibbly-wobbly-timey mess.
Hester Gray.
Nadya had laughed then, laughed long and hard at Hester's confused frown. Gray, she had said, was a gypsy name. A river gypsy name. Salty and strong.
Hettie hadn't known that. She didn't know a single thing about her biological family. She only knew she had been adopted by James and Lily, found abandoned beside the Themes in a wicker basket at the age of eight months. Before that-
She only remembered a tune, a half-lost lullaby. Nothing else.
A small body bounced into her back, knocking the honeysuckle from her mouth and into the river.
"Bloody 'ell, Treju."
The boy in question hopped back, rolling in the weeds, grinning.
"Can we go riding now, Hettie? Please!"
Pulling her feet from the cool river, Hester, Hettie to her friends, stood, dusting off her skirts.
"You heard your Ma, no riding until after supper."
The boy pouted and dug into the river bed further.
"But Jibben's gone riding!"
"Who with?"
"No one. He said he was old enough to go riding by himself now."
"I doubt his father or mother agrees. He still at the stables?"
The boy shuffled underneath her bottomless stare.
"Treju…"
And broke.
"He went for the big black one. The one you leashed out in the clearing away from the others."
Hettie spat a curse.
"Demon?"
The black stallion they had found roaming wild two weeks ago, a big bastard with a bigger and meaner temper. Willy had called the beast a demon after the fifth time he had bucked and nearly broke his leg, said his black coat was darker than hell and his eyes had the devil in them, and the name had stuck.
The only person the horse had let close, so far, had been Hettie.
Jibben was a small boy, spindly, barely seven with a port wine stain on his cheek, one good stomp would squish him flat.
When Treju nodded, Hettie bolted, shouting behind her to the boy, to the river, to the wind.
"Get back to the caravan and get your pa and his brothers!"
Next Chapter: Hettie tries mend a broken arm and find a runaway horse
It's been so long since I posted anything. I took a year break as things, as I think everyone can agree right now, have been absolutely mental. So sorry for not updating or writing but I am back now and I thought what better way to come back than to pop out a story I've been working on for a while. I really like this story, I've really worked hard on it, and I hope you all will like it too.
WARNING: This fic contains an explicit relationship between cousins (FemHarry's pairing). In no way, shape or form do I condone incest. I want that clear. However, the psychology behind it is fascinating and the topic is rich to explore through writing, which is what I'm going to try and do, as tasteful as possible, with both the highs and lows, in this fic. This, I understand, will be triggering to some and so I have tried to label this fic as clear as possible so anyone who could be triggered by such a thing has time to turn away. So please take this as fair warning.
This fic is set at the very beginning of season 2 of Peaky Blinders, and post Harry Potter canon. I highly recommend that you watch the show before reading this fic because, well, it would make all this garbled mess a lot easier to understand and Peaky Blinders is a kickass show, with season 6 due out very soon. If you're a stickler for canon Harry Potter, I'm afraid you're not going to like this fic much as I do mess around, quite heavily, with canon. Then again, if I wasn't, I wouldn't be writing fanfiction and if you really minded, stick to reading the Harry Potter books lol.
I think that's all the warning I need to give right now, but if a chapter contains explicit material I'll make note of it above to give you lot a heads up. And, finally, do let me know your thoughts!