Thank you so much again for all the reviews I received from the previous chapter!! michael buble's lover brought up many good points in her astute criticism of chapter three, and I'll try my best not to rely so much on TSFT for plot ideas.
I know the story's really slow at the moment, I'll pick it up soon with the next chapter. Oh, and a little Romani lesson: Vardo(s) is/are the colorful caravans the Gypsies travel in/treat as homes. Blood, like dogs and gaje (outsiders,) are considered particularly impure/bad luck.
Anything familiar I do not own. They are property of Miss Libba Bray.
If there was any confusion, Ithal is talking about Felicity at the end. Kartik and Ithal joke about Freya at the beginning. :)
The gypsy camp is surprisingly still, the dreadful air of something terribly amiss inexplicably evident as I make my presence known with two sharp taps on a neighbouring bark of a tree.
Someone sitting quietly on the steps of a nearby caravan glances up instantly at the sudden sound.
"Baba Elena?" He demands of the sighing trees, anguish stealing nearly all the breath from his voice, and seeing my face, his mouth falls into grim smile. "I see you've returned to us at last."
He evades the last three steps on the stairs with a jaunty leap, and I meet his cheerfully extended hand with my own, pumping it.
"Yes, I am aware of your expressed concerns regarding the union, but I will not be denied my heart's true love," I begin, summoning a most affected tremble to my voice, and Ithal lets out a little, affectionate bark of laughter at our silly joke.
"Ah, yes. She's been most inconsolable since you've left… threatened to nip my nose when I spoke ill of your character," He adds for good measure, and I follow him nimbly through the many colourful rows of vardos at rest, the novelty of my surprising return earning me the small, occasional smile from the younger set of the gypsy women, who silently braid modest sprays of pale, minute flowers and sweet-smelling herbs into the elaborate, serpentine twines of their long, dark hair.
Ithal and I soon reach a familiar, desolate clearing situated a few feet away from the leisured bustle of the camp, and with the first, genuine smile I've allowed myself to show in months, I amble eagerly towards a sleepy, dappled mare who, with an overjoyed whiny, recognizes the feel of my fingers almost instantly against the majestic span of its back.
"Be wary now. I'm only a few feet away, and I'll not have you compromising Freya's virtue," Ithal lifts a cautionary finger, and I laugh, well and truly, the sound seeming so much more foreign, and strange to me than a few spoken words in Romani. Ithal throws me a fat apple he's cleverly hidden in his pocket, and I offer the bright, ruby fruit to Freya's eager, nuzzling mouth.
"I gather you found your stay with the English well." There is a noteworthy edge to Ithal's words, and I eye him meaningfully.
"I found my stay with the horses well," I murmur, loud enough over Freya's blissful chomp-chomping, and Ithal scoffs.
"You slept in the stable house?" He shakes his head, and a lithe curtain of his pale gold hair falls to hide the slighted indignation brimming hotly in his white-blue eyes, "We might as well be horses, no dogs, the way they treat us."
I try to beckon, somewhere from within myself, a similar sense of stung resentment at having been treated thus by a hideously indulgent society crippled with flawed values and a cruel, perverted sense of worth. But I find, to my slight alarm, that I am nearly indifferent, that I am numb. Compliant.
Compliant to the unjust, and often disheartening conventions and ways of a world I cannot affect or hope to change.
"I wasn't lying, just so you know."
I lift my gaze abruptly from Freya's savage mauling of the apple, and I pull a puzzled expression. "Lying?"
Ithal is suddenly grinning widely, his demeanour smug with the air of knowing something I do not.
"'She's been most inconsolable'?" When I am hopelessly lost as to his meaning, Ithal leans in, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "She's been asking for you."
It takes me all of a dull moment to register that Ithal must be speaking of Gemma, and I very nearly choke Freya with the remaining bit of apple so ill at ease am I with this new information. Freya shoots me a warning look.
"Asking?" I wheeze out, strangely afright, picturing in my mind's eye a foolish, unthinking Gemma, creeping breathlessly from the safety of Spence, and unwisely into the illusory calm of night… with nothing more in the way of dress than a woefully misbuttoned robe, and a chemise so loose, so absurdly thin you can nearly make out the sinuous shapes of her-
"The first day our camp got settled," Ithal explains slowly, one of his fair eyebrows raised in a look of confusion, no doubt in a fitting response to the sudden flush that has overcome my cheeks, which, considering their dark colouring, must be very bright indeed...
"She sought after one of us, and invented some tale about your needing employment," Ithal leans back to stroke Freya's dusty mane. The gesture is loving, gentle, but the smile on his face is carnal. "But I knew it was her who was in need of something."
I should clout Ithal's bloody nose for such a deplorable assertion.
But as I am, too, rather guilty of having my thoughts wander, unabashed, in places where they've certainly no right or business to be, I force, from the squirming depths of my throat, a laugh of such an obnoxious and pompous nature, that for a horrifying instant, I am reminded of the several, philandering gentlemen whom I've had the great displeasure—as dutiful, and ever unquestioning coachman—of taking home after an evening's length of questionable activity, from the sprawling estates of their mistresses.
Ithal is content to join me in my feigned merriment for a good minute or two, before I am required to stop the bloody madness with an unpleasant question I've longed to ask him since first witnessing his earlier distress,
"And what of Baba Elena? Is she not well?"
Ithal lowers his gaze, the swell of his throat rising and falling.
"It is like asking if it rains everyday in this damned country. But to answer your question, she has gotten worse. Crying for Carolina, plagued with horrible health-"
A strangled cry swallows the rest of Ithal's reply, and I am suddenly aware of fingers, curled and insistent along the length of my forearm. I twist my head around, and it is one of the gypsy women, Sofia, her brown eyes wild and lined with worry.
"The outsiders, the English men, Baba-" she pants hysterically, nearly incoherent from her running, and Ithal, face twisted with fury, is on his heels at once. Sofia urges me to follow him with an agitated shake of her head, and I require no further permission, abandoning my reunion with Freya with a quick, apologetic smile, and a loving pat on the creature's soft, obliging muzzle.
The camp has grown impossibly stiller, hushed with the obvious absence of men. Ahead, there are shouts, loud and wounding in their dissent, and I swallow, anticipating the worst.
The branches rain down upon me like a thousand arms, tugging weakly at my rumpled hair, clinging to the stubborn folds of my weathered clothes, teasing my dark skin into the ready pinkness of dawn, pushing me back as if in a fruitless attempt to keep me from discovering something gruesome, shocking beyond words.
The trees begin to thin, and I glimpse Mother Elena's stooped figure, the shadowy outline of her small, frightened form cut against the bright, golden bath of sun.
Another face swims into view, worry plainly written in its in startlingly green eyes.
Gemma.
What business could she possibly have here?
"Here now what's all the trouble?"
A formidable figure of a man heads towards the direction of the fray in a brisk, indignant clip, the mouth beneath the enormous, dark moustache set tightly into a thin line of disapproval.
"Bloody Gypsies, mate."
The hatred in this new voice startles me into outrage, and I narrow my eyes at the speaker in mutual contempt.
"I am not your mate, Sir," The former man's gaze is steely, "And you'll have a care around these ladies or I'll have you at the Yard." Yard.The Scotland Yard in London.
The Inspector is glowering at something the other man is holding, and I discover, my ragged breathing quite nearly ceasing altogether, that the worker is clutching a very large hammer, his hunger to wield it as sure and fierce as the loathing in his eyes. I flank Ithal in his shielding of Mother Elena, and the workers' nasty smiles broaden.
"Best go back, m'um," The Inspector says gently to Mother Elena who refuses to be consoled with his kindness. Her thin, frail lips hang open like trap doors, helplessly mute in their secret horror.
I can feel the fretful roam of Gemma's eyes upon me, and struggle insanely with myself not to return it.
"Let us go, Baba," Ithal whispers, lifting her bony, sun-spotted elbow gingerly to his chest. The other Gypsy men offer Mother Elena soothing smiles, stooping low, and raising their arms high to clear a demure path for her in the trees. Then it happens. A subtle change in the air. There are poorly smothered chuckles, and Ithal stiffens.
I note the gleam of something faint against the sharp slope of his right cheek, and his fury is palpable, infectious. The numbness within me lifts like a thick, blinding fog, and there are only the workers' taunts, aching with the want for release from lips shut tight with the strained pretence of civility. The spiteful eyes that cannot even see; I am too small for them, beneath their notice, insignificant.
I turn before I am stopped to flash them a silent threat, but my eyes find Gemma's, and I cannot rein the anger that eagerly stirs the blood in my veins. Gemma. Gemma and her sodding petticoats, her balls, her title, her family, her bloody Simon Middleton.
I do not even think of you as Indian.
I scissor my glance towards the workers, noting the strokes of days-old grime along the bridges of their proud noses, the violent ruddiness in their sun-beaten cheeks, their teeth stained with the promise of eventual rot. A lady of Gemma's standing would not even think to associate herself with someone so damnably low. We are all dirt under someone's heels, and everyday we try our very best not to get crushed with the weight of that truth. We fight back by belittling those we can, with the shameless and outright maligning of others, so that in their deep bouts of torment, we might convince ourselves that we are greater. We are of some worth.
"Amria…" Mother Elena croaks to no one, and no one troubles themselves to listen.
Amria.
Curse.
Ithal is nowhere to be found.
This troubling news reaches me—where I was to be found at the late hour, furiously restless within the boathouse, paring a bit of deadwood into the shape of Gemma's amulet with an old letter opener—by way of a tearful, diminutive girl I recognize instantly to be Ithal's little sister, Ravena.
"He say he would only be gone for little while," she explains to me miserably, her eyes, the faded cobalt of her brother's, extremely glossy with tears, and I kneel before her, stroking her wild, blonde hair into the sweet tameness of silk.
"When did your brother leave?" I ask, dread a tightening ache in my gut, and Ravena tiny lips tremble, her voice cut in terrific, anguished sobs. "Ho-o-ours a-goo-o! And… I… don't… know where he go-o!"
I look past the ceaseless shudder of her timorous shoulders, my eyes climbing the dirt path from the boathouse and past the dim, libertine maze of trees until they can go no further, denied and obstructed by a thick, murmuring curtain of dark.
"Ravena, if I am not at the camp within an hour, please alert the others," I instruct gently, mopping up her slick tears with light, soothing sweeps from my thumb, and she nods vehemently, running the short distance from here to the merry descant of the Gypsy camp. I turn quickly from the open mouth of the doorway, my heart pumping furiously with a possibility so gruesome, so appalling I can scarcely will myself to entertain it: What if Ithal is grievously harmed? Perhaps he sought a confrontation with the workers, or them, with him?
I scour what little I have for anything that would prove to be most beneficial to me in a brawl. My one, treasured copy of the Odyssey sits, seeming to peer hopefully up at me from my makeshift desk of abandoned crates. Well.. unless I want to torment them with language so elevated in sophistication they nearly die of bemusement, I think I shall settle for some other instrument that would hurt dearly to have beaten against one's mouth, face, or teeth.
The little light glowing from the heart of the lantern dances, as if in suggestion, against the skin of something long, and masked by the dark.
Gemma's cricket bat.
I reach for the slender handle, the tender, swollen ridges of it seeming to kiss the hot face of my palm in its gratefulness to be employed. I all but walk out of the boathouse, my pace in the mind of an avid runner as I begin to make my way up the dirt path by the thin, watery light of the moon. The trees seem to grow larger, more fearsome in the dark. Beneath the toes of my shoes, the grass is brittle and dry as sun-burnt hay.
There is the sudden lurch of water to my right, and I flinch as though struck.
I turn swiftly, and to my immense surprise and relief, I am greeted by the site of an unharmed Ithal, his shapeless trousers drawn up to his unnaturally pale knees as he wades his way roughly past the brimming edge of the lake. He tries to right himself with a steady hand on the ground but his palm proves far too slippery and it slips against a small spattering of iridescent stones, their little, pointed teeth forging fresh, tiny rivulets of blood across the front of his hand. He cries out at the unexpected sting of it.
"Ithal, wait!" I shout. I hurry to reach his side but he raises his injured hand at me, his eyes observably red with the throb of spirits as he finds my gaze and holds it, pleading with me fiercely to stay where I am.
"I am impure," He lets out in a voice astonishingly close to tears, and I struggle to find words that will be of some comfort to him. I have never seen him so distraught.
There is the curious, faintly musical peal of glass in movement. An empty bottle rolls within view.
"It is alright," I say firmly after a moment's pause, my footfalls as quiet and soft as snow. "We will clean the wound, and Baba Elena-"
Ithal chuckles bitterly at the apparent foolishness of my suggestion.
"You don't understand, I have been impure for a long time." He stares out bleakly into the perfect still of the water as though the sight of it is inordinately fascinating.
"I have been consorting with outsiders—with her." Ithal utters the last so softly that I am sure he meant only to say it to himself. My confusion is bitten through by the terrible gnaw of understanding, and I delicately lower myself beside his crumpled form, knowing I do not have to utter a single word, but need only listen.
"Is there something wrong with me?" He chokes out, his eyes hidden beneath flickering lids that try, desperately, to keep disconsolate tears at bay. "Is there something so vile, so unbearable about me that she cannot keep the promise she made here?"
I shake my head silently, unable to speak or swallow or draw even the tiniest of breaths so undone am I by the extraordinary sight of him sobbing. This is what love reduces one to. We are no longer ourselves. Our shape alters, changes drastically, until we are no longer full, blissfully solid, only something that will forever desire the company of some other complementary piece, the one that will make us well and truly whole.
Complete.
I stare at Ithal's wounded hand, wanting desperately to tend to the only injury I can help. I tear it from where he is cradling it mournfully against his heaving chest, and ignoring his sharp, strangled cry of pain, I dip it into the shallow lip of the lake, letting it bleed out steadily into the numbing cold of the water.
"There is nothing wrong with you," I say at last, my throat burning with something I cannot name. "It is something we cannot help."
For we can only be ourselves, and trust, that somehow, to someone, it will be more than enough.