Julie Anne Long (23 page)

“Aye, that may well ’ave been a good plan, but Rebecca, honest girl that she is, ruined it: she told Martha the pair of ye were engaged, not wed, and Martha told all the women in the camp. And I willna ’ave a scandal, no’ even for you, my friend. ’Tis trial enough t’ keep the young in line. Ye’ll sleep in my tent, and Rebecca can stay wi’ Leonora, and we’ll . . .”

Raphael stopped talking when he noticed that Connor’s attention was concentrated elsewhere. He followed Connor’s gaze.

Rebecca was now standing, awake and blinking in the sunlight, at the entrance to Leonora’s tent. She was back in her brown muslin dress and wearing a bonnet, which made Connor smile; perhaps Leonora had coaxed her into them in a nod to proprieties. He had become so accustomed to Rebecca bareheaded or covered in a boy’s cap that the bonnet seemed faintly silly.

Raphael saw the expression on Connor’s face, the wonder and possessiveness.

“Oh,
how
will ye survive?” he said in mock sympathy.

Connor snarled something profane in Rom, and strode away from him toward Rebecca.

“Did you have a good rest?”

It was strange, Rebecca thought, to stand so close to Connor and not touch him. That had been one of the luxuries of the past few days: touching him whenever she pleased, as he had touched her; so casually, so often, it almost seemed as if their hands never left each other. A lock of hair lifted from a cheek, a brush of fingers against an arm, a touch on the thigh, soft kisses freely and extravagantly bestowed, kisses that turned into . . . her face went warm at the thought.

But she took her cues from Connor, and Connor’s hands were at his sides, his fingers restlessly drumming his thighs. And now he was asking her, as politely as if he were a stranger, if she’d slept well.

“Good enough, thank you,” she replied tersely.

Connor lifted an eyebrow at her tone and lowered his voice. “What is it, wee Becca? Can you not sleep when I am not next to you? I would think it was the first decent rest you’d have had in a day or two.” He leered charmingly.

She rolled her eyes, and he stifled a laugh.

“Connor, where are we going? What are we doing here? Did you know Leonora is a healer? Is she married to Raphael?”

“Which question shall I answer first?”

“Answer all of them, in that order, and quickly.”

“Very well, then. Wee Becca, I have some final business to conduct before we can go to Scotland. We will be safer traveling with the Gypsies for a few days, much more so than if the two of us went on alone. And yes, I knew Leonora was a healer, which I thought would please you to no end. And no, Leonora and Raphael are not married. Leonora is a widow, and Raphael is a widower. They are cousins.”

“Business?” Rebecca said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Does this have to do with . . . with your past, Connor?”

“With my past, wee Becca,” he said softly. “And with our future.”

She fixed him with a penetrating stare. Connor met it valiantly.

“Business where? And how long?”

“Just a few days, wee Becca. We will travel with the Gypsies as far as Cambridgeshire. And then we will go to Scotland straight away to be married.”

His eyes were full of promise and entreaty, begging her silently not to ask any more questions.

Rebecca looked away from him for a moment, gazing out across the camp, as though mulling his words.

At last she returned her gaze to him.

“All right,” she said reluctantly.

Connor released the breath he’d been holding.

“There is one more thing, wee Becca. While we travel with the Gypsies, we must observe their . . . proprieties. Which are, I’m afraid, much like your own dear mama’s proprieties.”

“Which means . . .”

“You will ride with Leonora in her cart, and I will ride horseback with the men. And at night, you will stay with Leonora in her tent, and I will stay with Raphael.”

Unease prickled the back of Rebecca’s neck. Martha’s words echoed in her mind:
He looked at you as one would look at a sister.
It was ridiculous, really, she knew: no brother would look at his sister the way he was looking at her now . . . a look that she could almost feel on her skin, a look almost as hot as his hands. Still, every moment of her adventure had been spent with Connor so far. And though he would be but a few yards away from her at night, she already felt bereft.

“Why can’t I ride horseback with you?”

“Are you asking why you canna ride astride alongside me and a pack of strange Gypsy men, wee Becca?” he asked mildly.

She took his point. Still . . .

Connor saw her stricken expression and made a sound, half laugh, half moan.

“
Believe
me, wee Becca, it will be the longest two days of my life.”

She gave him a weak smile.

He wanted to touch her, kiss the weak smile from her lips, kiss her senseless. But Gypsy eyes flitted toward the two of them regularly, even as everyone seemed to be bustling about the camp packing the wagons. And he had promised Raphael there would be no scandal.

So Connor smiled, too, a smile she could normally have wrapped around herself like a soft blanket.

But it was clear from her expression that for Rebecca, at the moment, his smile wasn’t nearly enough.

The little caravan consisted of five carts brimming with Gypsies and Gypsy belongings, flanked and followed by Gypsy men on horseback, Connor among them on his gray horse. The men shouted to each other in jesting tones, their teeth winking like chests of diamonds in their swarthy faces. The women laughed and called to each other, teasing, instructing, shushing the children, who wiggled and fought boredom by driving their mothers to distraction. Rebecca sat between Martha and Leonora, who had the reins to the wagon. She felt like an island amid an eddy of Gypsy conversation.

A cart was approaching the caravan from the opposite direction on the road. In it sat a man and a woman, farmers possibly, dressed in what was probably their finest clothing. Perhaps, Rebecca thought, they are on their way to visit relatives, or to dinner with the vicar. Rebecca prepared to nod as they passed, a reflex of her breeding, expecting a polite nod from the woman in response, perhaps a doffed cap from the man.

But the woman’s eyes remained fixed on the road in front of her, as though the entire caravan of Gypsies was invisible, or as though she wished them so. The man met Rebecca’s searching eyes, and a chill unfurled down her spine at the contempt she saw there. His cap remained on his head. He held Rebecca’s eyes for a moment, then leaned slowly, pointedly, over the side of his cart and spat as he passed them.

Shaken, Rebecca looked at Leonora, who was gazing contemplatively at the road ahead of her.

“Do you mind it?” Rebecca blurted to her.

“Mind it,
Gadji
?” Leonora asked distantly.

“
Rebecca
,” Rebecca corrected. “Do you mind how he looked at you?”

Leonora turned to Rebecca in mild surprise.

“They are . . . what is your word? Jealous,” Leonora said. “The
Gorgio
do not understand our way of life. They cannot imagine living where they please, and moving when they please. They prefer the shackles of big houses and land. They do not understand us, and it frightens them, and fear makes them cold.”

“Perhaps it is also that Gypsies
steal
,” Rebecca said, somewhat defensively, conscious that the “they” to which Leonora referred included her. Immediately regretting her words, she swiftly turned to Leonora to gauge her reaction.

Leonora was grinning broadly.

“Ah, but stealing is wrong to your people, not to ours. If ye’ve so many things that you canna keep them from being stolen, then surely ye’ve too
many
things? And is it not right to share? It is merely another difference in . . .”

“Philosophy,” Rebecca completed for her.

“Yes,” Leonora said triumphantly, pleased with this odd little
Gadji
’s grasp of things Rom.

Rebecca was both appalled and strangely enchanted by this exotic point of view. She imagined repeating Leonora’s words to the vicar. The thought made her smile and crane her head for a glimpse of Connor. He was riding behind the cart, and his head was thrown back in laughter, probably at something hopelessly male and profane that Raphael had said.

Hmmph. There he was, she thought, riding in the summer sun, having what looked to be the time of his life, while she was relegated to this jouncing cart and . . .

Well, if she was being
completely
honest about it, she wasn’t exactly miserable. In fact, if it weren’t for the presence of Leonora’s owl-eyed daughter, she would be having the time of
her
life. Leonora had been genuinely enthralled by the story of Connor’s musket-ball wound, and she had been full of praise for Rebecca’s decision to bind the wound instead of stitching it closed, which could have led to infection. Rebecca was thoroughly enjoying basking in the unfamiliar rays of near motherly approval.

Their conversation then careened between wounds and effluvia and herbs for the rest of the morning. It was about as close to heaven on earth as Rebecca had ever come in her life—with the exception, of course, of the moments spent in Connor Riordan’s arms.

None of it, however, seemed to be endearing Rebecca any further to Martha.

As Rebecca and Leonora chatted, Martha was busy with mending; shirts and skirts and trousers were heaped in a basket on the seat next to her in the cart. Despite the rattle and jounce of the cart, her needlework was exemplary—one tiny, even stitch after another. Her lips were pressed tightly together, however, and she drove the needle into the cloth with motions that bore more resemblance to stabbing than sewing.

“You do that very well,” Rebecca told Martha, feeling magnanimous in the glow of Leonora’s praise.

“Aye,” Martha said matter-of-factly. “I sing very well, too. And I can
dukker
best of all.”

Clearly modesty was not among the proprieties Gypsy mamas taught their daughters.

“But can you play the pianoforte?” Rebecca found herself blurting. As far as Martha knew, Rebecca could play like Bach himself, and she was suddenly prepared to lie, lie, lie if it would help in any way to stem the flow of Martha’s insane self-assurance.

But Martha stopped stitching for a moment and gave her a gently incredulous, pitying look.

“Why would I want to play the pianoforte?”

An excellent question, Rebecca saw now, especially since Gypsies didn’t typically have drawing rooms in which to entertain guests with pianoforte tunes. She could feel her face growing warm.

“What does
dukker
mean?” she asked, instead of answering the pianoforte question.

“Yer palm,” Martha said. “I can read yer future in yer palm. I will
dukker
for ye later.” She said it in a conciliatory manner, as though offering a treat to a feebleminded child.

Rebecca surreptitiously turned her hand over and gazed down at it. Perhaps the lines that hatched across it
were
a sort of Gypsy hieroglyphics. Imagine if everyone was born with a map to their entire life in their hand . . .
Does it say
, Rebecca wondered,
that I will one day be trapped in a Gypsy wagon with an insufferable Gypsy girl
?

“Martha does sing very well,” Leonora said, perhaps feeling guilty for showering praise on another young woman within earshot of her daughter. “Perhaps ye’ll hear her one day.”

“That would be lovely,” Rebecca lied. “What kinds of songs do you like to sing?” she asked Martha, hoping, probably in vain, to impose a sort of drawing-room pleasantry on the conversation.

Connor rode up next to the cart just then, his cheeks ruddy with sun and good spirits.

“Songs of love,” Martha said, throwing her shoulders back to display her round bosom at its best advantage. “I sing songs of love
very
well.”

Connor looked at Martha, startled, and frowned faintly, perplexed. He opened his mouth as if to say something to her, then closed it and nodded politely to her and to Leonora before turning his attention toward Rebecca.

“How are you finding your trip, wee Becca?”

How was she finding her trip? Pity she couldn’t think of a word that meant both “wonderful” and “horrible.”

“Oh, it’s . . . it’s lovely,” she said lamely. “Not a single highwayman in sight. When will we stop?”

“When we arrive.” But then something in her face must have told him that she was
not
in the mood for glib answers, because he gently amended his answer. “We will stop in a few hours more, wee Becca. Just before sundown. Raphael knows of a place to camp. Near a town.”

“You need to rest, Connor,” she said awkwardly, when what she wanted to say was
I love you
.

“Aye,” he agreed softly, “I do. Thank you for looking after me.” And when he smiled down at her, his expression said
I love you, too
. For a moment, Leonora and Martha and all the Gypsies dropped away, and they were aware only of each other.

Martha cleared her throat.

“I will
dukker
for you tonight, Rebecca.” She stabbed her needle one last time into the trousers.

The town was barely a town at all, a few little houses and storefronts. The caravan rode down the center of it just as the sun was sinking in the sky. Rebecca watched as Raphael rode toward a meadow at the outskirts of the town and motioned to the rest of the caravan with his hand; this was where they would be stopping for the evening.

Swiftly, tents were erected, a fire built, pots and pans extracted from the baggage in preparation for supper. To Rebecca’s tired eyes, it was like watching a tightly choreographed dance; each Gypsy seemed to know their role and performed it deftly.

She stepped down from the cart, ecstatic to be on solid ground again. Strangely, riding in a cart for hours was far more grueling than riding a horse, she thought; one almost becomes an extension of a horse, one could adjust to the rhythm of the animal’s body. But with a cart . . . well, one merely suffered a cart. Her body was stiff in ways she never felt from riding on horseback.