Gypsy Heiress

It was impulse, and the ache of pity that made me stop to free the fox. Father would have warned me to pass it by. “No, Liza, let be. That one belongs to God,” he might have whispered, and my grandmother would have made a hand sign, a secret sign from the ancient language and told me, “Leave the mokada jook for the poacher. Shoo! Fox is a dirty beast!” But four years had passed since Father was buried in the pretty churchyard on a sunwashed hill in Greece. Grandma had seen her last sunset three weeks ago, and now there was no one to scold and guide, to love and laugh with, and to sit with under the black night skies watching the sparkling stars that held in each the heart of an angel.

The fox had already been in the trap for some time; from my high perched seat in the wagon I could see the ragged path cut through the roadside underbrush where the fox had dragged the trap in her struggle to escape. The creature was near exhaustion, though her spirit was strong. As I approached, she bared her teeth and growled a warning, so I stopped where I was and sat on the sparse grass beside a mound of wild lilies. I sat with my legs together, as was proper for a gypsy maiden. She was wise, the fox, and stopped the rumble in her throat to show her approval for my respectful attitude. The clouds shifted in the heavens as we sat, and golden spikes of sunlight pierced the leaves of the overhanging oak. I could feel the speckles of heat across the width of my cheekbones and was glad for it and for the many layers of my bright cotton skirts that kept the spring soil’s damp from my legs. After the fox had time to take my scent, I began to talk to the frightened animal softly in Romany.

It took an hour, more perhaps, until the fox trusted me enough to let me come close and work open the rusted jaws of the trap. A fallen branch from the oak had been caught accidentally in the metal teeth and had prevented the trap from doing its ugly work. To my joy, I found the fox’s leg was not broken, only much scratched. The fox, the mokada jook, leapt away at once and disappeared into the underbrush.

My heart was light for the first time in three weeks as I stood brushing the forest floor from my skirts. The crashing of a man’s boots through the nearby thicket came so swiftly that I had not time to turn my face toward the sound before a heavy hand fell upon the back of my neck and jerked me around.

“So! A stinkin’ gypsy brat! You’re the one’s been settin’ these traps, are ye? By Ged, ye’ll learn before you’re much older what justice we’ve got here for poachers. Where’s the rest o’ ye?”

My accuser was a short man of middle age with the body of a boxer. The fine quality of his woolen frock-coat and breeches advertised his prosperity; the professional fit bespoke his superior status. His anger-reddened features might have been pleasant if he were in a softer frame of mind; there was nothing of the bully about him, only the righteous outrage of an honest man confronted with a thief. Had I been any young English girl, a farmer’s daughter perhaps, or a hand at the local fulling-mill, the man might have seen my fear or waited to hear my plea of innocence. But I am a gypsy, and it needed only that to convict me of all crimes. Grandmother said it was the lot of the gypsy to be despised by the non-gypsies, the gorgios; it was God’s will. I tried desperately to view the man only as a manifestation of the Divine Plan and to think of something to placate him. My hesitation was too long, and the man shook me with ruthless impatience. The trap fell from my trembling fingers, leaving a deep scratch across my palm.

“Don’t ye ken the King’s English, wench? Where are they, eh? I haven’t heard that there was any such vermin camped hereabouts.”

“There are none, sir,” I said, and immediately regretted my words. Grandma had warned me more than once about letting a man know I was unaccompanied in a secluded place. So carefully guarded had I been that this was the first time I had ever had the opportunity to use that knowledge—the first time, and I had failed.

As it happened, the man didn’t believe me anyway. He called me a sly little liar and a devil’s daughter, and, encasing my wrist in a hand so calloused it bit like iron, he pulled me toward the woods.

My fear was as deep as the ocean’s hidden valleys; I struggled, although it stained my dignity. As I tried to twist and fight, the man paid no more heed to me than he might have to the bucking of a spring lamb being led to the market. Minutes ago, I had been a free being, seeking to share my freedom with a trapped animal. Now it was I who was trapped, as though the creators had ordained that I must trade my liberty for hers.

The man strode implacably through the underbrush, deflecting branches that swung sharply back to whip my cheeks. The pain of it shocked open my mind, which had been so locked in grief since the death of my grandmother, and I began a torrent of explanation that fell worthlessly upon the man’s broad gray back.

“You’ll have your hour in court, wench,” the man growled, preoccupied. “My only task is to get you there.”

He pulled me into a clearing, where a large brown, Roman-nosed horse was cropping the grass in the radius of an iron spike, which held its tether. Wordlessly, the man tied my wrists together with one end of a long rope, and held the other end as he untethered his horse and mounted.

With a quick, flipping motion, he gave the rope which held me a few twists around his own wrist, and heeled the horse into motion. I had no choice but to follow, my tied arms stretched before me like the tongue of a wagon.

Though the man held his mount to a walk, the horse’s long legs moved too rapidly for me, and I had to train my gait to an uncomfortable half-run in order to keep pace. The sharp, iron-clad hooves cleared the ground no more than a wagon wheel’s width from me; I feared the large creature might find me an irritant at its heels and strike out. And might not the man, through an impulse of cruelty or forgetfulness, put spurs to his mount and urge him to a speed beyond my means?

I took little comfort in the reflection that dragging might be a more merciful death than I would meet through the English courts. I knew how poachers were punished. Men, women, and children alike were whipped and pilloried, followed by imprisonment in vile cells rampant with deadly gaol fever. And prison was for Englishmen born. I was a gypsy, and me, they would hang. Who had not passed the crossroads and seen wretched corpses dangling from the gibbet? There seemed to lie a great crevice at my feet. Arivell, the beng, the God of Darkness and Death lay at wait in it, his awful jaws yawning open to swallow me as he had my parents and my grandmother.

The road became sun-dappled as the track widened and the trees overhead began to part. We were leaving the forest. At another time I would have been filled with the delicious joy of visiting a new place, but the misery of my situation clouded my view as the wall of silvery-barked ash trees was left behind.

After crossing a clear, shallow stream filled with darting minnows, the man turned his horse down a grassy corridor through an orchard of snowy, blossoming apple trees, growing in neat well-attended rows. The heady scent was almost overpowering with each step under the blossoms bringing into sharper focus the smell of the horse which pulled me along. The corridor led onto a sloping avenue bordered on both sides by monkey-puzzle trees. The close-cropped grass was like a carpet, made for walking, but I still stumbled, if only because I was trying so hard not to stumble. There must have been some pity in the man, for though he gave a disgusted snort, he stopped his animal when I lost my footing a third time, waited for me to get up, and then moved on more slowly.

After half a mile, the man dismounted and led the horse and me up a slope that ran with daffodils like a spill of butter and cream. As we reached the crest, I looked below into the dip of a natural amphitheater.

A shock of recognition came as I gazed at the focal point of the dramatically diving greensward. It was Edgehill Hall! Indeed it could be none other—the historic home of the Earls of Brockhaven. I knew its façade well from a book of etchings my father kept,
Great Houses of the British Isles.
My family had carried few books; life in a wagon did not lend itself to the gathering of material possessions. Those they did carry I had read again and again.
Great Houses
had been one of my favorite volumes, for the stately homes had seemed fairy castles from a dream peopled by fine and noble lords and ladies of courage and intelligence. I knew it wasn’t so, of course—Grandma had said they were evil
gorgios
like the rest of them, who starved and ill-treated their servants and threw gypsies off their meadows.

But Edgehill Hall it surely was. It was one of the few mansions built in that uniquely English cousin to the Continental Gothic, the Perpendicular style. Its great symmetrical facade was awash with the sunlight reflected from its many and generously proportioned windows. They said of it, “Edgehill Hall, more glass than wall.”

I shyly asked the man, “Sir, are you—can you be Lord Brockhaven?”

He looked back at me over his shoulder, the angry frown deep as though he suspected me of mocking him. “What do you know of Brockhaven?”

“Nothing, my lord,” I answered, wishing I had held my tongue instead of making him more angry. “Only I’ve seen the hall in a picture book. I… I never knew I was passing so close.”

“Or you might have been more careful with your traps, eh?” said the man harshly. He stared hard at me. Then his expression lessened in severity, perhaps in reaction to something he saw in my face. His lips twitched as though a humorous thought had touched his mind.

“No, I’m not ‘my lord.’ I’m his game warden, and a far different stamp of a man than he. Come on with ye.”

As we neared the Hall, I saw in greater detail the cluster of outbuildings which sprouted in the late day shadow like mushrooms in the shelter of a massive stump. The buildings were architecturally matched to the Hall, of the same design and stone, though on a smaller and functional scale. Each building was surrounded by a planting of early bulbs—columbines, poppies, and pinks—which ran around the square of the building out to border the flagstone walks connecting each with its nearest counterpart. A pillar of steam rose from the laundry and wafted over a huge succession house filled with the shiny green leaves of orange trees, planted to provide yearlong fresh fruit to the inhabitants of the Hall. There was a bakehouse, a dairy, a brewhouse, and a number of small pretty cottages, and, at the end of the row, a stable block with a blacksmith shop and a carriage barn. A group of children were playing at skips underfoot three scurrying, aproned servants. The action stopped when they paused to stare at the man on horseback and me, his captive. The smallest of the children, a boy, broke and ran screaming to his mother, who sat spinning by an open doorway. He hid behind her skirts, pointing and screaming.

“Gypsies, ma! Gypsies! They’ve come to steal me away!”

The woman lay down her spindle, and in an affectionately scolding tone said to the boy, “Hush you, James. Be a man! You can see Mr. Stewart has her tied up with a rope so she won’t be stealing away anything.”

An older woman stepped out of the bakehouse. She was dressed in a crisp white uniform, and covered in flour up to her elbows. She kneaded a pillow of white bread dough as she said: “A gypsy, is it? Folks’ll have to be watchin’ their property again with
them
about. Has she been thievin’, Mr. Stewart?”

“Poachin’,” said the man gruffly. He seemed strangely vexed as he looked back at me.

“Are ye going to take her in the wagon to the gaol in Chipping, sir?” asked a youth who sat idly on the icehouse stoop, chewing on a strand of straw.

The game warden scowled uneasily at his questioner. “Aye, but what business is it of yours, layabout?” He swept his questioners with a scowl as black as a summer thunderstorm. “If ye’ve all stared your fill, remember the lesson of Lot’s wife and be about your business! I’ve the situation well in hand.”

It was a measure of the game warden’s authority that he was obeyed at once, even by the straw-chewing youth who rolled his eyes expressively at the bakery maid and sauntered off toward the dairy.

After that, the stares became surreptitious. Usually, such scrutiny made me self-conscious, though Grandmother said that a gypsy should meet the stares of peasants with contempt and secret amusement. Now, I was too distressed to care.

“John! Afternoon, my good man!”

The voice was youthful, male and heartlessly cheerful. I looked up to see a young man dressed at the height of fashion riding toward us on a Thoroughbred horse that might have sold for upward of a hundred guineas. Evidently the beautiful animal had been worked hard, for its sloping shoulders were shining with sweat.

The rider was twenty, perhaps a little older, with clear gray eyes sparkling from the exercise, and cheeks reddened from the wind. It was a handsome face, well-boned, but there were haughty edges to the mouth which time had not yet softened.

“What have you got there?” said the youth, spurring his horse toward us.

“Poacher, sir,” answered the warden. So the younger man was not the Earl, or Stewart would have addressed him as “my lord.” “Caught her by the forty-acre forest near the valley road, and I’ll be taking her into town.”

The younger man gave the warden a look of humorous reproach. “You promised to let me have first pick of any new fillies at Edgehill.”

Stewart watched warily as the youth, with one hand on the reins, edged his horse in front of me, and gently lifted my chin with the butt end of his riding crop. He smiled at me in an intense way that I found rather frightening; however, it emboldened me to plead my cause.

“I wasn’t poaching, sir!” I said. “There was—I saw a fox, a trapped fox as I was passing by the forest in my wagon, and I only sought to free it. I hadn’t thought at the time, but I realize now that I can prove what I’m saying.” I swung around and looked up at John Stewart. “Sir, if we could go back to that place where the trap was set, you would see shredded fox fur and signs of blood, and you would believe me when I say I couldn’t have been setting the trap, but that it had been there for some time.” I read a new uncertainty in the warden’s face, and looked desperately back to the young man. “I beg you, sir.”