Ironbark (3 page)

Gem's gold earring glinted in the sunlight as he swung her up behind him to ride bareback on his piebald horse. His voice caressed her.

‘What do you say, little Keziah? I'm your Rom if you want me.'

‘Oh yes, Gem, please!' she whispered.

Sure of her then, he twisted her hair around his fist and pulled her face within an inch of his lips. ‘I have loved your shadow since the first day I saw you.'

‘But I was only five!'

He told her he had waited long enough, then teased her by avoiding her parted lips.

‘Now you're eleven – almost a woman. It is time we were promised to each other.'

That same night as Keziah lay with her grandmother in their
vardo,
they overheard Patronella condemn Keziah's
gaujo
mother.

‘You women talk of history!' Gem shouted. ‘But I am a man! I do not take history to my bed! You will offer Keziah's family a fine bride price for the sake of her pride.'

Patronella wailed that she would rather die first.

Gem was unmoved. ‘Then you die without grandchildren! I swear on Grandfather's grave if Keziah Stanley will not have me as her Rom,
I'll wash my own shirt for the rest of my life!'

Keziah gasped at Gem's threat of lifelong independence and celibacy.

Despite Patronella's moans it was clear Gem had won. Keziah leapt into her
Puri Dai's
arms and covered her wrinkled face with a flood of little kisses.

‘So you want him as much as that, do you?' Her grandmother chuckled. ‘Listen, I will strike a hard bargain. Your father has no head for such things. He'd prefer to drink their wine and play his violin.'

Keziah was so nervous her grandmother was quick to reassure her. ‘I'm old, not stupid. I'll raise the price but not high enough to send them packing. I'll get Gem for your Rom, see if I don't!'

Her grandmother's magic worked and soon everyone knew Keziah was promised to Gem. He teased her with his lover's games until she would have given him anything he asked, but he chose to wait for their wedding night – when they discovered that their bodies were created for each other.

Keziah's pride in her Rom and their life together would have been perfect except for the shadow cast after every cycle of the moon passed without the promise of a longed-for child.

Patronella pressured Gem to divorce Keziah and take a fertile wife, but he angrily dismissed the idea.

Then, after three years, Keziah had been blessed with fertility. But on the night Gem was transported, her world was destroyed – twice over.

Keziah blocked the painful memory of her miscarriage. She did not doubt her grandmother's magic would reunite her with her hero. They said New South Wales was a vast island prison. Escape was not possible.

• • •

Keziah's heart leapt at the sight of her grandmother's shabby travelling house. For years her
Puri Dai
had stubbornly refused to allow her kinsmen to repair it. Keziah knew tradition demanded this
vardo
would be burned along with all personal belongings after her grandmother's funeral to allow her soul to relinquish the burden of material possessions. Unlike most of their people her grandmother did not fear death – and death would find her soon, even if Keziah refused to believe her
Puri Dai
would ever die.

With unblinking eyes, the old woman watched Keziah approach. Her gnarled hands folded in her lap, no flicker of movement except for the fringe of her floral shawl teased by the breeze. Around her wrinkled neck hung an engraved silver amulet. Webbed lines traced her face, like a map recording every Romani route she had travelled in her eighty years.

Keziah met her grandmother's gaze. She knelt at her
Puri Dai's
feet, took the old hands between her own and tenderly kissed each palm. The tribute accepted, the old woman clasped Keziah's upturned face, their love so deep it was beyond words.

Hand in hand they entered the
vardo
. The
Puri Dai
poured tea from a brass kettle on a tiny black stove. She had set out fine blue-patterned china on a snowy lace cloth. Each piece of furniture was perfectly scaled to the dimensions of this small travelling world. Keziah saw her childhood bed had been unfolded from its alcove, the quilt turned down.

‘You knew I was coming, didn't you?'

The
Puri Dai
nodded. ‘A swallow told me. That woman with the viper's tongue can't prevent you following Gem.'

‘Patronella has heaped me with curses! I will never bear a living child. Gem will divorce me. I'll become a whore.'

‘The bitch is eaten by envy of Gem's love for you. You are not barren, at the time the gods choose, new life will come through your body.'

The
Puri Dai
stroked Keziah's hair and told her to drink her tea and fill her belly with the cake she had made. ‘Then I will speak to our ancestors on your behalf.'

Keziah sat on a cushion at the old woman's feet while her
Puri Dai
sat immobile, her snow-white hair mottled by the yellow candlelight, her face an image of concentration as she summoned up all her gifts to remove the curses.

‘That bitch Patronella knows her stuff. It was a difficult business. Our ancestors were all involved and there were heated discussions between them and my son who bears the name of the Archangel.'

Gabriel – a name too painful for his mother to pronounce after his death.

‘My father spoke to you about me?'

‘Apart from Gem, who loved you more?' She gestured dramatically to an empty chair. ‘Right there playing his violin he was, so sweetly it's a wonder you didn't hear him.'

‘Tell me his words for good or evil,' Keziah begged.

‘Your
baxt
lies not in Wales but in
New South Wales
, thousands of miles across oceans of terror.'

‘
Mi-duvel!
I can't swim!'

‘No matter. It is your destiny to find Gem.'

The
Puri Dai
had freed Keziah from Patronella's curses. All but one.

‘This must be your decision!' She gripped Keziah's hand. ‘Make one false move in the
gaujo
world and it will return to haunt you. I've taught you to be on guard against
gaujo
trickery. You must also distrust their
kindness
. Beware the
gaujo
with a silver tongue. I see him with a big book. He will make you read to him!'

Keziah shrugged dismissively. ‘That's easy to avoid. I can recognise all my letters but I cannot build words from them.'

The
Puri Dai
took out her coin purse. ‘You'll need more silver for your journey. And this will protect you wherever you travel on land and water.'

Keziah shrank back from the silver amulet being offered to her. ‘No! I'll not take your good luck.'

‘I command you to take it!' The
Puri Dai's
wrinkled brown face softened. ‘This is the last thing you can do for me. Wear this always.'

With a cry Keziah embraced her. As she stroked the furrowed cheeks, she felt her grandmother's tears wet her hair. Exhausted, they lay in each other's arms. The old fingers closed Keziah's eyelids in a silent command to sleep but Keziah sensed her
Puri Dai
was concealing another warning.

‘You know what happens to me in that new Wales at the bottom of the world?'

‘I tell you true. If you choose by your own free will to bring that last curse down on your head, your life will be entangled with
three
men.'

‘Three?'

‘I see clearly a man with red-gold hair – you've never met a
gaujo
like
him
before!'

Keziah gripped the protective silver amulet, her throat tightening with unshed tears. ‘Gem is the only man that matters to me! I
will
find my Gem and lay in his arms!'

‘Headstrong girl. Heed my words. My amulet can only do so much! You must learn wisdom. May
The Del
protect you from yourself. Beauty like yours is a curse when the heart is too open to love.'

It was May Day and dawn had already broken over the hamlet near the Cheshire village of Poulton-cum-Spittal. Unwashed, and barely awake, Daniel Browne rose in fright from his bed of straw in the vicar's barn. He combed his hair with his fingers, drank a mouthful of water from a chipped china jug, stuffed a crust of stale bread in his pocket, then grabbed the rake and ran down the broken flagstone path that led to the old vicarage.

Today of all days he must not be late to begin his daily labours. All his other birthdays had passed unmarked and uncelebrated but this nineteenth birthday was different. So much was at stake that his hands trembled more from nerves than the early morning chill.

As he worked Daniel was conscious of how much his tall lanky frame had grown in the past year. His wrists and ankles protruded from the hand-me-down work clothes bequeathed to him by an elderly gardener who had expired last winter while shovelling snow. The work made him feel halfway between handyman and charity case but at least it kept him fed. No need to go cap in hand to the poorhouse.

Daniel was distracted by a bunch of ruddy-faced boys running past the dry-stone wall toward the village school. They called out the familiar sing-song chant that always ended in derisive laughter: ‘Daniel Browne. He's a clown! Wears his trousers upside down!'

Daniel swallowed his humiliation knowing the children were an echo of their parents' contempt. He hated them all. He looked down at his hands. Although they were chafed and raw, he prided himself that his long slender fingers were Nature's reminder that he was destined for better things – the hands of an artist.

I'll have the last laugh. One day these villagers will have to line up and
pay
to see Daniel Browne's work. They'll be quick enough to claim me when I'm famous – bastard and all.

He glanced over at the church graveyard where his mother was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave. Only the vicar remembered Mary Ann Browne – no one else cared.

Edging closer to the house, Daniel peered through the open window of the vicar's study. On the desk under the window a pile of paper lay pinned beneath a paperweight in the shape of a rampant lion. Pristine paper had long been a magnet to Daniel's hand. Sweat broke out on his forehead with the temptation it offered. He mentally covered the pages with images that fought for release from his imagination. Would the vicar notice a few sheets missing? Daniel assured himself that by the time the theft was discovered he would be miles away.

He stretched out a trembling hand towards his prize but was thwarted by the sudden appearance of the vicar's stooped figure rounding the corner.

The old man beckoned and Daniel hurried over to him, ready to receive instructions. He was surprised when the vicar ushered him into his study and gestured for him to take the easy chair opposite his desk. Daniel looked around searching for the glorious art book full of colour plates of the old masters' paintings, which the vicar had once allowed him to borrow. He had studied their work so intensely he knew every detail by heart.

Hanging on the wall was a print showing Moses leading the escaping Israelite slaves between the giant waves God had rolled back from the sea that the vicar called the Sea of Reeds. This seemed an auspicious omen for his own escape.

When the vicar's wife brought them a pot of tea, a plate heaped with strawberry jam butties and slices of caraway seed cake, Daniel hid his reaction. Now that he was leaving, the vicar was treating him like a guest.

Daniel drank his tea slowly and copied the vicar's every move while
eating the cake with an unfamiliar cake fork. He waited expectantly for the coveted piece of paper that would set the seal on his hopes of independence. The vicar was the only literate person he knew who could write the reference Daniel needed to present to prospective employers.

‘Have you had time to write a Character for me, Vicar?'

The vicar nodded and drew out an envelope from the desk.

‘You are a good, reliable worker, Daniel. This will give you fair chance of work in Chester but it can be a hard life for a village lad unused to town ways.'

‘I thank you for giving me my start at the reading and writing. More chance than most labourers are given in a month of Sundays.'

When Daniel reached out to receive the envelope, the vicar unexpectedly added three coins to tide him over for a few days until he found work. The gesture caused a wave of guilt in Daniel at the memory of his intended theft, a feeling compounded by the vicar's words.

‘We may not meet again in this life, Daniel, so it seems the right time to give you something that's a link with your past.' He opened a mahogany cabinet and carefully took out a scroll of paper, which he unfurled on the desk.

Daniel touched the art paper in awe. Its edges were faintly yellowed with age. The subject of the black and white sketch was a beautiful young girl with long, wavy hair, her face captured at a three-quarter angle as she lay dressed in a plain nightgown. Her hands were folded across her breast like a child who had fallen asleep in the act of prayer.

‘She's beautiful,' Daniel said reverently. ‘Is this girl …'

The vicar hesitated. ‘Mary Ann Browne. Age fifteen. Your mother.'

Daniel noticed the initials and date in the bottom right-hand corner. ‘The third of May was two days after I was born. You told me my mam died in childbirth.'

‘Aye, that she did, lad. This sketch was done by an artist chap who came to visit her at the poorhouse. He arrived two days too late.'