When the carriage was properly loaded and the luggage was secured with leather straps, Cam went into the hotel suite where the family was staying. They had gathered in the receiving room to say their good-byes.
Merripen was conspicuously absent.
They crowded the small room, the sisters and their brother, Leo, who was going to France as Win's companion and escort.
"There, now," Leo said gruffly, patting the back of the youngest, Beatrix, who had just turned sixteen. "No need to make a scene."
She hugged him tightly. "You'll be lonely, so far from home. Won't you take one of my pets to keep you company?"
"No, darling. I'll have to content myself with whatever human companionship I can find on board." He turned to Poppy, a ruddy-haired beauty of eighteen. "Good-bye, Sis. Enjoy your first season in London. Try not to accept the first fellow who proposes to you."
Poppy moved forward to embrace him. "Dear Leo," she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder, "do try to behave while you're in France."
"No one behaves in France," Leo told her. "That's why everyone likes it so much." He turned to Amelia. It was only then that his self-assured facade began to disintegrate. He drew an unsteady breath. Of all the Hathaway siblings, Leo and Amelia had argued the most frequently, and the most bitterly. And yet she was undoubtedly his favorite. They had been through a great deal together, taking care of the younger siblings after their parents had died. Amelia had watched Leo turn from a promising young architect into a wreck of a man. Inheriting a viscouncy hadn't helped one bit. In fact, the newly acquired title and status had only hastened Leo's dissolution. That hadn't stopped Amelia from fighting for him, trying to save him, every step of the way. Which had annoyed him considerably.
Amelia went to him and laid her head against his chest. "Leo," she said with a sniffle. "If you let anything happen to Win, I will kill you."
He stroked her hair gently. "You've threatened to kill me for years, and nothing ever comes of it."
"I've been w-waiting for the right reason."
Smiling, Leo pried her head from his chest and kissed her forehead. "I'll bring her back safe and well."
"And yourself?"
"And myself."
Amelia smoothed his coat, her lip trembling. "Then you had better stop leading the life of a drunken wastrel," she said.
Leo grinned. "But I've always believed in cultivating one's natural talents to the fullest." He lowered his head so she could kiss his cheek. "You're a fine one to talk about how to conduct oneself," he said. "You, who just married a man you barely know."
"It was the best thing I ever did," Amelia said.
"Since he's paying for my trip to France, I suppose I can't disagree." Leo reached out to shake Cam 's hand. After a rocky beginning, the two men had come to like each other in a short time. "Good-bye, phral," Leo said, using the Romany word that Cam had taught him for "brother." "I have no doubt you'll do an excellent job taking care of the family. You've already gotten rid of me, which is a promising beginning."
"You'll return to a rebuilt home and a thriving estate, my lord."
Leo gave a low laugh. "I can't wait to see what you will accomplish. You know, not just any peer would entrust all his affairs to a pair of Gypsies."
"I would say with certainty," Cam replied, "that you're the only one."
After Win had bid farewell to her sisters, Leo settled her into the carriage and sat beside her. There was a soft lurch as the team pulled forward, and they headed to the London docks.
Leo studied Win's profile. As usual, she showed little emotion, her fine-boned face serene and composed. But he saw the flags of color burning on the pale crests of her cheeks, and the way her fingers clenched and tugged at the embroidered handkerchief in her lap. It had not escaped him that Merripen hadn't been there to say good-bye. Leo wondered if he and Win had exchanged harsh words.
Sighing, Leo reached out and put his arm around his sister's thin, breakable frame. She stiffened but did not pull away. After a moment, the handkerchief came up, and he saw that she was blotting her eyes. She was afraid, and ill, and miserable.
And he was all she had.
God help her.
He made an attempt at humor. "You didn't let Beatrix give you one of her pets, did you? I'm warning you, if you're carrying a hedgehog or a rat, it goes overboard as soon as we're on the ship."
Win shook her head and blew her nose.
"You know," Leo said conversationally, still holding her, "you're the least amusing of all the sisters. I can't think how I ended up going to France with you."
"Believe me," came her watery reply, "I wouldn't be this boring if I had any say in the matter. When I get well I intend to behave very badly indeed."
"Well, that's something to look forward to." He rested his cheek on her soft blond hair.
"Leo," she asked after a moment, "why did you volunteer to go to the clinic with me? Is it because you want to get well, too?"
Leo was both touched and annoyed by the innocent question. Win, like everyone else in the family, considered his excessive drinking an illness that might be cured by a period of abstinence and healthful surroundings. But his drinking was merely a symptom of the real illness-a grief so persistent that at times it threatened to stop his heart from beating.
There was no cure for losing Laura.
"No," he said to Win. "I have no aspirations to get well. I merely want to continue my debauchery with new scenery." He was rewarded by a small chuckle. "Win… did you and Merripen quarrel? Is that why he wasn't there to see you off?" At her prolonged silence, Leo rolled his eyes. "If you insist on being closemouthed, Sis, it's going to be a long journey indeed."
"Yes, we quarreled."
"About what? Harrow 's clinic?"
"Not really. That was part of it, but…" Win shrugged uncomfortably. "It's too complicated. It would take forever to explain."
"We're about to cross an ocean and half of France. Believe me, we have time."
After the carriage had departed, Cam went to the mews behind the hotel, a tidy building with horse stalls and a carriage house on the ground floor, and servants' accommodations above. As he had expected, Merripen was grooming the horses. The hotel mews were run on a part-livery system, which meant some of the stabling chores had to be assumed by the horse owners. At the moment Merripen was taking care of Cam 's black gelding, a three-year-old named Pooka.
Merripen's movements were light, quick, and methodical as he ran a brush over the horse's shining flanks.
Cam watched him for a moment, appreciating the Rom's deftness. The story that Gypsies were exceptionally good with horses was no myth. A Rom considered the horse to be a comrade, an animal of poetry and heroic instincts. And Pooka accepted Merripen's presence with a calm deference he showed to few people.
"What do you want?" Merripen asked without looking at him.
Cam approached the open stall leisurely, smiling as Pooka lowered his head and nudged his chest. "No, boy… no sugar lumps." He patted the muscular neck. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing the tattoo of a black flying horse on his forearm. Cam had no memory of when he'd gotten the tattoo… It had been there forever, for reasons his grandmother would never explain.
The symbol was an Irish nightmare steed called a pooka, an alternately malevolent and benevolent horse who spoke in a human voice and flew at night on widespread wings. According to legend, the pooka would come to an unsuspecting human's door at midnight, and take him on a ride that would leave him forever changed.
Cam had never seen a similar mark on anyone else. Until Merripen.
Through a quirk of fate, Merripen had recently been injured in a house fire. And as his wound was being treated, the Hathaways had discovered the tattoo on Merripen's shoulder.
That had raised more than a few questions in Cam 's mind.
He saw Merripen glance at the tattoo on his arm. "What do you make of a Rom wearing an Irish design?" Cam asked.
"There are Roma in Ireland. Nothing unusual."
"There's something unusual about this tattoo," Cam said evenly. "I've never seen another like it, until you. And since it came as a surprise to the Hathaways, you've evidently taken great care to keep it hidden. Why is that, my phral? "
"Don't call me that."
"You've been part of the Hathaway family since childhood," Cam said. "And I've married into it. That makes us brothers, doesn't it?"
A disdainful glance was his only reply.
Cam found perverse amusement in being friendly to a Rom who so clearly despised him. He understood exactly what had engendered Merripen's hostility. The addition of a new male to a family tribe, or vitsa, was never an easy situation, and usually his place would be low in the hierarchy. For Cam, a stranger, to come in and act as the head of the family was nearly unendurable. It didn't help that Cam was poshram, a half-breed born of a Romany mother and an Irish gadjo father. And if there was anything that could make matters even worse, Cam was wealthy, which was shameful in the eyes of the Rom.
"Why have you always kept it hidden?" Cam persisted.
Merripen paused in his brushing and gave Cam a cold, dark glance. "I was told it was the mark of a curse. That on the day I discovered what it meant, and what it was for, I or someone close to me, was fated to die."
Cam showed no outward reaction, but he felt a few prickles of unease at the back of his neck.
"Who are you, Merripen?" he asked softly.
The big Rom went back to work. "No one."
"You were part of a tribe once. You must have had family."
"I don't remember any father. My mother died when I was born."
"So did mine. I was raised by my grandmother."
The brush halted in midstroke. Neither of them moved. The stable became deadly quiet, except for the snuffling and shifting of horses. "I was raised by my uncle. To be one of the asharibe."
"Ah." Cam kept any hint of pity from his expression, but privately he thought, You poor bastard.
No wonder Merripen fought so well. Some Gypsy tribes took their strongest boys and turned them into bare-knuckle fighters, pitting them against each other at fairs and pubs and gatherings, for onlookers to make bets on. Some of the boys were disfigured or even killed. And the ones who survived were hardened fighters down to the bootstraps, and designated as warriors of the tribe.
"Well, that explains your sweet temperament," Cam said. "Was that why you chose to stay with the Hathaways after they took you in? Because you no longer wanted to live as an asharibe? "
"Yes."
"You're lying, phral," Cam said, watching him closely. "You stayed for another reason." And Cam knew from the Rom's visible flush that he'd hit upon the truth.
Quietly, Cam added, "You stayed for her."
Chapter Two
Twelve years earlier
There was no goodness in him. No softness. He had been raised to sleep on hard ground, to eat plain food and drink cold water, and to tight other boys on command. If he ever refused to fight, he was beaten by his uncle, the rom baro, the big male of the tribe. There was no mother to plead for him, no father to intervene in the rom baro's harsh punishments. No one ever touched him except in violence. He existed only to fight, to steal, to do things against the gadje.
Most Gypsies did not hate the pale, doughy Englishmen who lived in tidy houses and carried pocket watches and read books by the hearth. They only distrusted them. But Kev's tribe despised gadje, mostly because the rom baro did. And whatever the leader's whims, beliefs, and inclinations were, you followed them.
Eventually, because the rom baro's tribe had inflicted such mischief and misery whenever they set up camp, the gadjos had decided to scourge them from the land. The Englishmen had come on horses, carrying weapons. There had been gunshots, clubbings, sleeping Romas attacked in their beds, women and children screaming and crying. The camp had been scattered and everyone had been driven off, the vardo wagons set on fire, many of the horses stolen by the gadjos.
Kev had tried to fight them, to defend the vitsa, but he had been struck on the head with the heavy butt of a gun. Another had stabbed him in the back with a bayonet. The tribe had left him for dead. Alone in the night, he had lain half-conscious by the river, listening to the rush of dark water, feeling the chill of hard, wet earth beneath him, dimly aware of his own blood seeping in warm runlets from his body. He had waited without fear for the great wheel to roll into darkness. He had no reason or desire to live.
But just as Night yielded to the approach of her sister Morning, Kev found himself gathered up and carried away in a small rustic cart. A gadjo had found him, and had bid a local boy to help carry the dying Rom into his house.
It was the first time Kev had ever been beneath the ceiling of anything other than a vardo. He found himself torn between curiosity at his foreign surroundings and rage at the indignity at having to die indoors under the care of a gadjo. But Kev was too weak, too much in pain, to lift a finger in his own defense.
The room he occupied was not much bigger than a horse stall, holding only a bed and a chair. There were cushions, pillows, framed needlework on the walls, a lamp with beaded fringe. Had he not been so ill, he would have gone mad in the overstuffed little room.
The gadjo who had brought him there… Hathaway… was a tall, slender man with pale yellow hair. His gentle manner, his diffidence, made Kev hostile. Why had Hathaway saved him? What could he want from a Romany boy? Kev refused to talk to the gadjo and wouldn't take medicine. He rejected any overture of kindness. He owed this Hathaway nothing. He hadn't wanted to be saved, hadn't wanted to live. So he lay there flinching and silent whenever the man changed the bandage on his back.
There was only one time Kev spoke, and that was when Hathaway had asked about the tattoo.
"What is this mark for?"
"It's a curse," Kev said through gritted teeth. "Don't speak of it to anyone, or the curse will fall on you, too."
"I see." The man's voice was kind. "I will keep your secret. But I'll tell you that as a rationalist, I don't believe in such superstitions. A curse has only as much power as the subject gives it."
Stupid gadjo, Kev thought. Everyone knew that to deny a curse was to bring very bad luck on oneself.