Chapter 11
Chapter
Magda invited us all into her vardo, a cramped arrangement, for numerous pieces of furniture had been fitted inside, and there was even a small stove crammed into one corner. Its brisk fire pumped out tremendous warmth, and I imagined the wagon would be cosy even in the iciest of winter winds.
She made a brusque gesture of hospitality, and we seated ourselves around a small table that had been covered with a piece of carpet. Arranged atop were the tools of Magda’s trade—a pack of well-worn cards, a teapot, and a small glass orb.
“Which do you prefer?” she inquired. “The cards? The crystal ball? The tea leaves? Or perhaps you would like the palm?”
Without waiting for a response, she reached for my hand and turned it over, tracing the lines of the palm with careful scrutiny. “You have known many lovers,” she began.
I snatched my hand back as I heard a repressed choking sound from Stoker. “Thank you,” I said with a cool smile. “But we have come on a different matter.”
She smiled and sat back in her chair, waving an airy hand. “Fortunes first.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Magda,” Lady Julia muttered. She thrust out her hand, palm up.
“I have read yours,” Magda reminded her. “More than once. You want to know your future? Look no further than the man,” she said, gesturing to Brisbane. She paused meaningfully.
Lady Julia sighed and turned to me. “Magda has already read for me, and she will not read for Brisbane. It is not the usual custom to read for another Rom,” she explained. “Romany folk prefer to read for gorgios.”
I had just reconciled myself to being the subject of Magda’s reading, when to my astonishment, Stoker sat forwards. “I will do it.”
Magda inclined her head. “Very well, lordling.”
“Lordling?” Stoker gave her a curious look.
“I know a man brought up in privilege when I see one.” It might have been a guess or it might have been a calculated deduction.
Stoker’s clothes, after all, were expensively made even if he had treated them appallingly.
His teeth were excellent—another sign of wealth—and his vowels were elegant.
He might present a figure of a man a little down-at-heel, but to a close observer, it would be obvious that he had enjoyed at least proximity to money.
A parlour trick, I thought. Clever, but not difficult.
Magda surveyed the items before her, considering them each in turn and muttering to herself in her own language. At last she reached for the deck of cards.
“I rather thought the tea leaves—” Stoker began.
She waved again, sending her shawls rippling. “It is not a matter of choice, lordling. The crystal ball shows me pictures when it wishes. The leaves speak when they have something to say. Now it is the cards who want to be known.”
Magda rose and adjusted the lamps so her face was in shadow. “Light must not fall directly upon me when I read the cards,” she explained as she resumed her seat. She opened her hand flat in front of Stoker. “You must cross my palm with silver.”
“I think you’ve already been paid. Handsomely,” Lady Julia said with a sternness I had not yet heard in her. She was looking hard at the pearls Magda wore, and the fortune teller smiled, stroking the gleaming jewels.
“A gift for my old age. They have nothing to do with this gentleman. And the cards will not speak unless my gifts have been paid for—by him,” she added firmly.
Stoker fished in his pocket and withdrew a worn silver florin, placing it gently in the wrinkled, outstretched palm.
Magda’s fingers closed about it, and when she opened her hand again, the coin had disappeared—probably into her lap, but the effect was good.
It added to the otherworldliness of the experience, and I had to admire her showmanship.
She turned her attention to the cards then.
They were well used with the ragged softness of much handling.
She began to shuffle them slowly, dividing and riffling and reassembling the deck over and over.
As she shuffled, she closed her eyes, murmuring again in her own tongue.
After seven shuffles, she cut the deck in half and gave this portion a partial turn, then shuffled three more times.
Then she tamped the deck together and pushed it towards Stoker.
“Shuffle them with the left hand,” she told him. “Four times.”
“Why the left?” I asked softly.
“It is the hand of destiny,” she explained. “The right hand is that of reason and the mind. The left is connected to the heart.” In the gloom, I saw Lady Julia touch her wedding ring reflexively. A slender band of gold, worn upon the finger whose vein is said to run directly to the heart.
Stoker did as Magda told him, shuffling the cards slowly. When he finished, they were stacked neatly in the middle of the table.
“Knock on the cards as if upon a door,” Magda instructed.
“How many times?” Stoker asked.
“As many as you like. It is your conversation with the cards, not mine.”
Stoker curled his hand into a fist and rapped three times in quick succession. Magda retrieved the deck and held it in her hands, head tipped as if listening to a faraway voice. She then gave a nod and began to deal out the cards.
She dealt five of them face down in the shape of a cross and then spread her hands.
“This is the Cross of Destiny. It will tell you about your future, and it will reveal things to you that you cannot yet imagine. It is not for you to understand everything now. But you will remember these images and the things you have heard, and when they come to pass, you will recall what was said here.”
She touched the first card but did not turn it over yet.
“These are Romany oracle cards, first drawn in Bohemia. Each bears an image that will seem obvious to you. And it bears a title, also obvious. But look closely. They may call memories to the surface. Perhaps strong emotions or fantasies, even. Whatever the card represents to you is unique. There is no one else on earth who could look at these five cards and have the same reaction. So, let us begin.”
She paused and took a deep breath, blowing it out slowly through pursed lips, all the while stroking the first card lightly with her fingertips. She turned it over. “This card represents the present. It is the Sweetheart.”
The image on the card was of a slender, elegant woman dressed in an old-fashioned yellow gown, a red mantle draped over one arm.
She held a letter, no doubt a billet-doux, in one hand, smiling as she read its contents.
Stoker flicked a glance to me, a tiny, knowing smile on his lips.
Almost immediately, Magda turned over the second card with a brisk snap.
“The past,” she told him. “Sorrow.”
Another lady in yellow, this one with a blue cloak.
She stood in a posture of abject despair, weeping over a letter.
She was obviously meant to be a general representation of the emotion of sorrow, but I could not help remembering Stoker’s former wife, a woman of incalculable cruelty who had brought him nothing but pain.
“And the third?” Stoker asked tightly.
Magda reached for the card. “The near future.” She turned it over.
Unlike the first two, this did not feature a figure, but instead a disembodied hand holding an envelope inscribed with a name and address, the writing illegible.
In the background was a room with cheerful blue curtains and a tall vase of pretty pink flowers.
“The Letter,” Magda intoned. “A communication of great significance will come to you. Very soon.”
I repressed a sigh. With a deft bit of sleight of hand, any moderately skilled person could have arranged these cards for any client, although even that small bit of effort was not necessary given Magda’s performance.
Her instructions, the comment that any interpretation might be placed upon the cards, was sufficient to suggest that whatever the querent read into the meanings must be correct and the cards themselves were vague enough to permit the desired conclusions.
The Sweetheart card might refer to a current attachment or merely the desire for one, a nearly universal experience.
And who among us has not had a heavy share of sadness as depicted by the card of Sorrow?
One could read any grief, large or small, in that image.
As for the Letter, the London post was delivered a dozen times a day, bringing with it scores of missives of every description.
Bills, invitations, appeals for money, introductions, offers of employment, cheques for services performed, chatty communications from friends near and far.
We received all of these and more on a daily basis.
Any might be considered a letter of great significance to a mind already primed to expect it.
As much as I wanted to believe in the possibility of receiving glimpses into what was yet to come, I feared Magda was a charlatan.
Not that I blamed her, of course. She was a woman who had need of funds to support her family, and fortune-telling was a decidedly lucrative endeavour when undertaken by a clever practitioner, which Magda undoubtedly was. She had set the scene perfectly.
But one might have expected a trifle more drama to heighten the atmosphere, I thought as she turned over the fourth card.
“Misfortune,” she intoned gravely—and with a bit of understatement.
The image was not so much one of misfortune as that of frank catastrophe.
A burning building, utterly crumbling to ruin, with a man falling from the top of it.
Another man stood at the bottom in the helmet of a member of the fire brigade, pointing a hose at the conflagration, but the jet of water was utterly helpless against the roaring flames. Utter destruction was at hand.
“Magda.” Brisbane’s voice held a warning tone. She shrugged in response.
“The cards show what they will. I am only a messenger.”
“Show me the last,” Stoker commanded.