Chapter 13
Chapter
With no more to be gleaned from the formidable Magda, we took our leave then. She handed Stoker the putsi, pressing it into his palm and folding his fingers closed around it.
“You should carry this,” she instructed.
“That is very kind. But you have already given me an amulet of protection,” he reminded her, touching the hagstone through his shirt.
She canted her head, raising a brow at him. “Do you think you have enough good luck to turn up your nose at more?”
He laughed and raised her hand to his lips, pressing a courtly kiss to the back of it. “Thank you, Magda.”
“You will come again, anytime you wish,” she instructed. She flicked a glance in my direction. “Do not feel obliged to bring the woman.”
He laughed again and we left her then. I took the opportunity to ask Lady Julia where she had met Magda.
“Oh, she was my laundress for a time. Romany women will sometimes take on domestic service, usually to supplement their earnings, but in Magda’s case, I think it was simply to avail herself of the opportunity to sell her charms and potions to a captive audience.
She was forever telling my friends they were cursed and she would happily remove the malefic influences for a small sum.
” She paused to smile. “But I never begrudged her. I think she was fascinated by how the gorgios live and wanted to try her hand at it. Do you know, it was the first time she slept under a roof that didn’t move! ”
“Did she enjoy it?” I asked. We had moved back through the circle of vardos and were making our way down the line of staked horses. One or two of the animals raised their heads as we passed, and one whickered gently by way of greeting.
“For a little while,” Lady Julia told me.
“But she found our domestic arrangements unhygienic and was happy enough to leave us.” She pitched her voice to a confiding tone.
“She could not bear the fact that we had an indoor water closet. The Romany do not think it clean to attend to one’s private business in the same building where one eats and sleeps.
When the Romany camp by a river, they are extremely strict about which items are washed upriver and in which order.
They are far cleaner than we, I assure you. ”
I did not doubt it. It was an endless battle to try to keep George the hallboy even halfway clean, and he had access to as much hot water and soap as he could use. Yet young Thomas, orphaned and running wild, had appeared without a speck of grime upon either his person or his clothes.
Just then, I heard Brisbane’s name cried out, and an enormous bear of a man stepped out of the flickering light of one of the campfires.
He hailed Brisbane with a wide grin, his teeth gleaming white in the black bush of his beard.
Brisbane returned the affection of the greeting, and they exchanged an embrace embellished with claps to the back and light punches to the belly.
“Oh, dear,” Lady Julia murmured.
“What is it?” Stoker inquired.
“It was too much to hope that we would be able to slip away without his kinfolk learning we were here,” she said.
Several other men came forwards, each calling greetings in mingled English and Romani.
Brisbane turned and grinned at his wife, gave us a quick salute, and was borne away by the crowd.
Lady Julia shrugged her shoulders apologetically.
“They have not always been welcoming, so we are grateful a rapprochement has been reached. They will expect us to stay for some time—perhaps the night. And there will be more food. Much more food. If you don’t want to sleep on a pallet in someone’s vardo, you will leave now,” she warned.
“Take our carriage. Just send the driver back.”
I was sorely tempted to accept the hospitality of the travellers, but I thought of J. J. back at Bishop’s Folly, no doubt still recumbent in her misery.
“We will leave you with our thanks,” Stoker told her.
She smiled her singularly charming smile. “I am only sorry it was not more informative.” She pressed my hand. “Do say you will come to dinner soon. I must see more of you both!”
Before I could reply, she was off, folded into a group of Romany women who exclaimed happily upon seeing her, chattering like so many brightly plumed birds as they welcomed her.
Stoker looped his arm through mine. “I know you would have liked to stay, but I have had my fill of sleeping in wagons.”
I grinned. “I seem to recall sharing a wagon with you for a short period. It was most illuminating.” In the course of our first investigation, we had been forced to seek sanctuary with the travelling show that had once been his home.
[*] It had been my introduction to the itinerant life, and while it had forged an immediate intimacy between us—one cannot share a small sleeping space with a man without learning things—it had not been precisely comfortable.
“I was thinking of J. J.,” I told him. “She oughtn’t to be left alone whilst she is feeling so lowly.”
Stoker rolled his eyes. “She is indulging in a fit of the morbs, nothing more. She is capable, resourceful, and clever. To hear her speak of her lodgings, they were truly dire. She is better off away from them. Moreover, she was utterly wasted writing for that rag. I wouldn’t use the Harbinger to wipe dog muck from my boots. ”
This was patently absurd, as I had seen Stoker satisfy his prurient curiosity on more than one occasion by indulging in a quick flick through the pages when he thought himself unobserved.
But as it happened, I agreed with him. J.
J.’s lodgings had been catastrophically uncomfortable, fit more for the habitation of mice and the occasional enterprising rat rather than a human.
And her position at the Harbinger had always been at the whim of the editor, a capricious and vicious man who had not deserved to make use of her talents.
J. J.’s current misfortunes might well be clouds lavishly lined with silver, if only she could be persuaded to view them as such.
We had come to the end of the encampment, the campfires and calling voices left behind. The warmth of the little settlement, however temporary, had been real, fashioned out of their own will and their meagre resources. It was something of a marvel.
“It has been my first time in a proper Romany camp,” I said. “What do you think of them?”
He shrugged. “They pass through and they take nothing, at least nothing that is of importance. Whatever is essential to them they carry always—their family names, their traditions, their language. Whatever customs we try to impose upon them, they make a pose of accepting, but they do so only as far as necessity demands. They are always and authentically themselves. There is much to admire in that.”
“Indeed.” I fell silent then, brooding a little. As if sensing my mood, Stoker nudged my arm.
“Penny for them.”
“I was merely reflecting on the fact that however interesting this interlude has been—and however glad I am to have made the acquaintance of the Brisbanes—our outing has been singularly unproductive. We are no closer to finding this mysterious Ruthven character than we were before—to say nothing of the Harpocrates Society.”
We continued walking, Stoker silent as I carried on, indulging in a modest rant.
“We know only that Maurice Quincey was afraid of someone, afraid enough to purchase a charm against magic, but that tells us nothing of significance. We cannot question the families of the men who were murdered, for fear of offending them or compromising Mornaday. Young Thomas is too afraid to tell us more, even if he knows anything, which I seriously doubt. And you…” I paused to nod towards his burgeoning collection of talismans.
“Are apparently marked for death, which I find a trifle unsettling.”
“You? How do you think I feel? I am the one who is doomed,” he returned with a lightness of tone I could not quite match.
I was a rationalist, a woman of science, and yet there had been something deeply affecting in the experience in Magda’s vardo.
There was much for which science could not yet account, and I was not so foolish as to dismiss the possibility of things beyond my ken.
After all, would not a mediaeval peasant find it astonishing that we could be inoculated against smallpox?
Explain to a person of that limited understanding that there were organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye that were responsible for disease, and they would think you possessed—or mad, at the very least. And yet we now understood the theory of germs and that handwashing was a critical component of proper hygiene.
Would science someday be able to explain the existence of creatures that had only previously been discussed in terrified whispers?
Were there such beings as vampires, nourished by blood and cursed to walk in darkness?
We had reached the carriage by this point and Stoker handed me in, calling instructions to the driver. We settled ourselves, and Stoker interrupted my mental peregrinations. “We did discover something,” he said as the driver sprang the horses.
“What is that?” I demanded.
“Thomas described the scene in the carriage in detail. The one thing he did not remark upon was an excess of blood.”
“Of course there was no excess of blood,” I said. “The body, according to Mornaday, was fully exsanguinated.”