CHAPTER FOUR
The contrast to the pleasant buzz of commerce and music made me startle; when a man gives an angry shout, a woman is always wise to beware. I looked to see Lazaro, big fists clenched, striding toward a woman as she passed the fountain. At once I comprehended his hostility—and the danger to her.
She was dark-haired and dark-eyed like me, but foreign in her features and her clothing, obviously not from Verona and even more than that, not from the Italian peninsula. Her heavy black skirts dragged against her scuffed black boots, and colorful fringed shawls wrapped her head and shoulders.
She was a wanderer, one of the people who traveled in homes on wheels.
They called themselves Romani.
The righteous burghers of Verona reviled them, but the Montagues allowed them to camp in our vineyards; Nonno said allowing them to rest from their constant travels was an act of Christian kindness, and in return they brought luck and a bountiful harvest.
Nonna scoffed at that as superstition, but she kept their campsite stocked with firewood and made sure the children were fed, and assured me that never had we taken harm from them.
And I—I learned from my grandparents’ example.
Before Cal or his bodyguards could make a move, I hustled over to the woman and slipped my arm through hers.
In a voice pitched to project, I said, “Maria! It’s so good to see you after so long an absence.
Thank you for meeting me as I requested. Will you walk with me?”
The woman, who I had never met before, met my eyes and smiled with white, even teeth. “You may call me Maria, and it is always my pleasure to meet a Montague no matter where she might be.”
Ah yes. I resembled both my father and my mother, and her sharp eyes identified me. “May I accompany you to your destination?”
Her gaze flickered toward the scowling Lazaro. “It is a kindness I much appreciate. Lazaro fears I’ll reveal his activities in our camp last night. They bring no honor to him and his family.” Her accent sounded as if she had traveled far, from Rome or Gaul, or even beyond.
I said, “He’s a bully, while I—”
“You’re the betrothed of Prince Escalus, and therefore untouchable.”
That insight set me back a little. “How did you know?”
She glanced at the singing children, then strolled toward the other end of the square.
“The gossip has flown across the cities and the countryside, that Prince Escalus has chosen an elderly, eccentric bride to grace his side.” She laughed at my expression.
“You’ve become famous, Rosaline of the House of Montague, especially after your divination of the elder Prince Escalus’s assassin.
They say you saw his ghost. They say you’re mad.
” She laughed again. “If you didn’t wish to know the gossip, you shouldn’t walk with a gypsy. ”
I accompanied her as if we were the best of friends. “Why did you come within the city walls? That seems unwise.”
She glanced behind us. “I’m safe now. You hold my arm, and we have an escort.”
I glanced, too. Cal and his men followed close enough to protect us, and back far enough that we could speak in private.
She continued, “I have a girl-child, born of a liaison with one of your kind. Fool that I was, I believed when he said he’d marry me.” She spit on the ground.
“Sfigato,” I agreed.
“Si. Last year, I left Eva here, to the orphanage.” Her husky voice grew gravelly with heartbreak.
She was a lovely woman, no more than twenty-five. “Why did you leave her?”
“I raised her in all the tradition of the Rom. Like us, she can live by her wits. She can tell fortunes that are true. But she was scorned as too pale, too smart, too insolent.” Her face screwed up with scorn. “Our chief decided to tame her, to take her as concubine.”
I clenched her arm closer against my side. “Bruto.”
“Men are swine, all of them, and I wouldn’t have it.
But she…she was fiercely angry at me for leaving her here.
She told me no, no orphanage, she would earn her living cutting purses.
” The woman shook her head. “I wanted her to have a chance. I told her to learn from the holy people, to get a craft, to become a citizen. She’s so stubborn.
Like me. I don’t want her to pay the price I do. I fear for her.”
“I haven’t seen your daughter, but now I know, and I’ll watch for her.” I pulled her to a stop in the long winter shadows, and I faced her. “My family exerts a loving influence that’s almost irresistible.”
She laughed. “Yes. Thank you. You relieve my mind. If you wish, and if you have silver to cross my palm, I would read your future.”
I’m a cynic about a lot of things, and telling fortunes is one. True love is another, but my parents show all signs of true love, and then there’s me who did the “love at first sight” with Lysander, although that was thwarted by the machinations of Prince Escalus…
As was his wont, the prince moved swiftly and softly and suddenly loomed over us in that I’m taller, broader, and can easily overwhelm you irritating manner he had. “I have silver.” And he firmly pressed his coin into the wanderer’s palm.
I did not see that coming.
However, she didn’t seem surprised. She cupped the coin as if feeling its warmth, then passed it to me.
Uncertainly, I took it.
“Before I can read, I must always have the silver, but no charge for this reading.”
I tried to hand it back to Cal, but he shook his head.
Maria’s voice dropped a knowing octave. “He wants to know your fortune, for his luck and life is linked with yours. Keep the coin, Princess, and show me your palms.”
I dropped the coin into the bag on my belt and extended my hands, palms up.
She cupped them in hers. “Square palms. Strong, spatulate fingers. Salt of the earth, a solid person others can depend on. You live to serve others, and at the same time, you’re determined to guide your own destiny.”
That was true enough. Not that I’d been particularly successful recently.
“In your determination, you see only what you wish, and fail to see what’s obvious to others.”
Wrong!
Yet Cal made that noise in his throat, the one he used to disguise amusement.
I turned to glare at him, but Maria’s deep, omniscient voice continued, “And yet…look at this thumb, the way it crooks out! Whimsy, intuition and imagination.”
“Buried deep.” Whimsy, intuition and imagination did not fit my self-image.
“To be revealed by the right man,” Cal answered as if I spoke to him, as if I challenged him.
I whipped my head around to glare. Of course, his demeanor remained cool, untouched by my fiery temper. I should never have allowed him to pay the fee. “Why do I have different lines on my hands?” I wasn’t challenging her, exactly, but this art of the palms made no sense to me.
“The left hand is the hand you were born with—your talents, your character. The right hand shows how you use those traits. I look at them both, for to read you, I must know you, but the right hand shows what you make of your life. That’s the hand I look at to see your future.”
I didn’t shout, Nonsense! …but I thought it loudly.
For she chuckled. “Princess, look here.” She tapped a cluster of lines that crisscrossed on the fleshy pad beneath my fourth finger.
“A star is always a sign of good fortune, or wealth, or talent well used. But to have one here—you know that this finger leads a direct blood vein to your heart. The vena amoris.”
Latin for “vein of love,” and how interesting this illiterate wanderer spoke any Latin at all. Proof one should never make assumptions. Although the assumption I made now was obvious. “My mother, Lady Juliet Montague, has that star.”
Maria inclined her head.
“I’ll be blessed with a great love like hers?” Of course. The foretelling of a great love was required.
“Not at all like hers. In your hand, there’s passion—so important to you! And love. But also, a kind of madness, or forgetfulness.” Her black lashes fluttered, and her eyes rolled back in her head.
Which was darned spooky, may I say!
Her voice seemed dragged from a mysterious place hidden within her. “A desperate nightmare of seeking.”
“What?” She startled me. This wasn’t the way a fortune-teller pleased her clients!
She seemed to snap back to the present, and she traced across my palm from wrist to forefinger. “Look at this line! You’ll live long and be blessed with good health.”
That was more what I expected.
Her eyelids fluttered eerily again. “The wild places sing siren songs in your heart, and I see you running, your arms outspread, to embrace the wind.”
Now how did she know what I always did when I visited the Montague family estate?
“You will have adventures,” she said. “How interesting. A lady of Verona who has adventures.”
Cal sighed heavily.
She peered up at him. “When you began this, you knew the fire you sought to contain in your hands.”
Driven to speak, I said, “Me? I must protest. I’m not fire!”
Neither of them paid me heed. Rather, she twisted my wrists to show me the sides. “One love. Forever.”
I peered at the lines, but I couldn’t see what was so obvious to her, and briefly I experienced a moment of sadness. I knew Cal and I would craft a good marriage, but without love, how hollow it would seem.
Cal asked the question he’d given up the coin to find out. “How many children will we have?”
I expected to hear promises of dozens of children, filling the palace with crawling diapered butts and dramatic monologues delivered in lisping childish voices, of poetic diatribes about a misplaced toy and lost front teeth. For fortune-tellers told you what you wanted to hear, right?