The Red Necklace (18 page)

Sido knew the minute she entered the library exactly the reason for Kalliovski’s visit. Her father, his face funereally grim, walked toward her just as a stone was thrown into the room, breaking the window and spraying glass onto the Persian rug. The marquis stopped and stared transfixed as if the stone were a fragment from a comet.

"You’ve brought this on yourself,” said Kalliovski. “Fortunately for you, today they’re out for bigger fish. But never fear, your time will come, you can rest assured of that.” He walked slowly around Sido. “Do you now agree to the marriage?”

“I can’t think. My head hurts,” was all the marquis could say. “Later, leave it till later,” and he turned to look once more out of the window.

Citizen Kalliovski touched Sido’s face. She recoiled from him, stifling the words that were about to erupt from her. Yet again, she knew that silence was her only means of survival.

“Such soft skin, velvety like rose petals. Still too thin,” he said.

Sido stood stock-still, hardly daring to breathe, Kalliovski’s hand now resting on her neck.

“There is no later,” he said, “just an urgent now. So I take it that you agree to this marriage?”

“Have I any choice?” asked the marquis.

“No,” said Kalliovski. “It was, and it always will be, check-mate. ”

Outside the women shouted:

chapter nineteen

At fifteen, Yann looked older than his years. The gossip of where he had come from had long since ceased. It was generally agreed that he was a distant cousin of Juliette’s whom the Laxtons had adopted.

Mr. Trippen had turned out to be an excellent tutor. By now Yann could read and write, was accomplished with sword and pistol, was a graceful dancer, and proved to have an uncanny way with even the wildest of horses. His great love, though, remained the theater. It was here that he felt the closest to Têtu and home. He would spend many an evening with Mr. Trippen watching famous actors performing Shakespeare and Sheridan; but the shows he loved best always touched on magic.

He had seen the great illusionist Katterfelto lecture on natural philosophy, and had paid close attention while Katterfelto performed tricks with dice, cards, money boxes, medals, and glasses, claiming that he knew the secrets of the occult.

Mr. Laxton had been most impressed by the show, and Mr. Trippen saw it as one of the wonders of the world. Only Yann stayed silent. He had not found in anything he had seen or heard what he was looking for.

The magic that he wanted to understand, Têtu alone had performed. He had read with interest about gold threads that the magicians used to achieve their illusions. Gold was lost to the human eye in the subdued light of the oil lamps, yet Yann knew for certain that Têtu had used no such devices. It made his magic all the more mysterious and tantalizing.

He felt sure that such magic came from deep within. It must be a force as powerful as anger, grief, or love—you had somehow to connect with it to make it work. It did not rely on sleight of hand, or baggy trousers from which a never-ending stream of handkerchiefs appeared.

Today, as he walked through Covent Garden, the sun was shining watery bright. The city looked as if it had put on its best clothes for the occasion. London in all her finery thrilled Yann. The piazza was, as always, full of people. There were street-criers selling bread and buns, shouting out their wares. Porters rushed here and there with parcels. Apprentices stood outside their masters’ shops, begging passersby to go in and peruse the goods, each one shouting a little louder than his neighbor.

He had finished his fencing lesson, and had a tingling of tiredness and a good hunger. He was on his way to his favorite coffeehouse to pick up the latest news when he saw a young couple, brightly dressed, with shiny rings in their ears and silver buttons on their clothes. The girl had dark eyes and jet-black hair, and she caught Yann’s attention, not only because she was pretty but because she was speaking a language he understood. He stopped to listen, and the girl smiled at him.

“Would you like me to read your fortune, sir?” she said. “Cross my palm with silver . . .”

Yann laughed and answered in Romany, “Not now.”

The girl and the young man looked surprised. Taking in Yann’s fine clothes, the man asked uncertainly, “
San tu Rom?
Are you a Gypsy?”

For a moment Yann hesitated. Then he said, “
Da, pralo
. Yes, brother,” accepting at long last the truth of what he was saying.

“Glad to meet you, brother. I am Talo Cooper and this is my wife, Orlenda.”

They shook hands and the girl, smiling sweetly, asked, “Are you from the royal city?”

“No, I am not from London. I am from Paris, the city across the water.”

After a while Yann walked away, looking back over his shoulder as Talo started to play his violin, the sound of his music filling the piazza with its sweet, aching melody.

Yann sat in the coffeehouse and ate his meal in silence, thinking back to the night of the marquis’s party when Topolain had died. Deep down he had never quite gotten over the idea that he was responsible for what had happened, that if he had kept silent that evening when he was asked what the Pierrot saw, everything might have been all right. The memory of it made him bring his fist down hard on the table.

“Steady on, sir!” said the gentleman opposite.

Yann looked up, almost surprised to find himself in the middle of this busy eating house. In his head he was floating in a soundless sea of unanswered questions, driftwood for the mind. He stood up, his plate unfinished, paid for his meal, and left.

As Yann walked away he thought about Têtu, as he often did, and he wondered if the magic and the answers he was hungry for lay not in the theater but with the Gypsies themselves. There was also another reason for seeking them out. This one was less simple, a tangle of feelings that try as he might he couldn’t untie.

For all the Laxtons’ kindness and generosity toward him and their genuine concern to make him feel at home, Yann had known ever since he had first arrived in Queen Square that it was Sido who should have been there, not he. He understood all too well the longing Mrs. Laxton had to see her niece again, and when she told him about her sister and the accident, the girl with the sapphire-blue eyes whom he hardly knew had become a presence in his life. When he heard the news of her forthcoming marriage, his rage against Kalliovski surfaced once again.

The one comfort Yann took was the idea of how he would revenge himself on the man he held responsible for the murders of Topolain and Têtu. Magic would be his weapon of choice, though how he was to achieve the powers he needed he did not know.

It was getting dark as he neared Seven Dials, where he knew the Gypsies camped in winter, and fog had begun to descend. The camp, a small city of tents, rolled out before him as far as the eye could see. It was not a place to go walking in unless you had business there. Groups of young men eyed his fine clothes and wondered which Gypsy girl had bewitched him enough for such a gentleman to come calling.

At last Talo Cooper appeared out of the fog.

“Orlenda knew you would come,” said Talo. “She’s never wrong in these matters. I will take you to my grandfather, Tobias Cooper. He is waiting for you.”

A very old man sat at the entrance of his tent, smoking his clay pipe. Yann sat down beside him and stared out at the thickening fog that hung down over the camp like the muslin petticoat of some monstrous giantess.

“What is it you want to know?” said the old man, looking at Yann as if he could see right into his heart.

“I want to know how to move objects without touching them.”

Tobias laughed. “What makes you think I would know such things?”

Yann shrugged his shoulders. “A feeling. I was brought up by a dwarf called Têtu, who was of the Romany blood. He worked a wooden Pierrot in a theater in Paris. He did it all from the wings; he never once touched it, still, he could make it dance.”

“Then he knew the ways of the ancient magic. What makes you think you have any right to such knowledge?”

“My mother could do the same, and my grandmother. I never knew them. My mother died when I was a few weeks old. I worked in the theater with Têtu and the wooden doll. I made it talk, I read minds, and sometimes I even foresaw the future. Then one day I saw and said too much, and my gifts left me. Shortly after that Têtu was shot and I was brought to the royal city. All that is left to me now is that I can still throw my voice; but it is a cheap circus trick, nothing more.”

“Show me.”

Out of the fog came the noise of a man wheezing, gasping for breath, asking Tobias for a pipe of tobacco.

Tobias smiled and said, “Very good indeed. Choose an object.”

Yann picked the first thing that caught his eye, the old man’s hat lying inside the tent.

Without touching it Tobias appeared to lift it off the ground, where it hovered, as if listening to what was being said, before vanishing. In its place, suspended in midair, was a red rose.

"Yes!” said Yann excitedly. "That is what I want to be able to do, that kind of magic.”

“You need, then, to be able to see into the spaces in between things,” said the old man. “Can you do that?”

Yann squinted. “I see nothing. There is nothing to see.”

“Then you are blind.”

“I’m not!”

“The eye plays tricks, fills in the gaps, so that we see what we want to see. Objects are only solid because of our desire that they be so.”

This did not make sense to Yann. He said, “A hat is a hat, a cup is a cup. I would prefer to trust in solid objects.”

“Well, then, don’t come knocking on my door,” said Tobias with a shrug. “Go on believing in the flat lands of your mind. I tell you no magic lies there. If you see the world that way, that is all you will ever see of the world.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” said Yann furiously. Had he come all this way just to be told he was blind?

“If you will let her, Orlenda will read your palm. That might help me to know what it is you are fighting,” said the old man.

He called for her and she came out of the tent with Talo. The firelight caught her pretty face, and she smiled at Yann, taking his almond-shaped hand in hers, looking carefully at his palm, moving it toward the light.

After a while she straightened up and said, “I am sorry, Grandfather. The gift has left me for tonight.”

“Are you afraid of what your hand might reveal, boy?” Tobias asked.

Yann felt annoyed, as if somehow he had been cheated of what he needed to know. He wasn’t going to be so easily put off having his palm read.

“You don’t frighten me, old man,” he said. “I am not afraid.”

Orlenda stared deep into his eyes.

“You are a true Gypsy, and you could be a great shaman. You have a rare gift.” She stopped, letting go of his hand.

“Go on,” said the old man. “Tell him. Isn’t that why you came here, boy? To know what the future holds?”

“Yes,” said Yann through gritted teeth.

Orlenda took a deep breath as if going underwater.

There were three things she told Yann that foggy afternoon, and it was the third one that shocked Yann to the core, as she had known it would. It made him feel as if he were standing on the edge of a ravine, looking down into nothingness. It was an abyss that he had seen before.

“You have survived one bullet, but another is waiting for you in the city over the water.”

Yann had gotten up without saying a word and started to walk away.

Tobias called after him. “I will be here when you come back.”

By then he was running, feeling as if he were suffocating.

In Covent Garden Piazza, totally out of breath, he had bent over to take in huge gulps of soupy air. What a fool he had been. Did he truly believe in all that hocus-pocus? He laughed out loud, a hard, bitter sound. This much he knew: He was done with trying to find out Têtu’s secret. Magic belonged to a world he wanted nothing more to do with. If he was ever to take revenge on Kalliovski he would use a pistol, as any rational man would.

This was the moment when Yann decided to turn his back on notions of sorcery. He would concentrate on the opportunities given to him, and live like a gentleman. No one would ever take him for a Gypsy again; no one would ever know where he had come from.

Two years has passed since that momentous day. It was now the summer of 1792, and Yann was now seventeen years old.

He had never told a soul what had happened at the Gypsy camp, and he had long given up the idea of revenge. The burning flame of grief had lost its urgency: There was so much more he wanted to do. He had worked hard at his studies, acquitted himself well, and was a credit to the Laxtons and to Mr. Trippen. A future he couldn’t have envisaged a few years ago was his for the taking—a place at Cambridge University, the possibility of becoming a lawyer. London suddenly seemed to be filled with pretty, flirtatious girls whom he met at private balls and public dances. He had made the pleasing discovery that young ladies liked his company, would giggle, flounce their curls, pout, and generally look charming to get his attention.

“It’s because you dance so well, Mr. Margoza,” Sophie Padden had whispered to him.

The Laxtons’ house in Queen Square had become a meeting point for many of the émigrés who now found themselves in London, under what they felt to be gray skies and diminishing circumstances.

Mr. and Mrs. Laxton’s parties were renowned for excellent food and talk. The conversation was often heated, and the ideas expressed both radical and conservative.

The distant drum of the Revolution could be heard loud and clear across the water here in London. It had started out as a glimmer of hope for a new generation, when slavery would be no more, when men and women would be equal, and people would be judged, not by their birth, but by who they were, not divided by race, class, or creed. Yann believed passionately in these ideas.