Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [598]
The journey there and back would take her all day; but she was already well across the high ground, and she knew tracks that would take her swiftly to the right road.
As she came up over the familiar ridge and glanced back, the memories of their time together flashed back with a terrible vividness. She must find him, even if it was only for a few minutes, to see his face again.
The storm blew up in early afternoon. She had covered many miles. Before her stretched an expanse of open heathland, about five miles across, she believed: and after this the country gave way to the richer vales where Jethro’s new farm lay.
The storm was brooding and heavy; she licked her finger to determine the direction of the wind. By cutting across the heathland following a diagonal path she thought she could just head it off.
Five minutes later she was soaked, and could no longer make out the lie of the land. She pressed on.
The storm was so thick the sky over the heath did not seem to be grey, but brown. Twenty minutes later she was lost.
“And the trouble is,” she thought, “I may be heading back to the plain. I can’t tell.”
She was.
It was nearly half an hour more before she passed an ancient dewpond on a bare expanse of turf. It was filling rapidly. Another five minutes went by.
Then, through the driving rain, directly ahead of her, she saw them – a group of painted wagons, standing in the middle of nowhere.
She gave a little gasp of fear, and reined her horse sharply.
Gypsies.
The wagons seemed to be tight shut, their owners presumably inside them; but even so, she automatically looked around her anxiously in case there were figures lurking there.
She wheeled about, and urged her horse away. One could never be sure with gypsies.
Five more minutes passed. On a grassy slope, her horse slipped and almost fell, and she wondered whether to dismount and lead him. She had no idea what course she was following.
The wagons. They were in front of her again. All she had done was to approach them from another angle.
Once again she turned.
It was ten minutes later that she came upon them again.
She could have cried. She started to turn away again, then gave up. She was too tired to go on.
Slowly and gingerly she made her way towards them.
They eyed her strangely after she had rapped upon the caravan door; but they took her in, and to her relief a few moments later a gypsy woman was helping her to undress and wrap herself in a blanket. Then she sat in the crowded little space with its strange, rich smells, gazing at the heavy embroidered cushion on the bed along one wall, and at the little family in front of her, whose four children, after eyeing her with suspicion, were now staring at her with shy amusement.
The man gave her a sideways look.
“They’re waitin’ to see you catch cold.”
“I fear I shall. Wouldn’t you?”
He shook his head.
“No.”
And she remembered what she had always heard: gypsies did not catch cold.
What did she know about gypsies? That they were short and dark; that they stole sheep and hid them by burying the carcasses beneath their fires. Now she was sharing their caravan.
The storm did not abate until it was dusk, and when she looked out over the darkening, empty landscape and glanced back at her sodden clothes, she knew it was useless to go on. The nearest hamlet, they had told her, was some six miles away.
“Would you give me shelter for the night?”
The woman nodded.
Later that evening she saw the woman carry out several black objects which looked to her like stones but which she soon discovered were lumps of old meat that had been soaked in salt and which now the woman was quietly boiling over the fire in a pot. She ate, glad that it was hot and salty, and that night, in one corner of a caravan, with her clothes already dried, her horse attended to, and the gypsy woman lying so near to her they almost touched, she slept a deep sleep.
She paid them and left at dawn.
She had never seen the spring dawn over the plain. Great bands