Days Before Easter, Spring, 1790
Holy Week - Good Friday
The quiet shop of Mastersen Arms
"You had my heart from the moment you took that lantern. It has not been long, but it is hard for me to see to the times you were not with me. I love you, Lewis Mastersen." The admission in English made it seem more real.
I love you, Breanna Keelan. I always have and I always will. From the beginning of time to the end of eternity. I will be by your side.” Lewis leaned in, put his arm around her shoulder, and gave her a soft kiss. He pulled back a little and smiled.
- From " The Offering" -
It'd been since the month was early when Winter was in the last days before it threw itself in to a hot, humid spring. The hibiscus bloomed in brand batches. Long strands of wild grass populated the shorelines between stone crags turning over toward the fields. All of the wildflowers he had picked for her had multiplied in a riot, and she slept in those fields to remember the scent of what was drier now. The flower petals had since been dried. Breanna was a woman of sentiment, but also one of practicality. Whether she brought him lunch, kept his bed, or listened to the beating of his heart work had to be done.
She didn't pine for him in the way of silly gadje girls looking love lorn in to the rising sun. It always found her on the shore before the embers of a fire being put out after the morning meal being cooked. By the time the bells rung the hour, she would be at a stall or sharing the candlemaker's shop. Her way with money had been wise, and it allowed her to rent a place to keep her forge tools for the lantern work. When she looked to the hour for rest in the sun's height in the sky was when she first realized how much she missed him. Lewis had a way of speaking that was simple, humble, and good. His life was an honest one for the most part. Whatever was harsh or beneficial, he dealt with equally. Somewhere between his rambling about the mechanisms of a gun to the way his stomach growled for the want of her food, Breanna believed that she could let herself trust again.
The danger with relaxing of a barrier is the exposure to pain. Laying vulnerable in the sun allowed one to feel the wind, sun, and rain, but it was possible to for the chaff of the wind to make your skin raw, the sun to burn you, and the rain to drown you. So had it been in his company, his voice, and the sound of the vocation he took pride. The tender affections of love renewed crossed in to lowered boundaries with the strangers, whom would not see her as less than. Still, she watched the children of the Archers who were not far from the shop. She helped the candle maker with his tasks, forged her lanterns, and spun yarns as long as the sea was wide. It would be over days it would begin to change. Somewhere, a rumor breaking forward that she'd been accosted by the guard. Angering them to the point of beating up a young white boy. Things would begin to twist so that those who gave generously gave nothing. Her baskets would be pilfered more than once, the contents spilling outward for greedy hands to take. More than once would she turn concerns over to the guard for one to pitifully look at her with nothing he could do. Others were watching him. "You should move on, madame," he said. "You should move on."
Then it turned in to the candlemaker telling her she couldn't work with him anymore. Her stock too full in days when she could keep none left. Those who would come to her, pulled away by others or rumors, whichever. Every day what she had come to trust was proving another lesson learned. One more Roma girl too foolish. A gadje lover making promises he couldn't keep for a respectability not attained. Yet, it hadn't been all him! She had come. Days of dazzle melded with the simpler gestures. Between ways merged in to one that they seemed to understand until the old way of prejudice came to call again. She mourned for lover's understanding, compassion, and his want that she never change.
Each day she had changed since the coming of spring, for nearly a fortnight; a little harsher, a little less patient, and a little more sad until the day came that she stood on his doorstep the day they declared it good. Good that a man gone to a cross had died. Even as a child, she'd found celebrating the crucifixion morbid. It was the gypsy in her, too strong to relinquish anything over to the Irish Catholic blood her grandmother tried so damn hard to reach in the seasons her father left her in the care of her mother's kin. The month had rolled to the verge of a new one, and yet, he was not home. She pushed a hand against the door in the dead of night. At once, all of the colors were wrong. Gray, blue. Black. All of the emotions mixed in them pulled at her heart so hard, she swore it would leave her chest.
Breanna wiped away the tears as she turned to go down the back alley where the rats skittered over the old pallets piled up from no one to remove them. No materials had come this way, no calls for orders or requests done. No, she had seen enough people at his door go away in worry. Even in the day, their words were turning over to wonder. Whispers of another man gone. Another disappearance. Yet nothing was disturbed. A sign still read, "Mastersen Arms". Through the dust of the windows she could still see his things inside. What was left to do but pick the lock? The vardo was stabled in a cave along the shore. Tide? Memorized. It would not fill again until Easter with water. Lucian, the draft horse, could nibble his feed with little to worry over.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness with no difficulty. Her mother, grandmother, and father alike had all called her eyes blessed with fire or fairy. They were filed with too much gold and copper adrift within, molten and ever moving, to be the eyes of a common girl. Even if they should be deemed brown? It was never so, for in the next instant the flash would settle. there. Her steps disturbed only the dust as she moved from the back. Oh, the ghost of him was strong! She could see the outlines left by the shifting of energy. It turned, if she let her eyes skew enough, to the outlines of a person flush with a faint trace of their reflection. Her eyes were not yet schooled enough to see the ghosts. There had been no time to learn more from the wise woman. Not before the gadje broke their heads against the stone. Executed them. Crushed them. Sold them in to slavery that dark day in Romania so long, long ago.
This was like walking in a tomb. Everything here was frozen in time. From the ledger opened with dust settled on the last line. A quill left against the desk. Cold forge was like the winter past in the North, empty and furious when it picked one down to the bone. It was the heart of the forge and it was gone. The guns left just where he had placed them. He had walked away. Walked away and did not come back. That she had not looked sooner crushed her. To see this crushed her. It was the last vestige of hope.
Gone now.
Her hand covered her mouth as she ran up the steps to his living place above the shop. A mussed bed, his clothes, and the plate left on the table told of a life lived with such forgetfulness. It was why he'd needed a wife, but not only that. No. She'd not only been that. The room smelled so much of him she damn near suffocated on it. The plate was picked up and throne. In the sound of the shattering came the cry of her pain as she sat at the table to weep. He was gone! Once again, she was left behind. All the air inhaled was dust and sadness. She choked on it, damn near ready to throw up as she held her belly only to remember and even greater price paid. Wherever he was. Whatever had happened? She carried the only trace of him left. It was realized just that morning. Now, what should have been a joyous thing with his face turned bright red in the sweet shame of how their love took form only to delight that he would go on..was only a woman morning the bastard in her belly. Nothing new. Nothing new for the whore they branded her as now. Expected.
On this night, in the settled dust of what was before the guild would surely seek to auction everything here and establish a new man? She would not let the old one be brushed away. It was the fault of the gadje! She knew not which one. She knew not why. Only that she knew his loyalties were not as black and white as the simple man with nothing to gain or lose but his name. This much she knew, and he would not tell her more in the greater scope of things, but she knew. It was hard to pull the wool over the eyes of a woman whose culture invented the art.
Gentle, gentle now.
She rose from the table and walked toward the chest of drawers to draw out a ruck sack. Careful careful now. She would fill it with as many of his clothes from there and the wardrobe as she could before sealing every door. A hat, bindings for his hair, a watch fob. A piece of hair from the pillow wrapped in cloth.
Her eyes did not burn as red as the inside of her soul. It was like a desert heat. An oasis once beautiful and lush, scorched. The sun on top of an already man made fire. It burned until the memory of him was all that was preserved against the life, trust, and desire for any part of the gadje world gone up in flame. In it, one could say their safety went too. Save for those few whose names she could recall, whose charity was ever returned? The rest went up in a fire that burned hotter than hell tonight under the still moon. Narrow were the eyes that looked on the guns. She had found a second sack, and without a single thought against it, she took up as many as she could; pistols, rifles, single and double barrels, ammunition and stores of gunpowder. Arms for the plain man, and arms of his greater commissions. Her tears fell in steeled silence as it was done. There was no way she could get all of them, but if the spirits were willing she'd return for the rest.
Or find someone that could.
Even as a thief dared to follow in after her idea, picking the lock? He would find that tonight a woman held a barrel against his chest as soon as the door had opened. "What here, mine. You come back to touch? You will find so many ways to die." They scuffled for only an instant before the butt of the riffle ended up slamming in to his back. He whimpered, was kicked by a boot, and then scurried off in to the nigh to tell the tale of a theft gone wrong with a lie that would save his shriveled manhood.
Nothing would be in shambles. No. It would now look as if what was here had moved on, moved away, in the dead of night without telling a soul.
Tucked in to a place only he could find would read this note --
Vest'acha -- if you come home , find me. All that I have is yours again, and always. If you never do, then I will see you in the ever after as it comes in my visions. I will tell our child of you. No one will touch your work because they do not deserve it. Whoever left you to this fate, did not deserve you. I will love you until I can not breathe.
Vest'acha was the Kalderash word for beloved. None of them here would not that save two souls. Lewis Mastersen..and the woman she went forth to find now, Lenora Torres. with the life of a man in her vardo, his jacket across her back, and a rifle at her side.
Whatever came after this night, the gadje only had themselves to blame for it. For no one came for him.
