Beulah would smile as she uncovered the glass sphere she’d brought out and set on the table at eventide, waiting.
Not that a ball made of a bit of glass had anything to do with it, yet that was what was expected. The gypsy might not have been an educated woman, but she knew what sold. She didn’t need glass, or crystal, a bit of amethyst, a cup of still-wet tea leaves, or a rabbit’s foot to see, either. No, those knickknacks were for the customers, for those who needed to witness her using something solid, because the thought of her seeing pictures of what was to come in thin air would be enough to send them running. And you never scared away money.
Beulah heard a squeal from the tent that leaned against her son’s vardo, little Boosul waking from sleep. Her people were stirring, coming out to light fires, to make ready for the day. True gypsies never slept in their spotless vardos, with shining brass and wafer-thin china hanging from the walls. Like Beulah, they lived in tents, hardy canvas tied across a frame of birch or ash. The vardos were kept for best. Beulah looked up to the rising sun, then again at the fields as the steamy mist of warming dew rose to greet the day. She didn’t care for the people of this village, Heronsdene. She saw the dark shadow that enveloped each man and woman and trailed along, weighing them down as they went about their daily round. There were ghosts in this village—ghosts who would allow the neighbors no rest.
AS SHE REACHED down to pour scalding water into the teapot, the old woman’s face concertina’d as a throbbing pain and bright light bore down upon her with no warning, a sensation with which she was well familiar. She dropped the kettle back into the embers and pressed her bony knuckles hard against her skull, squeezing her eyes shut against flames that licked up behind her closed eyelids. Fire. Again. She fought for breath, the heat rising up around her feet to her waist, making her old legs sweat, her hands clammy. And once more she came to Beulah, walking out from the very heart of the inferno, the younger woman she had not yet met but knew would soon come. It would not be long now; the time approached—of that she was sure. The woman was tall and well dressed, with black hair—not long hair, but not as short as she’d seen on some of the gorja womenfolk in recent years. Beulah leaned against the vardo, the lurcher coming to stand at her mistress’s side as if to offer her lean body as buttress. This woman, who walked amid the flames of Beulah’s imagination, had known sadness, had lived with death. And though she now stepped forward alone, the grief was lifting—Beulah could see it ascending like the morning cloud, rising up to leave her in peace. She was strong, this woman of her dreams, and . . . Beulah shook her head. The vision was fading; the woman had turned away from her, back into the flames, and was gone.
The gypsy matriarch held one hand against her forehead, still leaning against her vardo. She opened her eyes with care and looked about her. Only seconds had passed, yet she had seen enough to know that a time of great trouble was almost upon her. She believed the woman—the woman for whom she waited—would be her ally, though she could not be sure. She was sure of three things, though—that the end of her days drew ever closer, that before she breathed her last, a woman she had never seen in her life would come to her, and that this woman, even though she might think of herself as ordinary, of little account in the wider world, still followed Death as he made his rounds. That was her calling, her work, what she was descended of gorja and gypsy to do. And Beulah Webb knew that here, in this place called Heronsdene, Death would walk among them soon enough, and there was nothing she could do to prevent such fate. She could only do her best to protect her people.
The sun was higher in the sky now. The gypsy folk would bide their time for three more days, then move to a clearing at the edge of the farm, setting their vardos and pitching their tents away from Londoners, who came for the picking to live in whitewashed hopper huts and sing their bawdy songs around the fire at night. And though she would go about her business, Beulah would be waiting—waiting for the woman with her modern clothes and her tidy hair. Waiting for the woman whose sight, she knew, was as powerful as her own.
ONE
Marta Jones surveyed her students, casting her eyes around the studio, with its high ceilings and skeins upon skeins of colored yarn hanging from laundry racks raised up with pulleys and secured on the wall, and the six wooden looms pressed against one another, for space was at a premium. Her desk—a battered oak table set next to the door—was covered in papers, books and drawings, and to her right, as she faced her class, an ancient chaise longue was draped with an old red velvet counterpane to hide darnings and tears in the upholstery. Several spinning wheels were set against the wall to the left of the room, alongside a box where she kept wool collected on Sunday excursions into the country. Of course, she ordered untreated wool directly from her suppliers, but she liked to collect tufts from the hedgerows, where sheep had pressed against hawthorn or bramble to ease an itch and left behind a goodly pull of their coats.
She had taken on students with some reluctance. Even though the rent on her studio close to the Albert Hall was cheap enough due to an ancient land law that provided for artists, her commissions had diminished and she was forced to look for additional income. So she had placed one small advertisement in the newspaper, and written to those who had purchased her works in the past, to let them know that she was taking in a “small number of students to learn the art and craft of traditional tapestry.” In general, her students were a motley group and definitely better off; the working classes could barely afford to eat, let alone spend money on frivolities. There were two ladies from Belgravia who thought it might be “rather fun” to spend a Saturday afternoon or evening here each week, chatting as they worked their shuttles back and forth, following the sketched cartoon image that lay beneath the lines of warp and weft.
Another two friends, well-funded students from the Slade seeking a class beyond their regular curriculum, had joined, as had a poet who thought that work in color would enhance the rhythm and pulse of his language. Then there was the woman who spoke little but who had come to Marta’s studio after seeing the advertisement. Watching her now, the artist was fascinated by this particular student, drawn to the changes she had observed since class began. The woman had explained that she had recently been exposed to the world of art—she said it as if it were an unfamiliar country—and that she wanted to do “something artistic,” as her work was far removed from such indulgence. She had smiled and gone on to say that she had never produced a proper painting, even as a child, and she thought she could not sketch at all, but she was drawn to tapestry, attracted to the weaving of color and texture, to a medium that did not present an immediate image but, when one stood back to regard the day’s endeavor, a picture began to take form. “It’s rather like my work,” she had said. And when Marta asked about the woman’s profession, she paused for a moment and then drew out a card, which she offered to the artist. It said, simply:
MAISIE DOBBS
PSYCHOLOGIST AND INVESTIGATOR
Marta thought that this one evening each week was the woman’s only recreation, but with each class, something about her seemed to change almost imperceptibly, though the artist found the effect to be quite extraordinary. Her clothes had become more colorful, her artistry more bold as she gained confidence. On the evening when they had experimented with dyeing, taking the yarns they had spun during the previous week, pressing them down into buckets of dye, and then pulling them out to hang first over sinks in the studio’s own scullery before looping them over laundry racks to dry, she had rolled up her sleeves and simply laughed when color splashed across her face. The Belgravia matrons had frowned and the poet appeared shy, but soon this woman, who had appeared so reticent at first, so slow and measured in her interactions with fellow students, had come to be the lynchpin in the class—without saying much at all. And, Marta thought, she was very good at drawing out stories. Why, only today, while Maisie worked at her loom, her fingers nimble as she wove threads of purple, magenta and yellow, she had asked the teacher but two questions and soon knew the entire story of the woman’s coming to England from Poland as a child. In fact, as she answered the questions that Maisie Dobbs put to her, the whole class knew in short order that Marta’s father had insisted that his children learn only English, so that they would fit in and not be marked as foreigners. And her mother had ensured the family dressed in a way that did not set them apart from their new friends, who knew them as the Jones family—that most British of names, adopted as they disembarked from their ship once it had docked at Southampton.