Читать книгу Power Play - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 10

Yes, she had learned young what it meant to be an outcast, Pepper reflected wryly.

Almost from the moment she could toddle she had been shunned by the other Romany children, but through their cruelty she had learned two valuable lessons.

The first had been to conceal her hurts. As a child she had been sensitive to a degree that had meant the other children’s contempt and dislike of her had constantly lacerated her. She had known as children always know that they neither accepted nor liked her, but she had not known why, and so she had learned to cover her feelings with a protective stoical acceptance. That had been the second lesson she had learned—not to let others see that they had the power to hurt her.

Not that the others had deliberately wanted to hurt her; it had simply been that she was not one of them; that her mother had offended so far and so deeply against their code that her child would never be one of their number.

Pepper’s childhood had been spent moving with the tribe through the country in their nomadic annual journeyings; formal schooling for gypsy children in those years had been spasmodic at best—not even the most ardent of school inspectors could spare the time to check up on the constantly caravanning tribes and their children—but Naomi had been taught to read and write by her husband and she was immensely proud of her skill.

She too had seen what was happening to her grandchild, and while she grieved over it, she knew that according to the rules of her people they were not being deliberately unkind.

Occasionally it crossed her mind that she should approach Sir Ian MacGregor, but she doubted that he would welcome Rachel any more than her own people did, and then the winter that Rachel was seven Ian MacGregor died and the land passed to a very distant member of the family.

Since Duncan’s death, the gypsies had not revisited the Glen, knowing that they would not be welcome, and the loss of the privileged campsite was chalked up as another black mark against Rachel.

It was Naomi who insisted that she learn to read and write; who sent her to school whenever the tribe stopped long enough for her to do so.

Knowing how proud her grandmother was of her own ability to read and write, Rachel never told her of the purgatory her own schooldays were. Just as she was unacceptable to the tribe, so she was also an outcast to the non-Romany children. They laughed at her clothes, calling them rags, and they sneered at her heavily-accented voice and the gold rings she wore in her ears. The older boys tugged on them until her lobes bled, and called her a “dirty gypsy”, while the girls huddled together in giggling gaggles to gaze at her darned jumpers and patched skirts.

With no man to protect them or hunt for them, Naomi and Rachel were forced to depend on whatever Naomi could make from telling fortunes and selling pegs. Occasionally in the depths of the night, one of the women of the tribe would knock on her door and ask Naomi for the special potions she made in the summer months from wild flowers and herbs.

Rachel watched these transactions wide-eyed and curious about what it could be that brought the women of the tribe to her grandmother’s door late at night, but all Naomi would say when she asked her was that she was too young to understand. The herbal lore which she had learned from her own mother and which she had tried to teach her own feckless daughter was something Naomi was not going to pass on to her granddaughter. None of the women of the tribe would come to Rachel for advice and potions the way they did to her. She was, after all, one of them, and still respected, although now their respect was tainted with pity, but Rachel never would be; she was the daughter of a gorgio, and it had been for the love of this man that Layla had betrayed one of her own, breaking the sacred gypsy code. Now when she grew older Rachel’s life would lie apart from that of the tribe, and this troubled Naomi.

She was getting old, and her bones ached in the cold and the damp. She hoped that by sending Rachel to school she could in some way prepare her grandchild to enter into the gorgio way of life, and because Rachel loved her grandmother she didn’t tell her that she was derided and disliked as much by her father’s people as she was by her mother’s.

School, which had been a place of fascination and delight at first, when she had absorbed everything the teachers could tell her, had now become a hated prison from which she escaped as often as she could, often spending her days in complete isolation in the hills and the fields.

When she was eleven her body started to change, and with it the reactions of her peers. Boys at school who had pulled her hair and jeered at her now tormented her in different ways, trying to pinch the small swellings that tightened the fabric of her shabby clothes.

Her hair, always thick and lustrous, seemed to darken and curl with a vivid life of its own, her body alluringly changing shape. Rachel knew what the changes portended; her tribe lived close to nature, and its girls were taught to be proud of their womanhood.

Even one or two of the young men glanced at her sideways as she helped her grandmother to gather kindling or worked with her on her pegs and baskets, but they didn’t forget who her mother was, or what she had done.

While the other girls of her age in the tribe tested their new-found femininity, laughing and flirting with their male peers, Rachel instinctively suppressed hers. She was a child of the shadows, her grandmother often thought sadly, watching her pensive face and too knowing eyes. As though she had been gifted with second sight Rachel knew instinctively that the rest of the tribe were looking for signs of her mother in her; as long as she was quiet and unobtrusive no one bothered about her.

But some things are impossible to hide, and the way her body was blossoming and developing was one of them.

The pinches and lewd remarks of her schoolmates was something she quickly learned to ignore, just as she had learned to ignore their jibes about her clothes and her speech. She wasn’t the only girl who had to endure this rough male teasing, but the others all had friends, families, supporters and protectors whom they could call upon if the boys’ tormenting became too familiar. Rachel had no one; she knew it and her tormentors knew it.

The gypsies’ progress through the country was an annual one. At the time of the Whitsun fairs they were always in the north of England; among the mill towns of the north-west; grimy, enclosed ribbons of towns set in stark valleys, whose inhabitants were the inheritors of the Industrial Revolution; a grim and starkly realistic people who had often known the harsh bite of poverty.

The lives of the people were as enclosed as the hills surrounding their valleys; their minds as narrow as their habitat.

The mills were closing, being driven out of existence by imports from Pakistan, cheap cloth produced by cheap labour. The secondary school in the valley was overflowing with teenagers who would have no jobs to go to; the mills that had employed their parents and grandparents were closing, and the atmosphere within the valleys was one of resentment and bitterness.

This particular stopping place on their annual pilgrimage was one that Rachel had always detested. The poverty of the people in the valley was almost on a level with that of her own tribe, and because of it the valley people jealously guarded their rights and privileges. Outsiders weren’t welcome whoever they were; and the gypsies were disliked and detested here much more than they were in the richer south of the country.

There were few pleasures to be had for the people inhabiting these valleys full of “dark Satanic mills”. Whitsuntide was one of them.

The religious persuasion of many of the inhabitants sprang from Methodism, the cornerstone on which the Industrial Revolution had been built, but this did not prevent the people from throwing themselves into their Whitsuntide celebrations with enthusiastic vigour. The highlight of these celebrations was the Whit Walks. For weeks beforehand the females of the family would gather round to gaze consideringly at the “catalogues” to choose the all-important outfit for the Walk. The Whit Walks were an unashamed opportunity to show off. A new outfit was an absolute essential, if family pride were to be upheld. Everyone would line up to walk through the streets in their new clothes; afterwards families would gather for high tea, and then later still the teenagers would be let loose to attend the fairs that had set up in the market squares.

It was these fairs which brought the gypsies to the north-west. There were rich pickings to be had from them, what with fortune-telling, working on the fairs themselves and selling their wares.

Rachel hated the whole thing. She hated the taunting looks the other girls in her class gave her while they giggled behind their hands about their new outfits. She hated knowing that she was an outcast, that she was being made fun of, but now this particular spring, with her body burgeoning into that of a woman, she hated it even more. The girls resented her glowing prettiness, and the boys lusted after the growing development of her body. The fact that she wasn’t one of them, that she was an outcast, made her an easy target for their malice and male vulgarity.

She had long ago perfected the art of ignoring all that was said about her, of pretending that she simply hadn’t heard the insults. But this particular morning, knowing that the whole school would be seething with excitement over the coming Whitsuntide break, she knew she could not face them. Always sensitive to the opinions of others, she had found that with the onset of puberty her sensitivity had increased. Sometimes the effort of forcing herself not to cry in the face of the jeering taunts of her schoolfellows made her drive her nails deep enough into the palms of her hands to draw her own blood.

The northern valleys possessed three modes of transport; the road, the railway and the canal. Rachel was walking alongside the latter, pausing now and again to watch a moorhen with her chicks or to study the fleeting shadow of tiddlers as they changed direction at the sight of her shadow. The canal had been abandoned as a transport route long ago, and the rotting lockgates and weed-filled waters gave silent testimony to its decay. Mills long abandoned by owners who could no longer afford to compete with foreign imports reared up darkly alongside the towpath, casting dark shadows, their windows gaping emptily, the glass broken, their interiors long silent.

Occasionally a golden bar of sunlight slatted through the bleakness of the building. Rachel liked walking. It soothed her, gave free rein to her thoughts. She shivered as she walked beneath one of the narrow bridges, feeling the cold and damp seeping down through the stone. She passed few people as she walked. The occasional old man walking his dog; courting couples, giggling. Across on the other side of the valley she could see men working in their allotments alongside the railway lines, the narrow black lines of terraced houses blotting out the sunlight.

This particular valley was very long and narrow, the hillsides treeless. It was a grim and depressing place and Rachel hated it. Whenever they came here she suffered a sense of being shut in; she loathed the oppressive atmosphere that infiltrated the place.

Outside a row of terraced houses overlooking the canal she could see one woman donkeystoning her steps. She was wearing the all-enveloping pinafore that was the uniform of the married woman here. She looked up and saw Rachel and scowled at her.

“Be off with you!” she called out harshly. “We don’t want no dirty gypos round here!”

Rachel was impervious to her insults, and walked on to where the river Calder ran alongside the canal. The towpath had crumbled away at the edges here. On one side it was level with the canal and on the other it dropped away to where the river ran sluggishly below, its progress choked with the detritus of human living—old rusty prams and bicycles, tin cans, and a variety of other rubbish that had been slung out of back yards and into the river.

She paused by a gap in the dismal line of terraced houses to enjoy a warm bar of sunlight. In front of her was the back door to a small pub. A man came out and staggered across to the gents’, and then changing his mind, instead relieved himself into the river.

Rachel moved on, ignoring him. One day she would escape from all this, from people who disliked and taunted her. One day…

Daydreams were the only things that made her life bearable, and she escaped into them whenever she could. She enjoyed reading and from the books she read she knew that there was another way of life, very many other ways of life, and one day…

Her daydream was brutally crushed when she heard someone call out her name in a jeering voice. Her whole body tensed as she recognised the harsh male voices and came to an abrupt halt in front of a gang of boys she recognised from school. They were all older than her, due to leave school at the end of the summer term. They were all dressed in grubby jeans and cheap leather jackets. The rank smell of young male bodies closed offensively round her as they came closer. Resolutely Rachel stood her ground, deliberately avoiding any form of eye contact. Her heart was pumping like a terrified rabbit’s, but her body was completely still.

“Lost yer tongue, gypo?” one of them taunted. His eyes shifted from her face to her breasts. “Got a fine pair of tits growing there, ain’t yer? They say gypos make good lays…”

The coarseness of his comments and the laughter of his friends increased her terror, but Rachel knew it would be madness to even try to run. That was what they wanted her to do. They could hardly rape her here in broad daylight, she reassured herself stoically, as the lad reached out and pressed a filthy hand against the front of her dress. She had to fight against her instinctive desire to tear at him with her hands and nails, to rid her body of his unwanted presence, but long after they had jeeringly let her go past, calling out obscenities after her, she felt tainted by the encounter, her body still shaking with a mixture of outraged pride and feminine fear.

During the Whit week festivities her grandmother was busy telling fortunes, and Rachel escaped to the hills, ranging over the moorlands where thin half-wild sheep foraged and the land was barren and bare. Here and there the remnants of some long-ago drystone wall boundary darkened the landscape, but in the main it was untouched by man’s hand apart from the odd reservoir mirroring the swift movement of the clouds across the hills.

At Whitsuntide the people of the valleys went on holiday, the more affluent of them sometimes for as much as three or four days, the poorer just on a day trip, but all of them to the same venue—the Lancashire coast and Blackpool. Rachel watched the coaches depart filled with them, and heard them come back at night. The gypsies were camping on a spare piece of land, close to the market square where the buses terminated, and late at night the coaches would disgorge their passengers, replete on beer, candy floss and fish and chips.

Here in the small town centre a viaduct spanned the canal and road, carrying the railway overhead, and at night these arches were the haunt of eager lovers. The tribe looked down on the gorgio teenagers and their lack of modesty, but Rachel knew that many of the young men, especially those who worked on the fairs, slipped away late at night to enjoy the favours of the girls who gathered in giggling masses beneath the viaduct.

One night as she walked beneath them on her way back to the camp, she recognised one of the intertwined couples. Ann Watts was in her class at school, although she was two years older than Rachel. Ann Watts was described as “slow”, but there was nothing slow about the way she responded to and attracted the opposite sex. Jealous of her position as acknowledged sex queen of the school, Ann Watts was one of Rachel’s most vindictive enemies.

It would be many years before Rachel would be able to recognise the other girl for what she was and to pity her for it, that night as she saw Ann voluptuously pressing her body against Tyler Lee.

Tyler Lee was the oldest of the three brothers; tall for a gypsy, with a shock of wildly curling black hair. At seventeen his body was hardened and well muscled by the work he did on the fairs and labouring in the fields during the summer. His skin was brown, his eyes black as jet. He was proud of his Romany blood and destined to marry his second cousin. Rachel knew this, but Ann Watts did not. To her Tyler Lee epitomised the glamour she saw every week when she visited the local flea pit. He was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, far better-looking than the lumpy dull boys she was at school with; and better still, Tyler was dangerous. He rode a motorbike that he had put together from parts garnered here and there during his travels, and he knew exactly the effect he had on a girl when he looked at her from out of those night-dark eyes.

Although Ann Watts didn’t know it Tyler despised her, just as he despised all the gorgio women who desired him, and Ann Watts was very far from being the first. Tyler had first realised the potential of his sexuality when he was fourteen years old. He had lost his virginity to a bored, thirty-odd-year-old housewife in Norfolk, exchanging it for his motorbike and enough money to buy himself the coveted teenage uniform of black leather jacket. Since then there had been more bored housewives and Ann Watts than he had cared to count.

Ann Watts was not destined to remain in his memory for very long. She wriggled against him provocatively, enjoying the rhythmic thrust of his hips. Tyler would be the third boy with whom Ann had “gone all the way”, and already she was enjoying savouring what she was going to tell her friends afterwards. She liked the shocked, wide-eyed way they listened to her confidences. They were all younger than she was, and still virgins.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched Rachel go past, and glared at her. She disliked the proud way the younger girl moved, almost as though she thought that somehow she was better than anyone else. How could she be? Everyone knew that gypos were nothing better than thieves, and that they never washed.

Ann had a bath once a week, in the new bathroom that had just been installed in the terraced house. Theirs was the only house in the street to have an indoor lavvy as well. Ann’s father was a foreman in one of the few mills still working and her mother served school dinners at the local Tech. And Ann was their only child. Already Mrs Watts was boasting proudly that her Ann would marry young, she was that pretty. All the boys were after her.

Sensing that he had lost her complete attention, Tyler pushed her firmly against the hard stone of the viaduct wall, thrusting himself against her open thighs, demanding, “Who you looking at?”

“That Rachel Lee.”

Ann saw the expression on Tyler’s face and realised that he liked Rachel no more than she did herself.

“What’s up?” she asked him curiously. “What you got against her?”

“Her mother was a murderer,” Tyler told her.

No one in the tribe had talked about Rachel’s mother, but they all knew the story, and Ann’s eyes widened in malicious glee. She had always known there was something odd about Rachel Lee. Just wait until she told the others at school about her! At that moment Tyler moved more determinedly against her, pushing up her skirt and pulling down her pants with one experienced movement, and Rachel was forgotten…but not for long.

Rachel knew the moment she walked into the schoolyard that something was wrong. Her senses, always attuned to danger, alerted her to the menacing quality of the silence engulfing her the moment she walked into the tarmacadam yard, but she looked neither to the right nor to the left as she walked past the silent huddles of watchers.

Ann Watts waited until Rachel drew level with her before launching her first salvo.

“Whose mother’s a murderer, then?” she sang out, swiftly followed by her friends, as they picked up the taunting chorus and rang it across the schoolyard.

By now Rachel knew the story of her conception, but she still felt sensitive about it, and about the cloud hanging over her birth. She lashed out instinctively and her open palm caught the side of Ann Watts’ nose, and almost instantly blood spurted from it.

Almost as though the scent of blood drew them like hounds to a fox, the schoolyard was in an uproar. It took four teachers to separate the seething mass of bodies, and when they dragged Rachel out from beneath her attackers, she had a broken collarbone and three cracked ribs.

Despite questioning from her teachers and from the police Rachel refused to say what had caused the fight. The police constable was only young—he had recently been moved into the area from Cumbria and he was finding the brooding violence of the valley difficult to take. There was poverty where he came from too, but it was a different sort of poverty from this, just as his people were a different sort of people. Privately he felt sorry for the little gypsy girl, but his expression betrayed nothing of this when he questioned her. She looked very forlorn and alone in the starched hospital bed, and he suspected that the nurses weren’t any kinder to her than her peers had been.

It was after her stay in hospital that things began to change for Rachel. She saw the change in her grandmother almost from the moment she came out. Naomi had aged, but more than that, there were new lines on her face that could have only been put there by pain. For the first time in her life Rachel knew the terrible fear of being all alone. What would happen to her if her grandmother should die? The tribe didn’t want her.

Would she have to go into a home? Rachel knew very little about these institutions other than the fact that they were held over the heads of hapless gypsy children as a threat of what could happen to them if they misbehaved. Somehow in Rachel’s mind, children’s homes had become confused with prison, and she thought of being sent away to one of them as a form of punishment.

Every day she saw her grandmother fade away a little more. Sometimes when she thought no one was watching her Naomi massaged the outside of her breast. She was in deep pain, Rachel knew that. She also knew that her grandmother had to drink some of the special poppy drug she made to help her sleep at night.

Rachel was frightened, but as with everything else she learned to lock the fear up inside her.

Naomi knew that her time was short. There was pain inside her that ate into her, a gnawing, bitter pain that was destroying her from within. The pain came from the lump she had discovered in her breast, she knew that. She was going to die, and when she did what would become of Rachel?

Winter came and the tribe was once again in the far north, not camping in the tranquil valley on the MacGregor lands this time, but on a barren piece of waste ground outside a small town.

Where once they had commanded a certain amount of respect and fear, gypsies were now almost consistently reviled. The townspeople called them “dirty thieves”, and Rachel was more conscious than ever of the way others looked at them. She had never felt more alien and alone. There was no one she could turn to. Naomi was dying, but Rachel still doggedly hoped that somehow her beloved grandmother would grow well and strong again.

She spent hours searching for special herbs that were supposed to have magic properties to heal her. She saved the choicest pieces of meat for her, but none of it did any good; Naomi was dying.

The spring that Rachel was fifteen they stopped off in the north for the Whitsuntide fairs again. Ann Watts was still at school, but now she was in her last year. Last year’s plumpness had given way to unsightly fat, and she eyed Rachel with spite and bitchiness when she arrived at school.

“I see the gypos are back,” she sneered, giving Rachel a wide berth. “I thought I could smell something bad!”

Blotting out the laughs and jeers, Rachel held her head high and walked into the classroom. She loved the deep tranquillity of its silence almost as much as she hated her fellow pupils. Inside her something was yearning desperately for knowledge, but her lessons were so fragmented that in all her years of schooling she had learned almost nothing.

To the teachers she was just another gypsy brat, who would be gone before she could learn anything worth knowing. She could read and write and add up simple columns of figures, which in a school like the one she was in now was as much as many of their pupils would achieve by the time they were ready to leave.

They had been back in the valley for almost a week when one afternoon Rachel was struck by the knowledge that Naomi needed her. When the class stood up and the teacher left, Rachel darted out after him, taking the short cut to the gypsy camp, along the canal tow path. She ran all the way, and arrived out of breath and scared out of her wits. This was the first time she had felt for herself the power that ran so strongly in the women of her family.

As she had known she would, she found her grandmother close to death. Naomi recognised her, and forced away her pain for long enough to take her hand. She had spent many hours worrying about this child, this changeling who was neither Romany nor gorgio.

Pulling Rachel close to her so that she could whisper in her ear, she told her where she had hidden the small amount of money she had managed to scrape together since she had realised she was ill. She had saved the money with one purpose only in mind, and now she told Rachel what she was to do.

“You must leave here now, before…before I die. You must pretend that you are older than your years. You must get yourself a job and live as a gorgio would, Rachel. The Romany way of life is not for you, and I do not want you to become any man’s whore. Remember always that my spirit goes with you.”

Hot tears fell on her cold hands as she pushed Rachel away from her. Rachel was losing the only person on earth who cared about her, but if she stayed the tribe would reject her, and the school authorities would come and she would be put in a home. Naomi was right…she had to leave.

Alternately shivering and crying, Rachel found the small store of money. She bent down to kiss Naomi’s cheek and murmured the secret Romany words of farewell. She would not be here to see her grandmother’s funeral pyre; she would not be here to wish her spirit well.

Naomi opened her eyes and saw the indecision on her grandchild’s face. Summoning the last of her strength, she took Rachel’s hand in hers. “Go now…go with my blessing, my child…Go now.”

From the moment she had learned to read Rachel had realised that it was education that was the only escape route from poverty, and now she was drawn as countless thousands of others had been drawn before her to the gilded spires of Oxford.

She had passed through the town many times with the tribe. She knew from her reading what it was…but in her ignorance she knew nothing of the taboos and rituals it represented; just as strong and damning as those of her own people.

Rachel reached Oxford in the late summer of 1977, when she was just short of her seventeenth birthday. She travelled mainly on foot, using the ancient Romany paths, carefully eking out the money her grandmother had given her by taking casual work along the way—mostly on farms, but always taking care to choose a farm where she could be sure of being taken under the wing of the farmer’s wife. Rachel had learned enough about the male sex in her short life to make her wary of putting herself into any man’s powers. She still remembered the hated sensation of being touched by male hands, and it was a man who had led to her mother’s rejection by her people. Men of any age were to be avoided.

By the time she reached Oxford she had added to her small hoard of money and had two hundred pounds tucked away in the leather bag she had tied to the inside of her skirt. Her clothes were in rags, too short, too skimpy, augmented here and there by the odd cast-off given to her by kind-hearted farmers’ wives who had taken pity on her.

Where once their pity would have offended her, now she accepted it with a brief smile, because Rachel was realising for the first time in her life the power of freedom. Oh, she missed her grandmother, but she didn’t miss the oppressive disapproval of the tribe, which she was only just beginning to recognise for what it was; nor did she miss the contempt and dislike of the people in whose towns they stayed. Here in the country it was different—she was different, because she no longer wore the hated tag of “gypsy”.

Only now was she coming to realise that she was free; that she had the power to choose what she would be. The farms where she stopped off to work thought she was just another of the itinerant band of teenagers who spent their summers working in the fields; gypsies didn’t travel alone, and her skin was pale enough, her hair dark red enough for her not to be picked out immediately as a member of the Romany people.

She was willing to work hard and she was consequently awarded respect by the farmers’ wives who employed her. Rachel didn’t mind what kind of work she was asked to do, just so long as it didn’t bring her into too much contact with any male members of the households where she stopped, and that too was a point in her favour. Several times she was asked to stay on, but she was slowly coming to realise that there might be more for her in life than the drudgery of such menial tasks.

At one farm where she stayed in prosperous Cheshire she was allowed to sleep in a room which had once belonged to the now adult daughter of the family, and this room came complete with its own television. Several members of the gypsy tribe had had television, of course, but her grandmother had not been among them, and Rachel spent her free time absorbing information via this new source like a desert soaking up rain. She watched all manner of programmes—education, political, cartoons, American cops-and-robbers series, and everything she saw only confirmed to her that there was another form of life out there.

She remembered how her grandmother had always told her that education was the key that unlocked many doors, and how she had believed her. But how could she get the sort of education she needed? Because now Rachel had a goal. She wanted to be like the women she saw on television, polished, glamorous…loved. How did they get like that? They were like no women she had ever seen before, with their long blonde hair and their pretty faces—and their clothes.

Up until now as far as Rachel was concerned clothes had simply been something she had worn to protect her body from the weather, but now she was seeing girls wearing pretty clothes, and she ached to wear them herself.

When she wasn’t working she spent more time than she had ever done before exploring the various towns she passed through on her way south. She stared in through shop windows and watched…and soon she had plucked up the courage to walk in through the plate glass doors of one of the stores. If the girl who served her was shocked by the state of the clothes she was wearing, or surprised that Rachel didn’t even know her own size, she kept it to herself.

Rachel spent her money carefully. She knew exactly how she wanted to look. When she came out of the store she caught sight of herself by accident in a plate glass window, and froze, shocked by this new image of herself. She no longer looked different—poor. She looked just like everyone else.

She turned her head to make sure. All around her young girls dressed in the timeless uniform of the young strolled, flirted and laughed, and she was now one of them. She stared down at her jean-clad legs—her grandmother hadn’t approved of girls wearing any form of trousers—then touched the soft fabric of her new T-shirt. The feel of clean new fabric beneath her fingertips was sensuously pleasing. It felt good to know that no one had ever worn these clothes before her, that they were hers and hers alone.

By the time she reached Oxford Rachel had lost all but the faintest tinge of her Romany accent, and she had also removed her gypsy earrings. She was dressed just like any other teenager, and wore her new-found confidence like a patina of pleasure.

Oxford drew her like a magnet. She had seen a programme on television about it, and that had increased her yearning to be there.

She arrived just before the start of the Michaelmas term, and the town was almost empty of students; the bicycles that later would fill the narrow streets were few and far between, and the pubs and discos that later would be the haunt of the young were almost empty. During the long summer recess Oxford belonged to its inhabitants and its tourists—American in the main, come to stroll among the colleges, and examine the quaintness of this ancient seat of learning.

Rachel found a job easily enough in one of the hotels, but the pay wasn’t as good as it had been on the farm, and the work was hard. The majority of the other chambermaids were foreign; an Irish girl with an accent so thick that Rachel could barely understand it made friendly overtures towards her, and by the end of the first week she was beginning to feel she was settling in.

When she complained to Bernadette about the poorness of her wage the Irish girl grinned at her.

“Well, why don’t you do what I do? Get yourself a job in one of the pubs in the evening? They’re looking for someone at the place where I work. I could take you along and introduce you if you like?”

Rachel agreed. Although the hotel provided its chambermaids with board and food, the meals they were served were very meagre indeed, and she was almost constantly hungry.

She got the job in Bernadette’s pub. The manager was a plump cheerful man in his late forties, with two girls of his own who were away at university, and his wife kept a stern eye on the more flirtatious of the barmaids.

Rachel felt happier than she had ever been in her life, but when she shyly asked Bernadette if she knew how she might go about joining a library, the Irish girl filled the dormitory they shared with the other chambermaids with her rollicking laugh.

“Joining a library, is it, you’re wanting? Well, sure there’s a fine thing! Oi’m thinking that a pretty girl like you can get all the learning she wants from the men…”

Bernadette was a flirt, Rachel had quickly realised that, but she hadn’t realised until now how great a gap yawned between them. For the first time since she had left them she felt homesick for the tribe. They were, after all, her people.

When Bernadette asked her if she wanted to go to a disco she refused.

“Ah well, suit yourself, then…I’m sure I don’t mind having all the boys to meself.” Bernadette tossed her dark hair as she walked out, and Rachel knew she had offended her.

Fortunately Bernadette had a mercurial temper and a kind heart, and by morning she was her normal friendly self, chatting animatedly to Rachel about the boy she had met the previous evening, as they worked.

“Keep away from Number Ten,” she warned Rachel. “Helga…you know, the German girl, she was telling me that when she went in this morning he came out of his bathroom stark naked and asked her if she’d mind giving him a rub down! Dirty old man, he’s fifty if he’s a day…and married. I mind he’s stayed here before with his wife…”

All the chambermaids gossiped, although Rachel tended to keep herself aloof. She wasn’t used to such friendliness, and she treated it with caution, half expecting them to change and turn on her, unable to forget what she had suffered during her schooldays, but now she was different, now she wasn’t a despised gypo but simply another young woman like themselves.

The seventies were a good time to be young; the world was full of optimism, and youth was petted and fêted by all. To be young was to hold the world in the palm of your hand. Rachel was constantly meeting other young people who, like herself, cherished their freedom, but who, unlike her, had travelled the world. They came into the pub in their faded jeans, carrying their backpacks, the men thin and bearded, their girlfriends long-haired and kohl-eyed, drinking beer while they told their tales of Kathmandu, and worshipping at the feet of the great ashrams. Everyone who was anyone was into meditation; Rachel read the magazines left behind by the guests and learned that she was living in an almost magical era.

As the summer heat faded into autumn, and mists began to hang over the river in the early morning sunlight, Oxford gradually began to stir back to life. Students arrived in dribs and drabs, trickling back into the town; life began to stir beneath the somnolence of the summer, as the tourists left to make way for the undergraduates.

By the beginning of Michaelmas term life in the town had changed, its pulse hard and heady. Bernadette was delighted.

“Now we’ll see some foine young men,” she promised Rachel one morning as they finished their work. “You wait and see!”

It was impossible not to respond to the surge of excitement beating through the air. Rachel felt it in her own thudding pulse. The crisp tang of late summer with its nostalgic undertones of autumn hung on the air. Almost every night the pub was full of young men in shabby jeans or corduroy trousers, University scarves wrapped round their necks, their long hair brushing their shoulders. They talked with a multitude of accents, but almost always in the same studiedly throwaway fashion; they were the cream, the jeunesse dorée, and they knew it.

In some of the staider colleges it was still necessary to have permission to run a motorcar, and so the traditional bicycles were very much in use. Rachel had to run across the road to avoid being knocked down by one of them one evening as she hurried to work. Behind her she heard a great shout and then a crash, and turning round she saw a tangle of jean-clad legs and bicycle wheels.

Instinctively she started to walk away, until a plaintive voice halted her.

“I say, don’t go and leave me here! I might have broken my leg…”

His voice was cultivated and teasing: the voice of a male used to being courted and flattered. As she turned her head to look back at him Rachel caught the blond flash of his hair. She hesitated.

“Come on…it was your fault I fell off, you know. I haven’t ridden one of these damn things for years, and when I saw you…pretty girls oughtn’t to be allowed to cross the roads in front of learner bicycle riders!”

He had called her pretty, and immediately Rachel stiffened, but there had been none of the hated near-violence and dislike in his voice that she had heard from the other men.

Caution urged her to walk away, but something deeper, stronger, and much more potent, urged her to stay. Slowly she walked towards him and watched him disentangle himself from his bicycle. He was tall, over six foot, with shoulder-length fair hair, and the bluest eyes Rachel had ever seen. They were the sort of eyes that always seemed to be full of light and laughter. He was laughing now, grinning ruefully as he brushed himself down.

“Damn! I think I’ve twisted my front wheel. That’ll teach me to look at pretty girls!” He moved and then winced, taking his weight off his left foot. “I seem to have twisted my ankle as well. My rooms aren’t far from here…If you give me a hand I should be able to make it to them without too much difficulty.”

At any other time Rachel would have found his assumption that she would automatically agree to help him off putting, but for some reason she found herself responding to his smile and walking towards him.

“If I could just put my arm round your shoulders…”

His arm was muscular but thin, and she could smell the scent of his body mingling with the oily odour of wool from his sweater. He smiled at her, his teeth white in the tanned darkness of his face. For some reason she almost wanted to reach out and touch him. Shocked by her own reaction, Rachel dragged her gaze away.

He was like no other boy or man she had ever known. There was an aura about him that she could feel herself responding to. She looked at his hand, cupped round the ball of her shoulder. His fingers were long, the nails well cared for.

“Cat got your tongue?” he demanded with another grin.

Rachel shook her head. He was going to make her late for work, but recklessly she didn’t care.

He said it was only a little way to his rooms, but in actual fact it was half a mile. Rachel gazed up in reverence at the ancient buildings of his college. She had explored them all during the summer recess, combining her walks through their hallowed grounds with knowledge she had gained from the books she had borrowed from the library. It had been the publican’s wife who had come to the rescue and shown her how to join the library, and now she touched the weathered stone as they rounded the corner of the building and entered the enclosed quadrangle.

“Tom Quad,” her companion told her cheerfully, glancing sideways at her.

Rachel only smiled. She knew all about the history of Christ Church College; that it had first been commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey, four years before he fell from Henry VIII’s grace. Christopher Wren had added the Tower over Wolsey’s gate, in 1682, and Rachel glanced up towards it automatically, just as Great Tom, the bell, tolled its curfew.

“Bang on time as usual! Come on, my rooms are up here.”

His weight was beginning to make her shoulder ache, but it never occurred to Rachel to refuse to go with him. During the summer recess she had learned to parry the flirtatious remarks of the pub’s patrons, but both Bernadette and the landlord’s wife had warned her that Oxford’s students could be remarkably persistent.

“You’d think they’d have better things to do with their time than spending it trying to get you into bed with them,” Bernadette sniffed disdainfully.

It was from Bernadette and the other girls at the hotel that Rachel had gradually learned to be a little more worldly. Now when she worked she often hummed the latest pop tune. She wore make-up—something her grandmother had always disapproved of, and she was gradually adopting the manners and fashions of her peers.

For the first time in her life she felt that she was actually accepted on equal terms with her peers, and she liked that feeling, but Rachel was by nature cautious. When the other girls disappeared for the evening with flurried giggles, and didn’t appear until the following morning, Rachel listened to their whispered confidences about the boys they had been out with, but when anyone tried to date her she kept them firmly at bay. She wasn’t interested in boyfriends and romance; there wasn’t time in her life for them. She had so much to do; coming to Oxford had opened her eyes to all that was missing from her life.

These students who flocked through Oxford’s streets would one day go out into the world and become people of eminence, secure and respected. The bitterness of her childhood haunted her and Rachel was determined to make herself inviolate. The only way she could do that was by achieving financial security.

She had a quick intelligence and had soon realised that she could never be content with the goals Bernadette and the other girls set themselves. They were happy to drift from day to day, spending their wages on new clothes, dating a different boy every night. They were like the poppies that bloomed in the cornfields in the summer, Rachel thought wryly—pretty and giddy, blowing this way and then that at the will of the wind, but once summer was gone they wilted and died; they could not survive without the sun, without warmth.

“Think you can get me up the stairs?”

Rachel frowned and looked consideringly at him. He wasn’t the first student who had shown an interest in her, and caution warned her to tread carefully.

“I have to get back,” she told him. “I should be at work.”

“You work?”

He said it with such amused condescension that Rachel could feel her skin flushing with resentment.

“Yes,” she told him curtly, “at the King’s Arms.”

“Ah…Yes. I see.”

He was looking at her differently now, consideringly; and Rachel knew what was going through his mind. In her almost teenage uniform of jeans and cotton peasant blouse, her long hair down on her shoulders, he had mistaken her for a fellow student. Now that he knew she was not, he was looking at her in much the same way the village children had regarded her and her contemporaries when they camped near their homes. Only the suspicion was absent from his eyes, and in its place was an intense glitter of sexual speculation.

“So you’re not a student.”

Her head lifted, her eyes coolly meeting his and dismissing the look of desire he gave her.

“No.”

“What’s your name? Mine’s Tim…Tim Wilding.”

His abrupt change of tack caught her off guard, and unwillingly Rachel found herself telling him,

“Rachel.”

The blue eyes laughed down into hers. “I don’t like it…it’s far too biblical for you! I shall call you Gypsy…it suits you far more.”