I nodded. It was an old theme for Da. He was most pitiful when he was in his cups on this topic. He was a tinker: a no-good pedlar-cum-thief when he had met my ma. She had been pure Romany, travelling with her family. But her man was dead, and she had us twin babies to provide for. She believed him when he boasted of a grand future and married him, against the advice of her own family, and without their blessing. He could have joined the family, and travelled with them. But Da had big ideas. He was going to be a great horse-dealer. He was going to buy an inn. He was going to run a livery stables, to train as a master-brewer. One feckless scheme after another until they were travellers in the poorest wagon she had ever called home. And then she was pregnant with another child.

I remember her dimly: pale and fat, and too weary to play with us. She sickened, she had a long and lonely labour. Then she died, crying to Da to bury her in the way of her people, the Rom way with her goods burned the night of her death. He did not know how, he did not care. He burned a few token scraps of clothing and sold the rest. He gave Dandy a comb of hers, and he gave me an old dirty piece of string with two gold clasps at each end. He told me they had once held rose-coloured pearls.

Where she got them Da had never known. She had brought them to him as her dowry and he had sold each one until there was nothing left but the string. One gold latch was engraved with the word I had been told was ‘John’. The other was inscribed ‘Celia’. He would have sold the gold clasps if he had dared. Instead he gave them to me with an odd little grimace.

‘You have the right,’ he said. ‘She always said it was for you, and not for Dandy. I’ll sell the gold clasp for you, and you can keep the string.’

I remember my dirty hand had closed tight over it.

‘I want it,’ I had said.

‘I’ll split the money with you,’ he had said winningly.’ Sixty: forty?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘That’s enough to buy a sugar bun,’ he said as if to clinch the deal. My stomach rumbled but I held firm.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Who are John and Celia?’

He had shrugged, shifty. ‘I don’t know,’ he had said. ‘Maybe folks your ma knew. You have a right to the necklace. She always told me to be sure to give it to you. Now I’ve done that. A promise made to the dead has to be kept. She told me to give it to you and to bid you keep it safe, and to show it when anyone came seeking you. When anyone asked who you were.’

‘Who am I?’ I had demanded instantly.

‘A damned nuisance,’ he said; his good temper gone with his chance to trick the gold clasp from me. ‘One of a pair of brats that I’m saddled with till I can be rid of you both.’

It would not be long now, I thought, sucking on a grass stem for the sweet green taste of it. It would not be long now until he would be able to be rid of us. That conversation had happened a long time ago, but Da had never changed his mind about us. He never acknowledged how much meat Dandy provided for the pot. He never realized that his horses would have been half-wild if I had not had the knack of riding them. Not he. The selfishness which made it easy for him to take on a woman with two small babies at the breast and no way to keep her save a cartload of foolish dreams, now made it easy for him to plan to sell us to the highest bidder. Whatever the terms.

I knew Dandy would end up whoring. Her black brazen eyes twinkled too readily. If we had been with a gypsy family, travelling with kin, there would be an early betrothal and early childbirth for Dandy, and a man to keep her steady. But here there was no one. There was only Da who cared nothing for what she might do. And Zima who laughed lazily and said that Dandy would be street-walking by the time she was sixteen. Only I heard that feckless prophecy with a shudder. And only I swore that it should not happen. I would keep Dandy safe from it.

Not that she feared it. Dandy was vain and affectionate. She thought it would mean fine clothes and dancing and attention from men. She could not wait to be fully grown and she used to insist I inspect the conical shapes of her breasts every time we swam or changed our clothes and tell her if they were not growing exceedingly lovely? Dandy looked at life with lazy laughing eyes and could not believe that things would not go well for her. But I had seen the whores at Southampton, and at Portsmouth. And I had seen the sores on their mouths and the blank looks in their eyes. I would rather Dandy had been a pickpocket all her days – as she was now – than a whore. I would rather Dandy be anything than a whore.

‘It’s just because you hate being touched,’ she said idly to me when the wagon was on the road towards Salisbury for the fair. She was lying on her side in the bunk combing her hair which tumbled like a black shiny waterfall over the side of the bunk. ‘You’re as nervy as one of your wild ponies. I’m the only one you ever let near you, and you won’t even let me plait your hair.’

‘I don’t like it,’ I said inadequately. ‘I can’t stand Da pulling me on to his knee when he’s drunk. Or the way Zima’s baby sucks at my neck or at my face. It gives me the shivers. I just like having space around me. I hate being crowded.’

She nodded. ‘I’m like a cat,’ she said idly. ‘I love being stroked. I don’t even mind Da when he’s gentle. He gave me a halfpenny last night.’

I gave a little muffled grunt of irritation. ‘He never gave me a thing,’ I complained. ‘And he’d never have sold that horse on his own. The farmer only bought it because he saw me ride it. And if it hadn’t been for me Da would never have trained it.’

‘Better hope the farmer’s daughter is a good rider,’ Dandy said with a chuckle in her voice. ‘Will she throw her?’

‘Bound to,’ I said indifferently. ‘If the man hadn’t been an idiot he’d have seen that I was only keeping her steady by luck, and the fact that she was bone-weary.’

‘Well it’s put him in good humour,’ Dandy said. We could hear Da muttering the names of cards to himself over and over, practising palming cards and dealing cards as the caravan jolted on the muddy road. Zima was sitting up front beside him. She had left her baby asleep on Dandy’s bunk, anchored by Dandy’s foot pressing lightly on her fat belly.

‘Maybe he’ll give us a penny for fairings,’ I said without much hope.

Dandy gleamed. ‘I’ll get you a penny,’ she promised. ‘I’ll get us sixpence and we’ll run off all night and buy sweetmeats and see the booths.’

I smiled at the prospect and then rolled over to face the rocking caravan wall. I was still bruised from my falls and as weary as a drunken trooper from the day and night training of the pony. And I had that strange, detached feeling which I often felt when I was going to dream of Wide. We would be a day and a half on the road, and unless Da made me drive the horse there was nothing I had to do. There were hours of journeying, and nothing to do. Dandy might as well comb her hair over and over. And I might as well sleep and doze and daydream of Wide. The caravan would go rocking, rocking, rocking down the muddy lanes and byways and then on the harder high road to Salisbury. And there was nothing to do except look out of the back window at the road narrowing away behind us. Or lie on the bunk and chat to Dandy. Between dinner and nightfall Da would not stop, the jolting creaking caravan would roll onwards. There was nothing for me to do except to wish I was at Wide; and to wonder how I would ever get myself – and Dandy – safely away from Da.

2

It was a long, wearisome drive, all the way down the lanes to Salisbury, up the Avon valley with the damp lush fields on either side where brown-backed cows stood knee-high in wet grasses, through Fordingbridge, where the little children were out from dame-school and ran after us and hooted and threw stones.

‘Come ‘ere,’ Da said, shuffling a pack of greasy cards as he sat on the driving bench. ‘Come ‘ere and watch this.’ And he hitched the ambling horse’s reins over the worn post at the front of the wagon and shuffled the cards before me, cut them, shuffled them again. ‘Did yer see it?’ he would demand. ‘Could yer tell?’

Sometimes I saw the quick secretive movement of his fingers, hidden by the broad palm of his hand, scanning the pack for tell-tale markings. Sometimes not.

He was not a very good cheat. It’s a difficult art, best done with clean hands and dry cards. Da’s sticky little pack did not shuffle well. Often as we ambled down the rutted road I said, ‘That’s a false shuffle,’ or ‘I can see the crimped card, Da.’

He scowled at that and said: ‘You’ve got eyes like a damn buzzard, Merry. Do it yourself if you’re so clever,’ and flicked the pack over to me with an irritable riffle of the cards.

I gathered them up, his hand and mine, and pulled the high cards and the picture cards into my right hand. With a little ‘tssk’ I brushed an imaginary insect of the driver’s bench with the picture cards in a fan in my hand to put a bend in them, ‘abridge’, so that when I re-assembled the pack I could feel the arch even when the pack was all together. I vaguely looked out over the passing fields while I shuffled the deck, pulling the picture cards and the high cards into my left hand and stacking them on top alternately with stock cards so I could deal a picture card to myself and a low card to Da.

‘Saw it!’ Da said with mean satisfaction. ‘Saw you make a bridge, brushing the bench.’

‘Doesn’t count,’ I said, argumentatively. ‘If you were a pigeon for plucking you’d not know that trick. It’s only if you see me stack the deck that it counts. Did you see me stack it? And the false shuffle?’