Dark and Deepest Red(19)

This is why there is no friar. She has been brought in on a matter of city ordinance, one the men of the Church must consider beneath them.

“So you understand our concern with the speculation that you and your aunt…” The bailiff trails off, motioning with his hand for her to complete the thought on her own.

Lala nods, because it is all she can do.

And because it is not a lie.

She does understand.

Lala’s heart spins faster, like the limbs of the stricken women.

This is how she will be blamed, her and Tante. They will be like the Jews blamed for the plague a century ago, hundreds slaughtered in this very city, all on an unproved suspicion that they put sickness into the wells. And again, four years ago, so many thrown into jail because someone had to be blamed for the bitter winter.

Lala stills her breath. Who has pointed to her and Tante’s black hair and their dark eyes and their skin that stays a warm color in winter? She searches the pit of her stomach for any suspicion that it might be Geruscha and Henne. But their strange efforts at friendship persist, and more and more she thinks they do not understand what they saw. So who else? Guilds who do not want Tante Dorenia’s competition? Men who think women should not be in the business of ink and dye at all?

“Mademoiselle Blau.” The bailiff casts his winter-blue eyes at her. “Are you a woman of die Zigeuner?”

Lala drags herself from her own fear, calling up the words her aunt told her to say if anything like this ever happened. Tante Dorenia taught them to her until she could repeat them back without flinching.

Except that Lala has already failed, because Tante Dorenia taught her never to need them.

Lala’s eyes water, her own eyelashes prickling her. She thinks of the fines, the cropping of hair, and far worse, that so many before them have endured.

Now, to save Tante and herself, she must deny her mother and her father, the dead in the ground, her own blood and her aunt’s.

It is the thought of leading Tante away from that imagined execution that steadies her tongue.

“No,” Lala says.

“And your mother and your father?” the bailiff asks.

Lala crosses herself, out of reverence for the dead, but it brings the benefit of seeming like a gesture of shock.

She replaces her parents’ vitsi, Manouche and Sinti, with the words her aunt gave her.

“A Frenchman and a German woman,” Lala says, because the bailiff will assume two Roma could not also be French and German.

The bailiff nods, satisfied with a job done.

She has said it.

She has denied her mother, whose heart held the most beautiful fairy tales. She would enthrall children with stories about a ?havo and a princess who glowed gold as the sun, or a young Rom completing an impossible task given by a wicked king or queen. Lala was not old enough to remember them, and whatever small threads live in her, she has now surrendered.

She has denied her father, who spent his short life mastering the davul-zurna. A man with a musician’s heart, he was such a contrast to his serious, business-minded sister, Dorenia. What would he say of his own daughter now?

“And you will swear an oath to this, yes?” the bailiff asks.

He asks as though it is nothing, no more than the oaths sworn for the Schw?rtag every year.

Her lips part to protest, but no words come.

An oath, one that denies herself and her mother and father.

She is caught, a moth ensnared in the sticky lace of a web she did not notice. She has flown straight into it.

She knows, in this moment, three things.

The first is that she will never tell Tante what has happened in this room. The shame would crush Lala where she stands. Tante taught her the words she has spoken—a Frenchman and a German woman—so she would know how to save herself. But Tante taught her more not to need them, not to be brought into this room in the first place.

Second, she will bake hyssop into unsalted bread to atone for the words she is about to speak. She will take it onto her tongue, and perhaps the penitence will stop her heart from growing so heavy it breaks her ribs.

The third is that she cannot touch Alifair again.

She will put an even wider distance between her and Alifair than he did when they were younger. Now that the magistrate has cast an eye toward Lala, any suspicion could catch him too. If she is not careful—more careful than she has been—the very things she loves about him, that which make him someone who could learn Romanipen, will destroy him.

Lala readies her tongue to speak, and is sure she can already taste the bite of hyssop leaves.

Mother and Father, she prays, forgive me. Forgive me. I must live, and I must save the woman who has treated me as her own.

The hidden altar Lala and Tante made them feels so paltry now. The best cloth they had, the white candle and dish of water, the food brought as earnestly as Lala would have brought her mother flowers she picked; it seems so small compared to what Lala must now do.

Mother and Father, forgive me.

The words become a chant through her bones, through the blood she must forswear.

“Yes,” she forces out, making herself meet the bailiff’s eyes. “Of course.”





Rosella


I flew past my parents’ room, both of them asleep, thinking I was staying over at Piper’s.

I went into the bathroom and soaped up my ankles. I splashed them to bubble up the soap, wondering if maybe I could slip the shoes off like a too-tight ring.