Dark and Deepest Red(46)

The first, the least, was that those relatives were stripped of their home and livelihoods. Because so often, that was what being Romani meant. It meant being blamed. It meant holding your ground as best you could, because if you gave every inch they asked for, they would drive you off the earth. And sometimes it meant they did anyway.

But that screaming, so deep it felt written into his bones, left him standing with the second possibility.

He made himself ask. He made the words come.

“What happened to them?” he asked.

His father shook his head, as though telling him to turn back. It was the first time Emil wondered if his father knew what he’d been doing this whole time, keeping distance from their family’s history so he didn’t have to rip it out of himself every time he left the house. And for the first time, Emil wondered if his father maybe thought he was onto something.

“Papa,” Emil said. “What happened?”

His father’s eyes fell, and in that small flinch, Emil knew.

Emil had never asked how their sixteenth-century relatives had died. He already knew there were a stomach-turning number of ways to die five hundred years ago. He’d seen them in his parents’ papers. Childbed fever. Bloody flux. Saint Anthony’s fire. Lepry. The ague. Venereal disease. Unexplained fever. “The red plague.” The bite of a “wayward sow.” Being thrown into a river by “a skittish calf.” Drowning in a ditch. Scythes. Falling from things—a tree, a window, a yarn winder’s stand. Falling onto or into things—a rock, a well, the horns of a bull.

He had never before considered death from a dancing plague.

And he had never before considered execution, not for those relatives in Strasbourg.

But now, when he shut his eyes, all that history grew its own voices and called up its own ghosts. The scream of that girl, that woman, burned away every possibility except that one.

In the few seconds before his father said, “They were executed,” Emil had already run through the possibilities. Even from what little he’d heard of his parents’ lectures, he knew enough about criminals hanged in the center of town. Women thought to be adulterers strangled by the tradesmen with the strongest hands. Poor men punished with lashing that led to infection and then fever.

Suspected witches murdered by water or rope or fire.

“How do you know?” Emil asked. “How do we know any of this?”

“Church records,” his father said. “Coroners’ rolls. Physicians’ logs. Transcripts of sermons. Strasbourg city council notes. Firsthand accounts. Transcriptions after the fact.”

Emil flinched. It was all so damningly specific, detailed as the footnotes in his mother’s articles.

“All of them say that?” Emil asked. “That they were executed?”

“No,” his father said. “But we have enough to guess.”

“How?” Emil asked.

“Death records,” his father said, without hesitation or ceremony. “Their names are spelled a little differently every place you find them, but it’s the same women. Lavinia and Dorenia Blau, their ages more than ten years apart, both listed as, Commended back into the hands of the devil for the blessing and good of the people, who now live free from the demons who once plagued them.”

Emil tensed. He wondered how many times his father must have read that translation to have committed it to memory.

“‘Commended back into the hands of the devil’?” Emil asked. “What does that even mean?”

His father set a hand on the counter and looked away. “What do you think it means?”

Those strange words—commended back into the hands of the devil—fit so neatly with what gadje thought of them. It mapped so cleanly against the scorn that landed on his grandmother when that little girl went missing, and the lack of apology when she turned up again.

“You know so little about those who came before us, Emil,” his mother said. “Don’t let this be all you think of. We are more than what we’ve survived.”

But Emil swore he could smell the dust and stone of Strasbourg, a thin cord through the house.

In those few seconds above the reservoir, the space between centuries had thinned and faded.

In those few seconds, Rosella Oliva had blurred into a girl from five centuries earlier.

He had thought he’d imagined it all, that he’d lost himself somewhere in the haze of not-sleeping. But everything that had happened five hundred years ago was coming back to life, and it was dragging Rosella with it.





Strasbourg, 1518


So many dead, their names rung out in the square, one after the next.

Cateline, the book binder’s wife, and the book binder with her.

Enneleyn, the girl called the Lily of Strasbourg.

And the miller’s elder daughter.

“The miller’s son himself swears he has seen you engaging in witchcraft,” the friar says.

The bailiff has left her in the room with this tall, proud man in his robes.

That is the worst sign thus far.

“And that he caught you pilfering artifacts from the dead for your dark magic,” the friar says. “Do you deny his charges?”

She must, if there is any chance of surviving this.

“I deny them,” she says.

“And you deny even his claim that he saw you fly from the crypt on a pitchfork? That which he was sworn to see with his own eyes?”