Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(3)
Well, then, she would let the cards fall where they may and prevaricate according to their pictures. Since only with concentration could she decipher the text below the pictures, she mostly memorized their meanings her mum had rendered.
One by one, Romy turned the cards face up – and stifled a gasp.
The Magician, the Emperor, and the High Priestess. With her own readings, this layout had come as no surprise, but to turn up in an inquirer’s reading . . . something was surely amiss.
If she expected to convince these two of her psychic powers, she could only be the Tarot’s Fool. A meal was at stake here. Or more, she inexplicably feared.
Nevertheless, she gamely flipped over the next card. The Tower card, with lightning striking around it, flames bursting from its windows, and people leaping from them in desperation. And, despite its ominous implications, she sighed with relief. It was not the Death card. At least, not immediately. Interesting, that.
She resumed laying out the rest of the cards, but Gunter’s elegant hand slapped over hers, halting her.
“That card – the one with the tower atop the jagged bluff – you paused after turning it over. Why?”
Observant, he was. And in need of a comeuppance. She shook off his hand with its deluxe watch and glibly rattled off, “The high and mighty shall fall.”
“And the high and mighty would be who?”
“The cards are always about the inquirer – yourself.” She returned his gimlet gaze with a defiant one of her own. A foolhardy gesture. Always make the gadje you read for feel better. “Hook them in, so they’ll come back,” her mum had admonished repeatedly. And reinforce that any lack of belief on the inquirer’s part will generate energy that will negate the positive outcome.
But Romy’s tongue just wouldn’t stop. The man’s arrogance annoyed her. “The Tower signifies plans built on false assumptions. That you sit in the comfort of your train compartment, oblivious to its shaking and rattling. The Tower will rattle your expectations.”
This time, his smile, reducing the length of his dueling scar, was tight and parsimonious. “As a gypsy, who practices gypping, you should know better than to bite the hand that fe –”
“ – that is dirty,” she finished cheerily. If she weren’t so preoccupied about Old Duke, most likely coughing his life away from smoking his murderous Gitanes, she would not have been so careless with her words.
“Dirty?!” The man called Gunter looked both stunned and enraged by her comment. As she had done before their arrival, his elegant fingers abruptly whisked from the built-in table the half dozen cards she had laid out. They fluttered onto the moth-eaten carpet.
“Gunter!” the young woman remonstrated. “Let her finish. Please.”
He emitted an exasperated sigh and plowed fingers through his pomaded, Leprechaun’s pot o’ gold hair. “This was your idea, Irina.” He nodded at Romy and negligently flicked his hand at the scattered cards. “Proceed then with your theoretical fortune telling skills.”
Knobhead.
When she wanted nothing better, indeed, than to bite that hand that fed her, her stomach’s growling prompted her to comply. She collected the cards – four in all – retrieving one, in addition, teetering on the table’s edge and one more from Irina’s lap
Nose wrinkling again, the young woman shrank from her touch.
Well, mere water, like exotic perfume, was a camp luxury.
Without shuffling, Romy re-laid the recovered six cards out before her.
Her mum would have said those six held significance in that they had escaped the deck. But then her mum had also said, all too often, “Happy is the Gypsy girl, with feet dirty from dancing and a heart reckless from romancing.”
And just look where that had gotten her mum.
Incredibly, the Emperor, the Magician, and the High Priestess were yet again among the cards. And the Death card, naturally.
Her stuttering fingers continued the layout. The Wheel of Fortune reversed and the Tower. Significantly, the Tower card was also reversed this time. Even more significantly, she thought, the six escapees were all Major Arcana Tarot cards.
According to her mum, those high cards were an indication of life-altering events that would have long-term effects. Her mum should have had her own lay out and heeded it.
Not that a card reading could have saved Old Duke’s daughter. Her Spanish side had been as impetuous and passionate as her Slavic husband’s – shooting and stabbing one another, as they had, till death did them part.
Well, not exactly. It took a few hours for them to die, rejoined, at last, in one another’s arms. As Old Duke would wryly describe his daughter and son-in-law’s demises, “How they did love, when they loved.”
Naturally, Irina noticed the Death card. A manicured fingernail that contrasted with Romy’s ragged ones nudged the spectral card. A gleaming sapphire ring on the young woman’s right hand could have bought food for Romy and her grandfather for an entire year. “What does that mean?’
If Romy wanted food for her stomach, now was the time for grand embellishment. She thought of the train on which the couple had arrived. Were they traveling for business or pleasure?
“Ye will go on a difficult journey, a time of severe discomfort, so that you can learn an important lesson.” The porcelain doll to Romy’s left had no idea what severe discomfort was.