Power Play. PENNY JORDAN

her mother’s back was turned, Layla poured it away.

      She could not endure another night like this one; she would not endure it.

      While the rest of the camp slept she crept silently away. The constable on duty at the police station listened to her story in stunned shock, wondering whether or not to believe it. The sergeant, woken from his bed and brought grumbling to the station, took one look at Layla’s white, bitter face, and knew that he had found the motive for Duncan’s death.

      They arrested Rafe at dawn; and he was sentenced to death two months later. He never reached the hangman’s noose. Somehow, from somewhere, he obtained a secret poison. He was found dead in his cell one morning, his body already stiffening, his eyes glaring bitterly into emptiness.

      The rest of the tribe shunned Layla. They elected a new leader, who decreed that Naomi must be allowed to stay among them, but that Layla must leave.

      When Naomi discovered that her daughter was pregnant, she pleaded with the tribe for clemency, and it was granted; Layla would remain as an outcast from the tribe, but she would be allowed to travel with them.

      Her daughter’s frail, wraithlike condition appalled Naomi. The thought of the coming child was the only thing that kept her alive. Duncan’s child. Layla said the words over and over again to herself like a mantra.

      “It could be Rafe’s child,” Naomi told her.

      Layla shook her head, and looked at her mother with eyes far too old for such a childish face.

      “No, it could not. He did not take me as a man takes a woman; he did not spill his seed inside me.”

      Rachel Lee was born to her mother during her eighth month of pregnancy. To see Layla’s thin, almost sticklike body bloated almost obscenely with her pregnancy caused Naomi almost constant pain. Some fierce spirit seemed to burn in Layla, giving her a pride and a determination she had never thought to see in her fey, spoiled child.

      The birth was a difficult one, and although they paused to listen to the cries coming from the caravan, none of the other women came to help. Naomi did not mind. She was an experienced midwife, and the child was well positioned, although perhaps a trifle large for Layla’s emaciated frame.

      It was only when she placed the child in her daughter’s arms that she saw Layla smile properly for the first time since Duncan’s death.

      “She is beautiful,” she told her mother. “You will call her Rachel, and you will love her for me, won’t you, Mother?”

      Already a swift-flowing river of red blood was carrying Layla away from them, and Naomi knew it could not be staunched; that her daughter was dying. She had known it from the moment Layla gave birth. In some ways she felt her daughter had willed herself to stay alive only as long as she carried her child. She had in any case been as one dead to the rest of the tribe from the moment she betrayed Rafe.

      There was no burial pyre for Layla, no grieving or lamenting for the brief life so quickly extinguished, and although the tribe accepted Naomi, little Rachel grew up knowing that she was not truly part of it; that there was something mysterious about her own birth and the death of her mother, that set her apart from the others.

      She soon learned that her mother’s name was one that must never be spoken and that she and Naomi were allowed to stay with the tribe as a favour rather than as a right.

      Her pain at the way she was excluded was something she learned to cloak with pride and indifference, and she was soon being described as far too much her mother’s daughter. She was not popular with the other children, and she knew it. It made her only more aloof and withdrawn. Only Naomi loved her, only Naomi stood between her and the hostility of the others.

      5

      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