A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles)
Read A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) Online
Authors: Willow Rose
A GYPSY SONG
The Wolfboy Chronicles
by Willow Rose
Copyright Willow Rose 2011
Published by Jan Sigetty Boeje
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
Cover design by Jan Sigetty Boeje
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Special thanks to my editor Christie Giraud
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Romance Fatal Serif Font by Juan Casco
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Table of Contents:
THE GIRL IN THE BASKET
They came in
the middle of the night. It was during the war, the Second World War that is, and therefore they had to travel in the dark in order not to be seen. It was somewhere in the mountains of southern Germany called Bayern in a small town called Lindenmühle not far from the border to Austria.
No one in the nice street of Reidenburgerstrasse would ever have imagined such a thing happening in their part of town, and especially not the couple in number sixteen.
Mr. and Mrs. Schneider were sound asleep in their house and certainly not suspecting anyone to approach their door in the middle of the night placing a basket with a little baby girl sleeping in it on their doorstep. And certainly they would never imagine someone would leave her there for them to find with only a small note as explanation saying:
Her name is Sara, please take good care of her.
Lindenmühle was a very small town with only three hundred twenty-one inhabitants and indeed a place where news would travel faster than the speed of light (especially if that chubby lady, Mrs. Müller, in number thirteen got a hold of it). Mr. and Mrs. Schneider knew that and they always kept their secrets to themselves. Not that they had many, but they did have one they never shared with anyone on the street.
They wanted so badly to have a child, but hadn’t succeeded yet. Not that there was anything wrong with any of them, their doctor assured.
“Maybe it is just the war,” he said.
So he suggested they wait until the war was over—which he meant was not going to be long. Now they had waited for three years and the war had no end in sight.
They both longed for a child that seemed to never come, both of them in very different ways. She would talk about it constantly while he would listen as the husband and caretaker he was, but he would never utter a word or complain himself. He was simply not brought up that way. It was not suitable for a man of his position.
Instead, he had his own little ritual. Every morning before Mr. Schneider went off to work at the train station in Lindenmühle he would stop for exactly four and a half minutes at the door leading into the room that was meant for their future baby. He would open the door and look at the empty crib and the rocking chair in the corner and he would imagine his baby lying in the crib or his wife sitting in the rocking chair, singing for the baby until it fell asleep.
He would then stuff his pipe and light it and nod a little to himself while thinking:
“Some day … some day soon.”
So it went on every morning for three years. While the world was fighting outside, he kept the dream alive inside.
And so it was this particular morning, too, when he woke up and prepared himself to go off to work. He washed his face, trimmed the mustache with a pair of scissors, put on his uniform, looked at the clock in the small pocket in his vest and then peeked into the nursery—while stuffing the pipe—before he went downstairs for his morning coffee and toasted bread. Normally, that is before the war, he would get a sausage and even maybe some bacon to go with the toast, but these days he was satisfied just to get some real bread and—well not
real
coffee—but something that was nearly as good.
He kissed his wife as always, put on the uniform jacket, looked at his watch a second time, because a train station manager is always on time, and then he put the pipe back in his mouth and opened the beautiful hand-carved wooden door that separated them from the outside world and its madness.
And there it was.
A small, braided basket right in front of his feet. The good Mr. Schneider could hardly believe his eyes. But since his wife had seen it too, it had to be true. Now, who would leave a big nice basket like that in these days when it was hard to get anything at all? he thought to himself while taking the pipe out of his mouth.
The basket seemed to have a big blanket inside of it.
“Look there is a letter,” Mrs. Schneider said and kneeled beside the basket to get the small envelope.
“Maybe it is a gift from someone.”
She read it out loud for them both.
“Her name is Sara …?”
Mr. and Mrs. Schneider looked at each other with great confusion. Now what was all this? Could it be?
Carefully, Mrs. Schneider lifted some of the blanket and the most beautiful sight met her. That of a sleeping baby girl only, three weeks old. Her hair was black as the night and her skin soft and smooth. She was breathing heavily and smiling in her sleep.
“Let me see,” Mr. Schneider said and looked under the blanket as well. It was hard to tell exactly what he felt when he saw the little face but that was always difficult to know with him. What he felt. That was what Mrs. Schneider had come to learn over the years. He didn’t talk much and when he did it was mostly about trains and whether they were on time or not.
But this time she knew they felt the same thing. She recognized it in his eyes. It was instant love for this little girl that someone had left for them as a gift. As a true blessing in the middle of the worst of times.
“Hurry. Let’s take the basket inside before someone sees it,” Mr. Schneider said, and Mrs. Schneider never thought about it twice.
Inside the house they unpacked the little girl and Mr. Schneider hid the blanket, basket and letter in the attic so no one would find it.
Then they put her in the crib.
Finally, they both thought as they held each other and stared at her until she woke up, finally someone was sleeping in the crib.
That day they didn’t think at all of the war or going to work or even about trains. They just held Sara in their arms and took turns at feeding her the bottle and tickling her tummy.
That day for the first time in his life, Mr. Schneider was late for work.
THE JINX
Over the next
twelve years, Sara grew up to be a young girl. She wasn’t exactly the prettiest of the girls in the neighborhood with her thick messy and curly black hair that always fell down in her forehead and covered her eyes (even though her mom always tied it nicely on the top of her head every morning, she would always come home from school with it like that) and maybe she wasn’t the most well-behaved either.
But Sara did have a good heart to her, her mother kept saying, when the neighbors complained about her climbing their trees, stealing their apples or destroying their rosebushes.
The teachers didn’t know what to do with her, either. She always seemed to get into trouble with the other kids and she had a hard time sitting still during classes. Then one day a teacher gave her a book.
“Try and read this,” she said, and suddenly Sara sat still for hours. She didn’t say a word to anyone until she was done with the book. Then she asked for another one, and the teacher gave her a new one.
As the years went by, she read more and more. Her teachers encouraged her to do so. That way she wouldn’t get in trouble and then they wouldn’t get disturbed trying to teach the other and more well-mannered students.
But even though Sara meant a lot of headaches for Mr. and Mrs. Schneider, they still looked at her as their pride.
The neighbors never asked any questions as to where Sara suddenly came from, but there was a lot of talking about it over the picket fences when Mr. and Mrs. Schneider were not around to hear. The little tousled black-haired, brown-eyed girl didn’t seem to fit in anywhere in the nice Reidenburgerstrasse.
Only the nosy Mrs. Müller occasionally asked some questions. She would wonder how come the little girl’s skin seemed much darker than her parents’, how she got her black hair and dark brown eyes since her parents where both so very blond and blue-eyed. But Sara never detected that there could be anything but mere curiosity behind it, and she just smiled and answered the best she could.
“I take after my grandmother, my mother always says.”
The nosy Mrs. Müller would nod and look at Sara with great suspicion since in those times during that war, being dark skinned was not a good thing.
Finally the war ended and all the hatred and fighting was over. So Mr. and Mrs. Schneider went on and did as the good doctor once had told them to do. They tried for another baby. A year later, to everyone's surprise, the tiny Mrs. Schneider didn’t just give birth to one child, she had triplets.
So Sara’s life changed dramatically. Her mother was busy feeding all the babies and trying to get them to fall asleep, and to Sara it seemed as there was always someone crying in the house, even at night. If it wasn’t one of the three babies, Mrs. Schneider would be the one sitting in the rocking chair crying.
And Sara was always in the way of her parents now. So she started to take care of herself. She would fix herself dinner and breakfast, and she was even taking care of her father when he came home tired after working double shifts at the train station in order to make enough money to feed the rapidly growing family.
“These are hard times, no one is making enough money to get by these days,” he would say to her as if she understood. Then he would sigh deeply at the sound of another baby crying, take off his shoes and go sit in the living room smoking his pipe and grumble.
And Sara kept wondering what happened to them. They never talked to each other anymore, and they certainly didn’t talk to her.
At school things changed as well. When Sara turned ten, things started to happen to her. Not to her body or anything like that, but around her. Stuff would move around or even fall from a table.
But it only seemed to happen when she got mad. Like really mad. Like when someone in her class teased her. And they started doing that a lot the next couple of years since they discovered what would happen. It made it more fun. But they were clever and only did it when the teachers were not looking.
Worst of them all was Gertrud Wagner.
Sara’s favorite thing was to read. She always had her nose in a book and could finish several of them during a week. And Gertrud with her pack of female wolves—as Sara liked to call them—one day took a book from her.
“What'cha reading?” she said, and Sara tried to stay calm until they started pushing her and hiding her book from her while chanting and singing. Sara had a big temper so it didn’t take them long to get her upset enough.