God's Sparrows. Philip Child
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in Joanna’s coloured Bible. Uncle Charles always called him Sir Tradition Gruff, and he might have been Dan’s own Uncle Murdo.
But it was Sir Rae’s lady that teased the boy’s imagination. She was dressed in flowing Gainsborough silks, as befitted a general’s lady of the eighteenth century, but the artist — perhaps with intentional irony — had left out of the picture the usual picture hat and shepherdess crook; instead, he had painted her with uncovered head, and in her blue-black hair above one ear was thrust a flower — not an English rose but some vivid flower of the south. She was dark and beautiful and strange, and out of her frame she stared not at her descendants, the most British Burnets, but beyond them — at what?
Charles Burnet came into the dining room and followed the boy’s glance. “The mysterious Lady Burnet,” thought Charles. “And worth looking at, too. Fifty devils in her eyes, and in her body the sway of an angel — no peace there.… But let the boy find out all that for himself.”
“Well, Dan, what do you think of your great-grandmother ?”
“She has a strange look in her eyes, hasn’t she?”
“Spells and incantations, my lad. Haven’t they told you about her?”
“Not much.”
“Want to know?”
“Yes. I bet there’s a lot to know.”
“Very discerning of you. I dare say there is, too, and I wish I knew it.… Would you say she was an aristocrat?”
“No-o — I see what you mean. She looks as if she didn’t care a hang for people.”
“Not much for people and less for their things , Dan. Her name was Faa and she belonged to a very special sort of aristocracy, the aristocracy of poverty and freedom.”
“Faa is Mother’s second name.”
“Quite. The Burnets have always been proud of her. She was a gipsy, Dan, a full-blooded Romany rawnie. What d’you think of that?”
Dan stared at his gipsy ancestor.
“It’s a fact. It’s the family skeleton — though we’re secretly proud of it — that her grandfather was hanged for theft in the seventeen-thirties at the Tolbooth in Edinburgh.”
“It must have been strange to be married to a gipsy. I wonder what she was like. Did she have children and was she happy, I wonder?”
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