Steadfast by Mercedes Lackey Page B

sometimes they’re right.” He chuckled a little, hoping to put her at
     her ease. “Honestly, the number of times I’ve had to cover for a husband or a daughter
     having a gay old time with someone they shouldn’t have been with don’t bear counting.
     We
know
you aren’t a thief now, whatever you might have had to do in the past. Short of murdering
     someone, I can’t think of anything you might have done that would cause us to turn
     you out.” He smiled into her troubled eyes. “And as for us, if we’d meant to do you
     mischief, we had plenty of opportunities, yet here you are, safe as houses, full of
     a good ham dinner and in a lovely chair and with lemonade when you want it. And you’ll
     notice, there’s a French door, right there—” He pointed at the door that led into
     the bedraggled garden. “—and neither of us is spry enough to keep you from it, if
     you cared to bolt. So.” He leaned back in his own chair. “Why don’t you tell us what
     sort of cuckoo we’re fostering?”
    Her face had gradually begun to clear as he spoke. After all, everything he had just
     told her was perfectly reasonable and sensible, and as she thought about it, he reckoned
     that she realized everything he had said was true.
    “I’m—half Traveler,” she said hesitantly, and waited for their reactions. When all
     they did was nod, her face lost some of its worry. There were not a lot of Travelers
     on the music hall circuit, but there were some. Jack knew of an entire enormous family
     of singers, guitarists and dancers from Spain—or so they said, you could never tell
     with Travelers. But their music sounded Spanish to him, and they did that foot-stamping
     sort of dancing that he vaguely associated with Spain.
    Maybe they were Gypsies, not Travelers, strictly speaking.
He also vaguely knew that not all Travelers were Gypsies, and not all Gypsies were
     Travelers, or cared to be taken for Travelers.
    “Ma was the Traveler, Pa was an acrobat. They met at a horse fair, and they just fell
     right in love there on the spot.” Her eyes softened when she said that, and Jack smiled
     a little. “He properly asked to court her, but when her people wouldn’t take him,
     as mostly Travelers won’t take outsiders, she ran off from them and back to be with
     him. When she did that, by Traveler law, she was spoilt, and her good name was just
     right gone, and since she didn’t have any brothers to come after her and beat him
     for it, just her father, then she was cast out.”
    “He was a lucky man, from what I’ve heard,” Lionel mused. “Travelers can be hard men,
     and they don’t take to having their women interfered with.”
    “Well, Ma was a lucky woman, for a spoilt Traveler girl will never get a husband,
     and will have to live and tend to her parents all her life, and do all the work,”
     the girl replied, then shrugged. “Well, Pa taught me the acrobatics, and Ma taught
     me dances, and I learnt more from every dancer we traveled with.”
    That, Jack thought, explained a great deal about her dancing skill. Had she learned
     one discipline and been taught in it in a proper school, she might have been great.
     Stupendous, even. She surely had raw talent, and must have a knack for picking things
     right up. But without proper training, her dancing was something of a muddle, and
     even he could see she’d never get out of it now. The more was the pity. But on the
     other hand . . . it meant she was versatile, and that was certainly what Lionel needed.
    “Things started to get hard though,” she continued. “It was getting hard for us to
     make money at fairs, with so many other new things coming along to take peoples’ pennies.
     We were small, and . . . and people would want to go see a Hindoo dancer, or Chinese
     acrobats, even if they weren’t as good as us. So we joined a circus. That was easier.
     We could always count on eating. I learned a lot of dancing there. There was even
     a