A Roux of Revenge by Connie Archer Page A

“How could he not? The resemblance is striking.”
    “And your husband—Doug? Did he know?”
    “Oh, yes. Douglas saved my life. Literally. You see, my family . . .” Miriam looked at Lucky, a frightened look on herface. “We were travelers . . . gypsies, I guess you’d call us. It’s impossible for you, or anyone like you, to understand.”
    Lucky could feel Miriam closing down, guarding her words. “Why do you say that? Someone like me?”
    “You . . . you had a home, a real home. A real identity. A birth certificate, a driver’s license, an education, for God’s sake. The way I grew up, none of that was possible.We lived under the radar. None of us had . . . has . . . a real identity in the outer world. Oh, we knew who our parents were, our brothers and sisters, and we were given names, but that was all.”
    Miriam stared out the kitchen window at her garden. Her face had taken on a far-off look. “My name was Morag. We moved constantly. We were always warned to stay away from strangers—people who weren’tlike us—anything to avoid involvement with the outside society, particularly the authorities, border guards, police, school systems. Someone like you, you have a real history, so did your parents. You had ancestors, official records, lives that were lived aboveboard. We had nothing like that. Truly we were second-class citizens or worse—not even citizens.”
    “You didn’t know where your familycame from?”
    “We knew our ancestors were from Nova Scotia. Originally Scottish. And we always maintained a connection with that place, but we traveled constantly. The men would pick up work wherever they could, and every few years we’d return to Cape Breton. We speak . . .” Miriam caught herself quickly. “They speak Gaelic, our dialect. We would always speak Gaelic when we were with our ownpeople. But we also spoke English and French—had to in order to survive, especially traveling through Quebec and New England.”
    “But if you had no identity papers, how were you able to cross borders?”
    “That was nothing. Our people knew all the byways, all the small roads and fire trails. We usually knew which country we were in, but it didn’t matter to us. Countries, nationalities, thosethings had no meaning for us.”
    “How did you come to leave? Was it not the life you wanted?”
    Miriam laughed ruefully. “I never knew there was any other kind of life. There were ‘us,’ and there were ‘the others’ that we must at all costs not become involved with. We were told we’d be taken from our parents; the police would arrest us; we’d be put into homes with strangers. It was drilledinto our heads. Our only safety was in obeying the rules.” Miriam took a sip of her coffee and looked around her kitchen. “This,” she said, indicating the walls of her home, “this was unheard of, unthought of, something that we could never hope for. In truth, something we should not even want. It was a strange, xenophobic mentality. To me, now, it feels as though I was raised in a time period thatwould have made sense several centuries ago.”
    “And you left that life?” Lucky asked.
    Miriam shook her head. “I never intended to. I never knew anything else. We didn’t have books to learn about the outside world. I could speak three languages, but I couldn’t read or write any of them. Can you believe that? How helpless we really were in terms of the real world.” Miriam paused to take asip of coffee. She seemed calmer now that she was speaking of her past. “It was a strange world, stranger than you could ever imagine. We . . . we had certain rituals.” Miriam pursed her lips, as though aware she had gone too far.
    Lucky’s curiosity was piqued. “Rituals?”
    Miriam stared into her coffee. “I never realized until many years later how strange this tradition was.” She pausedfor a long moment, lost in thought. “Once a year, at the winter solstice, someone, one of the adults,