The Little Gypsy

A wild-haired Romani child, snatched from a smoking caravan and reared beneath the chill turrets of a Highland estate, grows into a tempest of jangling bracelets and sidelong glances; when the village constabulary chain her for supposed riot-kindling she slips their iron like smoke, tumbling into the trembling custody of a Presbyterian prodigy whose collar is still wet with ordination oil. Together they bolt across heather, peat, and moon-bright lochs—she stripping rosaries for luck, he reciting psalms to outrun the bloodhounds—until the chase corkscrews into a private reformation: his dogma molts under her laughing irreligion, while her rootlessness sprouts anchor-shaped bruises from his grip. Their fugitive arc bends from kirk to kelpie-haunted river, from gypsy campfire to drafty manse, until every moral compass spins delirious and the only true north is the perilous magnetism that snaps them face-to-face with the Lord who once cloistered her. In the final reckoning, heritage, collar, and property deed combust into one crimson dusk, leaving only the question of whether love itself is another cage or the key that finally breaks all locks.