Star in a Box

Detailed Synopsis: Star in a Box

​

Part 1: Anselm:

 

Anselm’s wife, Esmeralda, gives birth to Zara in their gypsy camp but dies immediately afterwards leaving Anselm with no way to feed her. When he walks out on the moor, with his newborn, Stella, Esmeralda’s mare, trots towards him with her foal and noses Zara. Anselm recognizes Esmeralda’s message – Stella will feed Zara. He makes a sling to carry Zara around, and another one for Stella to nurse Zara comfortably.  When Zara is eight months old, Anselm rides out to a job at a nearby cottage. Julia, a widow, owner of the cottage and mother to 4-year-old Charlie, is taken with both Anselm and his baby. When Zara falls ill with pneumonia, Anselm is forced to take her to the hospital, and after her 3-day hospital stay, the doctor orders a long convalescence for Zara. Anselm’s caravan is draughty, and Anselm also fears that social workers may check up on Zara’s living conditions and take her away. His fellow gypsies at the camp are on the move again, so he seeks help from the village pub owner, who offers his rental room free for a few days. Julia offers her cottage for Zara’s convalescence. In return, Anselm will do odd jobs on her farm. Anselm resists at first, afraid both of their attraction and her confining lifestyle, but seeing no alternative, agrees to move in temporarily. However, one night in the barn he makes love to Julia. Anselm grows to love her and her son, but after some months, his roaming nature gets the better of him. He resolves to return to his gypsy existence with Zara but just before he can tell Julia, she informs him she is pregnant. Anselm is dismayed but fights with his conscience and sense of duty and eventually they marry. Julia’s pregnancy and birth go well, but their baby, Rose, develops leukemia at a few months old. As Anselm digs her grave in Julia’s field, his gypsy superstitions return, and he blames Rose’s death and their sufferings on his inability to listen and live according to his nature as a roamer. 

​

Julia becomes bitter, and difficult.  Over the years she draws further away from both Anselm and Zara, seeming now to be irritated with his gypsy ways, and the bond he shares with Zara. However, Anselm, determined to fulfill his duty to her, and re-ignite her love and passion for him, finds ways, gradually, to draw her back to him and Zara. All Anselm’s efforts are all the more rewarded when Julia becomes pregnant in her late thirties and a fine bouncing baby, “Lily,” heals the pain of losing Rose and restores joy to their cottage life.

​

Part 2: Zara

 

Zara is now a beauty with long dark hair and flashing eyes. She has inherited a gypsy’s love for music and dance and as one nursed by Stella has instincts that keep her close to all nature and especially horses. She becomes a proficient violinist and begins to compose music inspired by the sounds of nature. She is secure enough to shrug off negative attitudes, or stereotypes about gypsies. One day, at seventeen, she goes to a gypsy camp to play music and dance with them. She meets Anton there – a magnetic, dark-haired gypsy who is bewitched and immediately falls in love with her. She tries to ignore him because she has more important interests but runs into him again when she returns to the camp to read stories to the children. After Anton kisses her, she is smitten but still resists, until one day, he breaks his leg while doing a job for her father and ends up staying in their cottage to recuperate. Zara cannot now avoid Anton, and when she discovers his decency, that he too is a violinist but must work to support his widowed disabled mother, her respect and love for him kick in, and she can no longer suppress her feelings. They declare passionate love for each other. However, Anton feels inadequate as a mere gypsy, a feeling further enforced by his manipulating mother, Tressa, who needs Anton to support her.  Tressa, who has only one arm as a result of a fire, still manages to captivate everyone’s attention with her beauty and flamboyant gypsy ways; she incites Julia’s jealousy by flirting with Anselm and manipulates Anton into leaving Zara for a well-paid job far away. He leaves without contacting Zara, and she, broken-hearted, goes up North with her father to the Appleby Horse Fair to sell their foal and make money from their woodcrafts . Anselm and Zara reconnect with their gypsy roots in Appleby, play music, and wash their horse in the River Eden as is the tradition. Zara resolves never to trust a boy again and to devote her life to animals and her music. On the way home from Appleby, the caravan tips over in a bad storm. Their horse, Neptune leads Zara to Violet’s, an old lady’s, cottage, for help.  An ambulance takes Anselm, who has a broken back, to the hospital, and Zara returns home. The police are suspicious about the money they find in the caravan from their earnings at Appleby, and Zara has words with them about their negative “labels” of gypsies While Anselm is in the hospital, the doctor doesn’t arrive in time, and Zara has to deliver Julia’s baby, Rose. Anselm must remain on his back for months and Anton shows up again to offer his help on the farm. He asks Zara’s forgiveness for his absence and explains his mother’s suicidal dramas; Tressa has, in fact, now abandoned him and the caravan to marry a rich man. He wins back her love stronger than ever. 

​

Anton finds his mother’s caravan vandalized, and discovers she has stolen Edward’s, her new husband’s, money and run away with another man, a fellow gypsy she has loved for years. Edward has set the police on her.  Riding Neptune down by the river, Zara sees a policeman and hears about two people who have drowned – one of them is Tressa; the other is her gypsy lover. Anton and Anselm find the stolen money in Tressa’s caravan and go with the police to Edward’s house to return it and inform him of Tressa’s death. Anton ends up being Edward’s comforter; they dig Tressa’s grave together, and Edward insists Anton keep the money – it is tainted anyway. 

​

Zara, Anton, Anselm and Dave, a gypsy fiddler, have become renowned locally for their music and for Zara’s talent as a dancer. After their village performance as the ‘Gypsy Quartet,’ they are invited to perform at the Salisbury Folk Festival. They eventually receive a recording contract from the Decca company.

​

Anselm, at last, accepts Anton’s marriage to his daughter, and the couple are married in the village church one frosty December day. The whole village comes to the celebrations in the field around a huge bonfire. There is music and dancing enough to make any gypsy proud.  Edward gives Anton fifty thousand pounds as a wedding present to set up a wood-crafting business with Anselm, using the caravan as a “shop” in the village.