Peaky Blinders: Esme Shelby-Lee, Gypsy Curses and the Black Madonna
“We’re the family now”
Luckily for John and Esme, they clicked and soon, they had their own blended and growing family. Esme moved from her gypsy wagon to Watery Lane, where she worked at the Peaky Blinders’ betting shop. Life inside four walls though, never suited her, and she used whisky and cocaine as a way to escape – skimming from the company vault to support her addiction. She was against the gang’s expansion into London’s clubs, describing the city as just “smoke and trouble.” She once tried to persuade Tommy to pack up his life in Small Heath and run away in a wagon to France and visit the holy Black Madonna statue in the South, because his “gypsy half is stronger”, but Tommy had work to do.
Tommy’s work caused a rift between him and Esme that would never heal. In season three, he made a deal that led to the imprisonment of John, Arthur, Polly and Michael, all of whom ended up with nooses around their necks before a last-minute reprieve. It was all part of Tommy’s strategy, which Esme found unforgivable. She cut Tommy off and hissed at Ada, and Michael for continuing to deal with him, calling them his puppets. “We’re the family now,” Esme told John, “we can look after ourselves.”
“No peace for either of you”
When Lizzie tried to build bridges, she pressed Tommy to go to John and Esme’s New Year party where she said the family’s younger generation would calm things down. “Babies stop everything. Can’t pull a razor with a baby there, not even Esme.”
John didn’t make it to New Year. He was gunned down on Christmas Day outside his country house. Esme was last seen screaming and scratching at Tommy over John’s corpse at the mortuary. She blamed him for her husband’s death, told him that the Shelby family were cursed, and then she cursed him again, declaring “No peace” for either Tommy or Arthur.
Esme told John’s corpse that she was taking their seven children (four by John’s first wife, three between them) on the road “to be with decent people.” They would never know the cursed side of their family, she vowed.
It’s fair to say that neither Tommy or Arthur has had a moment’s peace since Esme laid her curse on them. Gypsy curses – like the one Tommy was told was held by the blue sapphire Grace was wearing when she was shot dead – are real in the world of Peaky Blinders. That’s why Tommy was terrified enough to rush home from Boston when he heard the Romany words his daughter Ruby was speaking in her fever: Tickna mora o beng. Tommy told Lizzie to keep Ruby away from horses and water, and for Johnny Dogs’ eldest wife Esmeralda to put a Black Madonna pendant around the child’s neck.
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