Aurora (2 page)

“Did he like you?”

“He was too discreet to let on if he did, but he used to flirt a little when Bernard was not around.”

“You will do better to stick to Mr. Berrigan,” Rorie replied. “Bernard is dead only a year, but I notice your crepe has dwindled to dark gloves, and I suppose they will go too now that spring is come.”

“My dear sister—how can you be so unjust! You will notice I wear a mauve gown, half mourning.”

“I notice too that Mr. Berrigan likes you in mauve. You will be married a second time before I make one match. It isn’t fair.”

“You’re only twenty-one, but
I
am in no hurry either. In another year or so I may remarry. Meanwhile I shall sit back and pray for Kenelm’s return.”

“The Lord helps those who help themselves,” her sister reminded her, thinking this a lackadaisical way of finding the rightful heir. But either way it would make little difference to Marnie whether it was little Charles or Kenelm at the Hall, she would still be the widow, living in the Dower House. She mentioned this.

“True, but it rankles—the speed with which Clare bolted off to London to present Charles’s claim to the title and estate the very week of Bernard’s death, as though she couldn’t wait to be rid of us. She got herself a sharp lawyer and convinced the judge, or chancellor or whoever she saw, that an absence of eleven years more than fulfilled the seven-years waiting period, and had the new baron installed before anyone knew what she was up to.”

“You knew. God knows she showed you that nisi decree often enough. I feel I know it by heart.”

“In my distracted state after Bernard’s death I hardly knew what was going on. ‘For the time being,’ she kept saying, and all I really wanted was peace and quiet. She pestered me into it. If I had had my wits about me, I would have fought it. I should have insisted on staying there till some effort was made to find Kenelm. I wonder what would happen if he were to turn up now?”

“He would have to prove his claim, I suppose. It shouldn’t be difficult for him,” Rorie said, happy to revert to the possibility of his being still alive.

“She’d make it difficult. Say he was an impostor and go demanding he produce papers and certificates that she, very likely, has burned. She’d put up a good fight. She likes very well being the baron’s mama, and lording it over everyone from the Hall. You may be certain she wouldn’t give up her glory without a good fight. And Kenelm is the very one who would give her a battle.”

“Why don’t you start advertising again? He may be about the countryside somewhere. He may not have heard of Bernard’s death, and not realize he is now Lord Raiker.”

“What, roaming the countryside for eleven years? Hardly. One would have heard of Kenelm, I am convinced. I sometimes wonder if he went to America. We are practically on the coast. I wouldn’t have a notion how to go about advertising in America.”

“You would hire an agent, I expect.”

The word “hiring” had the immediate effect of lessening Lady Raiker’s interest in finding her brother-in-law. She was not precisely purse-pinched, but she had a certain  natural tendency to behave as though she were, and her interest was diverted to the roses, where she discovered some slugs that sent her looking for her gardener.

Chapter Two

Lady Raiker returned to her chair, complaining that she had found the gardener under a tree, smoking a pipe if you please, while the slugs ate up every petal on her roses.

“What is it?” she asked in alarm, as she observed that her sister was staring toward the shrubbery, and pointing.

“Oh, the gypsies are back,” Marnie said, unperturbed. But the swarthy-faced hag that smiled at them through broken teeth looked dangerous to the younger lady.

“Quick, get Mimi!” Aurora said.

“They won’t
eat
you, you know,” her sister scoffed. “They come annually, usually about this time, in the spring. No doubt we will find a few chickens missing in the morning, but you need not worry about a slit throat. This one is the matron of the crew. She tells fortunes. How it brings it all back! She foretold Bernard’s death last year—she told me there was a dark cloud on my horizon, and within two weeks he was gone. Already he was complaining of the earache. Let us hear what she has to say this time.”

“Fortune, missie?” the old hag asked, advancing from the shrubbery when Marnie beckoned her. “Gypsy tell your fortune, yes?”

“Yes, please,” Marnie replied, and held her hand out. Aurora flinched to see her sister’s dainty white fingers taken in that disreputable brown hand, and kept looking to Mimi, who had released the kitten and was coming closer, staring in fascination at the woman. While the old lady traced along the palm’s lines and muttered to herself, Aurora regarded her closely. The hair sticking out from the front of her bright kerchief was grizzled, once black, now iron-gray. The face, the colour of café au lait, was lined and the eyes cunning.

“Tall gentleman friend coming,” the gypsy said, smiling and shaking her head for emphasis. “Coming mighty soon, yes, missie. Good friend coming. Big dark man—handsome. He got troubles too. You got troubles. Big dark man and little gold lady help the troubles go away.” She peered slyly up to Marnie’s gold curls and blue eyes to see how this prophecy went down. As the lady was smiling in girlish delight to hear of a handsome gentleman coming her way, the gypsy went on. “Here’s death going away, and life coming,” she chanted, tracing some lines on the palm. The memory of Bernard seemed to fade into the distant past as she spoke. “Happiness in your future.” She added a few details regarding watching out for dark moons and such obscure mumbo jumbo as left her listeners quite at sea, then she turned to Aurora.

“Tell the fortune, missie?” she asked. Aurora was repelled by the woman, but still some curiosity compelled her forward, and she held out her hand. The old gypsy shook her head doubtfully. One would think there wasn’t a line to be seen from the look of uninterest the hand evoked. “Life is slow coming.” she said at last. “No good here—no bad too. Long time no husband for missie. One day he comes. One long day from now.” Intercepting an angry glance from her client, she added a little good news, hoping to increase her reward. “The dark clouds have gold linings. Yes, missie.”

“What dark clouds? You saw no bad in my future.”

“Not bad. Dark clouds—gold linings.”

“I guess a dark cloud is better than nothing,” Rorie decided after considering the matter a moment. The woman was right about the past, at least. Life had been slow getting started. No real bad in her past—no serious illness or tragedy, but no good either. No romance or adventure. Strange how she felt a tingle of excitement at the old woman’s touch. Almost as though some energy, some exotic adventure, clung to those brown fingers and transmitted traces of itself to her.

“No handsome, dark stranger for me?” she asked, becoming more comfortable with time.

“She is the one who requires a tall, dark stranger, you know,” Marnie said, laughing lightly.

“She not the one he comes to,” the gypsy said firmly. “He comes to gold missie. Soon he come. You help, yes?”

“Yes, I am very particular about helping all tall handsome strangers who come to my door.” Marnie said, making a joke of the whole, but the gypsy was not laughing.

“Yes, missie. You help big man. You help!”

The smile faded from Marnie’s face. She stared closely at the old woman as she reached in her pocket for a piece of change. “Go now. Run along,” she said. The gypsy bobbed her head, snatched the money and left.

“What do you make of that?” Aurora asked.

“I don’t believe it’s the same one who told me about Bernard last year. They all look alike to me, and it was over a year ago. Tall dark strangers and happy futures are their stock in trade. When they start that, you know it is nonsense.”

“A pity she couldn’t have found one for me, then,” Rorie answered ruefully.

“I’ll let you have mine, in the unlikely event that he materializes.” In her mind a vision of Mr. Berrigan—no dark stranger but a blond friend—arose and was an acceptable substitute for a faceless phantom.

Before more could be said, a termagant more terrible than the gypsy hag descended on them from their own doorway. She was Miss Malone, their . . . everything. Her duties were too large to be confined in one title. By a will stronger than steel and a love broader than the ocean she had risen to such a position of dominance over the girls that their own mother took second place, and the woman was only a servant. A junior servant too, according to rights, for she had been their nursemaid when they were small themselves, and had been brought to Raiker Hall to fill the same position for Mimi upon the child’s birth. She had little education, had only learned to read when she was eighteen, though that had been perhaps thirty years ago, and she had ploughed through several cheap romances since then.

It was Bernard who was responsible for her rise to preeminence at Raiker Hall. Mimi had taken a terrible cold and fever in the first year of her life. The doctor as much as said she was done for, but Malone sat by her side, bathing her face with cold water, urging bits of liquid down her throat, tending her for days and nights on end till the nurse grew to a shadow of her former self. She had also prayed, and made the family do likewise. Mimi recovered, and Malone took the cure for her own miracle, as well she might. Bernard declared flatly, “The woman is a saint,” and from that day onward she bowed to no one. Her way with the butler and uppity housekeeper was a sight to behold. With her fractured grammar and atrociously mispronounced vocabulary she bear-led them all. She felt that upon coming into the home of a peer her plain old Irish English was not good enough, and took on a grand new language carelessly adapted from her readings. After the remove to the Dower House she had really no menials worth her talents, but still she was the real mistress of the small establishment. Mimi had now a governess, but Malone would let the poor child be pestered with this creature only for short periods at a stretch. Once an invalid, always an invalid. She was bound to find the girl looking pulled after an hour in the classroom learning those nasty numbers or putting together the map, and would usher her out for a “breath of air”—which was frequently taken in her own room, with the window carefully closed.

Wisps of reddish-gray hair flying from under her cap, her white apron flapping, she descended on them, pink-faced, green eyes sparkling. “What are you doing, talking to the likes of that old gypsy? You’ll catch fleas or worse. Get into the house this minute. She’ll have the rings off your fingers and her hands in your pockets rifling them.”

“You mistake her for Clare,” Marnie replied.

“Another she-devil! The world is infected with them entirely. But we’ll not be spoiling our appetites with talk of that mallifluous woman, for there’s a dainty tea waiting for you inside. Sides beyond, the wind’s blowing chilly, and I don’t want my Mimi taking another inhalation of the lungs, as she’ll do if I let her sit out here. Come along, then.”

The lady of the house obediently arose to do as she was told, but Aurora said, “Tyrant!” and ducked to escape having her ear pulled. This little trick had been carried over from nursery days, no longer perpetrated on Lady Raiker, but still used to bring the younger sister into line.

“What did the old gypsy say?” Malone demanded as she herded them in to their tea.

“She said Marnie is to get a new beau, and I am not,” Aurora told her.

“Never mind the likes of her. We’ll find you a very good fellow, an indelible
parti
as you might say.”

“I hope so. I wouldn’t want him to fade away on me,” Aurora replied.

“Aye, they’re good at that. Only let them get a whiff of the minister and they bolt for the hills. But you worry too much about it. You’re only twenty-one, and with the exterminating circumstances of us being in mourning for a year we couldn’t make a proper push at all. There’s young Lord Hanley would give his eyeteeth for a kind word from you I’m sure. If it’s a stranger you want, I’ll read the leaves for you after your tea, and won’t be holding my hand out for pay neither. What did she charge you?”

“A shilling,” Marnie said, and received a blighting stare. “Well, they have to live, you know.”

“You’re too soft by a mile, and so’s the government. With the whole world taking the attitude that everyone deserves to live whether he ever does a stroke of work or not, it’s no wonder the place is full of thieves and gypsies. The cook relieving us of a loaf a day and a half dozen of eggs, the laundress whisking the sheets home as rags before you can see a sign of light through them, and
that woman
buying muslin for dust cloths, we’ll be lucky we don’t have the bailey down our necks for debts before the year’s out.”
That woman,
never referred to by name, was Mrs. Higgins, the housekeeper, an insolent person who dared to stand up to Malone upon occasion.

“Never a body to open the door for a lady, and us with a butler being paid a fat salary,” she grumbled as they entered. She pushed her charges into the saloon and went to jaw at the butler for not having the tea on the table. Had it been there waiting, he would have had his ears burned for putting it out early to get stone cold before the ladies were ready. She was a hard taskmaster, Malone.

“Here, this came while you were out talking to the gypsy,” Malone told them, chucking a letter into Lady Raiker’s hands and standing at her elbow to read over her shoulder.

“I have been summoned to Raiker Hall,” Marnie announced.

“Summoned! I’ll summons her,” Malone said fiercely, taking it for
an insult, though she had only a hazy idea what it meant.

“When?” Aurora asked.

“Tomorrow morning at ten. It must be urgent to get Clare out of bed before noon.”

“Does she want me to go too?” Aurora asked.

“She doesn’t say.”

“You go if you have a mind to,” Malone ordered, the summons suddenly a thing to be desired. “Don’t let that underbred hussy deprive you of your just deserts.”

“Speaking of desserts, may I have a slice of that plum cake, Marnie?”