A Tall Dark Stranger Read Free

bear-led by a poor relation. On the contrary, we are slowly but surely leading Maude Talbot into a life of dissipation.
    She now accepts a half glass of wine with dinner; none for lunch. It gives her the megrims if taken when the sun is up. She accompanies us to the local assemblies, strictly in the line of duty. She goes to the card parlor but won’t touch cards. She gossips instead or tells the ladies’ fortunes.
    You may well stare to hear such a stickler for propriety reads palms, but so it is. The little touch of Beelzebub that lingers in the best of us must find some outlet. Auntie does not just read palms; she reads the whole hand. Auntie (and Lollie, too) has an earth hand; short palm and short fingers. These characteristics denote a hardworking, no-nonsense personality. I am afflicted with a water hand: long palm and long fingers, denoting one who lives with his or her head in the clouds and is impractical—in short, artistic.
    I got my water hands clean more quickly than Lollie despite my unreliability, however, and went below to distract Aunt Talbot from a lecture with a recital about the stranger met in the meadow. She is a glutton for gossip of any sort. When life offers no great doings, the small ones such as a passing stranger assume a large interest.
    “The man—I refuse to call a liar a gentleman—is no better than he should be,” she declared. “A man who lies about his past has some evil to conceal. But then who can you expect to meet if you go trolloping about the countryside looking like a commoner? When God gives a lady no children, the devil sends nieces and nephews in their stead.”
    That “looking like a commoner” was a dig at my oldest sprigged muslin. I have two or three such gowns that really ought to be dust rags, but they are too useful for my fieldwork.
    “Hardly the countryside, Auntie,” I objected. “I was in our own meadow. And Mr. Stoddart didn’t do anything.”
    “I don’t call lying nothing. A man who will tell an untruth will do worse. And posing as a clergyman’s son! I’m surprised Mr. Maitland didn’t run him off. But then Maitland is a perfect gentleman. Almost too good. He never suspects a trick.”
    Auntie entertains the forlorn hope that I will nab Maitland. Either that or she is so smitten by his beauty that she fails to hear the gossip about him. Age seems no inoculation against Maitland’s charm.
    Lollie joined us and we were finally allowed to listen to Auntie say grace and then eat. Afterward, since the day was too fine to spend a minute inside, I took my sketch pad and watercolor box to the orchard and sketched a yellow loosestrife that grew between the trees. When I tired of that, I dipped into my well-thumbed copy of Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne to read about nature.
    Lollie didn’t get to the shepherd’s hut to investigate, after all. A friend invited him to course hares and of course he was off like a shot to kill more harmless animals.
    We had company for dinner, which made it impossible for me to finish work on the morning’s sketches. This didn’t bother me. There were the long winter evenings to do the finely detailed work. Spring and summer were spent on the sketching outdoors.
    * * *
    The next morning I was back at the water meadow by nine. Lollie accompanied me to pacify Auntie, but in fact he intended to scoot off to oversee the sheep shearing.
    “You’ll be safe as churches for an hour or two, eh, sis?” he asked before leaving.
    “Yes, I’m fine.” I began looking about for a subject to sketch. “What is that blue thing amongst the bulrushes? Not a flower, surely? There are no water lilies here.”
    I peered at the flecks of blue through the bulrushes that swayed in the middle of the water meadow. The water swells in the spring and the bulrushes ring the edge of the water for the rest of the year.
    Lollie got a branch and began poking at the blue thing. “Looks like Maitland’s people are using