Aurora Read Free Page A

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