Rose Trelawney Read Free

neighborhood. A young lady would not be walking alone in the dark, into a howling storm. She would have a trunk, a case or at least a reticule. She would not be wearing a plain navy bombazine gown and shoes that did not fit her, not with a fancy silken petticoat under her gown at least. She would not have this insurmountable feeling of dread hanging over her—this ominous certainty that someone was after her. She wouldn’t be angry as a hornet either, and my anger was as great as my fear.
     

Chapter Two
     
    The storm continued intermittently for two days, heaping an unaccustomed ten inches of snow on the roads, making them impassable. Making a trip to that spot where my memory began impossible, too. Dr. Fell, who lived in the village, came once, sometimes twice a day to cheer me. He allowed me to read and to get out of bed, but he mercifully kept the curious villagers at bay. The Misses McCurdle in particular were eager to meet me. Miss Wickey pointed them out to me on one of their trips to the door—a pair of hawk-nosed dames both in black, with garishly-colored feathered chapeaux atop their heads.
     Fell explained away my lack of belongings by assuring me we would find them abandoned on the roadside where I had gained consciousness. He pointed out that I remembered many things. I told him, for instance, that I had already read the novels of Miss Edgeworth, that I liked Dr. Johnson’s works but disliked Walter Scott’s. He tried various tricks to make me regain my memory. He put a pencil and paper in my hands and told me to write, thinking I suppose that I might write my name. What I wrote instead was ‘Help me,’ in a shaky scrawl.
    Miss Wickey, too, was a frequent visitor. She let me in on the stories going around the village, the little neighborhood gossip. The McCurdles had sent a pair of footboys ploughing down the road through snow to their knees to the spot where I said I had come to, but there was no trunk found, no bag, no reticule. They did not quite castigate me as an outright liar, but the word ‘alleged’ was being hurled about with regard to my story. This would be pique that I had not allowed them an audience, Wickey told me. It thrilled her that she had access to me; they had not. The spinsters fancied that as I arrived at one, I must have left the spot at around twelve, and had therefore almost certainly descended from the night stage to Winchester. That a decent, Christian woman should be traveling alone in such a manner did much to counteract the glory of the silken petticoats. The stages were not operating these days during the storm, however, and travel of any sort was extremely difficult, so that no enquiries in that regard were instituted. That I was apparently headed east told us I came from the west. We examined together maps, hoping a name would jump out and hit me in the eye. None did.
    We discussed my strange outfit. The plain outer wrapping, fancy underpinnings. “Maybe my mistress gave me the petticoats,” I suggested.
    “They were nearly new, both of them,” Miss Wickey countered “And—and you must not take it amiss, my dear, it is not a dig in the least, but a lady who was in service would make her own bed in the morning. Little things you say and do—well, your hands for one thing, white and unmarked and manicured like a lady’s hands. And the quantity of butter and sugar you use—not that I mean to say you should not, but servants would be more sparing.”
    Here all along I had thought I was being sparing, due to the miniscule quantity of these goods placed on a table for three. I took my meals with Mulliner and Miss Wickey after the second day. Other things unmentioned by Miss Wickey but noticed by myself supported this idea. I found the meals at the rectory inferior almost to the point of inedibility. The wine, too, was scarce, and what there was of it execrable, the service intolerable. A dozen times I had been about to ring a bell to summon a servant, only to look