Rose Trelawney Read Free Page A

around inimpatience and find no bell. But if I were such a grand lady as this would indicate, why did I wear bombazine? Why did I travel alone? Why was not my prestigious family out proclaiming my absence?
    When I was alone, I looked into the little faded mirror over my washstand, to examine this strange body I wore. My hair was an utter mess. I had no one to dress it for me, and wore it pinned in an unbecoming knob at the back, like Miss Wickey. It was chestnut brown, thick and of medium length, with a natural wave. The eyes too were brown, the face pale—an oval face with an ordinary nose and full lips, teeth in good repair. I didn’t even know my age. Not a girl—over twenty, but not old. Between twenty and twenty-five I estimated. I was tall, not ill-formed, but with a little fuller figure than I considered ideal. In a better gown I thought I might possess elegance. I carried myself well, proudly. Even the word arrogant did not seem amiss.
    Over the week, the storm passed, the roads were cleared, my cold healed and I found myself a stranger being billeted on a country rector and his long-suffering housekeeper. Enquiries of the stage driver, whose customary route was now open, revealed that he thought someone, possibly a woman, had been let down around the spot where I was first born into this new life. He didn’t know where I had got on—not later than Shaftesbury, the last stop, possibly before. Due to the lapse of time and the difficulties caused by the storm, he was extremely vague about it all. Newspapers were scanned in vain for a clue as to my identity, but we did no advertising of our own, thinking every day that it would all come rushing back to me. I made no push to institute any advertisements. I wanted to remain hidden away from whoever might be after me. I wanted to discover who I was, but I had a strong compulsion to do it on my own. ‘Fear of the unknown,’ Dr. Fell called it.
    Mulliner must have abandoned the idea I was a woman of any importance. His manner began to change after about four days, after four visits with the McCurdles that would be. He was now merely tolerant, with even that wearing thin. He sat one night with Dr. Fell and myself in the small study of the rectory discussing what was to be done with me. “Thing to do, I think, call Sir Ludwig,” he suggested.
    “He’s gone to London,” Dr. Fell told him.
    “Is he so? Odd he didn’t tell me,” Mulliner answered, miffed. He often mentioned Sir Ludwig, but I had not yet laid eyes on the gentleman.
    “Maybe I could work for someone,” I suggested.
    Mulliner brightened up at this. He had half a dozen boys coming in for lessons in the mornings. If I was to batten myself on him, I could work for my bread, the look said. It was done. For three days the six boys sat under my unwatchful eye in this same study, reading poorly, writing worse, and trying vainly to put together the map of the world. I was amazed at their ignorance of geography. One of them was quite insistent France belonged in Asia, so I described it to him a little, its climate and vegetation.
    “Have you been there, miss?” he asked.
    “I have read about it, as any educated person has,” I answered, frowning. Yet I felt I had done more than read about it. I knew the look and smell of the Seine, knew it in springtime, with the trees in new leaf and the walks crowded with—Englishmen! No, it was a vivid dream, obviously.
    “I still say it’s in Asia,” he insisted. “They moved it at the Congress of Vienna.”
    I had been explaining a little earlier how the map of Europe had been altered a few years previously by the Congress. He apparently took my lessons to mean Russia and Prussia had literally ‘taken’ a piece of this or that country and dragged it off. But France at least had not been so dismembered that it went to England, and those Englishmen I saw jostling along the banks were out of place, a dream. Ah, but they weren’t! The ton of England had gone to