The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read Free

been a place of great religious significance once, but all that was left were superstitions. I remembered reading that the only way to deal with pixies was to take off one’s coat, turn it inside out, and put it on again.
    It was too cold for that and so I only hurried on. This time I found a light on in the cottage window, a light that hadn’t been there earlier.
    I knocked. I knocked hard. And harder.
    At length a gray head appeared in the window at the top of the door, and a low voice asked cautiously, “Who is it?”
    “Cassandra Reilly. I had an appointment with Tommy Price for tea a few hours ago. But no one was here when I arrived, so I’ve come back.”
    The door slowly opened and a woman in her early eighties stood there in a plain dress with a heavy shawl over her shoulders and slippers on her feet. The stay-at-home, I thought: Miss Root who keeps the home fires burning while Miss Price is out writing books about her adventures.
    “Please come in out of the rain,” she said finally, when she could see I wasn’t moving. “Miss Price isn’t at home, I’m very sorry.”
    I stepped into the vestibule and couldn’t help craning my neck for a view of a cozy-looking sitting room stuffed with books.
    “She left very suddenly,” the woman said.
    I remembered the car that had almost sideswiped me in the narrow lane: Tommy Price on a sudden mission to Borneo perhaps.
    “I can offer you some tea,” Miss Root said. “I’m afraid I live very simply when Tommy is not here.”
    She invited me into the sitting room.
    “Oh look,” I said, going immediately to the bookshelves. “The original editions of Out Beyond Outback and Kangaroo Cowboys . I loved those books when I was a girl. I longed to go live in Australia.”
    A faint glimmer of pleasure drifted across Constance Root’s wrinkled features, replaced almost immediately by one of disapproval. “Well, they’re terribly outdated now. The modern day reality is surely quite different. I watch television and read the papers, and what Tommy described is not to be found in Australia today. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in republishing such fairy tales.”
    “Oh, but that’s part of the charm,” I said. “We like to imagine a world where everything seemed simpler, where a traveller could come upon an enchanted place and describe it like a fairy tale. Nowadays it’s all Hiltons and package tours.”
    Miss Root shook her head and went to put the kettle on for tea. I took the opportunity to scan the bookshelves for other favorite books. Tommy Price had a wonderful library of women’s travel stories. Here were some of the classics: Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates by Lady Anne Blunt; My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel; Dust in the Lion’s Paw , the autobiography of Freya Stark; A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.
    Here too were hard-to-find, wonderful titles like On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden (1883); To Lake Tanganika in a Bath-Chair by Annie Hore (1896); and Nine Thousand Miles in Eight Weeks: Being an Account of an Epic Journey by Motor-Car Through Eleven Countries and Two Continents by Mildred Bruce (1927). Yes, and here were the complete works of Tommy Price, detailing her travels to Greenland, the Amazon, Tibet, Ethiopia, Australia—all written in the tough, no-nonsense prose that had so delighted me in my youth.
    I opened Kangaroo Cowboys and read at random:
It wasn’t long before Jake guessed I was not the fearless British ex-soldier I had made myself out to be. “Why,” he said to me one day as we were riding alongside each other through the bush, “you’re a lady, ain’t you?”
    Miss Root came back in with a tea tray and I told her enthusiastically, “One of the things I really loved about Tommy Price was her disguises. Half the time she was masquerading as a man, but she also loved to get herself up in any kind of native costume. Do you remember how she