The Indian Maiden Read Free

sentry has been gotten until one sees him fall.”
    At this, Lieutenant FitzHugh, the local squire’s third son, who’d got himself a bit deafened by cannon at Salamanca and who’d been listening in desultory fashion, now left off admiring Miss Protherow’s necklace as he’d been doing just to see her blush and leaned forward to pay closer attention to the young narrator.
    “It’s that which we can’t post sentries for, those creatures and things that lurk in our great forests, that we most dread. But if you really wish me to come along with you now, and can assure me that there are no such things here in England, why then,” she said, rising, with the earl’s immediate assistance of a hand beneath her elbow, “I should be pleased to go along with you.”
    “Hold on a bit,” demanded Lord Greyville, who’d been on fire to go to the lake a moment before, “what sort of things do you have lurking?”
    “Poison bushes and snakes, ticks and leeches and poison spiders,” the young lady said pleasantly, and since she’d only gotten to her knees, she shook off the preferred hand and remained there, looking blandly at her inquisitor.
    “We’ve ticks and leeches,” the young gentleman pointed out patriotically.
    “Nettles, too,” one of the ladies put in ruefully, remembering one unpleasant encounter in her youth.
    “Do we have any poison spiders?” one of the Washburn sisters asked fearfully, even as her twin left off fanning herself and looked down, examining the rippling surface of their satin coverlet anxiously.
    The horseman sighed. These young persons were the cream of society’s young eligibles, in the pink of health and blush of youth. Yet still, he thought, very much like the three old fates the ancients had said passed one eye around between them, this group would be lucky if they had the equiv a lent of one full brain to share among the lot of them.
    But then, he shrugged to himself, they weren’t expected to invent new machines, write great works, or compose beautiful music. Their primary task was to attract a mate, and breed in the true line to carry on their noble names. And this, in all fairness, he had to admit, they could do, and were actually now in the process of doing. This little gathering was all in the nature of a rite to advance those worthy purposes, and he should not have expected to hear anything very much more profound than the excited babble and argument that now arose over what noxious dangers America possessed that England did not. Actually, he mused, the fact that the conversation had risen above neckcloths and frock lengths to attain such dizzying heights as the nature of poisonous reptiles was likely entirely to the unknown young American female’s credit. But if she were a guest here, that, he thought sadly, was likely all he could credit her with, no matter how he tried.
    She’d spoken in the unmistakeable accents of her native land. That, and her remarkable face, of course, like the original sight of the entire party, had made him wish for more and feel this curious disappointment at finding two illusions unmasked within the same hour. Because if she were not a member of the idle nobility, then having been made welcome here, she was either related to one of them, or was herself extraordinarily wealthy. And that would make her a member of the newest aristocracy. That happy circumstance could buy her all the older class’s rights and privileges, only if, that was to say, she were fortunate enough to attract a true nobleman to help her spend all her money.
    Undoubtedly, that was why the earl was here, as close to her as her elbow. It was well known that though his line was as long as his limbs, his fortune was thin as they were as well. And though his intellect ran deep, his pockets were shallow. He doubtless deserved it, but still, the rider thought, it must be a bitter thing to sell oneself to a ninny to save one’s heritage. But the earl was never a fool, and what’s