I was a bit surprised. If ever I'd seen a confirmed bachelor, I would have thought the Reverend Brainfield was it. Still, I took the politely proffered paw and shook it warmly, resisting the urge to wipe a certain residual stickiness on my skirt.
The Reverend Brainfield looked fondly after the boy as he trooped off toward the kitchen.
"My niece's son, really," he confided.
"Father shot down over the Channel, and mother killed in the Blitz, though, so I've taken him."
"How kind of you," I murmured, thinking of Uncle Lamb.
He, too, had died in the Blitz, killed by a hit to the auditorium of the British Museum, where he had been lecturing. Knowing him, I thought his main feeling would have been gratification that the wing of Persian antiquities next door had escaped.
"Not at all, not at all." The vicar flapped a hand in embarrassment.
"Nice to have a bit of young life about the house. Now, do have a seat."
Douglas began talking even before I had set my handbag down.
"The most amazing luck, Elsie," he enthused, thumbing through the dog-eared pile.
"The vicar's located a whole series of military dispatches that mention Howatt Affleck."
"Well, a good deal of the prominence seems to have been Captain Affleck's own doing," the vicar observed, taking some of the papers from Douglas.
"He was in command of the garrison at Fort William for four years or so, but he seems to have spent quite a bit of his time harassing the Scottish countryside above the Border on behalf of the Crown. With this, he gingerly separated a stack of papers and laid them on the desk, reports of complaints lodged against the Captain by various families and estate holders, claiming everything from interference with their maidservants by the soldiers of the garrison to outright theft of horses, not to mention assorted instances of insult, unspecified."
I was amused.
"So you have the proverbial horse thief in your family tree?" I said to Douglas.
He shrugged, unperturbed. "He was what he was, and nothing I can do about it. I only want to find out. The complaints aren't all that odd, for that particular time period; the English in general, and the army in particular, were rather notably unpopular throughout the Uplands. No, what's odd is that nothing ever seems to have come of the complaints, even the serious ones."
The vicar, unable to keep still for long, broke in. "That's right. Not that officers then were held to anything like modern standards; they could do very much as they liked in minor matters. But this is odd. It's not that the complaints are investigated and dismissed; they're just never mentioned again. You know what I suspect, Affleck? Your ancestor must have had a patron. Someone who could protect him from the censure of his superiors."
Douglas scratched his head, squinting at the dispatches. "You could be right. Had to have been someone quite powerful, though. High up in the army hierarchy, perhaps, or maybe a member of the nobility."
"Yes, or possibly—" The vicar was interrupted in his theories by the entrance of the housekeeper, Mrs. Lindsay.
"I've brought you a bit of refreshment, gentlemen," she announced, setting the tea tray firmly in the center of the desk, from which the vicar rescued his precious dispatches in the nick of time. She looked me over with a shrewd eye, assessing the twitching limbs and faint glaze over the eyeballs.
"I've brought but the two cups, for I thought perhaps Mrs. Affleck would care to join me in the kitchen. I've a bit of..." I didn't wait for the conclusion of her invitation, but leapt to my feet with alacrity.
I could hear the theories breaking out again behind me as we pushed through the swinging door that led to the kitchen.
The tea was green, hot and fragrant, with bits of leaf swirling through the liquid.
"Mmm," I said, setting the cup down.
"It's been a long time since I tasted oolong."
Mrs. Lindsay nodded, beaming at my pleasure in her refreshments. She had clearly gone to some trouble, laying out handmade lace mats beneath the eggshell cups and providing thick clotted cream with the scones.
"Yes, I couldn't get it during the War, you know. It's the best for the readings, though. Had a terrible time with that Earl Grey. The leaves fall apart so fast, it's hard to tell anything at all."
"Oh, you read tea leaves?" I asked, mildly amused.
Nothing could be farther from the popular conception of the gypsy fortune-teller than Mrs. Lindsay, with her short, iron-grey perm and triple-stranded pearl choker.
A swallow of tea ran visibly down the long, stringy neck and disappeared beneath the gleaming beads.
"Why, certainly I do, my dear. Just as my grandmother taught me, and her grandmother before her. Drink up your cup, and I'll see what you have there."
She was silent for a long time, once in a while tilting the cup to catch the light, or rolling it slowly between lean palms to get a different angle.
She set the cup down carefully, as though afraid it might blow up in her face. The grooves on either side of her mouth had deepened, and her brows pressed together in what looked like puzzlement.
"Well," she said finally.
"That's one of the stranger ones I've seen."
"Oh?" I was still amused, but beginning to be curious.
"Am I going to meet a tall dark stranger, or journey across the sea?"
"Could be." Mrs. Lindsay had caught my ironic tone, and echoed it, smiling slightly.
"And could not. That is what's odd about your cup, my dear. Everything in it is contradictory.
There's the curved leaf for a journey, but it's crossed by the broken one that means staying put. And strangers there are, to be sure, several of them. And one of them's your husband, if I read the leaves aright."
My amusement dissipated somewhat. After six years apart, and six months together, my husband was still something of a stranger. Though I failed to see how a tea leaf could know it.
Mrs. Lindsay's brow was still furrowed.
"Let me see your hand, child," she said.
The hand holding mine was bony, but surprisingly warm. A scent of lavender water emanated from the neat part of the grizzled head bent over my palm. She stared into my hand for quite a long time, now and then tracing one of the lines with a finger, as though following a map whose roads all petered out in sandy washes and deserted wastes.
"Well, what is it?" I asked, trying to maintain a light air.
"Or is my fate too horrible to be revealed?"
Mrs. Lindsay raised quizzical eyes and looked thoughtfully at my face, but retained her hold on my hand. She shook her head, pursing her lips.
"Oh, no, my dear. It's not your fate is in your hand. Only the seed of it." The birdlike head cocked to one side.
"The lines in your hand change, you know. At another point in your life, they may be quite different than they are now."
"I didn't know that. I thought you were born with them, and that was that." I was repressing an urge to jerk my hand away.
"What's the point of palm reading, then?" I didn't wish to sound rude, but I found this scrutiny a bit unsettling, especially following the heels of that tea-leaf reading.
Mrs. Lindsay smiled unexpectedly, and folded my fingers closed over my palm.
"Why, the lines of your palm show what you are, dear. That's why they change—or should. They don't, in some people; those unlucky enough never to change in themselves, but there are few like that." She gave my folded hand a squeeze and patted it.
"I doubt that you're one of those. Your hand shows quite a lot of change already, for one so young. That would likely be the War, of course," she said, as though to herself.
I was curious again, and opened my palm voluntarily. "What am I, then, according to my hand?"
Mrs. Lindsay frowned, but did not pick up my hand again.
"I can't just say. It's odd, for most hands have a likeness to them. Mind you that I' had not just say that if you see one, you've seen them all, but it's often like that—there are patterns, you know." She smiled suddenly, an oddly engaging grin, displaying very white and patently false teeth.
"That's how a fortune-teller works, you know. I do it for the church every year's feast—or did, before the War; suppose I'll do it again now. But a girl comes into the tent—and there am I, up in a turban with a peacock feather borrowed from Mr. Donaldson, and robes of oriental splendor—that's the vicar's dressing gown, all over peacocks it is and yellow as the sun—anyway, I glanced at her while I pretend to be watching her hand, and I see she's got her blouse cut down to her breakfast, cheap scent, and earrings down to her shoulders.
I don't need to have a crystal ball to be tell her she'll have a child before the next year's feast." Mrs. Lindsay, paused, grey eyes alight with mischief.
"Though if the hand you're holding is bare, it's tactful to predict first that she'll marry soon."