Like the mistress

It had been very exciting to go to the woman, who told fortunes only by the lake shore. She had said she didn't like doing it near the camps, near her own people. They didn't approve of her doing it. She said it was because she was too good.

Listening to her, Rita had believed that this might be true. Everything had been said with a great, calm certainty. And the bits about the book learning had begun to come true.

Rita had been struck then and now how like the mistress she was. If you saw them in a poor light you'd swear that the tinker woman and Mrs McMahon were sistters. She wondered what she was doing here with Sister Madeleine, but she would never know.

"Rita and I read poetry togethr." Sister Madeleine made the only gesture she would ever make towards an introduction. The woman nodded as if she only expected as much; she was sure that everything else she had seen in the future was true also.

And suddenly, with a slight sense of alarm, so was Rita. There was a man across the sea who would marry her; she would have fifty acres of land, and money in her own right. She would have children and they would not be easy. She thought about her tombstone, far away in a city with lots of other crosses nearby.

The woman slipped silently away.

" 'My dark Rosaleen' "said Sister Madeleine "Read it nice and slowly to me. I'll close my eyes and make pictures of it all."

Rita stood in the sunlight by the little window with pots of geraniums people had brought for the hermit and, with the bantam chicks around her fett, she read:

My Dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!

Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,

Shall give you health, and help, and hope,

My Dark Rosaleen!