All The Days of My Life by Hilary Bailey Page A

magic,” said Mrs Gates. Mary brushed her hand along the lower leaves of the bushes and remarked, “You said there was no such thing.”
    Mrs Gates said wonderingly, “To think I’d see the day when a gypsy would tell a fortune and not charge a penny for it – and the things she said – enough to make your hair curl – three husbands you’re to have, Mary. I wonder if there’s any truth in it. Oh, my.”
    Mary had been startled by the shifting relationship between Mrs Gates and the gypsy woman. At one minute Mrs Gates had been demanding and disrespectful, rather like Lady Allaun in shops, and, on the other hand, she was plainly flattered and impressed by the gypsy’s attention. For her part, Mary was vaguely disturbed by the whole thing. If the magic was really true, she was not sure she liked the sound of it all. She concentrated on making a mixed bouquet of daisies, buttercups and trailing weeds on the way home. So they walked in silence until they were cutting back over the fields beyond the lake. Then Mrs Gates said suddenly, “I think that woman was Urania Heron.”
    â€œWho’s Urany Heron?” asked Mary.
    â€œShe’s the Queen of the Gypsies,” Mrs Gates said solemnly. “That’s who she is.”
    â€œCan she do spells?” asked Mary.
    â€œI expect so,” said Mrs Gates.
    They passed by the edges of the lake, where ducks quacked and began to settle for the night. Mary thought that she would try to forget all about the gypsy. And, as it happened, there was a shock for them when they got back to the Towers, so she never, after that, remembered the fortune-telling episode very clearly.
    There was this red-faced man in a major’s uniform, stick and all, and he was standing on the Turkish rug in front of the fireplace in the drawing room when we were called in there. When he saw me he just picked me up, spun me round and put me back on the mat. He said, “Well, you can see there’s something special here, whatever it is.” Then he put his hand in his pocket and gave me a little silver filigree necklace. He must have bought it specially for me in India. There was his hat, too, with the brass on it, lying on the sofa. He let me wear it.
    Sir Frederick was nice and funny that weekend. He borrowed a horse and let me ride on it with him. He told me stories. He was so kind –I think I took to him so much because he reminded me a lot of Sid, my dad. That was the last time I saw him happy though, Sir Frederick. It was rotten, really, what happened. It was the times took it out of him, I think. First the war and then the peace. Towards the end of the war Sir Frederick came home for good. They let him out early, I think, because he wasn’t well. They must have spotted he’d gone a bit funny.
    Sir Herbert, who has passed through the confusing streets of London, reaches the peace of his own quiet home in Kensington. Again he comments on Mary’s story:
    Curiously enough Mary Waterhouse’s accidental encounter with the gypsy, Urania Heron, crops up in one of Lady Allaun’s letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which passed the correspondence on to my father. These letters were chiefly about Mary’s health, which was always good, and about her progress at school. But oddly enough, in one of them, written in 1942, Lady Allaun actually records what she had gathered from Mrs Gates about the gypsy’s prophecies. There wasno comment from my father at the time, but in 1952, when Mary’s husband, Jim Flanders, was hanged and the course of her life began to look worrying he must have recollected Lady Allaun’s letter. I do not believe for a moment that my father was superstitious, but the old woman’s remarks, though vague, must have made him stop and think. Short and unlucky, she had said, of Mary’s marriage. No one would have disputed that. At any rate it was his duty to look into the thing