The Healing Season by Ruth Axtell Morren Read Free Book Online Page B

a performance.”
    He eyed her critically. She seemed much too fragile to him. “You can’t mean to say you starve yourself during the day.”
    “I have been recently following a regimen of only fruit and vegetables on a performance day and tea laced with honey and lemon for my throat. I only dine after the show.”
    “You certainly don’t look as if you needed to follow such a strict regimen.” He offered her his pastry.
    “I shall only take a bite since it looks so tempting.” She broke off a corner of the warm pastry he held out to her.
    “Thank you, it’s delicious,” she told him after she’d swallowed it and daintily wiped her mouth with herlace-edged handkerchief. As she looked up at him, he was struck afresh by the color of her eyes. It was the clear gray of the mist hanging over the sea at dawn.
    He cleared his throat, too dazed by his reaction to her to formulate any more complicated response than “You’re welcome.”
    They stopped at another booth, this one selling all sorts of trinkets. After Jem had bought a pair of fans for the two ladies, he turned to present one to Mrs. Neville.
    “I c-can’t believe I’m really h-here walking with a famous actress. How do you do such amazing things on the stage, from pretending you—you’re a pirate to a princess—”
    She laughed as she took the fan and opened it with a flourish. “Haven’t you heard that ‘all the world’s a stage’? You live in one. Look around you. There are all kinds of dramas taking place right under your nose.
    “Take that couple for instance.” She motioned with her fan to a stout couple standing at the next booth. “You can tell by their gestures alone that he missed his target and now she is berating him for wasting his money and not getting her a prize.”
    “You’re right,” Jem told her in amazement. He burst out laughing when the colorfully dressed woman turned to the man and scolded him for his clumsiness. “How did you notice them?”
    She shrugged. “I take those things I see and use themon the stage—the irate wife, the distressed husband, the lost, frightened child.” She stopped talking and, fixing her eyes on Ian, stared hard at him for a few seconds.
    “Wot? Don’t you see the draggle-tailed duck in front o’ yous? Can’t you ’it the bleatin’ target? I didn’t come to the fair so you could lose all our brass. What kind of a big looby are you?” She turned to Jem and the actress with a nod. “Gor, if it’d been my first ’usband, Alf, never a better man, if ’e’d ha been ’ere, ’e’d ha’ knocked down a dozen ducks already.”
    Jem and the children were doubled over in laughter, and the younger actress was clapping her hands in glee. Ian couldn’t help but smile. He was as captivated as Jem by Mrs. Neville’s ability to capture the scene they’d witnessed only briefly at the next booth.
    It struck him that this beautiful woman was as close an observer of human drama as he was of a sick body in order to diagnose it properly.
    “Come, we’d better keep moving before they notice us,” she said, once more in her natural tone. She placed her hand in the crook of his elbow, and Ian looked down at the kid glove, wondering at how natural it felt to have it resting there.
    They walked along, following Jem and the children. Mrs. Neville’s young friend had attached herself to Jem, and Ian watched in amusement as Jem blushed and stammered his replies to her.
    A moment later Ian turned to an angry voice up ahead.
    “They take away the food from a man’s mouth. They make us fight for the king, then put us on the street when we come ’ome!” A dirty, disheveled man wearing an old army jacket, stood waving a crutch and shouting to the crowd. One foot ended in a filthy, wrapped stump.
    Ian felt Mrs. Neville’s hand tighten on his arm as she noticed the speaker. “Poor man,” she murmured.
    The speaker soon had a group gathered around him, raising their hands and shouting back in