and would be married to Wilfred; to know that everything somehow would be all right.
Mrs Prout rolled the ball in her hand until it was smudged and greasy with fingerprints. Did Mrs Hilda Prout already know about Grace’s life and was now seeing some unknown future world with Grace in it, without Grace saying a word? Were there people who could grasp the truth, guess it, divine it, without being told?
Mrs Prout was hidden away from the bright world of science and modern medicine with its new vitamins and vaccines, and she earned her living charming shingles, warts, jaundice and dropsy. This was the ancient custom and it went unremarked upon and accepted in Narberth.
Grace asked self-consciously, ‘What do you see?’
Mrs Hilda Prout ignored her and gazed into the depths of the ball, then blinked tightly.
‘I was hoping to ask you about Wilfred Price …’
‘Ah … your affianced. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook”.’
‘Pardon?’ asked Grace, not understanding. ‘A willow? I don’t understand.’
Mrs Prout stared intently at her. ‘Were you expecting to understand?’ she asked harshly, brushing her brittle grey hair back into its bun.
Grace didn’t want riddles; she wanted a fact about the future, something she could hold on to, pin her hopes on.
Mrs Prout turned her back on Grace, wrapped the translucent orb in the scarf as if wrapping the relic of a saint, and locked it away in its case. She tucked the key down her bosom, drew back the curtains then sat down opposite the girl, saying nothing.
‘I didn’t hear from Wilfred … and …’ Grace desperately tried to explain. ‘You said I would marry him.’ There was a quivering note of panic in her voice but Mrs Prout ignored her.
‘There’s rain coming. I saw that.’
Grace didn’t know how to respond. Is that all? she thought.
‘Take your brolly. Don’t forget.’
‘Did you see anything in the crystal ball that might … help me?’ Near-hysteria was welling within her as her hopes were dashed.
‘Yes, but there is very little to say about what I saw,’ said Mrs Hilda Prout, ‘except to say that all mothers are healers.’
‘Grace, bach,’ Dr Reece called gently that evening, knocking on his daughter’s bedroom door. Grace watched her father come in. He looked ill at ease, which was unusual; she almost never saw him like that. As the only doctor in Narberth he was always the more confident one, the one who wasn’t in pain, the one with all the answers. He never needed his patients the way his patients needed him.
‘Grace …?’
Grace was waiting for his answer, which she knew – as was his habit – he would provide.
‘Would you take this?’ he asked soberly.
There it was – the answer, Grace thought. He placed a blue bottle of medicine on her dressing-table, the bottle clanking loudly on the curved glass covering the dressing-table top. The bottle, with its viscous liquid, stood next to the gilded hand mirror her grandmother had given her when she was twelve. Dr Reece gently put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and left it there for a few moments.
‘You may find it is of assistance,’ he continued, ‘for the heaviness you are experiencing.’ He avoided her eyes and Grace looked at her patchwork quilt. What did her father know? She crushed the thought.
Once her father had left the room and she’d heard his solid footsteps on the stair linoleum, Grace picked up the bottle. It was unlabelled. Her father hadn’t said how much to take. She could ask him, but she knew she wouldn’t.
Grace thought of Mrs Prout’s comment: she didn’t know if all mothers were healers. Her mother? Her accusing, rejecting mother? No. When she or Madoc had been ill in childhood it was their father who paid a visit to W. Palmer Morgan, the apothecary, who waited while the pills were made and then who dispensed – with exactitude – the treatment. It was true that very occasionally it had been her mother who had wrapped the laddered silk stocking around her or her brother’s neck when they had sore throats and who had lit the camphor lamp that burned through the night when Grace had tonsillitis, and had thrust teaspoons of Invalid Bovril into her mouth, but it had been at her father’s instruction.
Mrs Hilda Prout was wrong – completely wrong. Her father, with his thick grey beard and piercing eyes, was the healer – not that he would have called himself such; he would think that word was mumbo-jumbo. A healer