Free Charles Palliser by The Quincunx

I often could not understand but whose expression thrilled me. I read about the lepers who roamed England hundreds of years ago ringing a bell and crying out “Unclean! Unclean!” with hoods over their faces to hide their ravaged features until they became too infirm, when the Burial service was read over them and they were locked away in leper-houses. Curious to know how the truth about the East matched the Arabian Tales I had loved so much, I devoured travellers’ tales and read of hereditary and secret castes of worshippers of many-headed goddesses who strangled their arbitrarily-chosen victims by night as sacrifices to their deities, or of other votaries who hurled themselves to their death beneath the wheels of the great waggons carrying an image of their god. And I read of the hated and reviled Indian caste that only crept out at night to remove the night-soil.
    My mother had long read Sir Walter Scott’s works to me and now that I grew older I began to read his romances for myself — those works in which narrative A WISE CHILD

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    and history are so adroitly blended and made to change places. Perhaps because of my reading of history-books, I became fascinated by the past, and always wanted to know how things had come into being. My elders could not satisfy my curiosity except that Mrs Belflower told me stories of the great families of the locality, but her tales seemed to me not to be historical for they were never precisely placed in time.
    I became more and more curious to know about the past. Where had I come from?
    Where had my mother lived? She hated to be asked and would tell me nothing beyond the bare fact that she had grown up in London. Now that it was borne in upon me that we were not of the village, I was filled with a desire to belong, to have roots, to know of a past before I was born.
    The only clew I had to follow lay in the books. I looked more closely at those which I assumed had belonged to my mother. And now in a few cases I found the letters “M. H.”
    written in a corner of the fly-leaf and since I knew that my mother’s name was Mary, I assumed that the initials were hers. Now I examined the law-books which I had earlier cast aside and noticed that although they had once had a book-plate pasted in, all of these had been torn out. However, since this had not always been done very well, by comparing a number of them I was able to reconstruct the original. This took the form of a shield with the familiar design of the five quatre-foil roses. Above it were the words
    “Ex libris J. H.” and beneath it another line of writing which, as I gradually re-assembled it, I found to be the mysterious words: Tula rosa coram spinis. This was very puzzling, but by now the time was approaching when my mother had promised to satisfy my curiosity on this subject and others, and so I was prepared to wait as patiently as I could until Christmas.
    I suspected that the words were in Latin. This language was not one of the subjects my mother had undertaken to instruct me in, but I recognised it from church on Sundays when we attended divine service. And it was on one of these occasions that something happened that I must now describe.
    It was autumn and as we walked to church that morning — my mother in her yellow silk gown with her merino cloak and best bonnet and I in my top boots, blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, and creamy breeches — the season’s combination of fullness and foreboding was in the air. The chestnuts were bursting from their sheaths and we passed several young men carrying baskets of hazel-nuts, filberts and beech-nuts that they had been into the woods early to gather, following the tradition of the village, in order to give to the girl they admired. And the martins were clustered on the chimneys and thatch of the cottages ready for their departure.
    As usual we slipped into our little boxed pew (we had our sitting far away at the back and behind a pillar) before almost