Hey readers! After a couple of darker figures from Olive's life, today takes a turn for the sweeter side. I'm not entirely sure what to think of Lucky, but Olive clearly thought well of this strange man.
June 28th, 1890
There are times I’ve found it hard to speak, like Lucky, but though I have enough tales of him to fill your pages and another ten novels, I now find it equally challenging to write! My hand yearns to release every memory spinning through my head, yet so many of Lucky’s stories are the ones I should never tell. The dangerous, sad stories few would believe. Tales of warlocks and woes and our steadfast little Wolf overwhelmed by it all.
Certainly, I will fill most of your pages with stories of Lucky and Matilda, each one more beautiful and heartbreaking than the last, but I have a story of my own to write first.
He would follow at Matilda’s heels as if she’d lured him with a charm or held him to an invisible leash, but when she’d seclude herself to bathe, he’d stand behind me at the table, observing over my shoulder as I sketched. I always knew he was there from the scent of cedar and Duchess on his clothes, but he was usually quiet and content to let me draw as I would, and he was the only one I didn’t mind watching as I did.
One evening he sat beside me while I finished the details on a drawing of our sorrel mare. He leaned in to admire my depiction of Duchess’s sweet, gentle brown eyes…and to slip my pencil from my hand!
I’d never seen him produce anything more complex than scribbles before, but in a bare corner of my drawing, careful not to alter my work, he scrawled clumsy lines into the shape of a round, lopsided face with black squiggles for hair before returning my pencil to me.
It took me a moment of gaping open-mouthed at his self-portrait to realize he wanted me to draw him too, but as I sketched on a fresh page, he posed perfectly still with one corner of his mouth askew with an attempt at the grin I’d only half succeeded in teaching him. That drawing looked much like this portrait by the time Matilda finished her bath and I whisked my sketches upstairs. Lucky returned to shadowing my sister as if our exchange had never happened, lying across Matilda’s feet as she took up her knitting by the fireplace. She ruffled his ebon hair and laughed that he was just like a wolf pup.
Yet for a precious half hour I had sat with Lucky’s true self, and I was never again able to see the wolf.
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