by Susan Barrie
Dear Tiberius
Susan Barrie
Formerly published as Nurse Nolan
Harlequin Romance
#580
Lucy wasn’t sure of her feelings. Sir John gave his invalid daughter, Miranda, all that money could buy -- but the child craved love. As her nurse, Lucy became the object of Miranda’s affections -- reluctantly, because her position was only temporary. She felt concerned when Sir John brought home Lynette Harling, a temperamental ballerina uninterested in the role of stepmother. But was Lucy’s concern for her patient or because of her feelings for Sir John?
CHAPTER ONE
A playful gust of wind tore along the terrace and was very nearly successful in lifting Nurse Lucy Nolan’s cap from her neat dark curls. As she reaffixed it firmly—taking care this time that no other freakish zephyr should deprive her of it altogether—Miranda, in her wheelchair, put her head on one side and regarded her with interest.
“Has anyone ever told you how pretty you are Nurse Nolan?”
Nurse Nolan, cap once more secure, and every other item of her precise dress exactly as she herself would have approved of it, put a finger beneath her chin and appeared to consider.
“Well, now, since you mention it—yes! Numerous times, in fact! Such numerous times that I’ve forgotten half of them.”
Miranda giggled delightedly, and nuzzled her head against the cushion behind her.
“You know,” she said, “I think you’re saying that as a kind of joke, but I think you’re pretty—frightfully pretty! You’ve got such nice blue eyes, the smiley kind, and your eyelashes turn upward at the tips like little curly brooms. And your nose turns upward a bit, too.”
“That’s retrousse,” Lucy murmured.
“That’s re—what did you say?”
“Never mind, darling, but that’s what it is. The freckles are just freckles.”
“You haven’t got any freckles—or, at least,” she said with strict honesty, “not very many. And freckles are fairy kisses.”
“Then I must be beloved by the fairies.”
Miranda continued to survey her with a warm, glowing kind of smile in her sunken, cornflower-blue eyes. They were eyes that seemed to have captured the shadows of the sea on a stormy day, but they were bright, alive and intelligent, just the same.
“It’s a funny thing,” she said, “but when I really like you best is on Sunday, just before you set off for church, and not when you’re wearing that uniform. Must you always wear a uniform?”
“Oh, dear me,” Lucy Nolan murmured, the smile very evident in her own blue eyes. “And I was kind of kidding myself that my uniform was really chic. And unfortunately I can’t spend my life setting off for church on Sundays, so it’s rather awkward.”
“You could be like Fiske, and wear ordinary clothes.”
“Fiske wears black alpaca, with ruchings of lace at the neck and wrists. I don’t think that sort of outfit would become me, somehow!”
Miranda giggled afresh, obviously in entire agreement, and then she caught sight of a red admiral butterfly hovering close to her face and she cried out at once, “Oh, catch it! Do, do catch it, Noly! Just so that I can look at it, and then let it go again. I don’t want to do it any harm.”
“No, you wouldn’t do anybody any harm, now or ever!” Or that was what Nurse Nolan thought, as she got up to catch the butterfly. “Only one person has suffered a kind of fancied hurt as a result of your arrival in this world, my poor pet, and that is the august gentleman, your father. But even he may wake up one of these days!”
She carried the butterfly, fluttering wildly in her deceptively soft fingers, which Miranda declared smelled always of a mixture of antiseptics and lavender toilet soap, to the occupant of the wheelchair, and the two heads bent over it, the one with the brown curls escaping from beneath the crisp little cap, and the other with fine gold tresses stirring gently in the breeze. Then Miranda gave the order for it to be released, and she watched almost breathlessly as it skimmed away across the wide expanse of lawn in the direction of the lake.
“I think I’d like to be a butterfly” she remarked suddenly, and sighed.
Lucy tucked in an end of her rug, gave a soft little flick to her cheek, and then started to propel the wheelchair forward along the terrace.
“Butterflies don’t live very long,” she observed.
“But they can go wherever they want to go while they are alive, and that must be fun!”
Lucy Nolan made no response to this, but as she, too, followed the progress of the butterfly, and guessed that its brilliant wings had already negotiated the placid surface of the lake, and were about to be swallowed up in the piled-up woods on the opposite shore, her heart was full of a deep sympathy for Miranda’s point of view. But all she said, as the cushioned wheels of the chair made a fat, kissing noise on the flagged floor of the terrace, and a couple of pigeons flew up and took refuge on the back of an ornamental stone lion, was, “It’s time for your lunch, my child, and I hope you’ve worked up something in the nature of an appetite for it! We’ve been once around the park, nearly halfway down the two-mile driveway, and sat out here for half an hour, and if all the good air you’ve gulped into your lungs in that time hasn’t made you hungry—well, I’ll refuse my own lunch!”
“You know I’m never hungry,” Miranda said pettishly.
“That’s nothing to boast about!”
“You’ll have to coax me, as you always do,” the twelve-year-old informed her with a hint of a mischievous smile in her eyes as she looked around at her.
“As to that, my sweet,” Lucy responded, “you’ll have to begin to coax yourself, or let Fiske coax you, because after next week I won’t be with you anymore!”
She felt, rather than heard, Miranda give a gasp. “You mean you’re going away?”
“Right first time, clever girl!”
“But you can’t—you can’t go away!” Miranda made the effort to twist herself around in her chair, and she gazed upward imploringly. “Nurse Nolan—Lucy, you said I could call you Lucy sometimes—don’t you see that if you go away I’ll only have Fiske and Abbott, and what will I do? Fiske is absolutely hopeless because she’s always in a flap, and as for Abbott well, you know what Abbott is like!”
Lucy could not help laughing at the perturbation in the young voice.
“Fiske is a very worthy spinster who has adored you all your life and spoiled you consistently, and I’m sure your father considers Mrs. Abbott an excellent housekeeper, and I personally like her very much indeed,” she replied, trying to sound severe. And then, more gently, “But why have you made up your mind—as it seems you have—that I could remain with you forever? You must know, Mirry, that you’re getting better now, although it’s true you can’t walk yet....”
“Will I ever walk again?” Miranda asked, in a strange hard, unchildlike voice.
“Why, of course you will, darling!” But the breath caught in Nurse Nolan’s throat, for at the present time no one knew whether Miranda would ever walk again. It was hoped that she would, but no one could be certain. “But it may take time, and ... remember your father has to pay me for my services as long as I’m here, and apart from the fact that you seem to find me amusing to have around, I’m not strictly important to you any longer. That is to say, you can do quite well without me.”
“You think I can,” Miranda said, clasping her emaciated fingers so tightly together that the nails dug into the spare flesh. “But can you imagine Fiske even trying to catch a red admiral butterfly, let alone holding it while I looked at it? Why, she can’t bear it if a moth gets into her room! And I don’t want to be smothered by affection. Not her affection, anyway! And I do want
to laugh sometimes, and have someone laugh with me, and enjoy silly little jokes, and ... and ....” She swallowed hard.
“Fiske thinks Edward Lear is nonsense!”
“Well, that’s most unfortunate, I agree,” Lucy deplored, trying to make her voice sound light and merely faintly amused. “But there are other things in life apart from Edward Lear, and at least Fiske does like poetry. I’ve heard her recite to you quite often.”
“Yes—Macaulay’s Armada!”
“That’s stirring enough!”
They were approaching the open French windows that admitted them to the little room off the drawing room through which they always reached the hall on these occasions, and Miranda was leaning forward and clutching the side of her chair and looking, if she hadn’t been quite so young, as if she had been stricken by disaster and was unable to think of any means to cope with it.
Lucy halted the chair outside the windows and removed the plaid rug from the small invalid’s knees, and lifted and swung her up into her arms without any difficulty whatsoever. For she was so light and fragile and almost unbelievably thin that it was like lifting a large doll and bearing her into the dim, cool shadows of the small, paneled room. As she did so two large tears welled up in Miranda’s eyes, spilled over her lashes and rolled down her cheeks.
“Lucy, you’re a pig to want to go!”
“I don’t want to go, darling, but I must. Think of all the patients in the world who’re just waiting for me to take charge of them.”
“I don’t believe it! And my father’s rich enough to keep you forever if I need you—and I do need you!”
“You’re highly flattering, my child, but I don’t think your father would see eye to eye with you. In fact, I’m sure he wouldn’t.”
“I shall ask him not to let you go when he comes back to Ketterings,” Miranda said stubbornly.
“I wouldn’t my dear, if I were you,” Lucy urged her gently. “In this life we have to learn to accept things, you know.”
But she felt she was being brutal.
CHAPTER TWO
Purvis, the elderly butler, came forward quickly when they reached the hall, and Lucy handed Miranda over to him. This was all part of a daily ritual, when it was fine and they were able to spend part of the morning out of doors, and Purvis bore his master’s daughter upstairs to her own rooms and her own lunch, entrusting her to the care of the waiting Fiske, while Nurse Nolan washed her hands and then repaired to the dining room to wait for Purvis to return and resume his normal duties.
Except when the master was at home, there was never anyone in the dining room, but Lucy had grown used to sitting in state at the long oak table and being pressed to enjoy a little of this or that by the well-trained manservant. He knew her likes and dislikes very well by now, for it was nearly three months since she had first come to Ketterings, and usually there was a little choicely served fish or chicken, followed by a feathery-light sweet or souffle, coffee and dessert.
Purvis frequently prepared her a peach that had arrived at perfection in the Ketterings peach houses, or had ready for her a slice of pineapple or a few bloomy dark grapes.
The dining room at Ketterings was somber, with a great mullioned window inset with armorial bearings, and there was a coat of arms above the fireplace, and crossed broadswords on the walls. There were also one or two portraits that frowned down from their paneled background, and the hall of the house was hung thickly with portraits, climbing the wall beside the graceful, fan-shaped staircase, and overflowing into the long gallery.
But neither the portraits nor the armorial bearings had any link with the present owner of the house or his forebears. He had a title that had been handed on to him by his father, it is true, but the first Sir John Ash had sold newspapers in the streets of a large industrial city at a time when other boys of his age were still at school. By the time he died he was, however, not only the head of a firm of shipbuilders, but had amassed a fortune that had enabled him to bring up his son along very different lines from those that he himself had been forced to follow. The present baronet had acquired Ketterings, a lovely Elizabethan house, from the impoverished descendants of a family who had lived in it for generations, and he had taken it over lock, stock and barrel—even including Purvis, or so Nurse Nolan had been given to understand! And he had spent a great deal of money on it, especially the grounds, which were really beautiful, and in the summertime attracted sightseers who paid to be allowed to wander over them.
But the thing that astonished Lucy Nolan was that, having acquired his house and restored to it some of its former loveliness, Sir John himself came to it but seldom, and then only for the most fleeting visits. On the fourth Friday in every month his big, chauffeur-driven car arrived with him at the foot of the steps, and every fourth Sunday evening it took him away again. In between visits there was not even a telephone message—save for the short period when his daughter’s life was despaired of—and Lucy had come to the conclusion that everything that made life worth living for him had its roots ineradicably driven into the pavements of the big, bustling, thriving city where his father had started his hard climb upward.
Ships, apparently, meant everything to him—much more than a daughter whose mother had died when she was still too small to remember her! And not even when that daughter, on holiday with a school friend, had become the victim of a car crash that might so easily have terminated her short life altogether, did the father betray very much in the way of any really noticeable emotion that would have indicated that her loss would have affected him very deeply. Or even that it would have affected him at all! A daughter was a poor thing, or so it seemed, compared with a ship that could be launched triumphantly and go out across the broad seas to the other end of the world, carrying hundreds of passengers who paid fantastic sums for the luxuries the Ash-Aird Line offered them. For the Ash-Aird Line did really make ocean travel a thing without any sort of boredom or discomfort or inconvenience of any kind. And the man at the head of it, in his imposing offices that had once been not so imposing, but had provided the first rungs of the ladder for the first Sir John to get his two feet satisfactorily planted on, bent most of his endeavors nowadays to the still greater improvement of the line and the growth of his own prestige.
Or that was how it seemed to Nurse Nolan. She had had three interviews with Sir John, and three only. And on each of those he had struck her as a man it was next door to impossible ever to get to know.
It wasn’t merely that she felt sure he was iron hard, for there was nothing in his appearance or in his method of conducting the interviews, that would have justified that description. On the contrary he was exceedingly polite, and his voice never rose above a certain minor key, although it was at times quite noticeably incisive. He was not a particularly tall man, but he was so exceptionally spare that he gave the appearance of being taller than he was, and his face was thin and finely drawn, with tiny lines like crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. The eyes were quite expressionless, of the cold gray of pewter, and he had very black hair, that, but for the fact that he dealt with it determinedly with brilliantine, would have been inclined to tumble forward over one eyebrow.
Lucy Nolan, whose dark blue eyes gave away the fact that she had Irish blood in her veins, found it difficult sometimes to control the impulsiveness that was a part of her nature—and that four years of hospital discipline had only temporarily held in check—and in the presence of such a man as John Ash she was conscious of being at a loss. He never advanced any opinions, he waited for her to express hers and whilst waiting he appeared to study her without at the same time conveying to her any impression that he was even remotely interested in what he saw. She had the feeling that she was up against a curious insensibility, an imperviousness, perhaps it was, to everything but his own concerns that seemed to emanate from him, and that had the effect of numbing her wits and making her voice sound stumbling and uncertain in her own ears.
Matters she had wished to discus
s with him, and which had seemed to her of vital importance, seemed all at once to lose a great deal of their importance while those dispassionate, cool eyes of his surveyed her. She felt young and inexperienced, and even trivial, as if she was an unsatisfactory witness in a court of law being subjected to a scrutiny by the judge—and not quite a human judge, either!
He displayed no concern over his daughter’s welfare—no serious concern, that is—but he surrounded her with every care. He was a meticulous and a thorough man, and at least he had not neglected to pursue every avenue that might lead to the child’s complete restoration to health. There was one man—an Austrian surgeon with a worldwide reputation— with whom he had been in touch, but whether the contact had yielded anything hopeful she had no idea, for apart from a letter that she herself had written to him a few days ago, warning him that she considered herself now more or less redundant at Ketterings, and to which he had not replied, they had had no contact since their last meeting. But Purvis, while he waited on her at breakfast that morning, had let her know that the master was expected the following day, which would be the fourth Friday in the month since his last visit to the home that saw so little of him.
So perhaps he was waiting until he arrived home to summon her to his presence and discuss the question of her leaving. And in case he made any attempt to persuade her to remain with her patient a little longer, she had quite made up her mind to resist his persuasions, not in her own interests but in the interests of Miranda. For the child was becoming so dependent upon her for companionship that the longer Lucy remained with her, the harder would it be for the small invalid when she did finally take her departure.