The Nurse's Child

by Abigail Gordon

  'How about tomorrow night, then?' he suggested before he could change his mind. 'Sunday is a good day for me and I don't suppose you're rushed off your feet at the weekends.'

  Freya smiled.

  'Mine is a seven-day week, don't forget. My girls are just as likely to need me on one day as another. But Matron and I cover for each other and I am allowed some free time. Like today, for instance. So, yes, tomorrow would be fine.'

  'Would you like to bring Alice? She would be company for Amelia.'

  'Yes, why not?'

  Poppy would be phoning some time over the weekend and her friend would be intrigued to hear that her daughter and Amelia had become friends and that Freya was taking her to dine with the Hasletts.

  She realised that Richard was observing her with a look that had warmth in it. The kind that kindled when a man saw a woman that he desired. But there was watchfulness there, too.

  Freya supposed it wasn't surprising in the circumstances. It had only been a short time since he'd lost the wife he loved. He would see it as betrayal to be lusting after another woman so soon.

  But she was a free agent and if the situation had been any different she wouldn't be holding back.

  When Richard dropped Alice and Freya off at the school in the dark winter night he said, 'So we'll see you both tomorrow.'

  'Yes, you will,' she told him. 'Unless an epidemic occurs amongst the boarders in the meantime.'

  'Hmm. Well, we won't think about those sorts of things. Bye for now, Freya, and thanks for having Amelia.'

  'My pleasure,' she said briefly.

  And she meant every word.

  Taking Alice with her the following day had been a good idea, Freya thought as the two girls greeted each other eagerly and went up to Amelia's bedroom to do their own thing until the meal was ready.

  Having Alice around took away any constraint that might have been present between Richard and herself, and as she set the table while he put the finishing touches to the meal, Freya began to relax.

  Until she came to the place where she'd sat that other time when his arms had come from behind and held her close. She'd known then that she wanted him and it would have gone on from there if she hadn't had Amelia uppermost in her mind.

  When she looked up Richard was watching her from the kitchen doorway and, as if he could read her thoughts, he said quietly, 'If you're thinking about that other time, Freya, don't. My life is complicated enough. You have no idea how I'm tempted. Everything about you makes me come alive.'

  'And what is wrong with that?' She interrupted in a low voice. 'I have no wish to upset you, but if Jenny was the kind of woman you say she was, would she want you to deny yourself happiness for the rest of your life?'

  She was moving slowly towards him, now near enough to see a pulse beating in his neck, the clenching of his hands and the need in his eyes. The girls were at the other end of the house. The moment was theirs.

  'Are you always as direct as this with the men you meet?' he asked as her breasts came up against the strong wall of his chest.

  She laughed low in her throat.

  'Not often. I usually tell them I'm not interested.'

  'And so why...?'

  'Am I not saying that to you?'

  'Yes,' he replied, with his arms still by his sides.

  'Because I want you near me. And that's something I never thought I'd hear myself say.'

  If you only knew, he thought bitterly.

  But her arms were around his neck, her lips on his. And with the feeling that he might never get the chance again, his arms closed around her.

  Footsteps on the stairs had them drawing slowly apart with their glances still locked, their mouths yearning.

  'Bon appetit, Sister Farnham,' he said softly, adding as the girls came barging into the room, 'Who's going to stir the soup while I fry the chips?'

  'We have to talk,' Richard said in an aside when Freya and Alice were leaving some time later. 'If I can get Anita to pop round later for an hour to keep an eye on Amelia, can we meet somewhere?'

  'Anita!' she echoed. 'She won't like that.'

  'Why not?'

  'I think you know the answer to that,' she told him. 'I've already been warned off.'

  He was frowning.

  'Really? It makes me sound like a piece of merchandise up for sale.'

  'Well, that's how it is with Anita Frost,' Freya said with a take-it-or-leave-it sort of shrug.

  'So I'll ask Annie, my housekeeper. She doesn't live far away. It's eight o'clock now. Shall we say half past nine outside the school gates? We can go for a short drive if that's all right with you.'

  'Yes, if you like, but what is it that you want to talk about? Can't we just see how things progress?'

  He didn't answer the question, just said briefly, 'If only I could.' And left her to wonder what that meant.

  The truth had to come out. Richard admitted that to himself now. And he knew enough about Freya to feel that she would put her daughter first, as he had done.

  He would ask her to keep her identity under wraps until such time as they both felt Amelia was ready to be told. His conscience would then be clear and the attraction between Freya and himself could progress naturally, as she'd suggested.

  He was picking up the car keys at just before half past nine when the phone rang, and the message that he was given put all other thoughts out of his mind.

  There'd been an accident in the centre of the village. A bus and a car had crashed head on the policeman at the other end of the line was saying, 'An ambulance has been sent for, but if you could get down here, Dr Haslett, there might be something you could do while we're waiting for it to arrive.'

  'What's the damage?' he asked briskly. 'How many injured?'

  'Two. A couple of kids in what we think might be a stolen car are trapped under the bus. The folk who were on it are unharmed but in deep shock.'

  Richard was reaching for his bag even as the policeman was giving him the details.

  'I'm on my way,' he told him.

  It was cold, standing outside the school gates, and the minutes were ticking by. Half past nine had been and gone. The hands of Freya's watch were quivering on a quarter to ten. Where was Richard?

  It was only an hour and a half since they'd made the arrangement. So much for urgency! Maybe he'd changed his mind. Decided that those moments in his ill-fated dining room had been a mistake.

  A car was pulling up but it wasn't Richard's. Two of the resident teaching staff had been out for the evening, and one of them wound down the window when they saw her standing there.

  'If you're thinking of going to the village, be warned,' she said. 'It's chaos down there. There's been an accident and traffic is piling up. Two teenagers trapped under a bus. An ambulance has been sent for but it hadn't arrived when we left the scene. The fire service are jacking the bus up so that Richard Haslett can get beneath it to treat them.'

  'Can you turn round and take me there?' Freya cried. 'If the ambulance has been delayed for some reason, he's going to need all the medical assistance he can get.'

  'Sure, jump in,' her informant said obligingly, and within minutes the roofs of the houses in the village came into view.

  'You'll have to go the rest of the way on foot,' the other teacher told her when they got to the outskirts. 'The traffic's too snarled up for us to get any further.'

  Freya didn't need telling. She was off. Part of her training had been on accident and emergency. She knew the routine.

  'Where's Dr Haslett?' she demanded of the officer who was in charge of the firefighters.

  He pointed downwards.

  'Under the bus. You can just see his heels.'

  'Is it propped up safely?'

  'As safe as we can make it, lady, but I can't stand here, gossiping. If you'd like to stand back...'

  'I'm a nurse and am here to assist,' she told him firmly. Lying face down in the oil that seemed to be everywhere, she was slithering under the bus before he could
say anything else.

  'If you're not ambulance personnel, go back!' Richard cried as she came slowly up behind him. 'You'll only be someone else at risk...unless you know how to give an injection, or can resuscitate in six inches of space.'

  He could hear her but there wasn't room to turn his head to see who was wriggling alongside him.

  'I can do the first and will have a go at the second,' she gasped as she wrenched her hair free from a piece of mechanism hanging down from the bus.

  'Freya!' he exclaimed when he heard her voice. 'I can't think of anyone I'd rather have beside me. Except maybe someone who's used to performing amputations.'

  'Oh, no,' she breathed.

  'Oh, yes, I'm afraid. Where the hell are those paramedics? We need the guys from A and E, too. I've given these lads an injection for the pain and at the moment they've both got a pulse and a heartbeat, but for how long?

  'As you can see, they're a tangle of arms and legs and one of them is trapped by the foot in the part of the car that's under the front wheels of the bus. If the fire crew can't cut him free, it'll have to come off or he's going to die from his injuries.

  'The other kid is bleeding heavily from a massive head wound. My case is there beside you. See if you can stem the bleeding while I check if his friend is still with us.'

  Suddenly the deafening noise of the generator that provided the fire crew with the necessary hydraulic pressure for the cutting tools could be heard, and Richard said, 'We're going to have to move out while they get underneath, Freya.'

  At that moment a voice cried, 'We're ready to cut him free, Doc...and the paramedics have arrived.'

  As they slid out from under the wreckage Richard told him, 'It's a mess under there. If you can't manage it, his foot will have to come off.'

  'We've succeeded in tighter places than this,' the firefighter said with optimistic calm and, sure enough, moments later there was a call for the paramedics to take over.

  The twisted metal had been sliced through and the foot was free.

  'Might still have to be amputated,' the doctor who'd come with the crash team from A and E said when the two victims had been brought out and transferred to stretchers, 'but we'll do our best to save it.'

  He was eyeing Freya's smart suit, now covered in oil and grit. 'My grandma used to have a good recipe for getting rid of that stuff,' he said with a grin as he jumped aboard the ambulance and prepared to close the doors.

  The bus and the wreckage of the car had been towed to one side to allow traffic to move freely through the village and the shocked passengers had dispersed.

  The fire service had also departed, their function fulfilled, leaving Freya and Richard to wonder where the time had gone.

  It was eleven o'clock on a chilly winter night and as he drove her back to the school he said, 'I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw you beside me under the bus, yet somehow I wasn't surprised. We really are a good team. Although it was a dangerous thing to do, you know. There were all sorts of risks. The vehicle could have slipped back down onto us, or caught fire.'

  His voice roughened. 'You could have been killed before being told what you want to hear.'

  'And what is that?' she questioned softly, knowing it could only be one thing. He was going to admit that there might be a chance for them. 'Were you going to tell me again that you want me as much as I want you?'

  'No, not that,' he replied flatly, and she recoiled.

  'Oh, I see,' she said stiffly. 'It would appear that I presume too much.'

  He was pulling up at the front of the school and gave her a quick sideways glance. He wanted to tell her that he did want her, desperately.

  She was unique. Elusive, yet down to earth. Tough, yet kind when it came to his mixed-up young daughter and the other girls in her charge. And with himself a passionate whirlwind that would blow itself out when she found out what he'd done.

  Before he ever told her how much he was attracted to her, there was something else Freya had to know. She had to be told that her long search was over. She'd found her child.

  That was what he'd been referring to and now she was jumping to the conclusion that the attraction was all on one side... hers.

  He knew that when he told her the truth about Amelia it would wipe out everything else. There would be no possibility of a relationship between them after what he'd done. Yet she had to know. He was insane to have ever thought he could live with it on his conscience.

  Turning towards her, he took a deep breath, but she already had the door open and her feet were on the path before he could speak.

  'Goodnight, Richard,' she said woodenly, and turning the, knife that was already embedded in his heart. 'At least you were truthful.'

  Truthful he was not, he thought a short time later as he put the car away, but maybe he'd been give a reprieve. He'd been about to come clean back there at the school and hadn't been given the chance.

  Were the fates being kind to him? He doubted it. His misdemeanours were adding up. Now Freya thought he didn't care. That he'd just been using her.

  And as another depressing thought reared its head he went to find pen and paper. If anything had happened to him under the bus, or anywhere else for that matter, Amelia would be seen to be an orphan.

  Seating himself at the desk in his study, he wrote, 'In the event of my death it is my wish that, Freya Farnham, who is my daughter's natural mother, will be responsible for her.'

  So much for that, Freya thought as she lay sleepless beneath the covers. For the first time she'd met a man who mattered, and he was mourning his wife. That had to be what was wrong...or else she'd scared him off by being so outspoken about her feelings.

  Whatever it was, nothing had changed. It was the pattern of her life. Meeting Richard Haslett was going to be just another in a string of relationships that had fizzled out before they'd begun because she was too honest.

  What the recipients of her outspokenness weren't aware of was that it was the fear of any further hurt that made her how she was. Yet it seemed to have the opposite effect, by bringing more heartache.

  It would have been more sensible if she'd gone back to London when she'd found that Amelia wasn't hers, but for once she'd let her heart rule her head and had stayed because of Richard...and the job. She could see herself in so many of the girls in her care, with Amelia Haslett at the top of the list.

  As if she needed to be reminded of her duties, just as she was drifting off to sleep well past midnight, the internal phone beside her bed rang.

  'Sister!' an urgent young voice said in her ear. 'One of my friends has got the most terrible pain in her side. Can you come?'

  'Who is she and which dormitory are you in?' she asked as she reached for a robe to put over her nightgown.

  It was no false alarm. No attention-seeking ploy. Fourteen-year-old Rebecca was writhing on the bed with severe pain on the right side of her abdomen.

  There were all the signs of appendicitis, but when the girl said that she'd had a sore throat over the last few days and that her neck felt tender, Freya eyed her thoughtfully and felt the lymph nodes in her neck. They were swollen.

  In her time spent nursing in paediatric care she'd come across something similar, which had looked like appendicitis on the face of it but had, in fact, been what was known in medical terms as mesenteric lymphadenitis, where lymph nodes in the membrane that kept organs fastened to the wall of the stomach became inflamed.

  Serious-sounding though it was, on the rare occasions that she'd come across it the condition had cleared up rapidly, with the child being given painkilling relief until it did.

  It was decision time. Should she have the young sufferer admitted to hospital on the premise that it was appendicitis, or bed her down in the sanatorium to see if it was the alternative condition? Or have her admitted to hospital in any case just to be on the safe side? And then there was a fourth choice—she could phone Richard and ask him to come out.

  She wasn't going to do that, she decided.
For one thing, he would have to leave Amelia alone in the house if she did. He didn't take night calls for the practice for that reason. Garth Thompson dealt with those.

  But if she decided to keep Rebecca here and she got suddenly worse, it would be seen as negligence on her part. So, taking one of the blankets off the bed, she wrapped it snugly around the girl and went to phone for an ambulance.

  When she came back she sent the other girl back to bed. 'Tell Matron what's happened if I'm not back by morning, will you?' she asked the girl who had called her, and settled down to wait for the emergency services.

  'You could be right,' the doctor in A and E said with a rather surprised look on his face when Rebecca was admitted a little later. 'Where have you come across mesenteric lymphadenitis?'

  'On the children's ward of a big London hospital.'

  He smiled. 'Ah, that explains it. All human life is there, eh?'

  Freya smiled back at him and the elderly medic thought that this young woman looked tired. He wasn't to know that only hours earlier she'd been underneath a bus, trying to stem the flow of blood from a serious head wound.

  'We'll keep Rebecca in overnight,' he told her, 'and see what develops. Are you going to stay?'

  'Yes, until morning,' she told him. 'I hope that I'm right and that an operation won't be needed.'

  'Me, too,' he said with a twinkle in his eye. 'I'm back on Surgical tomorrow and have a theatre list as long as my arm.'

  Freya arrived back at the school the following morning just as the day pupils were arriving, and found herself face to face with Richard and Amelia.

  'I need a quick word if you've got a moment to spare,' she told him.

  Glancing at his watch, he said, 'That will have to be it, I'm afraid...a moment. I'm due to take morning surgery in ten minutes.'

  His voice was cool and detached, but she was too weary to delve into it.

  'I've spent the night in A and E with one of the boarders,' she said quietly. 'I thought at first it was appendicitis, but decided not to disturb you as there was a possibility that it might be something less serious.'