by Liz Fielding
‘It won’t take a minute. I just wanted to ask you to take more care when you’re vacuuming.’
She bridled. ‘I do my best with the dog hairs. The dogs aren’t supposed to go into the library, or the drawing room. The missus won’t have it when she’s at home. Of course, if I had one of those new cleaners—’
‘I’m not talking about dog hairs, woman!’
Harry was confronted by three pairs of female eyes—one pair narrowed with disapproval, one pair dark and very round, one pair framed with slightly raised brows. He ignored the ‘could do better’ look and concentrated on Susan.
‘I know you work extremely hard cleaning up after Sally’s strays, but that isn’t the problem.’
He had the strangest impression of breath being collectively held behind him.
‘Quite the contrary,’ he went on. ‘In your effort to do a thorough job you appear to have knocked the telephone jack out of the socket in the library. It’s why we haven’t been able to make or receive calls all morning.’
She frowned. ‘But I haven’t…’
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a movement but by the time he’d turned to look at Jacqui she was doing nothing more suspicious than tucking her hair behind her ear.
She gave him that ‘What?’ look.
A question he didn’t want to answer and he turned back to Susan, who, with rare meekness, said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Harry. I’ll be more careful in future.’
‘No!’ Maisie, who’d been sitting at the kitchen table, leapt to her feet, knocking over her chair and sending the hen squawking for safety. ‘No!’ she repeated. ‘You mustn’t blame Susan.’ She glared at him. ‘It was me, OK?’ she said, sounding more like a belligerent teenager than a six-year-old. ‘I did it.’
Maisie?
It was deliberate?
He looked at Jacqui in a bid for some kind of sense and realised that she’d known. Her eyes were liquid, pleading with him to understand, to be kind…
Something that Susan, leaping to Maisie’s protection and taking the blame, clearly thought him incapable of.
‘What did you do, Maisie?’
‘I unplugged the phone.’
‘In the library?’
‘In the library,’ she said, with a touch of defiance. ‘In the office. In the kitchen…’
He walked across to the kitchen phone and traced the line to a socket hidden behind a sagging sofa, the plug lying loose on the floor. He didn’t ask how she knew what to do—he could well imagine Sally yanking out a plug when she didn’t want to take a call—he simply replaced it and stood up.
She might be a little demon, but at least she wasn’t prepared to let someone else take the blame for her.
He knew exactly why she’d disconnected the phones, of course. Jacqui kept telling him why. She didn’t want him talking to Selina or Aunt Kate and making other arrangements for her. She wanted to stay here. If he allowed Maisie to tell him that, he’d never be able to send her away…
‘Thank you for being so honest,’ he said. ‘That was very brave of you.’ Then, turning to Susan, ‘And you are a lot kinder than she deserves. Just leave a note about that cleaner on my desk and I’ll see to it.’
There was a sharp rap at the back door, a call of, ‘Anyone about?’
‘That’s the mechanic come to sort out your car,’ he said to Jacqui. A welcome distraction. ‘Can I trust you to call your agency while I talk to him?’ He didn’t bother to conceal his anger with her. She was a grown-up and didn’t deserve kid gloves. ‘They must be very concerned not to have heard from you. Or was the story about the missing cellphone fiction, too?’
He didn’t wait for her answer. He wasn’t interested in her answer.
She’d known.
She’d looked at him with those big grey eyes, held out the telephone for him to listen to the silence and all the time she’d known what Maisie had done.
As he walked away, he heard the telephone begin to ring. It did not, as anticipated, signal relief. On the contrary, it had a hollow knell-like sound.
‘Morning, Dr Talbot.’
The mechanic had loaded Jacqui’s car onto the back of his pick-up and was wiping his hands on a rag.
‘Mike.’ Then, concentrating on the car, ‘You’re taking her down to the garage?’
‘Better get her up on the ramp, have a proper look. Nothing worse than a job half done.’
‘No.’
‘Do you want me to hang on to it until your visitor leaves? She won’t want to be bashing her nice new exhaust to bits going back down the lane, will she?’
He hadn’t said anything about a visitor, or that the VW belonged to a woman. But then she’d asked directions at the village shop; the local equivalent of a tabloid headline.
‘When will it be ready?’
The sooner it was done, the sooner he could get her disturbing presence out of here. Get back to normal. Or the nearest approximation of it that he could manage.
‘Ah, well, I tried to ring earlier. Did you know your phone’s out? I did report it.’
‘Then your call must have done the trick. It’s back on now.’
‘Oh, right. Well,’ he said, gesturing at the car, ‘the problem is that this is an old model. It’s going to take a day or two to get hold of the parts, but since I had to come up to tell you, I thought I’d save a trip and take it back with me. Is the delay going to be a problem?’
‘Will it make any difference if I say yes?’
‘No, but I could organise a rental in the meantime. Something with a higher clearance. If the lady needs a runabout?’
He resisted the temptation. Even if he provided her with alternative transport, where would she go? He had considered suggesting she take Maisie home with her. If she declined, there was no way he could insist. Besides, she might not have room. And if she had, would she admit it?
‘We’ll manage. Just do it as quickly as you can. And Mike, you’d better ask your brother if he’ll fill and roll the potholes in the lane as a temporary measure.’ His purpose in neglecting it had been to keep people out, not have them stuck up here unable to leave. ‘I’ll talk to him about something more permanent as soon as the weather improves.’
‘Don’t leave it too long. He’ll be starting work on the new houses after Easter.’
‘New houses?’
‘Nice little development. Your Aunt Kate is a canny woman. Pushed through the planning permission on that bottom field by the road. The low-cost housing she insisted on did the trick. It’ll keep the youngsters here and save the village school. Mean work for all us.’ He nodded in the direction of the house. ‘Will you be sending your little girl there?’
His words, so casually spoken, struck like a knife wound straight to the heart.
‘No. She’s not staying. Give me a call when the car’s ready.’ And, not waiting for a reply, he turned and walked away. Not back to the house, but up the hill and into the mist.
Jacqui, replacing the receiver, caught sight of her precious car being loaded onto the back of the garage pick-up and, since Harry was nowhere in sight, went outside to find out what was happening.
The mechanic finished securing it and then looked up. ‘Morning, miss. This your little beauty?’
She smiled. ‘She is lovely, isn’t she?’
‘A credit to you. Shame you had to bring her up here.’
Unprepared to commit herself, she asked, ‘Where are you taking her?’
‘Mike’s Garage. I’m Mike, by the way.’ He extended his hand, then, realising that it was less than clean, thought better of it. ‘You’ll find us down the lane behind the village shop. I told Dr Talbot that it’ll be a couple days before we can get a part. It’s her age, you see. Not standard stock. I did offer him a rental in the meantime, but he said not to bother.’
‘He did?’ Her heart did a little flip-flop that she couldn’t quite decipher. Maybe because it meant he wouldn’t be bundling her out of the door at the first chance he got. After th
e way he’d looked at her when he realised she’d known about the phone she’d expected to be thrown out, bag and baggage, at the first opportunity.
‘If that doesn’t suit you, miss, you just say the word.’
‘What? Oh, no.’ Then, ‘No, really, if I need to come down to the village I’m sure Harry won’t mind me borrowing the Land Rover. And I quite understand about the spares. I’ve had problems in the past. There’s no special rush.’
For some reason that appeared to amuse him, but he just said, ‘Whatever you say, miss. Do you want to close the gate after me?’
‘Of course.’
She waited until he’d driven through then closed it after him before turning back to the house. The mist had thinned sufficiently for her to see how it nestled comfortably in a fold in the hill. No longer threatening, but a sturdy refuge from the worst of the weather.
Beyond it, a movement caught her eye and she saw the dark shape of a man moving swiftly in fierce, angry strides toward the summit.
He had every right to be angry. She should have told him about Maisie’s stunt with the phones.
And now she’d compounded her duplicity by encouraging Mike to take his time about fixing the car.
Not that it would make any difference one way or the other since all Vickie had been able to tell her in their brief exchange was that Selina Talbot hadn’t responded to her messages, but ‘not to worry’, she was ‘on it’.
Maybe she should make a thorough job of it, call her back and tell her to take her time, too, although she was rapidly coming to the conclusion that it wouldn’t make any difference.
Selina Talbot must have known her mother was in New Zealand since it wasn’t exactly a last-minute, off-the-cuff trip. She’d been there for five months, for heaven’s sake. It would take a desperately casual attitude to communications to miss that one.
Maybe it was paranoia, induced by the bang on her head, but she was beginning to get the strongest feeling that Selina Talbot had known exactly what she was doing. That Harry had been the only responsible adult available and rather than give him the opportunity to say no—and he’d certainly have said no—he’d been presented with a fait accompli.
Left holding the baby—nanny included.
Because once she’d come to that conclusion it was equally obvious that, in spite of all her protestations to the contrary, Vickie Campbell—who was not casual about anything to do with her business—must have known exactly what the situation was.
The only thing that completely flummoxed her was the fact that no one had thought to pack some sensible, mucking-about-in-the-country clothes for Maisie.
‘The rabbits now. You must come and see the rabbits.’
Jacqui was being given a tour of the menagerie. They’d said hello to the puppies and their mother. Given Fudge an apple and brushed his mane. Taken carrots to the donkeys, who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but, bearing in mind Harry’s trouble with them, she’d kept a tight hold of Maisie’s hand when she headed for the gate. She had no intention of chasing donkeys all over the hill.
Now she was being dragged into a small paddock behind the stables, where the rabbits and chickens had large and comfortable quarters.
Her reluctance was more to do with the chickens than an unwillingness to visit the rabbits. They were loose, a mix-and-match assortment, busily stalking any worm foolish enough to put its head above ground. She didn’t like their sharp little beaks, their beady little eyes or that head-jutting way they walked.
They made her nervous.
The rabbits, more dawn-and-dusk explorers, were taking their time about being tempted to leave the comfort of the hutch and venture into the run.
‘Try a carrot, Maisie. Rabbits like carrots, don’t they?’
‘Not as much as dandelion leaves.’
She jumped as Harry spoke from a few feet behind her. The soft grass had muffled his approach and she’d been so busy keeping an eye on the chickens that she hadn’t seen him. She turned round. It was impossible to tell if his hard walk had blown away his temper. His face was giving nothing away.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Jacqui?’
Not wanting Maisie to witness what was clearly going to be an awkward conversation, she left her poking a carrot through the wire mesh of the run and walked across to the dry-stone wall at the bottom end of the paddock.
Harry, taking the hint, followed, turning his back to the wall and leaning against it. Waiting for her explanation.
‘I knew about the phone no more than five minutes before you. I apologise for not telling you but, having realised it must be Maisie, and aware how much you loathe having her here, I was hoping to save her from your anger.’ She looked at him. ‘I had intended to deal with it myself at the first opportunity. Would have done it straight away except that you decided to settle in the library.’
‘You thought I’d shout at her?’
‘It seemed a reasonable assumption.’ She glanced at him. ‘But actually you don’t shout, do you?’
‘Despite all appearances, Jacqui, I’m not an ogre.’
She reached out, touched his arm, very lightly as if this would somehow show him that she knew that she’d got it all wrong. Of course he wasn’t an ogre. He was unhappy. But then wasn’t that the case in most fairy tales?
‘I meant, you keep everything bottled up inside. It might be better if you did yell at Maisie. I’m sure she could deal with an emotional outburst a lot better than being frozen out.’ She shrugged. ‘Whether you can is something else.’
‘Amateur psychology I can do without,’ he said.
‘I’m just telling it the way I see it, but maybe next time you take off into the mist you should try just opening your mouth and letting rip. It’s supposed to be therapeutic.’
She held his mocking challenge, refusing to back down, and in the end he was the one who turned away, looking out into the misty void.
‘I can’t expect you to understand how desperately difficult I find it…’ He made a helpless gesture.
‘She’s just a little girl, Harry. That she’s adopted, a different colour from you, doesn’t make her different. She so much wants you to accept her—’
She was going to say ‘love her’, but thought that might be an emotion too far.
He was already frowning.
‘Colour?’
Jacqui swallowed, wishing she hadn’t chosen now, this minute, when things were going so well, to bring up the subject. But the words could not be withdrawn. ‘She told me.’
‘What?’ He looked genuinely perplexed. ‘What did she tell you?’
And suddenly she had that hideous sinking feeling that came when you realised that you were digging a hole with your mouth. But there was no going back.
‘When I tried to explain that I couldn’t stay here she asked me if it was because she was adopted. Because of her colour…’
And she looked across at Maisie, crooning to the rabbits, coaxing them out to play. She looked so happy, so relaxed, so different from the little girl who’d delivered that straight-to-the-heart appeal.
‘What did she say, Jacqui?’
She held her hand up in front of her, holding him off with a little wave, unable, for a moment, to speak…
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I can probably work it out all by myself. She said that I didn’t love her, didn’t want her because she’s adopted, or different. Is that the gist of it?’
She nodded. Then, because she had to know, ‘Is it a problem for you?’
He didn’t say anything for a while, just stared down at the ground on the far side of the wall. Then, not looking at her, ‘Yes, it’s a problem.’
What?
She didn’t say the word out loud, but maybe her expression was enough. ‘When I look at her all I can feel is—’
‘No. Not another word.’ She took a step back, putting a yard of clear air between them. If he registered the fact it didn’t show in his expression. Nothing showed… ‘
Here I am,’ she said, slowly, ‘dying of embarrassment for maligning you if only in my thoughts, and you’re actually going to stand there and tell me that it’s true?’
‘I—’
‘Look, Jacqui!’ Maisie, eyes alight, ran up with something clasped in her hand.
Jacqui gathered herself, then turned round and folded herself up to child height so that she could see what she was holding. Forced herself to smile. To speak normally…
‘What have you got there, sweetpea?’
Maisie opened her hands to show a tiny yellow chick. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s pooped on me…’
‘That’s all we need,’ Harry muttered from somewhere far above them. ‘Chicks on the loose. Fox heaven—’
‘Where did you find it, Maisie?’ Jacqui said, interrupting Harry before he said something that would seriously upset the child. Trying to ignore what he’d just told her as she dug a tissue out of her pocket to clean up the mess. Getting a peck for her trouble. Even cute fluffy chicks had beaks…
‘Over by the hedge. There are lots of them. Come and see.’ She didn’t wait, but began to stomp back across the paddock in boots that were at least two sizes too big for her.
‘Wait! Be careful, Maisie. You don’t want to step on them.’
She might not like chickens much, but she wouldn’t want to see one stomped on.
Maisie froze, one leg comically in the air. She was happy, really happy, and Jacqui thought her heart might break for the child…
‘We’re going to need a cardboard box to put them in. I’m sure I saw one in the mud room.’ She turned to Harry, who was still standing by the wall. ‘Do you want to get that?’
‘You don’t want to know what I want,’ he said.
‘I already do, but don’t hold your breath, it’s not going to happen any time soon.’
‘That sounds as if you know something I don’t.’
‘First the chickens,’ she said. ‘Then the bad news.’
CHAPTER NINE
JACQUI, while grateful for the distraction of rounding up the chicks, nevertheless held her breath as Maisie offered one up to Harry when he returned with the box.