Fortune's Lead (6 page)

‘H—hallo ... Heavens, what have you done?’

I sounded stupid, even to my own ears. And my nursing training was swiftly reasserting itself, at the sight of the red trickle across one grubby hand: Esther was definitely bleeding. Now I was looking, there was a rent in her coat-sleeve as well. ‘You’d better let me have a look at it,’ I said swiftly, but she glanced at her arm with indifference.

‘S’all right, t’isn’t much. Blast!’ This was as a drip trickled off her fingers and splashed on the carpet. ‘If you’re not the sort that faints at the sight of blood—’ her eyes assessed me doubtfully—‘you could come and tie it up for me. Only don’t
tell.
The fuss people make!’ She turned away along the gallery, holding her arm up to stop further drips and talking to me over her shoulder.

‘I want to go out again tomorrow, and I know Mottie would try and stop me. Appeal to Pa, or something. It only needs a bit of a bandage, and it’ll stop soon.’

She seemed to expect me to follow her, and anyway I couldn’t have let her go off without finding out how badly she was hurt. She led me into a room at the end of the gallery—obviously her bedroom, done up in pretty pastel shades with a thick, pale carpet, a frilly bedcover, and a matching frill round a kidney-shaped dressing-table. Esther was happily leaving a trail of mud across the carpet. She said, ‘Bathroom. I’ve got some bandages,’ and led the way to another door, adding, ‘What’s your name, by the way? Sorry, I’ve forgotten what Pa said.’

‘Charlotte Armitage. Esther, you’d better get that jacket off and let me see what you’ve done. How did you—’

‘Call me Essie. Everyone does, except Pa. And
don’t
fuss, I only gashed it on a branch. Cora threw me, the wretch.’ She turned to face me in the middle of the gleaming white tiles of her bathroom, her enormous brown eyes studying me. ‘You won’t go green, will you? It’s only a scratch. Perhaps you’d better look the other way while I clean it up a bit—’

‘Hardly,’ I said drily, ‘considering—’and then I stopped, memory warning me in time. ‘I did a first aid course once,’ I improvised hastily. ‘So get your jacket off, or do you need help? And have you got some cotton wool? Gauze would be even better.’

She seemed to have everything—a highly efficient first-aid kit, which led me to suspect she was used to doing secret repairs to her person rather than causing the ‘fuss’ she complained about. Her arm, after she had struggled it out of her jacket and rolled up a bloodstained shirt-sleeve, showed a nasty gash—not deep enough for stitches, but gory enough to give most people pause for thought. Esther, as I quickly gathered, wasn’t most people. She looked at the mess without wincing and with a kind of casual satisfaction as she held her arm over the basin I was filling with water.

‘It’s okay. Just slap some iodine on it and tie it up tight, would you? If it isn’t a broken bone or a busted artery there’s no need to worry—that’s what my cousin Dominic always says. He’s Kev’s next brother. Of course, Kev would be useful for this sort of thing, if only he wouldn’t get so pi about it. Besides, he’d go on about it being my own fault—just because Cora’s a devil sometimes. There’s no fun riding a beast that won’t go. Anyway, I’ve told him, if he encourages Pa to get rid of Cora I’ll go out on Thunder, so help me I will. Kev said he’d break every bone in my body if I did. As if that’d stop me!’ She glanced at me as I swabbed her arm.

‘Are you sure you’re all right to do this? You seem to know what you’re doing. I didn’t think you would, looking at you. What weight are you?’

‘What?’ I had been concentrating on her arm at the same time as trying to take in the mixture of information her husky little voice was throwing at me, and the question seemed peculiarly irrelevant.

‘Weight. You’re pretty tall. Not all that heavy, though, I shouldn’t think, are you? Still, you’d need something more than a pony, and Thunder’s the only sizeable beast in the place and he’s Kev’s private preserve. Besides, I shouldn’t think you’d hold him. Bet I could, though, if I got the chance. The Laidlaws might have something we could put you up on—’

‘I don’t ride,’ I said hastily.

‘You’ll need a quiet hack to start on, then,’ Esther said amiably, as if the flat statement was quite impossible to accept. ‘There’s—’

‘I don’t want to ride, thanks. I—I’ve come here to work,’ I added, seeing the amazement in her face and feeling lamely that some excuse was needed.

‘Oh, yes, but Pa won’t keep you hard at it all the time! I can’t think what he wants a secretary
for,
anyway. And surely he wouldn’t be nutty enough to bring a towny out
here
—’She broke off, and with a sinking feeling I saw that she was reassessing me. So much for Henry’s calm assumption that I might be able to have some influence over his daughter: she was already writing me off as a ‘towny ‘and that was that. She said doubtfully, ‘I suppose you could learn. But lord knows what we’re going to do with you if—if—’

‘You don’t have to do anything with me.’ I found myself saying it snappishly as I split the ends of the bandage and tied them in a neat knot. ‘There. Keep your arm fairly still for this evening, will you? Otherwise it might start to bleed again.’

‘All right. Sorry. Was I rude? I didn’t mean—well, yes, I suppose I did, really.’ Esther, examining the neat job I had made of her bandage, suddenly shot me a quick and disarming grin. ‘You can’t help it, after all, can you? I suppose you just haven’t had the chance. But Pa said you’d fit in, and I’m afraid you’ll be terribly bored.’

Despite her devastating habit of saying exactly what she thought, Henry was wrong about his daughter’s not having any social graces. She was smiling at me now in a way which took the sting out of her words, and showing a lot more poise than I felt. She went on, though with a shade of doubt in her voice, ‘You may find you like living in the country, of course. I must say though, it was a bit silly of Pa to bring you here for the hunting season, wasn’t it? And if he wanted some typing done I don’t know why he didn’t get one of the girls to come up from the village and do it.’ She looked at me again, looked at her bandage, and added, ‘You’re quite good at this. And you didn’t faint, either.’

It was startling, after all my years in hospitals, to be looked on as someone who might—until I remembered abruptly that this was supposed to be the New Glamorous Me. A more elaborate make-up and frivolous clothes instead of a nurse’s uniform obviously changed me a great deal. I said, with as much gravity I could muster against a sudden inclination to laugh, ‘It must be watching television. You know, all those hospital programmes th-they used to put on, like Emergency Ward Ten.’

‘Haven’t ever watched ‘em. P’raps I’d better, but they’re always so blasted romantic,’ Esther said, with a fine disregard for ladylike language. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-five.’ She seemed to have a habit of shooting direct questions.

‘And you’ve never been up on a horse? Phew! I’ve been riding since I was three. I s’pose I’d better not have a bath with this on—oh, I don’t know, I could hold it up out of the water. Pa’s sure to complain if I don’t look reasonably clean. Stay and talk to me,’ Essie added casually, beginning to peel off the rest of her clothes.

‘Oh, and you might pull my boots off for me, will you? Should’ve asked Phil to come up and do it.’

‘Who’s Phil?’

‘Phil Mott. Mottie’s son. He’s sixteen—works in the stables.’

I restrained myself from suggesting she couldn’t very well have asked Phil to come up here—since after all she hadn’t—and took hold of the small foot held out to me. It was extremely muddy, but Esther didn’t seem to expect me to mind, and a hearty heave detached her from first one boot, then the other. With the memory that I was supposed to be making friends with Esther I decided to follow her suggestion of staying while she had her bath—and picked up the clothes she
dropped absently
around her on the floor. She gave me, irrespective of my avowed disinterest in horses, a graphic description of her day’s hunting: what I could understand of it sounded terrifying. She threw out a request—more of a command—to wash her back for her, and I couldn’t avoid noticing that her own idea of washing was to get the worst of the mud off and ignore what might not show. I was feeling distinctly nannyish as (again commanded) I held out a towel for her to step into as she came out of a grime-streaked bath. She wandered away with the towel round her into her bedroom, and I cleaned round the bath, out of habit. When I went to join her she was wriggling into some clothes, taking little notice of her injured arm, so that I felt obliged to offer a warning.

‘Mind you don’t start it bleeding again. Perhaps I’d better fix you up a sling for this evening, when you’ve got your things on—’

‘Oh no, you don’t! I’m keeping it hidden—when I’ve got this sweater on the bandage won’t show.’ She turned round to face me, underlip caught between her teeth, her enormous brown eyes suddenly threatening. ‘You’re not going to sneak on me—understand? I don’t want to hear one word out of you!’

‘Esther—’

‘Don’t interrupt! Nobody asked you to interfere—and you won’t, get that? If I find you’ve told Pa, or Mottie, or
anyone
, I’ll—I’ll set the dogs on you!’

Startling as it might be to find a casually friendly young girl turning abruptly into a tough, commanding little madam; disconcerting as it might be to have been accepted one minute and spoken to like a very inferior housemaid the next; I had too many years as a Staff Nurse behind me to stand for that. I gave her back look for look. ‘You’ll—what?’ I asked in my most arctic voice.

‘You won’t have seen the dogs yet because they’re out. They’re Kev’s, and they’re huge,’ she said in the same threatening voice.

‘I don’t care if they’re Dobermann Pinschers trained to kill. Polite requests I
might
stand for—threats I don’t. If you want me to go straight downstairs and broadcast the fact that you’ve hurt yourself to the entire district, you’re going the right way about it!’ And that, I thought with a sinking feeling, was the end of any hopes I might have of making friends with Esther. I went on looking her in the eye nevertheless. To my surprise, after she had considered me for a moment to see if I meant it, the toughness vanished and she let out a gurgle of pleased laughter.

‘Oh, good! You’re
not
the blanket type after all! I was afraid you were, in there—you would keep
doing
things for me!—but we might make something of you after all! I don’t know where Pa found you, but you’ll do!’

‘Thank you very much,’ I said coldly. ‘Whether I’ll make something of you—after that—seems to be more in question!’

‘Oh,
don’t
stand on your dignity. I’ll apologize—okay? I had to try it on, that’s all.’ She was cajoling now, grinning at me with mischievous twinkle in her eyes she must have inherited from her father. ‘I just wanted to see what you’d say. I like people much better if they stick up for themselves—don’t you?
Please
don’t tell about my arm—is that asking nicely enough? After all, it’s not very bad, is it? And people do fuss so!’

‘We-ell...’ The twinkle was as infectious as Henry’s: I found myself, unwillingly, smiling. I was relieved, too—and somehow, despite her rudeness, I couldn’t help liking Esther. Standing in front of me in a pleated skirt, a jumper at least a size too large for her, and with her hair still tangled untidily, she looked like a child—though a very beautiful one. ‘I’ll tell no tales on condition you let me dress your arm again in the morning,’ I said firmly, hoping it would do. ‘But I am
not
some kind of—of whipping-boy, not even if my job depends on it! And,’ I added hastily, remembering my job was supposed to be nothing to do with her, ‘I shouldn’t think it does, either!’

‘Heavens, no—Pa never takes any notice of what
I
think,’ Esther said cheerfully. ‘Sorry if I was rude, but I haven’t got any manners, you know. We’re all frightfully bossy in this house. If Kev starts in on you, you’d better stand up to him, too. He can be quite inhuman. He’s a bruising rider, when he gets the time, though.’ She gave me another grin, while I wondered why being a bruising rider should be something one said with approval. ‘I shouldn’t think you’ll see much of him—when he’s here, he’s out on Thunder. Or hopping over to see that dreary girl of his at Whatham Hall. I suppose she’s not
bad
over the jumps—but it’s not going to do her any good giving him soppy looks, I don’t know why she doesn’t realize it! I hope—‘she had turned to the mirror, and was giving her hair an apology for a brush—‘
you’re
not the type to fall for Kev. I shouldn’t, if I were you.’

‘I should say it’s very unlikely,’ I said drily.

‘Some people think he’s handsome, though I can’t think why that’s supposed to have anything to do with anything,’ Esther said dispassionately. ‘It’s a pity he’s the eldest. Dominic and Con are more my cup of tea, but they’re over in Ireland, of course. Okay, I’m ready. Shall we go down?’

We went down. Tea, Mrs. Mott had said, would be in the drawing-room at four o’clock: it was a quarter past now, but I hoped Henry Would feel my arrival with Esther showed that I was already making an effort to do what he expected of me, even if it made me late. I couldn’t feel, however, that I was going to be much use with Esther, since her personality was nothing if not overwhelming—and if her manner was abrupt, she was so undeniably attractive as to need absolutely no help from me. Even if I could see what he meant about her conversation, and her way of dressing, there seemed little use in supposing she would take any notice of anything I said or did, or benefit from it.