Authors: Unknown
His examination was thorough enough to satisfy him that she had suffered nothing more serious than bruises and he nodded at last, satisfied. ‘You’re a very lucky young woman,” he told her, and frowned in mock severity at Fran. “And so are you, Fran. John is right, you should have known better than to use one of those coves under the cliffs.”
“I doubt if we shall be able to again,” Fran said ruefully. “I don’t think Janus will let us have the boat.” Dr. Barlow laughed, good-humouredly. “One can scarcely blame him if he doesn’t,” he said. “Too many alarms like this one today are a shock to the bystanders as well as the participants.” He looked seriously at Katie. “I would advise you to rest for a day or two,” he said, “but I doubt very much if you would follow my advice, so I shall refrain from giving it.”
“I’m sorry you were bothered, doctor,” Katie brushed back a dusty strand of black hair from her forehead. “It was very good of you.”
“Not at all.” The thin, intelligent face creased into a smile. “I hope I shall meet you again in less dramatic circumstances. I understand from John that you and Fran are very good friends.” Katie wondered whether he had described the friendship as a blessing or otherwise. “Now,” he rose and looked down at her, “I suggest that you go home and rest, at least until tomorrow.”
“I shall have to go home,” Katie said, smiling ruefully. “I’m not fit to be seen in this state.”
Sir James and his grandson appeared in the french window from the garden as she spoke, and she felt the steady gaze of the younger man on her. “I’ll take you if you’re ready,” he said shortly, and turned to his grandfather. “May I borrow the Humber, Janus? I can return it later if you’re not wanting to use it.”
“Of course, take it by all means.” Sir Janus came across to Katie. “You go with John, my dear,” he said, and lifted her chin with one hand to look at her dusty but still lovely face. “You need a rest after your ordeal; we’ll see you tomorrow if you’re fit and if not someone will
come
and see you. You’ll probably feel as right as rain in the morning.”
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Katie smiled uncertainly at his grandson, who stood waiting impatiently for her in the doorway. “But there’s no need to take me home in the car, I’m perfectly all right.”
“You go with John,” Sir Janus repeated kindly. “You’re better in the car when your knees feel weak, as I’m sure yours must. You’re rather pale too.”
Meekly Katie followed John Miller to the door and climbed into the Humber beside him, while Fran came out to see them go—Katie palely subdued beside the arrogant handsomeness of her escort, his face sternly averted from his passenger.
“I suppose it’s no use,” John Miller said, as he stopped the car outside Smuggler’s Rest, “suggesting that you follow the doctor’s advice and rest for a day or two?” He did not wait for an answer, but got out of the car and came round to open her door.
“I’m perfectly all right,” Katie insisted as he helped her out with a hand under her arm. “I’m only bruised a little.”
“And shocked.” He slammed the car door closed and walked round to join her on the pavement, his eyes icy blue as he looked at her standing there, dusty and dishevelled and still with his jacket covering her tom dress.
She pulled the shabby canvas closer round her, suddenly shy under his scrutiny. “I’ll let you have your jacket back as soon as I’m decent,” she said.
“Don’t worry about that.” He opened the gate of Smuggler’s Rest for her. “Just don’t do anything else as stupid as sitting under overhanging cliffs; you may not be so lucky next time.”
She felt her colour rise at the criticism in his voice and brushed past him into the garden. An imp of mischief and curiosity made her turn before he closed the gate. “How was it that
you
came for me?” she asked, and had the pleasure of seeing him discomfited.
A frown drew his straight brows together as he hesitated before he answered her. “I was on the cliff and I saw Fran come back alone in the launch,” he said at last. “I knew that two of you had gone out, so I came down to see what was wrong.”
“Were you worried?” She did not know what prompted the question, only that suddenly he seemed less unapproachable, more human.
“Of course,” the voice was its usual impatient staccato. “Two girls alone in a boat are always a potential accident.”
“Fran handles it very well,” she defended her friend loyally. “We weren’t to know that the cliff would fall.”
“At least one of you should have had the sense to realise that it might have done,” he retorted, and Katie remembered her own doubts about the safety of their little beach and Fran’s scorn of her fears, but she would not let him know that.
She smiled, half ashamedly and looked at him from under the black fringe of her lashes. “I don’t sound very gracious after the risk you took coming to rescue me,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry, Mr. Miller; I am grateful to you.” She met the iciness of the blue eyes a little warily. “Thank you is rather inadequate in the circumstances, but—thank you.” Impulsively she tiptoed and brushed her lips against his face, then turned and almost ran up the path to the front door.
Bridie greeted her arrival with a crescendo of shrill barks and Aunt Cora came out from the lounge to see her. “Good heavens, Katherine, what on earth has happened to you?” She pushed the pekinese, protesting volubly, into the dining-room and closed the door. “What has happened?” she repeated.
Katie felt ridiculously weak and very close to tears again as she lay back in an armchair. “I’m perfectly all right, Aunt Cora. I’ve had a slight accident, that’s all, and it’s unnerved me rather, but I’m not hurt apart from a few bruises.”
Her aunt glanced out of the window at the Humber visible between the trees. “Is that the Dennisons’ car out there?” she asked. “Why didn’t you ask them in, whoever it was that brought you home?”
“Because it was John Miller,” Katie said as if that was self-explanatory.
Aunt Cora frowned worriedly as she looked at her niece’s dust-smeared face and tom dress. “I think you’d better have a bath, Katherine, and get into bed,” she said. “You look very pale. I’ll ring Dr. Barlow and ask him to call and see you,
then
you can tell me what happened.”
Katie blinked her surprise. “You mean Dr. Barlow is your doctor?” she asked.
“Yes,” her aunt nodded, “he’s been my doctor for a number of years. Why do you ask?”
Katie smiled and got up, reluctantly, from the comfort of the armchair. “He’s the Dennisons’ doctor too, and he’s also a personal friend of the family; I’ve already seen him.”
“Oh, I see.” Aunt Cora looked at her anxiously. “And he says that you’re all right?”
“I have a few bruises, Aunt Cora, that’s all,” she smiled reassuringly at the old lady, “and my knees feel a bit wobbly, but I’ll be better when I’m clean and tidy.”
She did indeed feel better after a hot bath that brought out her bruises alarmingly, but refreshed her. The dust that she washed out of her hair made mud of the water in the wash basin and her scalp felt tingling fresh and clean as she towelled it dry. Turning to go downstairs again, she remembered the shabby canvas jacket she had borrowed and picked it up from the bed, brushing patches of dust from the inside of it.
“It’s John Miller’s,” she explained to her aunt as she carried it downstairs. “I must remember to give it back to him.”
“He’s still here,” Aunt Cora said. “At least the car is still outside, if you want to go round with it.”
Katie felt her cheeks colour under her aunt’s scrutiny and she tossed the jacket carelessly over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “Any time will do,” she said lightly. “I don’t suppose he’s waiting for it.”
Bridie, now blessedly quiet, joined them in the lounge and Katie leaned back comfortably in an armchair as comfortably as her bruises would allow. “Tell me what happened,” said Aunt Cora, seating herself opposite Katie and able to look out of the window. “I thought you were taking a boat trip with Fran Dennison this morning.”
“I did,” Katie said ruefully. “Fran knew of a quiet little cove where we could bathe and that’s where we went, just round the coast a little way.”
“Just the two of you?” Aunt Cora prissed her mouth disapprovingly. “Why didn’t Jamie Miller go with you?”
“Because he was playing golf;’ Katie explained, resenting the implication that they were incapable of doing anything alone, a doubt that John Miller had voiced.
“But two girls alone on the sea—” The thin mouth set tight and she shook her head.
“Oh, Aunt Cora, for heaven’s sake!” Katie said impatiently. “Fran is perfectly capable of handling
Sea Mist
on her own, she’s done it dozens of times—besides, the accident had nothing to do with the boat; it was a cliff fall.”
“A cliff fall!” The old lady’s eyes widened with horror as she looked at her niece. Katie appeared far more calm than she felt, in fact.
“We thought the beach was safe,” she explained, twining her fingers as the memory of the moment came back to her, "but it wasn’t. Fran, fortunately, had gone back to the boat for a towel and I decided to move the rug we had further back into the shade.” She paled as she recalled the miraculous instinct that had made her throw herself back against the cliff face as the crashing rocks come down. “It landed right on the spot where we’d been sitting.”
“You weren’t hit at all by the falling rock?” Her aunt’s eyes were round with amazement.
Katie shook her head. “It all fell in front of me,” she explained. “I was held against the cliff face with a solid wall of rock in front of me.” She closed her eyes, shaking her head to rid herself of the terrifying memory of those first dreadful moments. “I was terrified, I thought I’d been buried alive.”
“And John Miller got you out?”
“Yes.” Katie twined her fingers together, not meeting the shrewd old eyes as they watched her. “Fran went for help and John came back with a man called Clay— I don’t know his other name, I think he works for the Dennisons, and he was very good and kind.”
“Clay Pengarth,” her aunt supplied, surprisingly. “He used to be on the trawlers, I believe, but he’s worked for the Dennisons for some time now.”
“I see. I must remember to thank him properly—he was very comforting when I was so frightened.”
“What about Mr. Miller?” her aunt asked, and Katie flushed under her scrutiny.
“Oh, he was very good,” she said. “I
have
said thank you to him; he borrowed Sir Janus’s car and brought me home.”
“That was very good of him,” her aunt said, and raised her head to look out of the window. “His brother has just arrived,” she announced, getting up from her chair. ‘You have a visitor, Katherine.”
Bridie set up her usual noisy welcome, if it could be termed a welcome, and Aunt Cora tucked her under her arm as she crossed the room. “Come along,” she told the shrilling pekinese. “We’ll banish ourselves to the dining-room for a while.”
“Oh, no, Aunt Cora, there’s no need,” Katie protested, but in vain. The old lady popped her voluble pet into the dining room and shut her in before opening the door to Jamie.
His good-looking face was creased in concern as he came into the room, and Katie smiled at him reassuringly. “Hello, Jamie,” she said. “Don’t look so worried.”
“I am worried,” he retorted. “Of all the idiotic things to do!”
"You sound like John!” she said, and added hastily as he looked at her in surprise, “Only not so grim.”
“It’s a grim matter,” he grumbled, sitting opposite her in the chair Aunt Cora had vacated. “I’ve already torn Fran off a strip.”
“And now it’s my turn?” she asked meekly. “You shouldn’t blame Fran, she said
you
and she found that cove years ago.”
“So we did,” he admitted, “but it. was years ago when we were both too young to know better. I didn’t realise that the little idiot was still using it.”
And he had been badly frightened, Katie thought, and had a sudden clear insight into the relationship between the two younger members of the family. Fran had remembered that cove because Jamie had found it for her. Poor Fran, she thought, with Jamie as he is; one girl after another, and each one may be the one he thinks he’s looking for.
She looked at Jamie’s good-looking face, bronzed in the sun, and the fair head so like his brother’s. “It was lucky Fran wasn’t hurt,” she said. “She was all set to dig me out single-handed.”
"Yes, she would,” a smile of very real affection warmed his blue eyes. “She’s quite a girl, is Fran.”
“I’m glad you appreciate her,” said Katie. “And I hope you make it up to her for being so unkind to her.”
“I will,” he promised solemnly, raising one hand. “I’ll be absolutely charming to her when I get back, fair enough?”
Katie smiled, satisfied. “Fair enough,” she agreed.
He leaned forward, his eyes enquiring. “I suppose you
must
rest?” he asked. “You couldn’t possibly come out to dinner tonight?”
Katie shook her head. “No, Jamie, I can’t,” she said. “I do feel rather rocky, it’s the reaction, I expect.”
“Tomorrow?” he asked hopefully.
She smiled agreement, stilling her conscience as she thought of Fran. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll be fine by then.”
“Good !” Having achieved his objective he relaxed in his chair, smiling and inordinately pleased with himself, Katie thought, and came to the conclusion that Janus Dennison must have spoiled his younger grandson enormously to have given him such bland self-confidence. He took out a cigarette case, but glanced surreptitiously at the door before taking one. “Does the fairy godmother allow smoking?” he asked in a stage whisper.
“Of course,” Katie laughed at the exaggerated caution, then became aware of voices in the hall as she spoke and of Bridie’s muffled protests from the dining-room.
Jamie inclined his head listening. “Big brother,” he said. “What does
he
want, I wonder?” He looked queryingly at Katie.