Free Lonesome Road by Patricia Wentworth Page B

used to be, and when we’ve finished with me we go over all the other children she nursed. I sometimes think how odd it would be if we could all meet.”
    Louisa took no interest in Mrs. Capper’s charges. It annoyed her to think that there had been a time when Mrs. Capper had brushed Miss Rachel’s hair and turned down her bed. Rachel’s visits to her old nurse were a source of irritation, and she never let slip an opportunity of suggesting that it was too wet or too cold, or that Rachel was too busy or too tired.
    “That Miss Silver is coming at half past five, Miss Rachel. You’ll want to be in.”
    Rachel couldn’t help laughing.
    “Her train gets in at half past five—she won’t be here before six. I shall be back quite soon after that. Put my torch in the hall and hang out the lantern. Barlow can drop me before he goes to the station, and I’ll come back by the cliff.”
    Chapter Fourteen
    Cosmo seemed to think it was his turn for a tête-à-tête with Rachel after tea. He had a portfolio full of sketches to show her, was quite as annoyed as Louisa had been when Rachel reminded him that it was her day for Mrs. Capper. He said “Stuff and nonsense!” several times in a loud voice, and walked up and down jingling the keys in his trouser pocket and lecturing her about running herself off her legs, and when he had finished lecturing her he started in to scold the family for allowing her to wear herself out.
    “It’s all very well, my dear, but good people are scarce, and if no one else will stand up to you and tell you you’re doing too much, well I will. You’re looking fagged out. What you want is a holiday. Why don’t you go right away from telephones, and begging letters, and neighbors who want you to do their shopping for them, and the whole boiling of us? Unless—” He stopped and bent affectionately over her chair. “Unless… Come, Rachel, here’s an idea. What about letting me show you Morocco? We’ll take Caroline to chaperone us, and you shall pay all the bills.” He laughed heartily and dropped a kiss on her hair. “Think it over my dear, think it over.”
    Rachel laughed too and got up.
    “I think I should make a better chaperone than Caroline. And now I’m going to see Nanny, so you must look after yourselves.”
    It was an astonishing relief to get away. At Whincliff Edge everyone was so busy grinding axes that the noise quite deafened her. They pressed about her, exhausting the very air she breathed, always asking, always demanding, always wanting more. And under all this surface clamor and pressure something dark and stealthy moved, and waited to pull her down. In Nanny Capper’s neat kitchen she was in another world—a simpler, kinder world where Nanny herself played Providence and nobody else was more than seven years old.
    “Up in the night he got in his bare feet and nothing on over his night things, and that’s how I caught him, standing a-tiptoe in your father’s dressing-room and tugging at the little top drawer to get it open. Two in the morning it was, and the noise of the drawer that waked me. And ‘Master Sonny.’ I said, ‘for goodness gracious sake, what-ever are you doing?’ And you should have heard how he spoke up. ‘I want a handkerchief,’ he says, and ‘Oh, Master Sonny,’ I said, ‘there’s aplenty in your own drawer, and one under your pillow, for I put it there myself.’ And what do you think he said? Never flinched, but looked me straight in the eye. ‘They’re too little,’ he said. ‘They’re not men’s handkerchiefs. I want a real man’s handkerchief to blow my nose with. And please will you open the drawer, because I can’t reach it, Nanny.’ ”
    “And what did you do?” asked Rachel, who knew the answer.
    Nanny Capper was a very fat old woman in a white Cashmere shawl over a black Cashmere dress, and large shapeless slippers on her large shapeless feet. She never got out of her chair except to go to bed, but she enjoyed life