Free Fantails by Leonora Starr Page B

Heald had gone to take charge of a new baby, and Hugh had asked Lucia, the very-much-older sister of his dead wife, to stay with them at Swan House until a pleasant country girl could be found to keep an eye on John and help the MacNeishes, a middle-aged Scots couple who had been with him since shortly before Melanie’s death, when John was born, five years ago.
    John was a fragile little boy. His hair fell in a pale silky fringe on his high forehead and rose in a crest like a plover’s on the crown of his head. His grey-blue eyes were round and questioning in the pale triangle of his face. His lower lip stuck out in protest as he disconsolately stirred his semolina.
    Lucia said briskly, “Nonsense, darling! Milk is protein, and you need lots of that to build you up and make you big and strong!”
    “I’d rather have some gooseb’ry tart and grow up little an’ weak.”
    “Gooseberry tart isn’t what you need. Little boys have to have a balanced diet, dear!”
    Lucia was a tall woman of forty-five, heavily built, dark-haired, and sallow. Her small black eyes behind her horn-rimmed spectacles were like a pair of currants in the large bun of her face. She hoped that Hugh was noticing how capable she was being with John, matter of fact and sensible. John had calmed down nicely after his first excitement on arriving here an hour ago. It wouldn’t take her long to get him into her own ways. She had always been good at managing people. Years ago, when she and Melanie, his mother, had been left orphans, at eighteen she had taken complete charge of her ten-year-younger sister and been like a mother to her. She would be a mother now to John. Hugh would soon see that she was indispensable to the little boy’s well-being. Her stay here would be indefinitely prolonged until all question of a date for her departure gradually faded and her home was here. John should belong to her as Melanie had belonged to her. If Hugh had notions later on about sending him to a preparatory school, she’d manage, somehow or other, to put a stop to it, stressing John’s delicacy, his sensitiveness, his need of all the mother love and understanding she could give him.
    Hugh Brandon’s eyes, dark hazel, deep-set and enigmatic, gave no clue to his thoughts. Long practice in inscrutability, born of a doctor’s frequent need to mask a painful truth, stood him in good stead with Lucia. He was thinking now, as he had thought many times before, how singularly unattractive Lucia was in every way, and marvelling that two half-sisters could be as different as she and Melanie. Even the ten years between them and a different father did not seem enough to account for Lucia’s swarthiness compared with Melanie’s ash-blonde fragility, Lucia’s assertive manner compared with Melanie’s gentle reticence, Lucia’s maddening tactlessness compared with Melanie’s charm and sweetness ... Already Lucia was getting on his nerves. He told himself that he had been a fool to have her here. Better to have brought Miss Heald till such time as he had found the ideal successor. Yet he felt a brute for grudging her the delight of being with John ... Melanie, knowing all her faults, had loved her and for Melanie’s sake he wanted Lucia to be happy.
    He had half forgotten, though, with how absorbing a passion she had loved Melanie, had half forgotten that the tentacles of her devotion had been strangling in their jealous possessiveness until through marriage Melanie had escaped, though not without a tussle between that same possessiveness of Lucia’s and his own determination ... He had forgotten all that until now he was reminded of it by the look on Lucia’s face, brooding and dark and tense, as she watched John struggling to force down his cold and claggy pudding.
    Well, he would have to look about at once for some nice country lass, honest and clean and free from complexes regarding diet and what not, put her in charge of John, set Mrs. MacNeish, homely and full