Free The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden Page A

condition that I am not helped.’ Miss Brooke’s flush had deepened but her words were firm. ‘Except by Mr Blount, of course. Yes, it will be
difficult. I think we all realize now that for a time Kizzy will be unhappy, perhaps hostile . . .’
    ‘Hostile! How dare . . .’ Mrs Cuthbert was breaking in again, but the Chairman raised a peremptory hand. ‘ Madam! I will not have you interrupting; if you persist, I will
order you to leave the Court.’ Then, ‘Miss Brooke,’ he said, ‘you really are prepared to take this – hostile – child?’
    ‘What would we be in her place?’ Miss Brooke said it simply. ‘Yes, I would be prepared to do it – prepared to try.’
    ‘Mr Blount?’ The Chairman turned to the Officer, but Mrs Cuthbert broke in again, though a subdued Mrs Cuthbert. ‘May I say something, sir?’
    ‘At least she asked,’ the Chairman said to Miss Brooke afterwards, ‘although she didn’t wait for the permission!’
    ‘Forgive me for being personal, Olivia,’ said Mrs Cuthbert, ‘but it’s my duty to ask – especially,’ she said to the Chairman, ‘as Miss Brooke refuses
help. Though she may have had experience on committees, should a single woman take a child into her home?’
    ‘Thank you, Mrs Cuthbert, but Miss Brooke isn’t, if I may say so, the usual single woman; nor is this a usual child – in fact, so unusual that we should be grateful for any
solution, let alone such a promising one – but may we hear,’ he said with another stern look at Mrs Cuthbert, ‘what Mr Blount thinks?’
    ‘That it’s an excellent idea,’ said Mr Blount, and the Court ruled that Kizzy would go to live with Miss Brooke, ‘and be supervised, from time to time,’ said the
Chairman, ‘by Mr Blount.’ It was settled – began to be settled, Kizzy would have said.
    Term had begun and, ‘This is the morning,’ said Admiral Twiss. He had sent for Kizzy after breakfast. ‘Peters is taking you to school. Then he will pack up
your things and take them to Miss Brooke. She will fetch you.’
    Miss Brooke had not spoken while Kizzy was in the courtroom so that Kizzy had hardly noticed her, but she had since come to Amberhurst House, ‘to meet Kizzy properly.’ ‘Told
you so,’ said Peters. ‘Once one of’em comes, others will follow. Told you so.’
    If Peters was frozen, he was nothing to Kizzy. Admiral Twiss had introduced her in the library and Kizzy had not spoken – ‘Not once,’ he told Peters – Miss Brooke had not
tried to make her; after she had said, ‘Good afternoon, Kizzy,’ she had talked to the Admiral.
    At first it was stilted – Admiral Twiss was almost furiously shy – then she asked him about his silver cups and he showed them to her. ‘These were Rainbird’s.’
‘These were Royal’s,’ and soon he was talking of horse shows and racing as easily as if she had been Nat, ‘until she brought me up short,’ the Admiral told Nat
afterwards. ‘Yes, that was a good day,’ he had said of a certain race meeting. ‘I remember China Court won the Great Metropolitan Stakes—’
    ‘Not China Court – Mirzador,’ said Miss Brooke and, as the Admiral stared at her, ‘I know because my father trained him.’
    ‘Your father ? Then . . . your father . . .’
    ‘Was Gerald Brooke.’
    ‘Good Gad!’ and the Admiral turned to Kizzy. ‘Miss Brooke’s father was a famous racehorse trainer, so you see she must like horses too.’
    Kizzy only scowled.
    As Miss Brooke sat in the big chair opposite him where, since his grandmother, the Admiral could not remember any woman sitting, he wondered how it was that she had come to live at Amberhurst.
He vaguely remembered hearing that when Gerald Brooke died he had left scarcely any money, but Miss Brooke told no more about herself; she talked of the horses, of Amberhurst, of Kizzy, but he
found himself looking rather than listening and, when she got up to go, had an effort to stop himself from saying, ‘You know, you