Queen's Nurse

by Jane Arbor

  She smiled at him. “No. Liane isn’t there, and I’d never seek out Mrs. Bretton’s company by choice.” It was not her real reason and they both knew it. But it had served the pride that ached in her mind, and Michael was content to leave it at that.

  They promised themselves one more turn and then took another, and it was dusk before they went to the edge of the ice to take off their skates. But as Michael kneeled to help Jess with hers a childish wail of distress went up from fifty yards or so out on the ice-bound meadow.

  Jess jumped up. “That’s one of those babes. I thought they ought not to be out here still. Somebody has had a tumble, I expect. I’ll go. They know me—” And she sped away before Michael, with one skate already unstrapped, could follow. He was bending down to it when Jane Bretton skated up.

  She hesitated when she saw that he was alone. Then she said, “Excuse me—I thought Nurse Mawney was with you?” she asked..

  “She was.” He nodded toward the little group of shadowy figures out on the ice where peace now reigned. “She’s out there, doing some ministering angel stuff to an infant who seems to have come a purler. I’m going over as soon as I have this skate back on. I’ll tell her you want her, shall I?”

  For another instant Jane Bretton hesitated. In the half light, unseen by Michael, her close-set eyes narrowed at the corners. Then deliberately and decisively she said, “No. No, it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t important—” and skated away.

  Jess came back, looking like the Pied Piper with a trail of children behind her.

  “Do you mind if we drop these, one by one, at their homes on the way?” she asked.

  “Let them all come,” grinned Michael. And they set out, strung arm in arm across the quiet country road that led back to the village.

  Michael said, “Frozen face came over while you were away and asked me where you were.”

  “What did she want?”

  Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. She didn’t say, except that it wasn’t important and wouldn’t wait to see you.” He paused. “Could be that she’d been sent to add her invitation to the skating party.”

  Jess shook her head. “No. She isn’t fond enough of me to allow even her husband to persuade her to come and ask me. It must have been something else—” But it did not seem worthwhile to worry about what it could have been.

  They were to have supper in Starmouth after the movie, and as both Mrs. Boss and her neighbor would be in bed when they returned, Michael had been given a key. When they whispered their good-nights on Jess’s doorstep very little more of Michael’s visit remained. As he had had Friday free of duty, he had to be back on the ward by Sunday evening, and there was only one morning train that would get him there in time.

  As she often did with Jess, Mrs. Boss stayed to talk while they breakfasted.

  “That was a shame about Arthur Castle, wasn’t it?” she said.

  “What about him?” asked Jess.

  “Why, about his leg. Broken in two places, I hear from Andy Parsons this morning. It’s what I always say—if you try to be too clever, you’ll come a cropper. Like Arthur did. Trying to carry three lamps swung from his handlebars along the towpath, taking them to Mr. Forester on the water meadows. Caught his knee in them and came down—and that rutty old path like iron with the frost. Asking for it, I’d say.”

  “Oh, dear. When did it happen?”

  “About dark.” Mrs. Boss shot Jess a curious look. “Funny you didn’t hear about it, nurse.”

  “Well, we left the ice about then, didn’t we?” Jess glanced at Michael for confirmation. But seeing that he had looked at his watch, she took it for a hint that they had not much longer before they must leave for his train. So she stood up from the table, saying to Mrs. Boss, “When I’ve seen Dr. Leyden off, I’ll go and see if there’s anything I can do for Mr. Castle, though there hasn’t been a message about him from Dr. Gilder, has there?”

  “No. But there wouldn’t be any. They took Arthur into Starmouth Hospital as soon as they could get him there.” Again the oblique look and an odd restraint in Mrs. Boss’s manner. Jess did not understand it at all.

  At the station Michael’s last words before his train drew out were, “I say, could I bring Jean Carrelmore down here one day, do you think? She’s got a thing about mountains, and I’d like to show her a layout like this for a change. It has got something, hasn’t it?”

  Jess nodded agreement. “Yes, do bring her, Michael.” She would not have been a woman if she had not been a little curious about the girl who would take her place in Michael’s heart. But as his train drew out she knew she was sincerely glad for him with all her heart.

  She and Michael would probably always remain friends. But the ways their lives would take had drawn apart forever.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After seeing Michael off, Jess drove straight to Mrs. Castle’s cottage by the river. By now she knew most of the people in the villages well enough to be sure of a welcome as a friend, even if she were not needed as a nurse. And though Mr. Castle was safely in hospital, there might be something she could do for his wife. If Mrs. Castle wanted to visit him this afternoon, for instance, she, Jess could offer to look after the children—merry, eight-year-old Janet and young Roger, solemn as an owl in his new spectacles, of which he was so proud and for which Jess herself had been thanked more than once.

  She was quite unprepared, therefore, for her reception when she arrived.

  Mrs. Castle opened the door widely as usual, but on seeing Jess made almost as if to close it again. “Oh, it’s you, nurse,” she said in a dull, flat voice. “Arthur’s not here. He’s in the hospital.”

  “So I’d heard. But I thought I’d come and see if there was anything I could do, all the same.” '

  “Well—” Mrs. Castle hesitated, not being equal to a situation that she resented but did not fully understand. And in the pause Jess stepped inside, feeling that there was something here she did not understand, either.

  “Is there anything, Mrs. Castle?” she said gently.

  Mrs. Castle closed the door and faced her visitor across the little living room. “Well, I don’t know about that, nurse,” she said with a hint of truculence. “If you ask me, I’d say it was a bit late in the day.”

  “Late in the—? But I only heard about Mr. Castle’s accident this morning, from Mrs. Boss, who heard it from Andy the milkman!”

  Mrs. Castle shook her head. “Oh, no, nurse. Mrs. Boss knew last night. As most people did who were thereabouts,” she added significantly.

  “But I didn’t, Mrs. Castle!”

  “You didn’t, nurse?”

  “Of course not, or I’d have gone to see what I could do!”

  “Well, as I understand it, it wasn’t for want of telling. Arthur himself heard them sending for you.”

  At that Jess thought she understood. She said: “Perhaps they did. But it happened at about dark, didn’t it? And I left the ice about then. I couldn’t have got the message, and I spent the rest of the evening in Starmouth.”

  “Well, the message was sent. I know that. But if you didn’t get it, I’ll believe you. Though there are those, I’ll warn you, nurse, who’ll be ready to say that you couldn’t stay to do what you could for Arthur because you were too set upon the pleasure that took you to Starmouth.”

  “That’s not true!” The hot protest died upon Jess’s lips as a knock sounded at the door and Mrs. Castle, turning to open it, admitted Muir Forester.

  His smile for the woman was quietly reassuring. “I’ve called the hospital as I promised,” he told her. “Arthur had a comfortable night, and you may see him this afternoon. I came to see if you’d let me drive you over.”

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Forester. I’d like that.”

  “And I’ll look after the children while you are away,” put in Jess quietly.

  “Thank you, nurse. That would be kind—” Mrs. Castle turned to Muir. “Perhaps you’d just tell nurse when, and I’ll be all ready to go whe
n you say, Mr. Forester?”

  For the first time Muir’s glance included Jess. “About two-thirty, if that would suit you?” he queried. “Perfectly.”

  There was a little uneasy pause. Then Mrs. Castle, looking from one to the other, said, “Nurse didn’t get your message about Arthur, Mr. Forester. She’d gone to Starmouth when the accident happened.”

  “Didn’t get it?” Muir’s raised brows betrayed his disbelief. He turned directly to Jess. “But I sent it myself, and you were still on the ice then.”

  Jess felt as if she were suffocating beneath the implied injustice in the words. And not until she heard the murmur of the children’s voices talking to their mother in the kitchen beyond did she realize that Mrs. Castle had crept away, leaving her alone with Muir.

  She was ashamed to hear her voice barely controlled as she said, “You believe, then, that I got your message and that I chose to ignore it?”

  “I sent it, and I have every reason to think you received it. Beyond that, I suppose I mustn’t judge.”

  “But you are judging me!” She could feel the aggressive wind of his unspoken criticism about her. She went on. “Who carried the message?”

  “Jane Bretton. She skated down to you. I recalled that your friend was a doctor and could help, and I—needed you.”

  Jess caught her breath. “And Mrs. Bretton gave me the message, you think?”

  Muir frowned. “When she came back I was busy doing what I could for Castle. It was Edgar who told me she had seen you before he ran her home in the car and came back himself. By that time it was clear that you weren’t coming over to do what you could, though, fortunately, one of our party had driven down in a utility car, so we got Castle to hospital in that, and he came to very little harm.”

  “I’m glad.” Jess bit her lip in an effort to check its betraying quiver. “Would you believe me—” her voice was toneless “—if I told you that though Mrs. Bretton did speak to Dr. Leyden, she gave him no message for me and she did not speak to me at all?”

  For a long moment he regarded her with a level, measuring look. Then he said carefully, “I should find it difficult, I admit. After all, she went with just that purpose—to enlist your help. You hadn’t left the ice, so why should she not have done it?”

  “Then you don’t believe me?” The compulsion to make him admit that he trusted her word against any measured judgment was too much for her. She was in the right, but illogically she longed to hear him say that, right or wrong, he was on her side.

  He did not. “I didn’t say that,” he retorted. “There’s another possibility—that the message Jane took got no farther than Dr. Leyden. Either he forgot to give it to you or—”

  “Please leave Michael out of this!” Michael’s Christian name slipped from her in the sudden flare of her anger. “How dare you suggest that he, a doctor, wouldn’t have acted at once on a message like that—if he had received it?”

  Muir shrugged. “I shouldn’t think it likely. But I suppose it could be regarded as a fairly human reaction—if he had plans for the evening for you both that he didn’t want interrupted.”

  “When you say human you mean selfish. You can’t believe that.”

  “I don’t want to.” Muir’s eyes met and held hers. “I offered it only as an alternative to something I’d give all I have not to believe.”

  “You mean—the possibility that Jane Bretton was lying?”

  “No—that you are—”

  Jess supposed that she drove back normally to her rooms, that she ate a conventional Sunday lunch as usual and that she went out again to Mrs. Castle’s afterward as if nothing had happened. But she moved and acted in a cloud of bewildered anger in which everything she did seemed to be directed by no conscious volition of her own.

  She was angry for herself. She was angry for Michael, involved in suspicion of callousness through no fault of his. She refused to believe of him that he had kept back anything Jane Bretton had said. Yet her clamoring need to be cleared, for his sake as well as for her own, continuously beat and spent itself against a pride that refused to ask anything more of Muir Forester’s doubt of her.

  A memory throbbed dully. He had said he would give all he had to believe that she spoke the truth. But how much did that mean, she reflected bitterly. Just so many empty words, that was all!

  When she arrived, Muir was there, waiting to leave with Mrs. Castle. The children ran around the car to give some last messages for their father. Muir stood for a moment at Jess’s side before getting into the driver’s seat.

  “I’m dropping Mrs. Castle at the hospital and calling for her later,” he said. “Meanwhile, I shall come back. I have something to say to you.”

  She longed to retort, “We have nothing to say to each other!” But he had already signaled to the children to stand clear, and then the three of them were watching the car move away.

  She told herself she did not want to see him. But perversely her brain was already at work, calculating how long it would be before he returned. That was loving at its most abject, she supposed—being willing to take even blame and injustice from the loved one as the price of being near him, of watching him, of hearing his voice. Had she then come to that for a man who had no thought of loving her? And why, in a matter of moments, should love swing between pride and humility, between the need to escape and the longing to stay? She could not leave her post now because of the children. But would she have gone if she could?

  Roger wanted to paint, and after a glance at the neatness of Mrs. Castle’s living room, she decided that the kitchen table was the best place for artistic activities that involved, apparently, a copious use of water. Roger, enveloped in a garment he described as “my work apron,” settled down happily enough, while Janet, already a bookworm, curled up with The Red Fairy Book and became lost to her small world.

  When Muir came Jess went through to the other room to admit him. “Where are the children?” he asked.

  “In the kitchen, reading and painting.”

  “I thought I’d take them with me for the ride when I go back for their mother. It will set you free earlier.”

  “That doesn’t matter, but they’ll enjoy it. I’ll tell them—”

  He stopped her with a gesture. “I’m not going yet. I came back to see you. You’ll have guessed, of course, that this morning I went straight back to Jane?”

  “Did you?”

  His brows went up. “You must have known that I should? How else was I to get at the truth of this affair?” By believing me when I told it! The cry went up from her sore heart but did not reach her lips.

  And Muir went on with a rasp in his voice, “Naturally I needn’t tell you what I wrung from Jane—that my message asking for your help for Castle never reached either Dr. Leyden or you. She tried to make some excuse that wasn’t even plausible, but what her real motive was I was too angry to stay to discover. Jess—my dear—”

  He broke off on a strange, intense note. Fleetingly Jess recalled something that matched it—the revealing flame she had surprised in his eyes as he had kissed Liane under the mistletoe. But then he had been deliberately withholding passion from his kiss. What equally raw emotion could he possibly need to withhold from her?

  There was none, of course. Bleakly she foresaw the pattern of the exchange that would follow. He would apologize for his misjudgment of her. She would have to deny the need for apology. He might even want to confront Jane Bretton with her, and her spirit revolted at the thought of worrying the ugly dispute to uglier tatters still. She felt sick with spent anger and longed to have done with it here and now. If Muir Forester, his sense of justice satisfied, had come back this afternoon to apologize to her, let him do it and then leave her alone. The amends she really craved—the making up after a stupid quarrel between people usually close in understanding—was not for them. Cold logic alone had taken him to Jane Bretton to learn the truth. Only cold logic could have brought him back now.

  She looked up, startle
d, as in a couple of strides he had crossed the little room to stand before her, his hands taking her upper arms in an iron grip beneath which she flinched.

  He began again. “Jess—don’t you know why, this morning, I dared not let emotion cloud my judgment of all this?”

  Jess stiffened within his hold. What emotion could he fear being betrayed into? Anger over his then unproved cause? The weakness of believing her unconfirmed word? Either, she supposed wearily. Or any other emotion at all—except the one that is forgivingly, blessedly blind.

  Upon a brittle, unyielding note she said, “It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. In my limited experience of you you don’t waste emotion, Mr. Forester. And none was called for this morning, as far as I can see.”

  He recoiled as if he had been struck, and she did not know why. His grasp upon her arms slackened, then tightened again. He almost shook her as he demanded, “You think not? It hadn’t occurred to you to wonder—” his lips curled over the quotation of her own phrase “—to wonder or to ask yourself why I should care that you were not lying, when I had to believe by all the facts I had that you were? So far as you were concerned, the situation called for no feeling on my part? None at all?”

  Again, as many times before, Jess saw the abyss opening—the abyss of the after despair that came from trying to read more than their face value into mere words. She was choosing her own carefully as she replied, “If I thought so, I think I’d have rejected it as a—a dangerous avenue to explore—”

  “Dangerous?” Muir seemed to fling himself upon the word. “What do you mean—dangerous?”

  “I mean that it would have been a mistake to see anything personal in it.”

  “That is, personal between you and me?”