by Betty Neels
Rosie stood on one side, and Gyp, at a quiet word from Sir Fergus, stood by her; only when the slow, careful journey back to the road began did she essay to go as well. Sir Fergus had gone with the stretcher, and it was a constable who hailed her.
‘If you’ll come with me, miss, I’ll see you to your car; Sir Fergus has asked us to see you safely home.’
‘Oh, has he? I’m absolutely all right to drive, you know.’
‘I’m sure you are, miss, but that’s what Sir Fergus said—it’s only a wee way—I’ll drive behind you.’
They were following the stretcher party, and since the progress was slow it was half an hour before they gained the road. Rosie watched them loading the stretcher into the ambulance, a ticklish business which took a few minutes under Sir Fergus’s terse directions.
The ambulance doors were shut, the mountain rescue team gathered up their equipment and prepared to leave in their jeep. Rosie walked past the Rolls to her own car, and unlocked the door and got in; there was no sign of Sir Fergus, and the constable had gone to the patrol car to phone and then get in beside his driver, ready to follow her.
The car door opened and Sir Fergus loomed over her. ‘Thank you, Rosie. Now go home, have a dram of whisky and a hot bath, and go to bed. That’s doctor’s orders.’
He closed the door and was gone before she could utter a word, and a moment later his car swept past her to turn and drive back to Fort William, with the ambulance, its lights flashing, hard on its heels.
Rosie turned on the engine and started the drive back to Inverard. Fergus had called her his brave little love, but possibly he said that, or something similar, to any of his patients who showed signs of hysteria. He had kissed her, too—hardly treatment he would give even to the most hysterical of patients. She had been kissed often enough, but never like that. It hadn’t meant anything to him. ‘Whisky and a hot bath,’ she muttered, and clashed the gears going round a corner too fast.
The police car behind edged up a bit. The young lady was driving without due care—not that she could be blamed, it must have been so cold and lonely on the moor waiting for help. A bit of luck that it had been Sir Fergus Cameron who had come by; they had encountered him on various other similar occasions—always calm and resourceful, uncaring of the weather and an expert climber.
It was far into the night when Rosie stopped the car outside her home. The patrol car drew up alongside her, and she got out and went to poke her head through the driver’s window.
‘Someone is still up. Come on in and have a hot drink and perhaps a sandwich?’
Her father had opened the door, and Hobb came tearing out to meet her. They all went inside, and went through to the kitchen where her mother was pouring boiling water into the teapot. Rosie kissed her and smiled at her father, and introduced the two constables.
‘They were kind enough to escort me home,’ she explained, and her mother bade them sit down, and fetched more mugs and uncovered a plate of sandwiches.
‘Now you’ve to drive back to Fort William?’ she wanted to know. ‘It was good of you to come out here with Rosie.’ She added carefully in a casual tone, ‘You weren’t in an accident, love?’ She passed round the sandwiches. ‘Fergus said you were all right…’
‘He phoned? I didn’t know.’ Rosie bit into a sandwich. ‘It was a young man—a boy really, I suppose—walking alone for a dare. He’d got off the West Highland Way and got lost, and then fallen over and hit a rock…’
‘Then you came by?’ asked her father, turning to the two men.
They explained. ‘Not much we could do,’ said one of them. ‘Sir Fergus was there, and a good thing, too, for the lad had a fractured spine and a broken leg—he’ll be at the hospital now, with Sir Fergus sorting him out.
‘It’s this young lady who saw the boy’s torch and went to look for him, and luckily Sir Fergus came driving by after a while. He called us and the mountain rescue team—they’ve got the right stretchers for rough ground and they know how to handle injuries—and by the time we had all got back to the road the ambulance had arrived. Sir Fergus asked us to escort the young lady home,
‘Thanks for the tea and sandwiches. We must be getting back.’
Rosie went with them to the door, and shook hands. ‘You know, I don’t think I could have driven back on my own. Thank you both very much.’
They assured her that it had been a pleasure, got into their car, and drove off. She went back to the kitchen, and her mother said, ‘We’re not going to ask you another question—you can tell us tomorrow. Now you’re going to have a hot bath, a dram of whisky, and go to your bed.’
‘That’s what Fergus said,’ mumbled Rosie, and burst into tears.
She woke once while it was still dark, her sleepy head full of determination to forget Fergus, never to see him again, never to think of him… She fell asleep again, and when she woke the first thing she thought of was him. Had he been to bed at all? she wondered. And, if so, where? Had he gone back to Edinburgh or was he at home?
Lying there allowing her thoughts to wander wasn’t going to do much good; she got up and went down to her breakfast. She had overslept, but her parents were still at the table. Mrs MacFee brought in more coffee and fresh toast and then stood by the door, eager to hear Rosie’s account of the accident. She recited it baldly, leaving out as much as she could about Fergus, and when she had finished her mother said,
‘Would you like to phone the hospital and ask after the boy? I wonder where he was from?’
‘No one from hereabouts,’ said Rosie, and went to the phone.
The boy had had emergency surgery, said the voice at the other end of the wire; he had a compound fracture of his left leg and fractured lumber vertebrae. He was paralysed, but there was every hope that it was temporary.
‘You were the young lady who found him?’ asked the voice.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Rosie.
‘He said to tell you that he was deeply thankful.’
‘Oh, please give him my best wishes. He’s not local, is he?’
‘Glasgow. His parents are on their way here. You’re welcome to visit at any time, Miss Macdonald.’
Rosie rang off, and too late wondered how the voice had addressed her by name. It was nice that the boy had a good chance of recovery. She went to tell her mother and, since she felt quite unable to settle to anything, took herself off to the attics.
‘There’s a bag of odds and ends of wool,’ she told her mother. ‘It will come in handy once we start knitting; I think it’s in the back attic.’
A gloomy little room under the eaves, approached by a narrow passage from the main attic and lighted by a small window overlooking the back of the house, which was why she didn’t see the Rolls sailing down the lane to come to a halt before the house door.
‘I thought you might come,’ said Mrs Macdonald, throwing open the door as Sir Fergus reached the steps. She eyed him in a motherly way. ‘You’re tired. Were you up all night?’
‘Not quite all night.’ He smiled down at her. For all his tiredness he looked content and, as usual, beautifully turned out. ‘I’ve come to see Rosie…’
Mrs Macdonald smiled then. ‘She’s in the back attic—go through the main attic and along a narrow passage—it’s the door at the end. It overlooks the kitchen gardens and the river—she won’t know… Go up the back stairs, it’s quicker.’
Rosie wasn’t looking for wool, she was sitting on a very old sofa, its springs
sticking out, and eaten by moths. Simpkins was on her lap, and she was staring out of the window, although she wasn’t exactly looking at anything; she was, in fact, concentrating upon not thinking about Fergus, and not having much success. The faint squeak of the door opening roused her enough to look over her shoulder to sit, like a small carved statue, gaping at him.
He closed the door behind him, and came into the dim, dusty little room unhurriedly. He lifted Simpkins off her lap with gentle hands, deposited the small creature in an open, battered hat box beside the sofa, and pulled Rosie, just as gently, to her feet.
‘Well, now,’ he said, ‘where had we got to?’
‘Got to?’ She stared up into his quiet face. ‘Where were we going? I didn’t know…’
‘Of course you didn’t, how could you when I had no more time than to kiss you?’ He smiled suddenly. ‘Which reminds me…’
He wrapped his great arms around her and held her close, and kissed her gently at first and then quite ferociously.
‘Well!’ exclaimed Rosie, her hair all over the place, struggling to get her breath back. ‘Whatever next…?’
A silly question which plainly encouraged him to kiss her again.
At last she asked, ‘The girl—the girl you’re going to marry. It just won’t do—whatever shall we do?’
He held her, if that were possible, a little closer.
‘I hope that we shall continue to do what we are doing now, on and off, for the rest of our lives.’ He suited the action to the word. ‘My darling, you are such a sensible girl, but you have allowed your imagination to run away with you. Did I ever mention this girl by name? Did you ever get so much as a glimpse of her?
And at her muttered, ‘I did, I did…’ he added,
‘Oh—in the car, outside your grandmother’s. That was Grizel—a married cousin with four small boys and a doting husband. But did you, in your quieter moments, reflect that a man in love wishes to be with his girl every minute he can spare and, if he can’t spare the minutes, talk about her? And did I ever talk about her? And, heaven help me, haven’t I spent hours contriving ways and means of seeing you when I should have been doing something else?’
‘Oh,’ said Rosie, ‘do you really mean that?’ She caught his eye, and added hastily, ‘Yes, you do,’ and flung her arms around his neck and kissed him.
‘You see,’ she explained, ‘I didn’t like you at first, so I supposed that you didn’t like me either, and then when I did like you I thought you were going to be married.’
‘I am—to you, just as soon as you can arrange all the tiresome things women want to arrange when they get married.’
‘Mother will want us to have a big wedding…’
‘Quite right, too; you’re far too beautiful to be hidden away. Let her have her wish just as long as she can arrange everything in three weeks.’
‘Three weeks? It takes ages…’
‘Three weeks or I shall elope with you to Gretna Green!’ He kissed the top of her head, which was resting on his shoulder. ‘My darling love, not a day longer.’
‘Well, if you say so…’ She smiled up into his face. ‘I’ll do my best—I love you very much, Fergus.’
He kissed her for that. ‘I love you, my dearest love. Will you marry me?’
‘Yes, oh, yes, I will.’ She stared up at him, and saw the love in his face. ‘We might manage less than three weeks,’ she told him.
* * * * *
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ISBN: 9781459230620
Copyright © 1991 by Betty Neels
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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