As she struggled to get up, Frazer commanded her curtly, ‘Stay there, I’ll carry you up to the house.’
Carry her? As she looked up at him disbelievingly, he smiled back at her grimly and bent to pick her up, not in any tender facsimile of a lover’s embrace, but instead in a very undignified and also uncomfortable fireman’s lift. So much for the fierce thud of panic her heart had given at the thought of being held in his arms, Rebecca reflected grimly as she was carried relentlessly up the hill towards the house.
The twins, Mrs Norton and Aunt Maud were all waiting there for them in varying states of anxiety. Aunt Maud’s normally high colour had gone, leaving her face pale, and as Frazer dismissed both women’s anxious queries as to her state of health, refusing their offers of help, he said coldly to her once they were out of sight of the waiting quartet, ‘Yes, now you think of Aunt Maud’s age. A pity you didn’t think of that before. She’s not a young woman any more.’
He pushed open the door of her bedroom and dumped her down on the bed as though she were nothing more than a sack of coal, she reflected angrily, stung into retaliating swiftly, ‘No, she isn’t, which is something you might have thought of before you dumped the twins on her and went swanning off to the States!’
As he frowned down at her, she cursed her unruly tongue, wondering what on earth had prompted her to retaliate so recklessly. His response was surprisingly mild.
‘I didn’t dump them on her, as you put it,’ he told her quite calmly. ‘In fact I left an extremely competent and, so I thought, responsible young woman here in charge of them.’
‘She left,’ Rebecca told him coldly.
There was a moment’s silence; then he said, ‘Yes, I know. That’s the reason I’m here. She got in touch with me to let me know what had happened. Although she felt she couldn’t possibly continue to look after the twins, she felt it her duty to let me know the reasons why she’d felt obliged to leave. Naturally, the moment I realised that Aunt Maud was on her own here looking after them, I cancelled the rest of the tour and made arrangements to come home, only to find…’
‘Only to find that your sacrifice was completely unnecessary,’ Rebecca suggested sweetly, ‘since Aunt Maud had already made alternative arrangements.’
The look he gave her was derisive and hurtful.
‘If this afternoon’s episode was anything to go by, I hardly think that your tender care of the twins is of a type to banish parental fears.’
There were so many things she could have said, but what would be the point? Frazer was determined to see the very worst of her. The pain of knowing that made the blood leave her face. She shivered, chilled to the bone, shaking with reaction now that the immediacy of her ordeal was over.
‘What you need is a hot bath,’ Frazer told her crisply, monitoring her reaction. ‘Can you manage on your own, or….’
For a moment Rebecca actually thought that he was suggesting he should help her, and her face flamed scarlet at the thought of his hands on her body, no matter how impersonally. As though he could read her mind he said quietly, ‘If you do need help, I can always ask Mrs Norton.’
She shook her head, sending drops of water spraying on to the bedding. One droplet landed on Frazer’s hand, and as she watched he glanced at it, then casually lifted his hand to his mouth, licking the moisture away, a simple, almost absentminded gesture but one which made her stomach churn in mute reaction to the wantonness of her own thoughts.
Frazer got up and walked towards the door, pausing there to turn round and say acidly, ‘Why did you come here, Rebecca?’
She purposely chose to misunderstand him, shrugging her shoulders and saying coolly, ‘Because Aunt Maud asked me to.’
The look he gave her warned her that it was not the answer he was prepared to accept, but before he could question her any further Mrs Norton came bustling in, carrying a mug of steaming tea.
‘Drink this up, dear,’ she said to Rebecca. ‘It’s got plenty of sugar in for shock.’
Obediently Rebecca took the mug from her, allowing the housekeeper to fuss over her as Frazer opened the door and let himself out of her room. Despite her objections, he insisted on summoning the doctor.
It seemed to Rebecca, her nerves stretched to their limits, first with the shock of believing that Peter was drowning and then by the arrival of Frazer, that the doctor took an unconscionably long time in his examination, sounding her chest and then frowning thoughtfully before removing his stethoscope.
‘Tell me,’ he invited, when he had finished, ‘have you suffered from any kind of lung or breathing infection in the last twelve months? Bronchitis, pneumonia…anything like that?’
Uncomfortably Rebecca admitted, ‘I had pneumonia last winter.’
She still felt guilty about the way she had ignored the symptoms, which had eventually become so bad that she had earned herself not only a severe lecture from her own doctor, but a rather prolonged stay in bed. Her excuse had been that she had been so busy that she had simply not dared take time off.
‘Mm…’ Was the doctor’s only comment, but the look he gave her spoke volumes, and Rebecca felt her heart sink as he turned his head and said firmly to Frazer, ‘I’m afraid your cousin is going to have to stay in bed—at least for the next few days.’ He then turned back to her and told Rebecca herself, ‘And the reason that I’m telling Frazer that you’re to stay in bed is that I suspect that, if I don’t, you’ll be up and dressed the moment I turn my back.’
‘There’s nothing seriously wrong, is there?’ Frazer interrupted him.
He might at least have had the good manners to leave her alone with the doctor, Rebecca reflected bitterly, watching him. He was making her feel rather like a recalcitrant child, not the adult she was…both of them talking about her as though she wasn’t there.
‘Not at this stage,’ the doctor assured him, ‘but there’s just a suggestion of difficulty there I shouldn’t want to see developing. Pneumonia is an extremely debilitating disease, even for a woman as young and otherwise healthy as your cousin. A little cautiousness now will cost nothing.’ He got up and gave Rebecca a reassuring smile; an ageing, tired-looking ma
n who she could tell took his responsibilities to his patients very much to heart.
She knew she ought to be grateful to him for reminding her of the fact that she had been very seriously ill indeed earlier in the year…something which she herself tended to push to the back of her mind; as much because it made her realise how very silly she had been as because of her unpleasant memories of the uncomfortable time she had spent fighting off the infection.
She had only narrowly escaped being admitted to hospital, and then only because her mother had insisted on taking her home and nursing her herself.
She had not given that illness a thought when she had seen Peter’s jacket floating on the surface of the pool, but now suddenly, as thought the doctor’s warning words had conjured it up out of nowhere, she found that she was shivering fitfully, and that her chest felt uncomfortably tight.
‘I’ll leave a prescription,’ the doctor was saying to Frazer, then he turned to Rebecca and said quietly, ‘The tightness should ease within a couple of days. I’ll call in tomorrow to check how you’re doing.’
He got up and turned to leave before she could object and tell him that she was all right. And she was all right…or at least she had been until he started prodding and poking at her, she thought in blurry resentment.
Her head was starting to ache; a dull, heavy ache, accompanied by the feeling that it was stuffed with a thick material that made it impossible for her to think properly. She wanted to cough, but when she did so, her chest hurt.
She was still coughing when Frazer walked back into her room, although now the spasm was easing, leaving in its wake a depressingly familiar shakiness combined with a foolish urge to burst into tears.
Frazer took one look at her and said scathingly, ‘All this for a child’s jacket! Was it really worth it?’
Not for a child’s jacket, no, but for a child’s life, yes. The words burned the tip of her tongue, but heroically she swallowed them. Although she would have given a great deal to wipe the cynical look from Frazer’s eyes, she could not do so by exposing the twins. She was quite convinced that neither of them realised the seriousness of their actions. She had seen their frightened, chastened expressions when Frazer brought her out of the water.