Bird of Prey

BIRD OF PREY by

Henrietta Reid

Caroline needed a home and a job — but her rich cousin Grace had made it very plain that she needn’t turn to her for help.

So when Grace’s overwhelming friend Randall Craig offered Caroline a job instead, it seemed a little unreasonable for Grace to object. After all, what kind of competition was Caroline likely to offer to the stunningly beautiful Grace?

CHAPTER ONE

CAROLINE DOWNES sat up in bed, clasped her thin arms around her knees and rested her head wearily upon them. It was fairly early—earlier than she usually went to bed, but she was exhausted, too tired to sleep. She shivered a little. Her room was cold and she pictured her uncle and his wife in the room beneath hers, seated before a glowing fire, the small sitting-room a place of rest and warmth after the trials of the day. Yet so deeply was she in disgrace that not for a moment did Caroline wish to make one in that cosy nook beneath her bedroom.

Her eyes went to the empty chimneypiece in her room and rested on the third tile from the top on the right. She shouldn’t do it, of course: it was wrong to listen in to other people’s conversations, she knew, yet she slid out of bed and almost stealthily removed the tile with the block of masonry behind it. Into the room surged the voices of Trevor Cranwell and his wife and, as she had expected, they were discussing her. Caroline knelt on the cold hearth and listened, her small, brittle-boned head turned to one side—and as she listened she knew that at last the crisis in her young life that she had dreaded for the past two years had finally arrived. It had been only a matter of time until Aunt Muriel decided to get rid of her—and now the moment had arrived.

“We simply can’t afford to keep her any longer,” came Muriel Cranwell’s petulant voice. “A Meissen figure dropped, although I warned her how valuable it was. Our profits for the past few months gone in one moment of carelessness.”

There was a silence, then Trevor said in his soft, husky, dejected tones, “But what are we to do about her? After all, she’s my sister Laura’s girl. I promised her I’d take care of the child and—”

“And you’ve done so!” Muriel’s stronger tones came up very clearly. “We’ve taken her in, given her a home and educated her. She’s had everything a girl could wish for. We’ve treated her as if she were our own daughter—and what gratitude do we receive?”

“Oh, come now!” Trevor protested mildly. “She’s a good girl and anxious to please—it’s not her fault if she happens to have no talent for the business.”

“A great deal of it’s sheer carelessness,” Muriel snapped. “Any girl can learn to handle valuable china and porcelain without damaging it, but over and over again there’ve been breakages.”

Caroline, listening on the hearth above, could not but feel in her heart that Muriel had cause to be annoyed. The Cranwells ran a small but long-established repair service for valuable objects of china and porcelain. It had been opened by Trevor’s father, but Muriel had quickly become so adept that it took the eye of an expert to tell that any repair had been made.

It was into this business that her uncle and his wife had tried to introduce Caroline when her schooldays were over. Muriel had taught and demonstrated and explained and warned her and scolded—especially had scolded—and perhaps this had something to do with the fact that when Muriel was on the scene Caroline’s fingers seemed to be all thumbs.

However, that was no excuse, and Caroline listened, her breath held, as Trevor said slowly, “I suppose we’ll have to face up to the fact that she’s utterly unsuited for the business. But as for sending her away, that’s a different thing! As I said, she’s Laura’s girl, and I promised—”

“You forget she’s no longer a child: she’s a grownup young woman now, and you didn’t promise Laura we’d put ourselves into penury for the sake of her daughter,” Muriel snapped, and Caroline could visualise the sour lines about her mouth. “We’ll have to look around for a suitable girl who can be taught the business, and Caroline will just have to earn her own living.”

“You know she’s not trained for anything,” Trevor protested.

“And we have no money to spend on training her now,” Muriel put in. “The girl’s not too bright. Don’t you remember her school record? She wasn’t really clever at any subject: didn’t apply herself and was forever reading storybooks and wandering around with her head in a dream. But we’re not her only relations, after all! There’s Grace Brant at Lynebeck. Why shouldn’t she take on Caroline for a while?”

As Caroline heard these words she drew in her breath in a gasp of dismay. She had not seen Grace Brant for many years, and had only a dim recollection of a beautiful raven-haired woman with wonderful clothes—a woman who seemed to have only contempt for the gawky, plain child who had been Caroline Downes.

Caroline’s life with Uncle Trevor and his wife had been anything but happy. Muriel’s incessant nagging, increasing in impatience as the months passed and Caroline had showed no signs of having any talent for the little business by which they lived, had made her bitterly unhappy, and many a night she had cried herself to sleep in the little room high under the roof of the small terraced house. Still, it was the only home she could remember and she clung to it as being familiar. Trevor, too, had been good-natured: often he had quietly slipped her pocket-money when his wife’s back was turned.

Caroline listened, her lips parted, her breath a mist in the chilly room, for Trevor’s reply.

“Really, Muriel,” Trevor sounded irritable. “And what is Caroline to do in Grace’s big house away in the wilds of Cumberland? I don’t suppose Grace has much china to be mended—not a woman of her wealth, who seems to throw out anything that displeases her.”

“Had Grace china to be mended Caroline is the last person in the world she should entrust the job to!” came Muriel’s cold, antagonistic voice. “The girl may have some hidden talents— although I very much doubt it—but of one thing I am certain, and that is that the care of valuable pieces is certainly not amongst them.”

“Then what do you propose?” Trevor asked, impatiently.

“I’m thinking of that child of Grace’s, Robin.” Muriel told him. “He’s utterly spoiled, of course, and seems to get through several nursery governesses in the year. I never hear of Grace but she’s on the lookout for someone new.”

“You’re not suggesting that poor Caroline should take on Robin— and Grace too, for that’s what it would amount to?” Trevor demanded.

“The girl’s fit for nothing,” Muriel snapped. “But at a pinch she might do as a nursery governess. And as for putting up with Grace! It’s time Caroline learned that others won’t be as patient with her as we have been. ”

“I don’t like the idea,” Trevor began after a few moments’ silence. “Caroline is a good girl at bottom. She has tried hard to please us and to be dutiful in spite of the fact that she has no talent for artistic work—”

“So you admit it,” his wife broke in grimly. “The girl has done more damage than she’s worth, and it’s only because I’ve put myself out time and time again to make good her destructiveness that we aren’t out of business by now. I’m tired of having to explain to people that their work is going to be delayed. And I tell you flatly, Trevor, that I won’t put up with any more of it.”

“Oh, very well then,” Trevor returned with a tired sigh. “If you won’t have the girl, you won’t, and I’ll resign myself to letting her go. But who’s to break the news to her I don’t know.”

But Caroline hardly heard what else was said. They were talking about Grace Brant now. Muriel was saying that since Paul Brant’s death, Grace had been on the lookout for a rich husband—although there was no need for her to do this because Paul had left her well off. Grace was rich, Muriel was saying bitterly, but she was a restless, idle woman whose vanity was piqued that she should have no husband as a background for her fabulous beauty.

Caroline, as she slowly replaced the block of masonry, was trembling violently. So they were going to send her away! The sense of impending doom that had been hanging over her head in recent months had foreshadowed this banishment from the only place she had know as home since her childhood.

She crawled into bed and lay staring up at the ceiling where a dull, greenish patch of light thrown by the street lamp outside made a large irregular circle on the ceiling.

Then into her mind came her uncle’s plaintive query, “Who’s to break the news to her?” Tears stole down Caroline’s cheeks as she thought that the problem would be to disguise from him that already she knew. He was fundamentally a kind-hearted man, torn between his anxiety to please his wife and his desire to be kind to his dead sister’s orphan child. She could picture his troubled kindly eyes as he tried to approach the subject. And how could such news be broken tactfully? How could you tell anyone that they were a hopeless failure, that they weren’t worth their keep? It would be hard for him—and harder still for her, Caroline knew.

Suddenly her mind was made up. She sprang out of bed, switched on the light and feverishly began to scrabble through her purse on the dressing-table. She counted and counted yet again her little store of wealth. Lynebeck, she knew vaguely, was in the very north somewhere near to Scotland. The journey would be expensive. Yet she felt sure she would have enough to make the trip if she were very, very economical about such things as cups of tea and sandwiches on the way.

From the top of the wardrobe she drew down the fibre suitcase which she had used on the camping holiday which Uncle Trevor had paid for. It had been fun; wonderful to go boating and swimming, to be free to explore the countryside, climb trees in a sort of belated childhood, far from Muriel’s scolding tongue. During that holiday she had been a different creature, confident and surefooted—not the clumsy, inept girl she seemed to turn into as soon as her aunt’s hard, disapproving eye was turned in her direction.

Rapidly she packed her clothes and took down from a hook on the wall facing her bed the little stuffed donkey, her only souvenir of that holiday. It had been the prize in the competition for the girl who could sing the highest note. It had been organized by Dick Travers, one of the games supervisors, on the one rainy afternoon which had been the only bad patch of weather she could remember in those golden days of blue skies and sun. It had probably been a silly competition, she realised that now. The girls had giggled as one after another they had tried to reach a higher note than the previous girl. When it had come to her turn she had been a little shy. “Come on, Caroline,” they had cried jocularly, “you’re holding everything up. Look, the sun has come out again.” So, effortlessly, she had sung high E in her thin, sweet young voice. There had been a burst of clapping as she went up to receive the little donkey with the endearing, stupid look on his face.

Gently she squeezed him into a corner of her case.

When she did so, her case was full. What was she to do about her beloved books? she wondered. From the corner of her wardrobe she fetched the leather strap in which, only a few years previously, she used to carry her books to school. Swiftly she took down from the small shelf near the head of her bed the little library she had accumulated during the years. These books reached back to childhood, but she had never been able to force herself to part with them. “Treasure Island,” and “Anne of Green Gables”, “Little Women”, “Jane Eyre”, “The Scarlet Pimpernel”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”. Soon she was ready and sat upon the edge of her bed, until her uncle and aunt came upstairs. Then, as silence fell on the house, she picked up her case, slung the strap containing her books over her wrist and stole downstairs.

She awoke from a troubled doze, in which she had dreamed of wandering through an endless moor beset with stagnant meres and lit only by the eerie light of the moon, to discover that the October afternoon was cloudy and overcast. She looked around the carriage, dazed, her neck cramped from being inclined at an awkward angle against the dusty, plush seat. The train was slowing and, as it stopped, she strained her ears to hear the porter’s cry of “Lynebeck!” She pulled her case from the rack and stumbled on to the platform still half asleep. The shock of the icy air on her face roused her to instant wakefulness and she became aware of the fact that the station was much smaller than she had expected. She walked to the end of the platform, handed up her ticket to the collector, and found herself out in the station yard. Here, to her relief, she spied a single dilapidated taxi, at the wheel of which sat an elderly man apparently petrified with cold.

He took her case from her, placed it on the seat beside him, as she scrambled into the back. “Mrs. Brant’s? Yes, I know it,” he said wearily, as he drove out of the station yard and along a dark, tree-shaded road.