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Authors: Elizabeth Hoy

My Heart Has Wings

BOOK: My Heart Has Wings
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MY HEART HAS WINGS

Elizabeth Hoy

Jan’s busy life was one long rush; a full day’s office work for a most exacting boss (a brilliant but temperamental aircraft designer), then housekeeping for her father, sister and brother, on a frighteningly inadequate income, in their inconvenient but much-loved home. Even the long journey to and from work had to be spent usefully in knitting. But still her thoughts found time to stray far, far into the sky, where a certain test pilot carried out his thrilling, dangerous missions
...

Not than Jan imagined that Mike would ever give her a serious thought. Everybody knew that he was attached to Erica Scott-Manly, daughter of the head of the firm; Eri
c
a, who was beautiful and clever and rich,
a
n
d,
maddeningly, quite unspoiled by all the gifts with which Fortune had surrounded her. So how could there be any chance for a quiet, unremarkable girl like Jan? But all that didn’t stop her thinking and dreaming about him.

 

CHAPTER
ONE

Jan
Fe
rr
aby came
through the swing doors of the works canteen, glad to leave the lunch-hour heat and noise and odours of food behind her.
A
cool breeze was blowing from the river. You could just see the grey-green tops of the Lombardy poplars that grew by its banks, away beyond the flat expanse of the airfield. A swept-wing fighter taxiing along a runway half a mile away glittered in the mid-day sun, small and brilliant as some exotic bird. Jan screwed up her eyes to focus it, but it wasn’t Mike Carliss’ plane. Mike would still be airborne, testing the Arrow; the new twin-jet fighter now in production at the Scott-Manly airworks. She looked up into the blue infinity of summer sky and there was the silver vapour trail, a pencil line of light soaring soundlessly. The invisible Arrow was travelling fast; Mike building up altitude for one of those breath-taking vertical dives, Jan decided. She watched the pencil point of brilliance go higher and higher, until a faint dizziness assailed her, an intoxicated stirring of the blood, as if she too were airborne, without substance, caught up in that shining light,
snar
ing
with the unseen plane.

The vapour trail widened, fading into feathery flakes of white cloud. The line of pencil light had almost disappeared. Jan became aware that she was standing in the middle of the perimeter road, gaping after it fatuously. She hurried on her way, a tall slim girl in a demure linen suit that could not altogether subdue her vivid quality. The smooth brown hair, touched to bronze in the noonday sunlight, had the sheen of youth and health in it, there were dancing flecks of gold in her hazel eyes; humorous and alert; they surveyed life with courage—already tried. The sensitive mouth was firm, controlled. She looked what she was, poised and dependable; the ideal secretary for a temperamental chief designer of aircraft that heralded the new age in flight. If there were hidden depths they were kept hidden, her own incalculable concern. And there was very little time for one’s own concern when one was on the job at Scott-Manly’s.

Entering a one-storied glass-bricked, building, superlatively modern, eloquently executive in its setting of workshops and sheds and hangars, she pushed open a door marked “Mr. Hugh Daker”. Here in an enclosed suite was her office, with Daker’s adjoining, and beyond it the long light room in which he worked on his blueprints.

Helen Stanford was lifting the cover off her typewriter. The sight of her gave Jan a small shock. She hadn’t yet got used to having Helen as her part-time assistant; a gentle diffident girl with small delicate features that gave her an air of being almost absurdly young. But there was nothing of youth in the sorrowful wisdom that looked out of her clear grey eyes. Actually she was twenty-three, the same age as Jan herself. She had been married to Jock Stanford two months when he crashed while making a test
flight ...
here on the Scott-Manly field. That was more than a year ago. Mike Carliss, his friend, had been appointed in his place as the firm’s chief test pilot.

He was the obvious, indeed the most glittering choice; an air ace with more than one Far Eastern decoration to his name, who at the age of twenty-one had achieved the rank of Squadron Leader. His civilian career, almost equally spectacular, included a formidable list of record flights. He had joined the Scott-Manly firm after taking the routine Test Pilots’ course in his stride and had worked for a time in an experimental establishment. And now, at the age of thirty-three, he was not only an ace flyer but a brilliant technician. Sir Mark Scott-Manly, the firm’s owner and founder, thought the world of him. And so, it was rumoured, did Erica, Sir Mark’s daughter!

However that might be, he wa
s
a pretty constant visitor at the Scott-Manly home, Sheldrake Manor. But then, so was Helen Stanford. Sir Mark—S.M. to his employees behind his back—had been a pioneer in the early days of aviation, and he was keenly aware of all he owed to these younger men who now carried the torch he himself had helped to light. Jock Stanford’s death had hit him hard. And he had, Jan suspected, contrived this office job for Helen. In fact Daker had as good as said so when he spoke to her of the arrangement.

“S.M. and Lady Scott-Manly have been keeping a pretty close eye on young Helen throughout the past year; having her to stay with them at Sheldrake, and so forth. And now they’ve got the notion that it would be good for her to have something in the way of a regular job to occupy her mind. She likes the idea, poor kid, of being associated with Jock’s work in a small way
...
and I suppose, in spite of the firm’s pension, she’s got to earn her living. Anyway, it’s all fixed up. We’re taking her in here. She has done a short course of shorthand and typing and she’s all set to be useful. She’s a charming girl,” Daker had ended, “and a jolly plucky one. I think you’ll get on well with her.

And now here she was sitting at her desk, waiting humbly to be told what to do. Jan racked her brains for something interesting, and yet within Helen’s, so far, limited range. She flipped through the papers on her desk, seeking for inspiration. “Mike is flying the Arrow,” she found herself saying—without meaning to. It seemed to come out of its own accord.

“I know,” Helen said. “I saw the flight programme flimsy when I was tidying your desk just now, waiting for you to get back from lunch.” She broke off abruptly as the sound of a jet engine roared overhead. Jan stood arrested, a sheaf of notes in her hand. The roar became almost intolerable, changed pitch, and, abruptly as it had assaulted them, thinned out and ceased. Jan moistened her dry lips nervously. “There are these specifications Mr. Daker wanted,” she said. “I wonder if he has got back from lunch?” She glanced at the closed door of the inner office.

“He rushed in a few moments ago—in a bit of a lather,” Helen said. “S.M. has turned up unexpectedly, it seemed, and summoned all senior executives to a conference in the board room.”

Jan’s gold-flecked eyes registered mild surprise. “In the middle of lunch-time?” she said. “S.M. surely is the sort who usually eats solidly from one till three, with all the other tycoons, in the fastness of his club.”

“Well, he isn’t at his
cl
ub today.”

“One of his flaps,” Jan dismissed it. “Oh, well, maybe you could get on with some filing until I can ask Daker how many copies of the specifications he wants.”

The jet roared over the works again. There are times,” Jan had once heard Mike say to Daker, “when you need an awful lot of sky for these kites!” She hoped he had enough sky right at this moment. Through the window beyond Helen’s desk she could see an ambulance—with a red cross like a splash of blood on its centre panel—standing on the apron of concrete before the control tower, two fire tenders lined up beside it. A routine precaution for a routine test flight. But suddenly Jan was hating the sight of them, remembering with a sense of recoil the way they had screamed off down the runway the bright spring day Jock Stanford crashed. Her glan
c
e went involuntarily to Helen’s placid, patient face. What did it do to her—the sound of those roaring jet engines? Nothing apparently. There was something extraordinar
i
ly peaceful about her, as though she had faced and accepted the worst life could offer, and had nothing more to fear. Or else it was that she was still numbed, living in that grey limbo beyond feeling in which a broken heart bides its time waiting for warmth and hope to return.

Opening her notebook, Jan gazed dully at the shorthand hieroglyphics it contained. Letters Daker had dictated just before lunch. But she didn’t feel like settling down to them until Mike was safely back from his flight. Increasingly she was aware of this tension when he was in the air. Idiotic, but there it was. Maybe she was getting to know too much about the things that could go wrong with these powerful complex machines on test. Or maybe it was...

But she switched her thoughts sharply from the lurking alternative ... absurd as her too personal fears.

In a few minutes Mike would walk in and dump his wire recorder on her desk; the device that reproduced his spontaneous comments on the behaviour of the Arrow in flighty a technical soliloquy for the benefit of the designing team. But sometimes they weren’t all that technical, the level tones slipping a little, betraying excitement, elation, even apprehension, and as she typed the “play back” Jan’s heart would lurch in quick response. At such moments she felt herself very close to Mike Carliss, strangely in his confidence. As if these glimpses of a vulnerability he was usually so careful to hide were part of a secret life she shared with him. Perhaps, she thought now, that was why she was becoming more aware of him than was altogether
...
comfortable. She pulled herself up sharply. She was being ridiculously introspective today, and sentimental into the bargain. Anyone would think she was some fatuous teen-ager, given to hero-worship and school-girl crushes. Mike Carliss barely realized she existed!

Slipping a sheet of notepaper into her machine she began resolutely on the letters. The first one was marked “Top Secret”. A communication concerning the prototype light fighter Daker and Mike had been working on for the past fifteen months. The E.106a. An Air Ministry project, strictly hush-hush. The details of its progress from blueprint to “mockups” to ground tests had been shrouded most stringently in the aura of secrecy that surrounded all military commitments. When she had first
c
ome to the office Jan had been a bit overawed by the highly confidential documents that passed through her hands. But she was used to it now, and accepted her position of trust without thinking about it.

She worked on rapidly, her fingers flying over the keys, until she came to a query that would have to be referred to Daker. It was a nuisance that he was still locked up in that untimely conference; S.M. holding court and messing up everyone’s afternoon work. Jan wondered idly what it was all about. A spot of bother for somebody, probably. It usually meant trouble when S.M. called an emergency meeting.

It would have astonished her beyond belief if she had known that they were at that moment discussing her humble self in the board room across the way. And that there was trouble indeed afoot—of a kind that was to haunt them all for many a day to come.

“What about that girl of yours, Daker; Miss Ferraby?” Sir Mark Scott-Manly was saying. The face round the vast mahogany table turned toward Hugh Daker; a rather cadaverous little man
with an immense dome of brow from which a thatch of untidy black hair receded. He had a deceptively absent-minded manner, behind which his mind worked with the cold precision of a mathematical genius
.
A mind continually busy with its own esoteric pursuits. His thoughts this afternoon had been miles away from the wearisome verbosity of his chief, though he had absorbed its essentials. There had been a minor leakage of information; a paragraph in a obscure international weekly called
Ariel,
one of the numerous small magazines that go in for pseudo-science in the field of aviation. In a current number an unsigned article announced that the Scott-Manly works at Kingsfold were engaged on the construction of a prototype light fighter of revolutionary design; the E.106a. This machine, the article continued, was now in its final stages, ready for major ground tests, and could be expected to make its debut before the summer was out. There followed a forecast of the plane’s possible performance, obviously guesswork. But the details of its wing-span, armament potential and power plant were disturbingly correct. Daker had never heard of
Ari
el
before and he was quite sure Miss Ferraby hadn’t either. He said so now with obvious indignation.

Sir Mark made a small apologetic gesture. He was merely, he said, in a tone that offered the
cliché
s as a humorous sop, exploring all avenues, leaving no stone unturned.

BOOK: My Heart Has Wings
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