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*

The other person who gave Meg unasked-for information was a complete stranger—a girl who seemed to appear from nowhere but who proved to have plenty to say for herself.

Because she had nothing else to do and because she was carefully avoiding Jeremy so far as that was possible during her last few days at the hotel, Meg was still spending a lot of time in the cottage garden. On this particular morning she was taking a load of rubbish through to the paddock where she had cleared a space for bonfires and found that she was being coolly inspected by a girl who was leaning negligently on the chained gate—on Hector’s side. She was tall and slim and very fair and she was dressed in a Mediterranean blue trouser suit so perfectly tailored that Meg felt an involuntary pang of envy.

“Hallo,” the girl hailed her casually. “Are you the Ainslie girl?”

“Yes,” Meg said briefly, not relishing the off-hand manner of address and wondering who the enquirer could be. Certainly no one that she had seen before either in Blytheburn or Netherbyre.

“I thought you must be,” the girl commented, but without revealing her own identity. “Nobody else would bother over this tatty old place. I wonder you do, for that matter. You’ll never get away with it, you know. It was Heronshaw property once and it will be again.”

She spoke with such assurance that Meg wondered more than ever who she was, but nothing would have persuaded her to ask. She preferred to take refuge in silence, which had the effect of making her tormentor frown and return to the fray.

“Actually, it’s your uncle who thinks it belongs to him, isn’t it?” she drawled.

Meg, recognising this as a deliberate attempt to provoke her, refused to be drawn.

“It was to my uncle that Nanny left it, yes."

The girl laughed.

“A lot of good that will do him! ” she remarked scornfully. “It wasn’t Nanny’s to leave to anyone who isn’t a Sturt.”

“If that’s so, then it’s something to be discussed by my uncle and Sir Hector,” Meg told her indifferently. “It’s no one else’s business.”

“And that, I suppose, is meant to be one in the eye for me,” the girl retorted rudely. “Well, you’ve misfired, my dear. Believe me, I intend to make it very much my business!”.

She so evidently intended to goad Meg into asking questions that naturally it was out of the question to do anything of the sort. She had piled the rubbish on to the heap already there, and now, taking a box of matches from her pocket, she lit the small dry twigs she had laid at the bottom of the pile. Unfortunately there was no breeze, so the smoke went straight up instead of blowing in the girl’s direction, which Meg was annoyed enough to hope would have been the case —as the girl was quick to realise.

“Hard luck!” she said sardonically. “If I were you. I’d regard it as an omen. Nothing will go right for you here, you know!”

Who on earth was she? So insolently sure of herself and yet finding it so necessary to make that clear as to raise doubts in one’s mind—

For a moment neither of them spoke. Out of the comer of her eye, Meg saw that the girl had lit a cigarette and was seemingly considering what to say next. Suddenly she made up her mind.

“Nanny was always a troublesome old woman,” she remarked dispassionately. “Dirty and greedy and, of course, a witch.”

“What!” Startled, Meg spun round to face her tormentor. “What nonsense!”

“Oh,
I
don’t believe it, of course,” the girl remarked with a shrug. “Though actually, a couple of centuries ago an ancestor of hers only just escaped being burned as one by leaving the district in a hurry.”

“Oh!” Meg said blankly.

“You didn’t know that? Or that quite a lot of the locals think she came back—as Nanny. That’s how the roof got damaged. Some of the farmers thought she’d put the evil eye on their herds and they decided to pay her out.”

“How absolutely horrible!” Meg shuddered. “Poor old Nanny—”

“She asked for it,” the girl said calmly, stubbing out her cigarette on the top bar of the gate. “She encouraged the idea because she liked the feeling of importance it gave her to have people believe that she’d got the power to do that sort of thing,” She lit another cigarette. “As a matter of fact, they’d have done a lot more damage than they did if it hadn’t been that Sir Hector got wind of what was going on and turned up —with a shotgun. That persuaded them to call it a day. Stupid of him really, I think. She’d asked for it—”

“What a beastly thing to say!” Meg said hotly. “A poor, silly old woman—”

“Oh, she was silly all right,” the girl conceded. “Sir Hector wanted to repair the roof for her and she wouldn’t let him. Too scared of letting the wicked Heronshaw do anything which would put her in his debt! And perhaps she’d got something there,” she added reflectively. “He’s the sort of man that never does anything for nothing—and he likes getting his own way!”

“That’s certainly true in one respect,” Meg told her. “He objects to people trespassing on his land, so I advise you to get off it before you get caught!”

And that made the girl laugh with such genuine amusement that Meg knew instinctively that she had
made a mistake.

“Hardly, my pet!” the girl drawled mockingly. “You see, I happen to be a Heronshaw myself. Fiona of that ilk, to be precise—a third or fourth cousin of Hector’s. What’s more, I’ve almost decided to marry him.”

“Oh yes?” Meg said with a cool indifference she was far from feeling. “Does he know?”

The blue eyes which were not so blue as Hector’s snapped angrily, but that was the only sign she gave that Meg’s rather feline thrust had scored.

“Oh yes,” she said coolly, “he knows all right. The whole thing is his idea. You see, he’s my guardian and I’ve got rather a lot of money, and naturally he doesn’t want to lose control of it.”

“And knowing that, you’d marry him?” Meg asked incredulously.

“I told you, I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Fiona Heronshaw reminded her. “You see, there are fors and againsts. It would be rather fun to be Lady Heronshaw, and of course, Hector is frightfully reliable. He’s not the sort of person who would ever do anything silly so that he lost his money. But then, as we both know, he’s a very bossy individual, and I rather like having my own way! Besides—” she pinched her lower lip between her thumb and finger before finishing the sentence, “he’s not the only string to my bow. Not that there’s much to be done about that. Most unfairly, you see, Hector can refuse to hand over my money until I’m twenty-five if I marry someone he doesn’t approve of. And that’s what he’s made clear is just what will happen if I marry anyone but him!”

“But you
could
marry anyone you chose—legally, I mean?” Meg asked, interested in spite of herself. “You’re of age, aren’t you?”

“Oh goodness, yes! I’m twenty-two. But what’s that got to do with it?” Fiona asked matter-of-factly. “I want to have a good time and—”

“And this other man isn’t so well off that you could be sure of having it without your money?” Meg asked.

“That’s it!” Fiona said, evidently delighted at Meg’s quick understanding. “I’m completely between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

“No, you’re not,” Meg told her energetically. “You must surely care for one of them more than the other!”

"Well—perhaps,” Fiona conceded without much enthusiasm.

“Then that’s what matters!” Meg declared. “Don’t you see, money doesn’t come into it. It’s a question of whom you care for enough to want to spend the rest of your life with.”

Fiona shook her head.

“My dear, you’ve been reading too many romantic novels!” she declared with rather an absurd assumption of worldly wisdom. “Just you look around you and you’ll see what a lot of real people who married because they thought they’d found
the
love of their life only to find out quite soon that it was nothing of the sort! The trouble is, you see, that falling head over heels in love blinds one to practical considerations like household drudgery and always being short of cash! No, if I ever get married, I intend to do it with my eyes wide open. That’s why I’m dithering at the present. Well, and because it’s rather amusing to keep Hector dangling! It’s a new experience and he doesn’t like it very much, but there’s not a thing he can do about it.” She glanced down at her watch. “I suppose I’d better be going. Aunt Millicent wants me to go through some trunks of old clothes which are supposed to be quite interesting and rather valuable to see if any of them need repair. Not a job that interests me, but then I want to keep on Aunt Millicent’s right side. She makes quite a useful ally sometimes when Hector is more than usually aggressive.” She gave Meg a casual nod of farewell and began to walk away from the gate. Suddenly she turned. “Just in case it interests you, Aunt Millicent is actually another of those distant cousins of both Hector’s and mine. We call her ‘aunt’ because she’s so much older than either of us. She sort of keeps house—she’s a widow, but she was a Heronshaw before she was married—so that makes it quite respectable for me to be living in Hector’s house. Properly chaperoned and all that! I’m quite a nice girl really. I wouldn’t like there to any misunderstanding about that!”

This time she really did go, leaving Meg feeling both breathless and bewildered. Of all the extraordinary girls she had ever met, Fiona Heronshaw undoubtedly headed the list, and just how much credence one should give to anything she said was impossible even to guess at! Meg thought that Fiona’s belief that love without money was bound to fade, even vanish, was probably quite sincere. But the rest of her story—that was another matter. Two men both wanting to marry her and Fiona calmly weighing the desirability of one against the other in that coldblooded way! If anyone could be accused of having read too much romantic fiction, it was Fiona herself! Or else she was the victim of her own colossal vanity. No man worth his salt would stand for treatment of that sort any more than he would marry a girl for the sake of her money. Or would he? After all, Meg had to admit, she knew very little about men—nothing at all about those who had considerable wealth and position. Perhaps they did have different standards.

It was a depressing thought.

“A witch?” Uncle Andra laughed. “No, of course she wasn’t. But all the same, there’s always been a tradition that now and again there’d be a Sturt woman who could see further through a brick wall than most. But you’re wrong in thinking that it was as long ago as a couple of hundred years that one of the Sturt women found it wiser to leave the district. It was some time during the last century and there was no question of her being burnt at the stake. Simply, rather too many of her prophecies had come off for her to be popular and her own family insisted on her leaving. Her younger brother went with her and though, as far as I know, they were never heard of again, there was a story to the effect that they went to America and did well for themselves. It’s queer, though, how these old yams survive, and I admit I wouldn’t put it past Nanny to enjoy making capital out of them! She used to scare me stiff when I was a youngster telling me that she had eyes in the back of her head. I believed it firmly and she certainly had a gift for knowing just what sort of devilment I was getting up to! But occult powers of any sort—” he shook his head. “That’s nonsense, of course. Simply people letting their imagination run away with them. You get the same thing when a house is left unoccupied for a long time and falls into disrepair. It gets the name for being haunted—as Nanny’s cottage might well have done if it had stayed empty much longer. In fact, I’m rather surprised that it hasn’t already. There’s all the material there for a first-rate ghost story!”

“Yes, perhaps so,” Meg agreed doubtfully. “But even if anyone does have ideas like that, they’ll soon be forgotten when the cottage has been repaired and smartened up.”

"Yes,” Uncle Andra replied sombrely.
“When!”

Meg looked at him sharply. She knew, of course, that the dilapidated condition of his inheritance had depressed him considerably, but now she read more than mere depression in both his face and his manner. Exhaustion was a more accurate description.

With a pang she remembered how anxious both Aunt Ellen and she had been as the time had approached for Uncle Andra’s retirement. There had been a possibility of him being asked to postpone the date for a further year and it had been so very evident that increasing age and overwork had brought him very near to collapse. But neither of them had dared to advise him, for he was a man who preferred to make up his mind for himself and any suggestion of interference might have caused him to stay on out of sheer perversity.

Then he had heard of Nanny’s legacy and to their intense relief there had been no more talk of continuing working. But now—the way things had turned out —Meg saw that all that strain and tension had returned. There was that same drawn, greyish look about his face, his movements were slow and deliberate as if each one had to be carefully considered before he made it and, worst of all, he had lost all the high spirits which the prospect of returning to Blytheburn had induced.

“But you are going ahead with the work, aren’t you?” Meg asked, puzzled that there should be any doubt about it.

“Of course I am!” Uncle Andra retorted testily. “But it will mean going further afield for someone to do the work than I’d anticipated, since no one in Blytheburn or Netherbyre will take it on.”

“But why?” Meg asked anxiously. “Surely not because they really do think the cottage is haunted!”

Uncle Andra hesitated.

“No, not that. Unless you like to call it that when there’s deliberate obstruction because—someone—is using their influence to frighten people into submissiveness.”

“Sir Hector?” Silently Meg’s lips shaped the name, and Uncle Andra nodded.

“Sir Hector!” he replied grimly. “Who else? He knows perfectly well that he’s no legal right to the cottage and consequently he won’t come into the open. But I know, as surely as if he’d said it in words, that he wants to make it so nearly impossible for me to get the work done that I’ll be willing to sell to him at a knock-down price! Well—” his jaw set obstinately, “he can guess again! I’m staying, and I’m going to live in that cottage if it’s the last thing I do!”