that she’d exactly helped matters.
If Harry Talbot had been a wasp’s nest, she would have been the idiot poking it. Which wasn’t like her at all.
Usually she was the soul of tact. Was always prepared to see the other person’s point of view. Even to the point of being walked all over—witness the way Vickie Campbell had stitched her up like a kipper…
Pouring oil on troubled waters was something she usually managed without thinking, but Harry Talbot’s attitude made her see red, and instead of pouring the oil she’d set fire to it and tossed in a couple of metaphorical hand grenades for good measure.
It was within her job description to stand up to him, if necessary, for Maisie’s sake. Unfortunately she’d done rather more than that.
Not that it was entirely her fault. He had seriously provoked her.
She couldn’t have made it plainer that she didn’t want to stay, but honestly, from the way he’d looked at her, anyone would have thought she’d planned the whole thing just to annoy him.
As if she’d really choose to abandon a holiday in the sun—no matter how cheap and cheerful—in order to stay on some cold, fogbound hilltop in a less than spring-like English spring with a bad-tempered bigot.
‘This is my room,’ Maisie announced, opening the door, forcing her to push Harry Talbot to the back of her mind and concentrate on the job in hand.
Jacqui instantly saw the attraction; understood why the child would want to stay despite Harry Talbot’s miserable attitude. The room, at the top of the tower, was pure princess fantasy, from the lace-draped little four-poster bed and matching looped-back curtains, to the hand-painted furniture, where flora in all shades through mauve to deepest purple had been relieved by a green tracery of stems and leaves.
And Harry Talbot must have fixed the boiler because the room was warm and, despite the miserable weather, the bed didn’t feel in the slightest bit damp.
‘It’s lovely, Maisie. Did your grandmother do all this just for you?’
‘Don’t be silly. My mother got in a decorator.’
Of course she did. Go to the back of the class, Jacqui told herself, slapping at her own wrist as the child flounced across to the window.
‘You can see Fudge’s field from here.’
Jacqui, fully prepared to heap admiration on some fat little pony, followed her, but the mist pressed against the glass, obliterating the view.
‘It’s not very nice out there.’ Maisie frowned. ‘He’ll be cold.’
‘Won’t he be tucked up in the stables, where it’s warm and dry?’
‘Maybe. Can we go and make sure?’
Jacqui would have rather stayed away from the outbuildings. Harry Talbot had said he’d look at her car and she had no wish to run into him until he’d had a chance to forget some of the things she’d said. Until she’d had a chance to forget them, come to that. But somehow she didn’t think that Maisie was in the habit of taking ‘no’ for an answer.
‘Well, all right, but I think you ought to change first. Have you got anything more…’ she baulked at the word ‘sensible’. It seemed unlikely that Maisie knew the meaning of the word, but not even the most thoughtless mother would allow her child to ride in a frilly frock and satin shoes ‘…suitable? You know, for riding.’
Even as she said the word she had an image of little Bonnie Butler in Gone With the Wind, dressed in a velvet riding habit and ostrich feathers. Or had she just imagined the feathers…?
‘Trousers, for instance?’ she offered, more in hope than expectation, unzipping the child’s holdall to look for herself.
The white voile dress, she discovered as she unpacked—shaking out dress after dress and putting them on the mauve satin padded hangers she found in the wardrobe—was, by Maisie’s standards, restrained.
She’d even packed a pair of tiny designer fairy wings for those extra-special occasions. Embroidered and beaded in silver and the inevitable mauve. Very pretty, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, sensible.
There were no jeans. Not even a pair of designer jodhpurs or handmade boots, which would have been more Maisie’s style. No trousers of any kind, in fact. No boots. No hard hat. Not even a pair of mauve, sparkly waterproof wellington boots to keep her feet dry. Just more pairs of satin slippers to match her frocks.
‘There are wellingtons and coats in the mud room,’ Maisie offered. ‘You just try them on until you find stuff that fits.’
‘Right, well, I’ll just put my bag next door and we’ll go and sort something out.’
‘Next door’ hadn’t had the benefit of a decorator any time in the last fifty years if the faded floral wallpaper was anything to go by. But it was warm and, if the comfort was shabby, it was genuine.
She’d search out the linen cupboard and make both their beds later.
Petting the pony—since no matter what Maisie’s views on the subject, she wouldn’t even be sitting on him without a hard hat—obviously, was far more important.
Ten minutes later they were walking across the courtyard. Jacqui, well shod in ankle boots, declined to join in Maisie’s hunt for a pair of wellies that fit, but she had borrowed a waxed jacket so old that all trace of wax had pretty much worn away.
The smallest one in the mud room was still too big for Maisie. With the sleeves folded back it did the job, but Jacqui had to stifle a smile at the sight of her stomping happily across the courtyard in a pair of slightly too large green wellington boots, a froth of white skirt sticking out from beneath the jacket, sparkly tiara still perched atop her dark curls.
Maisie Talbot might be precocious, but she certainly wasn’t dull.
‘Where are you two going?’ Harry Talbot appeared in the entrance to the coach house, wiping oily hands on a rag.
‘Maisie wanted to say hello to Fudge.’ Why did she have to sound so defensive? ‘Her pony?’ she added when he didn’t appear to know what she was talking about.
‘That’s what he’s called?’ His expression suggested that never had pony and name been more aptly matched. ‘All right. Just don’t go wandering off in this mist. It’s easy to get disorientated.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of you getting lost, is there?’
She knew she shouldn’t have said that even before he stilled. Said, coldly, ‘Is that your idea of a joke?’
If it was—and she wasn’t prepared to examine exactly what her comment was meant to be—it had fallen distinctly flat, because he certainly wasn’t laughing.
‘Yes…No…I’m sorry.’ And she was. ‘Really.’
He used his head to indicate the far end of the yard. ‘The pony’s in the end stall. Don’t give her sugar; she’s old and her teeth can’t take any more abuse. You’ll
