speaking again, and Alix turned back to her ruefully. Obviously Makoto considered her mistress’s commands should be obeyed, and if she was anything like her father, then perhaps that wasn’t so difficult to understand. All the same, Alix wasn’t happy about the situation.
‘Er—Mr Morgan is expecting me to join him for dinner—’ she began awkwardly, and then gave an exasperated exclamation when Makoto performed another of her low bows and began to walk away. The last thing she wanted right now was hostility between herself and Morgan’s daughter, particularly when the situation was turning out to be such an intriguing one. A remote house, a child that no one knew existed—and now a Japanese servant! ‘Hey!’ she called, impulsively going into the passage and closing her bedroom door. ‘Hey, wait! I’ll come.’
Makoto’s paper-white face expressed her satisfaction. She waited for Alix to catch up with her, and then adjusted her small, half-running steps to Alix’s larger strides. If anything had been needed to convince Alix of the disadvantages of her size, walking beside the tiny Japanese woman would have done it, although judging from the admiring glances Makoto kept directing towards her, in her case the opposite could apply.
They crossed the gallery at the head of the stairs, and continued on into the east wing. Alix couldn’t resist glancing down into the hall below, half afraid that Oliver Morgan might be standing there watching them, but there was no one about, and she breathed a little more easily.
Makoto halted at the door at the end of the corridor, and turning the handle indicated that Alix should precede her into her room. Alix did so, not without some misgivings, and then came to an abrupt halt at the foot of an enormous tester bed. A child, perhaps eight years old, was sitting up in the bed, almost lost among so many pillows, her dark hair hanging in one thick braid over her shoulder. She was wearing a white nightgown which accentuated the paleness of her skin, for although her features were European, her eyes had a definitely oriental slant. But she was beautiful, even Alix saw that in those first astounded moments, and when she smiled her small teeth were as perfectly formed as the rest of her. Delicately small hands plucked impatiently at the bedcovers, and her whole demeanour was one of suppressed excitement.
So this was Oliver Morgan’s secret, thought Alix, feeling curiously shaken by the revelation. This was why the child had been kept out of the public eye, and why he had chosen to bring her back to a house as remote from London as he could find. The child’s mother had probably been as Japanese as old Makoto who stood so proudly beside her, her gnarled hands folded into the wide sleeves of her kimono, while his wife had been as European as he was.
‘Hello. I’m Melissa.’ The child’s voice surprisingly bore no Eastern intonation, but was as English as Alix’s own. ‘Are you Miss Thornton?’
Alex collected herself with difficulty. ‘I—I’m Mrs Thornton,’ she amended reluctantly. ‘How do you do, Melissa?’
The little girl beckoned her nearer the bed. ‘Are you really married? Do you have any children of your own?’
Alix flicked an embarrassed look in Makoto’s direction, but fortunately the Japanese woman was regarding her charge with evident satisfaction. ‘No,’ she answered uncomfortably, ‘I don’t have any children.’
Melissa’s small shoulders sketched a regretful shrug, and then she went on eagerly: ‘Have you come to stay with us? Daddy says you have. He says I have to go to an English school, and learn to be an English lady, and you’re going to help me.’ she paused. ‘Are you an English lady, Mrs Thorn—’
‘Melissa!’
Oliver Morgan’s voice was full of irritation, and Alix turned her head to see the master of the house striding into his daughter’s bedroom with evident annoyance. His appearance—he was dressed in black suede pants and a black silk shirt—was sufficiently grim to daunt the most intrepid heart, but Melissa’s reactions were totally without fear. Pushing back the covers, she thrust her small legs out of bed, and rushed across the floor to reach him, and with only a half-hearted protest her father swung her up into his arms. But not before Alix had glimpsed the flaw in the perfection—Melissa was lame.
Her eyes lifted to encounter the incisive scrutiny of Oliver Morgan’s gaze, and she knew he was waiting for her reactions. But she refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing she had been shocked, about anything, and before the child could launch into her explanations, she said: ‘Melissa and I have been getting to know one another.’
‘You’re not cross, are you, Daddy?’
Melissa’s arms were around his neck, modestly hidden beneath wrist-length sleeves, but her leap into his arms had brought the hem of her nightgown up round her thighs and Makoto was trying desperately to pull it down.
Oliver Morgan brushed the Japanese woman away, and looked into his daughter’s mischievous face. ‘You were supposed to wait until tomorrow morning to meet Mrs Thornton,’ he told her, but there was indulgence in his tone, and Alix was amazed at the tenderness in his expression.
‘I couldn’t wait,’ said Melissa simply, his face cupped between her two small palms. Then she flashed a smile at Alix. ‘She’s not at all like you said she would be, is she?’
‘Young ladies do not make personal remarks,’ observed her father dryly, allowing her to slide to the floor. ‘And now, I suppose, Makoto will have the devil’s own job getting you settled down again.’
‘Makoto brought Mrs Thornton here,’ stated Melissa, reluctant to return to the bed, and Oliver Morgan’s eyes turned in Alix’s direction, subjecting her to another of those raking appraisals such as he had given her downstairs.
‘I guessed that,’ he conceded, irritation tightening his lips, as if he blamed Alix for upsetting the child. Then he turned to Makoto, and speaking rapidly in a language Alix couldn’t begin to comprehend made his demands known.
‘Daddy is telling Makoto that you are here to give me lessons only, not to entertain me,’ translated Melissa artlessly, arousing an impatient oath from her father, and Alix decided that the time had come for her to leave. But the child was intriguing, and she was loath to go without reassuring her on that point at least.
‘I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to entertain each other,’ she told her lightly, as Melissa obeyed her father’s terse directions and limped back to the bed.
Alix walked pensively to the head of the stairs, and then began to descend them slowly. She had reached the central landing when Oliver Morgan caught up with her. He passed her without a glance, however, and then stood waiting at the foot of the stairs, watching her come down the rest of the way with what she was beginning to recognise as his usual taut expression. He made her nervous and in consequence she stumbled, but apart from a further tightening of his lips, he made no acknowledgment of her small accident.
‘Would you like a drink before dinner?’ he inquired when she had reached the comparative safety of the hall, but she shook her head. In truth, the whisky she had drunk earlier had been stronger than she had imagined, and she needed no further dulling of her wits where Oliver Morgan was concerned.
‘Then I suggest we go straight in to dinner,’ remarked her host briefly, and led the way across the hall and into the dining room.
Like the other rooms of the house, it was large, but as it was filled with a long polished table, flanked by a dozen tall-backed chairs, a pair of matching sideboards and a huge Welsh dresser, it did not seem excessively so. One end of the table had been set with two places—heavy silver cutlery, Waterford crystal and Crown Derby—and
