LITMIR.BIZ

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more about the plants. The orchids, in particular. I thought they might help him.’

      ‘Don’t go lending the books to the damned gardeners. They can’t read, half of them, anyway.’

      ‘Oh, this one can,’ Amy said.

      After his lunch Gerald demanded abruptly, ‘What are you sitting about for? Let’s have this walk, if we’re going.’

      He took his stick, but he made a point of only using it to swish at the grass as they walked. Amy was quickly out of breath, and so their slow pace was perfectly matched. In the sunshine they climbed the gently rising parkland to the crest of the ridge. When they reached it Amy and her father stood still, arm in arm. On one side of them was the dappled green patchwork of woodland, and on the other the grassy slope dipped down to the great grey house set amongst its terraces and flowers. In the distance was the sweep of high wall that enclosed the park, and the domestic huddle of houses at the village gates. The sky was a perfect, impervious blue, and under it the countless shades of green and gold shimmered in the haze of heat.

      Amy blinked at the tears in her eyes, and then they came rolling down her cheeks. Since her illness she had cried easily, sometimes inexplicably. But today it came with the unexpected wave of love for the acres of Chance, pulling inside her like a bowstring.

      ‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said, turning her face away from her father.

      ‘As beautiful as any woman,’ he echoed her. ‘It’s all here for you children. The three of you.’

      And there it will end, Amy thought, with a moment of clairvoyant certainty. She almost stumbled as Gerald turned them away from the ridged back of the hill and down the slope again.

      ‘Steady,’ he murmured. ‘Tell me. What’re you going to do with yourself, when this little illness is all behind you?’

      ‘Go back to nursing. That’s what I am, now. A nurse. State Registered,’ she added lightly.

      Gerald gave his characteristic snort. ‘I don’t understand you damned children,’ he complained. ‘But I suppose this nursing idiocy is better than marrying some fool or other.’

      Breathlessly Amy groped for the words that would let them begin to talk about Isabel, even about Richard. But awkwardness and apprehension drove all the possibilities out of her head. They never would talk, she realized. It was too many years too late. If only Gerald could have talked to his children, to his wife, even, Amy thought sadly, how different everything might be.

      ‘I don’t think I’m going to marry anyone,’ she told him honestly.

      ‘Delighted to hear it. Now then, I want to go down and see Mackintosh in the office.’

      ‘I’ll walk down there with you.’

      They crossed the park in a long diagonal, and came to the estates office at the gates. Mr Mackintosh, a sandy-eyebrowed Scot, was working at his desk. Amy sat outside in the sun while Gerald despatched his business and then, when he limped off to see another of his staff, Amy slipped in to see the estate manager. He bobbed up from behind his desk at once.

      ‘Good morning, Miss Amy. It’s grand to see you well again. We heard you were very bad at one time.’

      ‘Thank you, Mr Mackintosh. I’m quite all right again now. Tell me – Mr Penry, one of the gardeners. I met him working with the orchids, and he seemed so interested in them that I offered to lend him some books from the library. Where shall I take them?’

      ‘That’s really very good of you, Miss Amy. Penry shouldn’t be troubling you. If you would like me to come up to the house for the books, I’ll see he gets them. And takes care of them,’ Mr Mackintosh added.

      ‘It’s no trouble. It was my suggestion to him,’ Amy said pleasantly. ‘I’m sure I’ll bump into him again in the orangery.’ She turned away, and then as an afterthought she asked, ‘Where is Mr Penry living?’

      The sandy eyebrows went up by the merest fraction. ‘In the empty keeper’s cottage up on the north side.’

      ‘All the way over there?’

      Amy knew the tiny cottage. It wasn’t easy to settle any of the estate families in it because of its isolation.

      ‘Penry seems to prefer it,’ Mr Mackintosh said with a touch of grimness. Amy gathered that Nick wasn’t exactly his favourite amongst the men, and smothered a little smile at the thought of them confronting each other.

      ‘Thank you, Mr Mackintosh.’

      ‘Thank you, Miss Amy. You’ll find his lordship on the stable side with the farrier.’ As she walked out again into the late-June warmth, Amy knew what she would do.

      It took her most of the evening in the library to find the books she wanted. The botany collection belonging to the fifteenth Lord Lovell had hardly been touched for decades. Amy found the brown-leather Victorian volumes dealing with orchids, with the minutely detailed, almost erotic paintings of columns and labellae, bulbils and fleshy aerial roots that had vaguely disturbed her as a child. But something else tugged at her memory, and she went on searching.

      It was late when she made her discovery, standing on the highest level of the mahogany library steps. The big, square books, bound in calf, were tucked in at one end of the highest shelf, almost hidden by the frame of the case. Amy took them out, three of them, and blew the dust away. Then she carried them to one of the big tables and laid them carefully in the light of a lamp.

      Inside the flyleaf of the first, in a vigorous script that time had faded to faint sepia, was written ‘The journal of my travels through South America. George Lovell, 1854-1856’.

      Turning the pages, Amy began to read the matter-of-fact accounts of plant-hunting expeditions into tropical rain forests, or up the inhospitable rock faces of unclimbed mountain peaks. Her great-grandfather had clearly been a dedicated and stoical traveller. On one page she read with horrified fascination how one of his native bearers had accidentally shot himself in the thigh with a pistol, and how George had performed the operation to remove the bullet himself, with only the first-aid kit to help him. A little further on came the description of how a troublesome wound in his lordship’s own leg was refusing to heal and how he ‘feared that gangrene might develop and so hold up progress entirely’.

      The unemotional account of his self-cauterization with only brandy to dull the pain made even Amy shudder.

      But the adventures and obstacles were only incidental to the real purpose of the expeditions, the discovery and categorization of rare plants. The appearance and habitat of every one was minutely described, and the pages were full of long botanical names and tiny, immaculate sketches of leaves, petals and stamens. A regular entry was N.S. for new species, or with occasional uncharacteristic tentativeness, ?N. S.

      Amy read on, intrigued by her relative’s obsession.

      The big, domed clock on the library wall told her that it was nearly one in the morning when she closed the last book.

      Tomorrow she would take them to show to Nick. She knew that the stories of how the orchids had been found and brought home to the orangery would fascinate him.

      It would be a peace offering.

      The next afternoon Amy went riding with Gerald. They hacked slowly over to his nearest neighbours’ damp manor house where they had tea and fruit cake on the lawn and deplored the state of the country, and then rode back again. Gerald was a fine horseman in spite of his leg, and considered the round trip of ten miles hardly a ride at all. Amy was relieved to discover when they reached Chance again that she was barely tired. She was recovering rapidly.

      They ate an early dinner in companionable silence while Gerald peered at a bloodstock magazine, and then he went off to his rooms and left her alone. Amy put on her jacket, then searched for and found a basket big enough to carry the explorer’s journals. She went out of the terrace doors, down the steps to the lawn, and set off towards the north side of the estate.

      It

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