Walking round to get back into the driving seat, Helen schooled the errant impulse to drive away and leave her. If the Land Rover wasn’t good enough, let her find her own way to Matlock, she thought broodingly, but a glance back at her charge made her make another attempt to be civil.
‘Are you coming?’ she asked, pulling open her door, and waiting with impatience for the other girl to move.
But Miss Patterson didn’t move. Glancing down at her luggage with the air of someone unused to carrying anything heavier than a handbag, she lifted her shoulders indifferently, and Helen’s resentment deepened at the obvious implication. Dammit, why couldn’t the woman put her own suitcases into the Land Rover? she thought angrily. Time was passing, and she had no wish to meet Heath’s car at the gates, or anticipate his undoubted fury when he discovered what she had done.
Miss Patterson shifted her handbag and jacket from one arm to the other and looked up and down the street, as if hoping divine providence might intervene. She still made no move to get into the Land Rover, and Helen’s nerves tightened when she saw Father Kirkpatrick emerge from the Presbytery and start to walk in their direction. Heath was not a religious man, but he did occasionally have Father Kirkpatrick to dinner, and the last thing Helen needed now was the garrulous old priest to start questioning her for being there.
With a muffled curse, she came back round the vehicle and swinging open the passenger door, indicated that Miss Patterson should get inside. Then, with the resilience of youth, she tossed the two offending suitcases into the back of the Land Rover, before striding back to resume her seat.
Miss Patterson hesitated just long enough to put Helen’s teeth on edge, and then, after examining the worn leather seat rather dubiously, she acquiesced. The door closed behind her only seconds before the shortsighted priest would have reached them, and the Land Rover’s tyres sent up a cloud of dust as Helen made her getaway.
Not until she had put several hundred yards between them and embarrassing discovery did she relax, and Miss Patterson clung to her seat in dismay as the vehicle bounced recklessly along the High Street before swinging dangerously round the corner into Church Lane. The outskirts of the village were left behind within a few minutes, and Helen lifted her foot slightly as they crested Starforth Bank.
‘Have you been driving long?’ Miss Patterson enquired scathingly, when at last it seemed safe to distract Helen from her driving, and the younger girl nodded.
‘Nine months,’ she declared carelessly, refusing to rise to the bait. Matlock Edge, Heath’s sprawling country estate, was only five miles from Starforth, and she refused to be disconcerted now when all around them the countryside she loved was unwinding in undulating curves.
‘Nine months?’ Miss Patterson sounded surprised. ‘But I thought your uncle told me you’d only recently had your seventeenth birthday.’
‘Six months ago, I did,’ replied Helen defensively. ‘But I’ve been driving around the estate roads for ages. I passed my test a month after my seventeenth birthday.’
‘Really?’ Miss Patterson did not sound impressed. ‘I presume you learned to drive in tractors and the like.’
‘No, in Heath’s Mercedes, actually,’ retorted Helen shortly. ‘He taught me himself, when he had the time.’
‘Heath?’ Miss Patterson shook her head. ‘You mean—Mr Heathcliffe, don’t you? Your Uncle—Rupert?’
Helen sighed impatiently. ‘Yes,’ she agreed shrugging. ‘But no one calls him Mr Heathcliffe. Well, practically nobody anyway. He doesn’t care for it.’
‘I wonder why?’ Miss Patterson folded her jacket precisely. ‘I think it’s rather an attractive name. And so reminiscent of the area. I mean,’ she went on carefully, ‘this is Bronté country, isn’t it? And Heathcliff was such a—marvellous character!’
Helen’s skin prickled. ‘Heath’s not at all like his namesake,’ she declared contemptuously. And then, with reckless abandon, she added: ‘Is that why you’ve come here, Miss Patterson? Because you found my uncle attractive?’
‘Why, you—–’ The ice-cool features slipped for just a moment, and then, with an effort, the other girl uttered a light laugh. ‘Dear me,’ she exclaimed, her tone at once provoking and mocking, ‘no wonder your uncle feels you need some discipline! If you embarrass all his guests the way you just tried to embarrass me, I imagine he finds your presence rather tiresome!’
‘You’re not a guest,’ declared Helen tensely, but her hands were damp where she was clutching the wheel. She really had done it now, she thought unhappily. Heath would be furious with her when he found out about her insolence, and the spectre of the school in Switzerland where he had threatened to send her moved one step nearer.
‘I think you’re wrong,’ Miss Patterson was saying now, smoothing a pleat in her skirt. ‘Your uncle made it quite clear that I was to be treated as a member of the family, and that your—instruction—was, for the most part, to take the form of correction, rather than actual teaching.’
Helen did not answer; she was too choked up. This was typical of Heath, she thought mutinously. To hire a glorified governess for her, and then to treat the governess as if she, and not Helen, was his prime concern. She didn’t know what was the matter with Heath lately. He didn’t used to be like this. But in the last year he had become really objectionable. He hardly ever took her out with him any more, and when he had visitors he didn’t even ask her to join them for dinner. Once upon a time, he used to introduce her to all his friends, even the women who came and went in his life, and there had been a lot of them. Miss Patterson was right about one thing: Heath was an attractive man, and there had never been any shortage of females eager to show that they could be indispensable to him. But he’d never got married, even though she had overheard Cook telling Mrs Gittens that he should.
She used to hope that she might be responsible for that. During long nights at boarding school, she used to fantasize that Heath was only waiting for her to grow up to tell her he was madly in love with her. The other girls used to envy her in those days. When sports and speech days came around, all her friends wanted to be introduced to her handsome uncle, and she had lived for the holidays and the opportunities they gave her to be with him again. But it hadn’t happened that way. Since she was sixteen and had begged to be allowed to leave school, he had increasingly found reasons to avoid her, and the culmination of her humiliation had been his denunciation of her as a responsible adult.
She supposed she was partly to blame for the poor opinion he had of her. It was true that his neglect had led her to look for ways to attract his attention—not always sensible ways either. When he bought her the Honda for her sixteenth birthday, he had not intended her to use it to ride along the wall bounding the vegetable garden, or to tumble ignominiously in among Mr Wesley’s prize raspberries, successfully destroying the canes and tearing some of the bushes out at the roots. But it had been so boring riding the modest little machine up and down the roads of the estate, and she had been sure she could keep her balance.
The upshot of that had been that she was grounded for a couple of months, and by the time she got the use of the motorcycle back again, much of the novelty had worn off. Six weeks later she had passed her test for the machine, and she had never been reckless enough to repeat such an episode.
Nevertheless, there had been other escapades: like climbing one of the apple trees in the orchard and pretending she couldn’t get down. She had expected Heath would climb up to help her, but instead Mrs Gittens had called the fire brigade, and Helen had had the embarrassing experience of being carried down over a young fireman’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
But the incident which had caused the most bother had happened only a few weeks ago. One hot evening in June, she had decided to take a midnight dip in the swimming pool, and Heath had caught her climbing out of the water, naked as the day she was born.
Glancing sideways now at the elegant