The Quiet Heart Read Online Free Page A

She seemed quite eager to do the flowers. She was very clever with her flower arrangements, and, indeed, generally accepted as extremely artistic.
    Alison regarded her thoughtfully for a moment, and then nodded her head.
    “All right. Only don’t cycle over to the gardener’s lodge, you know it’s bad for your foot. Marianne must give you a lift in the Mini when she goes into Murchester.”
    Somehow, Alison had managed to buy the girls a small car. They shared it between them—each having passed her driving test—while she made use of the local bus service when she wanted to go shopping, or visit someone on the outskirts of the village.
    While Marianne protested that she wouldn’t have time to drive her sister back to the Hall Mrs. Davenport, having provided the gentlemen with coffee in Alison’s sitting-room, returned with a distinctly grim expression on her face, and stood with her arms akimbo at the foot of the kitchen table. She and Alison exchanged glances.
    “What about my old man’s dinner?” she demanded. “He always gets home at one. And what about the children?”
    “Don’t they get a meal at school?” Alison asked vaguely, seeming to recollect that all children got meals at school nowadays, unless they went to expensive private schools, like her three stepdaughters, where the arrangements were sometimes more complicated. “And surely your husband can manage for once?”
    Mrs. Davenport poured her a strong cup of coffee and agreed that he would have to manage.
    “After all, now that His Lordship’s turned up at last I suppose we’ll all have to reorganise ourselves a bit,” she remarked gloomily.
    “We’ve had nearly a year since Sir Francis died,” Alison reminded her, thinking how fantastically lucky they had been without knowing it.
    She and Mrs. Davenport spent the afternoon performing the kind of tasks Jessamy could never dream of undertaking, and by six o’clock their backs were aching but they were moderately satisfied with what they had done. At one time Alison had half decided that it might be a good idea to serve dinner to Mr. Leydon and his guest in her own small sitting-room-dining-room; but Mr. Leydon himself had negatived this suggestion when she made it. He had indicated quite clearly that he wished the meal to be served in the main dining-room, with as much state and dignity as was possible at such short notice, and taking into account the almost entire absence of servants. And he wished coffee to be served in the library where, naturally, another fire had to be lighted.
    The dining-room furniture was magnificent, and as the place was well cared for throughout the year in very good order. Mrs. Davenport had a way of working miracles with a damp cloth and a special brand of furniture cream, and in no time at all the side tables were gleaming, the sideboard reflecting the modest amount of silver that was nut out for the occasion, and the dinner-table itself—almost a priceless piece that needed a system of communication if two people were to dine at either end—a thing of beauty and almost certainly a joy to a large number of antique dealers (especially local ones) who were interested in it.
    Jessamy was left to do the flowers both in the dining-room and the library, and while a couple of girls hastily summoned from the village got the great Aga to work in the kitchen and prepared vegetables, Mrs. Davenport and Alison retreated upstairs and contemplated the well-nigh impossible task of deciding which bedroom would be the most cosy, and likely to let in the fewest draughts, during the one night—presumably—that Mr. Leydon would be occupying it.
    In the end, Alison herself made up her mind that the dressing-room adjoining the principal bedroom was the only possible answer to their leading problem. It opened on to the gallery near the head of the stairs, had a bathroom reasonably close to it—none of the bathrooms at Leydon formed a part of some of the magnificent suites—and