‘Your hair’s still wet,’ said Lucinda, maintaining her disapproval, and Holly ran careless fingers over the hastily tied pony-tail.
‘It will dry,’ she said, spreading butter and peach jam on her toast. ‘Did Micah check the radiator in the buggy? Yesterday it was running pretty hot.’
‘He checked it,’ said Lucinda laconically, apparently deciding she was wasting her time. ‘And will you pick up the oil from Parrish’s? As you’re going in anyway, it will save Micah a journey.’
‘I will.’ Holly added cream to her coffee and took a considering sip. She didn’t think she had forgotten anything. She had brought the exercise books downstairs the night before, and stowed them in her holdall in the hall. The text books she might need were already in there, along with the flask of iced tea Lucinda always made her.
‘What time will you be wanting supper this evening?’ asked the housekeeper now, folding her arms across her generous breasts. ‘You will be in for supper, won’t you? You ain’t planning on spending the evening with the Brents?’
‘Of course not.’ Holly’s eyes twinkled as she stuffed the remainder of the slice of toast into her mouth and sprang to her feet. ‘Now—you look after Mr Kane for me, won’t you?’ she added mischievously. ‘If he asks where I am, just tell him.’
‘Oh, thanks.’ Lucinda’s tone was full of irony. ‘That’s good to know. I don’t have to lie.’
‘Would I ask you to do a thing like that?’ asked Holly irrepressibly and, giving the black woman an affectionate hug, she sauntered out the door.
She met Micah in the cobbled yard at the back of the house. As well as attending to the upkeep of the house, he also looked after the two cars, shared garden duties with Samuel, and cared for the animals. As well as the chickens and two goats, Holly had also managed to rescue three of the horses from her grandfather’s stable. Left to run wild after her grandparent’s death, the two mares and one stallion had not been easy to tame. But, with Micah’s help, she had succeeded. Now, one of the mares had had a foal which Holly had called Hummingbird, and she could imagine what her father would say if he found out how she was spending the allowance he made her.
‘You leaving?’ Micah exclaimed in surprise when Holly shouldered her bag into the back of the little beach buggy, parked in the shade of a huge flame tree. ‘Does Mr Kane know where you’re going?’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Holly flatly, unwilling to get involved in another argument. ‘I’ll see you later, hmm? After I’ve been to Parrish’s.’
Micah’s wide nostrils flared, but he made no comment, and Holly gave him a rueful smile. ‘Trust me,’ she said, reaching out to touch his sleeve, and the man shook his head somewhat resignedly before raising his hand in farewell.
The journey to Charlottesville was not quite as enjoyable as it usually was. Although she knew a sense of satisfaction at having outwitted Morgan Kane for today at least, Holly was aware of a troublesome sense of conscience. She couldn’t afford to have a conscience, she told herself, as the buggy bounced its way along the forest track. People who wanted to succeed had to ignore the finer points of decency. Just because the Fletchers had some misguided notion that she should be polite to their visitor was no reason to be diverted from her purpose.
The road to Charlottesville took her through some of the most beautiful scenery on the island. For a while after leaving the overgrown plantation, her route took her along a bluff overlooking the jagged rocks of Angel’s Point. Once, when she was younger, she had asked her grandfather why the most dangerous part of the coastline should have been named Angel’s Point, and he had laughed. ‘Well, it’s to be hoped the poor devils went to the angels,’ he remarked, referring to the fishing boat which had floundered there only days before. ‘You wouldn’t want them going to the devil, now would you?’
From the point, the road turned inland again, skirting the sprawling mass of Pulpit rock before descending in a corkscrew to the little harbour town that nestled at its foot. Most of the residents of the island lived within a ten mile radius of Charlottesville, only the other planters like the Turners and the Brents having larger establishments further from town.
Holly was used to the road, which would have deterred the most enthusiastic of drivers, and reaching the comparatively gentle slopes above the harbour she drove more sedately to the Charlottesville Mission School. Here, she taught art and cookery three times a week, using the skills she had learned at the finishing school in Switzerland to teach boys as well as girls to appreciate the finer points of the culinary art. She doubted again whether her father would approve, but she didn’t really care. Teaching had given her back her confidence, had made her aware of her own worth as a human being, and erased the blank uncertainty that had coloured her early years.
The Charlottesville Mission School was not really a mission school at all. Not any longer. It was supported by the local education department and the church authorities and, as island schools went, it was very good. The children were taught arts and crafts, as well as more academic subjects, and the percentage of pupils who went on to do further education on one of the larger islands was quite high. Holly had been teaching at the school for almost eighteen months now, ever since Stephen Brent had visited the house and seen her paintings.
The Brents and the Gantrys were the oldest families on the island. When Holly visited the island as a child, her grandmother used to take her to visit the Brents, and she and Stephen, and his younger sister, Constance, had all been friends. By the time Holly returned to the island however, Stephen’s father was dead, too, and Stephen had married Verity Turner.
Even so, they were still friends, and it was Stephen who had suggested Holly should offer her talents to the education authorities. Although the Brent plantation was not in such a run-down state as the Gantry’s, he himself spent four mornings a week at the school, teaching English and history, and their liking for one another had been cemented by their mutual interests.
Stephen’s car was already parked on the dusty lot beside the schoolhouse when Holly drove the buggy in to join it. Although it was barely eight o’clock, school started early in the islands and, apart from a fifteen-minute break mid-morning, it continued, uninterrupted, until two o’clock.
As she got out of the buggy, Holly paused a moment to look at the view. She often did so thinking, as she did now, what an ideal location it was. Set above the harbour, with waving pandanus palms as a backcloth, and the sloping roofs of the little town sweeping down to the mast-dotted careenage below, it was an infinitely pleasant place to be, and she appreciated her good fortune. Determinedly putting all thoughts of her father and Morgan Kane to the back of her mind, she hoisted out her bag and crossed the sun-baked parking area. mounting the steps that led into the building with a slightly lighter heart.
She found Stephen in her classroom, propped against her desk, examining the sketches she had drawn for the play the children were hoping to produce at Easter. In his middle twenties, Stephen Brent was everything Morgan Kane was not, she thought reluctantly, despising herself for allowing that man’s image to intrude yet again. Sturdily built, and about her own height, with curly brown hair and blue eyes, he was different in every way from the lean, dark-haired Englishman. Morgan Kane would top him, as he did her, by at least four inches, and whereas Stephen was broad and muscular, Morgan looked nothing like an athlete. Yet, for all that, he did have a toughness the West Indian lacked, a rapier-honed hardness that shortened the odds between them considerably. Holly suspected it was the life he had led—the constant changes from one time zone to another; the shortage of sleep; the hastily snatched meals; the ravages of junk food and alcohol, and too many late nights. But whatever it was, in any physical contest between them she would be loath not to choose Morgan as the victor; the simple result of any conflict between a sleekly fed tabby and an alley cat.
Ignoring the small voice inside her that probed her reasons for even contemplating such an eventuality, Holly walked firmly into the schoolroom and dropped her bag on the desk. ‘Good morning,’ she said, easing the straps off her aching shoulders, and Stephen looked up.
‘Hi,’