Drop of the Dice Read Online Free PDF Page A

silence and a sudden fear came to me.
    ‘Clarissa,’ said Damaris slowly, ‘it was a very bad accident. You were lucky. Benjie was lucky…’
    ‘What do you mean?’ I asked faintly.
    Damaris looked at Jeremy and he nodded. He meant: Tell her. There is no point in holding back the truth.
    ‘Harriet and Gregory… were killed, Clarissa.’
    I was silent. I did not know what to say. I was numbed. Here was death again. It sprang up and took people when you least expected it. My beautiful parents… dead. Dear kind Gregory… beautiful Harriet with the blue eyes and curly black hair… dead.
    I stammered: ‘I shan’t see them any more.’
    I just wanted to close my eyes and go to sleep and forget.
    They left me. I heard them whispering outside my door.
    ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have told her. She’s only a child.’
    ‘No,’ answered Jeremy. ‘She’s got to grow up. She’s got to learn what life is.’
    So I lay thinking and remembering those who had been so intensely alive—my mother, my father and Harriet… now dead… filled with sorrow.
    I felt I was no longer a child on that day. Yet it was true that young bones healed quickly and young bodies could withstand such shocks and throw off the physical effects.
    Poor Benjie! He looked like a ghost. How cruel life was to Benjie, who was so good, and I was sure had never harmed anyone in the whole of his life… yet he had lost my mother to Hessenfield; he had lost me to Damaris; and now he had lost his parents, whom I knew he had loved with that rare, tender, selfless emotion which only people like Benjie are capable of giving.
    He came back with us to Eversleigh. Damaris and Jeremy insisted that he should.
    Jeremy carried me into Enderby Hall and Smith and Damon were waiting to greet me. Smith’s face was wrinkled up with pleasure to see me safe so that the rivers in his face seemed more deeply embedded than ever, and Damon kept jumping up and making odd little whinnying noises to show how pleased he was that I was back.
    Jeremy carried me up and downstairs every day until my bones healed; and Arabella, Carleton and Leigh were always coming to see me.
    Arabella was very sad about Harriet.
    ‘She was an adventuress,’ she said, ‘but there was no one else quite like her. She has been in my life for a very long time. I feel that “I have lost part of myself.’
    They wanted Benjie to stay but he had the estate to look after. He would be better working, he said.
    He did not ask me to come to Eyot Abbas to see him, and I knew it was because he felt it would be too sad a place for me without Harriet.
    I made up my mind that I would go often. I would do my best to comfort Benjie.

A VISITOR FROM FRANCE
    I T WAS ABOUT A year after the accident when it was decided that my education must be attended to and it was arranged that I should have a governess.
    Grandmother Priscilla set about the task of finding one. Recommendations were always the best way, she decided, and when the Eversleigh rector, who knew we were looking for someone, rode over to the Dower House to tell my grandmother that he knew of the very person for the post, she was delighted.
    Anita Harley came for an interview in due course and was immediately approved.
    She was about thirty years of age, an impoverished parson’s daughter who had looked after her father until his death, on which occasion she had found it necessary to earn a living. She was well-educated; her father had given lessons to the local aristocracy in which Anita had shared, and as her aptitude for learning far outstripped that of her fellow students, she had, at the age of twenty-two, assisted her father in teaching local children, so she was well experienced to have charge of my education.
    I liked her. She was dignified without being pompous and her learning sat lightly upon her; she had a pleasant sense of fun; she enjoyed teaching English and history and was not so keen on mathematics—so our tastes coincided. She also had some