The Young Nightingales Read Online Free PDF Page A

as he did the duties of host at a side table and handed her one. Jane looked slightly dazed, and she had taken little or no pains over her appearance and for once she looked almost plain. Her eyes were pink-rimmed from much crying, and her face was very pale ... the pallor that shock induces.
    Roger, on the other hand, was looking almost cheerful, and behaving as if he knew very well he was in his rightful element. He railled Jane gently as she refused the sherry.
    “Oh, come now,” he said, “it will do you good. ” His hand went out to the whisky decanter. “ Or would you prefer something stronger?” Jane shook her head silently.
    Roger frowned slightly.
    But, my dear girl, you’ve had a gruesome day—”
    Miranda moved forward until she stood between them. She laid a hand lightly on her stepdaughter’s shoulder.
    “Roger’s right, you know, Jane,” she said. “You have had a perfectly beastly day! We’ve all had a beastly day !”
    “I don’t need anything to drink,” Jane returned, in a flat and utterly colourless voice ... and she moved slightly so that Miranda’s hand perforce fell from her shoulder. “And it can’t have been so very beas tl y for Roger. Daddy was only his friend.”
    Miranda’s eyebrows went up.
    “ Your father’s greatest friend,” she reminded Jane reprovingly. “And I thought he was your friend, too.”
    To this Jane returned no answer, and Miranda looked from one to the other of them with a kind of careful interest. Then she enquired lightly:
    “ Not quarrelled, I hope? I thought you and Roger had known one another far too long to quarrel, or be even mildly critical of one another?”
    Jane stood biting her lower lip and looking utterly wretched, but Roger remained absolutely motionless and made no move towards her. He and Miranda exchanged glances, that was all. Then Miranda said softly, soothingly:
    “Ah, well, I think the best thing we can all do is go in to dinner and see whether some good hot food inside us will make us feel slightly better. I know I feel as if I haven’t eaten anything for days, and I’m positively hollow. I just couldn’t take very much more tonight! Come along, darling,” encircling the girl’s slim waist with what some people might have thought of as a motherly arm. “Don’t say a word until you’ve eaten ... and even after that you needn’t say anything if you don’t want to. You can go to bed early, and we’ll excuse you.”
    Jane, too, felt hollow and empty inside, but she found that she could eat nothing at all at dinner. While her stepmother exclaimed with pleasure at the roast and Roger tried to force her to drink some wine, she stared at him dumbly across the lavishly appointed table—no sign yet of any retrenchment, or any acceptance of the reason why the master of the place had died—and wondered whether perhaps she had imagined their conversation in the library, and whether the kindness in his eyes was the old kindness ... much more than the kindness of a lifelong friend, and with far, far more behind it.
    And then when she saw him turn the same look upon Miranda and fuss over her, too—an almost intolerable amount of fussing and con cern lest, now that she was a widow with no husband to take care of her she was in some danger of being completely neglected and it was his job to take over the role of leading protector and prime consoler—she knew that the conversation in the library had indeed taken place, and that as a result of it nothing could ever be the same again.
    She pushed aside her untasted plate and asked to be excused.
    Irina slipped into her room before going to her own much later that night and asked in some concern whether everything was all right between her and Roger.
    “Only I thought you seemed a bit stiff with one another before you decided to go to bed,” she said. “And the idea of you and Roger being stiff with one another is laughable.”
    “Is it?”
    Jane watched her sister curl up in her