MILLS & BOON

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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER ONE

      EUSTACIA bit into her toast, poured herself another cup of tea, and turned her attention once again to the job vacancies in the morning paper. She had been doing this for some days now and it was with no great hope of success that she ran her eye down the columns. Her qualifications, which were few, didn’t seem to fit into any of the jobs on offer. It was a pity, she reflected, that an education at a prestigious girls’ school had left her quite unfitted for earning her living in the commercial world. She had done her best, but the course of shorthand and typing had been nothing less than disastrous, and she hadn’t lasted long at the boutique because, unlike her colleagues, she had found herself quite incapable of telling a customer that a dress fitted while she held handfuls of surplus material at that lady’s back, or left a zip undone to accommodate surplus flesh. She had applied for a job at the local post office too, and had been turned down because she didn’t wish to join a union. No one, it seemed, wanted a girl with four A levels and the potential for a university if she had been able to go to one. Here she was, twenty-two years old, out of work once more and with a grandfather to support.

      She bent her dark head over the pages—she was a pretty girl with eyes as dark as her hair, a dainty little nose and a rather too large mouth—eating her toast absentmindedly as she searched the pages. There was nothing… Yes, there was: the path lab of St Biddolph’s Hospital, not half a mile away, needed an assistant bottle-washer, general cleaner and postal worker. No qualifications required other than honesty, speed and cleanliness. The pay wasn’t bad either.

      Eustacia swallowed the rest of her tea, tore out the advertisement, and went out of the shabby little room into the passage and tapped on a door. A voice told her to go in and she did so, a tall, splendidly built girl wearing what had once been a good suit, now out of date but immaculate.

      ‘Grandpa,’ she began, addressing the old man sitting up in his bed. ‘There’s a job in this morning’s paper. As soon as I’ve brought your breakfast I’m going after it.’

      The old gentleman looked at her over his glasses. ‘What kind of a job?’

      ‘Assistant at the path lab at St Biddolph’s.’ She beamed at him. ‘It sounds OK, doesn’t it?’ She whisked herself through the door again. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes with your tray.’

      She left their small ground-floor flat in one of the quieter streets of Kennington and walked briskly to the bus-stop. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock and speed, she felt, was of the essence. Others, it seemed, had felt the same; there were six women already in the little waiting-room inside the entrance to the path lab at the hospital, and within the next ten minutes another four turned up. Eustacia sat there quietly waiting, uttering silent, childish prayers. This job would be nothing less than a godsend—regular hours, fifteen minutes from the flat and the weekly pay-packet would be enough to augment her grandfather’s pension—a vital point, this, for they had been eating into their tiny capital for several weeks.

      Her turn came and she went to the room set aside for the interviews, and sat down before a stout, elderly man sitting at a desk. He looked bad-tempered and he sounded it too, ignoring her polite ‘Good morning’ and plunging at once into his own questions.

      She answered them briefly, handed over her references and waited for him to speak.

      “You have four A levels. Why are you not at a university?’

      ‘Family circumstances,’ said Eustacia matter-of-factly.

      He glanced up. ‘Yes, well…the work here is menial, you understand that?’ He glowered across the desk at her. ‘You will be notified.’

      Not very hopeful, she considered, walking back to the flat; obviously A levels weren’t of much help when applying for such a job. She would give it a day and, if she heard nothing, she would try for something else. She stopped at the baker’s and bought bread and then went next door to the greengrocer’s and chose a cauliflower. Cauliflower cheese for supper and some carrots and potatoes. She had become adept at making soup now that October was sliding into November. At least she could cook, an art she had been taught at her expensive boarding-school, and if it hadn’t been for her grandfather she might have tried her luck as a cook in some hotel. Indeed, she had left school with no thought of training for anything; her mother and father had been alive then, full of ideas about taking her with them when they travelled. ‘Plenty of time,’ they had said. ‘A couple of years enjoying life before you marry or decide what you want to do,’ and she had had those two years, seeing quite a lot of the world, knowing only vaguely that her father was in some kind of big business which allowed them to live in comfort. It was when he and her mother had been killed in an air crash that she’d discovered that he was heavily in debt, that his business was bankrupt and that any money there was would have to go to creditors. It had been frightening to find herself without a penny and an urgent necessity to earn a living, and it had been then that her grandfather, someone she had seldom met for he’d lived in the north of England, had come to see her.

      ‘We have each other,’ he had told her kindly. ‘I