Master of Melincourt by Susan Barrie Page B

magnanimity. Tina herself would almost certainly have preferred to be violently upbraided, since she knew she had done something outrageous, and the whole object of the exercise had been to undermine Miss Sands’ determination to remain at Melincourt in the position of her governess. She was not magnanimous herself by nature, and she didn’t like things being overlooked.
    But when she allowed herself to look curiously at Edwina’s face she was not so sure that relations would ever be the same again between her and Miss Sands.
    “You—you hate me, don’t you?” she said huskily, and somewhat theatrically.
    Edwina looked down at her with a smooth, pale mask of a face.
    “I don’t hate anyone,” she told her tonelessly, “and I certainly can’t work up the enthusiasm to hate a self-centred child like you.”
    “Wh-what is self-centred?” Tina enquired, lapsing into the stammer that affected her speech sometimes.
    “It means that you think only of yourself.”
    “But I don’t! I think a lot about my Uncle Jervis. I love my Uncle Jervis!”
    Edwina made a hopeless little gesture with her hands. She wondered why she was waging war with a child ... and where it would get her, anyway, if she continued to wage a form of cold war with such a strong-minded and unpredictable child as Tina Errol.
    Less than twenty-four hours ago she had thought that they were cementing a friendship ... or, at any rate, that there were the beginnings of a friendship growing up between them, and certainly that there was no longer any undisguised ill-will. Up until the moment that Tina slammed the stable door on her they had had a particularly pleasant day together, and were looking forward to a companionable high tea in the well-appointed schoolroom at Melincourt ... the room in which so many children, with all kinds of dispositions and problems, all kinds of grudges and moments of pure happiness, had toiled over their lesson books and shared their meals with a young woman like Edwina who was appointed to look after them.
    But surely not one of them had ever been guilty of quite such a calculated piece of malice as that which the sallow-faced Tina had been guilty of without any real cause for quite so much vindictiveness?
    All the same, she was very small for her age, and she was very spoiled, and at the moment she did look rather abject. Edwina couldn’t bear the sight of her anxious, black boot-button eyes upturned to her appealingly, and she knew that the appeal concerned her Uncle Jervis.
    Would Edwina, or would she not, tell Jervis Errol what had happened in his absence, and would this affect his opinion of his niece in any way?
    Edwina suddenly shook her head.
    “No, I won’t tell your uncle, and I won’t expect him to compensate me because I’ve collected a very bad headache—genuine this time—and my dress appears to be ruined by contact with the stable floor and the affectionate overtures of Mothball. Unlike a certain parlourmaid I shall say nothing ... but I shall be careful to hand in my notice to your uncle as soon as he returns. The one thing you desired above everything else will now become an established fact.”
    “You mean—” Tina spoke in a whisper—“that you won’t stay here ? ”
    Edwina sighed, and went across to her dressing - table to search the top drawer for a bottle of aspirin tablets.
    “I don’t want to spend another evening locked in with Mothball and Marquis,” she replied.
    “But I wouldn’t lock you in again—”
    Edwina turned and glanced at her sceptically.
    “You’d probably think of something else to bring me to heel. As a matter of fact, I think you’d have gone down very well with the chiefs of staff who ran the Spanish Inquisition.” And then she remembered that Tina was partly Spanish, and decided that might account for it. “I’ll just tell your uncle I don’t find the country as good for my health as I imagined, and ask him to release me as soon as someone else can be