The Strange Waif Read online

  The Strange Waif

  By

  Violet Winspear

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  First published 1962

  This edition 1974

  © Violet Winspear 1962

  ISBN 0 263 70799 7

  CHAPTER ONE

  "My dear Avery, don't tell me you're fooled by this fantastic little stranger and her preposterous story of a lost memory? Good lord, you're usually the first to suspect the motives of the most innocent thing in skirts!" Robert Chase's eyes, resting on the seated figure of his cousin, echoed the laughing scorn and amazement of his voice.

  Dr. Avery Chase, who, at one time, had very successfully practised his profession in Harley Street (he was now working at his home in Devon as a research chemist), had one of those grave, slightly unreadable faces which tended to make people believe him rather older and sterner than he was in actuality. He was, however, a man of considered impulses rather than impetuous ones, hence Robert's amazement at the unquestioning way he had taken this girl into his home…

  "Bob," quite unexpectedly Avery looked annoyed, and he took his pipe from his mouth with such a sharp gesture he spilled ash on to the knee of his slacks, "who's supposed to be the doctor in this family — you or me?"

  Robert examined the glowing tip of his cigarette and smiled—that darned cynical actor's smile of his, Avery reflected, suddenly cynical himself as with annoyance he brushed the pipe ash from his knee and thought of the many women who went foolish over that smile, especially when it flashed out from behind the mystifying, dramatizing lights of a London stage.

  "The trouble with modern medical science, old man," Robert drawled, "is that instead of keeping its little secrets to itself, as it did in the old days, it will rush to publish them in great fat books that are a great temptation to little girls. Now see here," he stabbed the air with his cigarette, a gesture he was very fond of when caught in the throes of oratory, "I could look up the symptoms of amnesia in one of these fat enticing books and I could come to you and carefully quote those symptoms. You'd take my pulse, which would be banging pretty hard because I was lying to you, and you'd be bound to say to yourself, 'Why, poor chap, he's lost his memory!'"

  "I'd be bound to say that, would I?" Avery broke into a smile and at once the gravity of his face was dispelled, and now it was easy to see that he was only in the middle thirties and Robert's senior by a year and a couple of months. "Tell me, Bob," he amusedly ruffled one of his blond eyebrows with the stem of his pipe, "why have you got such a down on this little girl, who is unquestionably suffering from loss of memory?"

  Robert, not in the least put out by Avery's smile, considered the question, lounging with dark grace against his cousin's big desk, which was untidily littered with an assortment of papers covered in chemistry symbols, a couple of telephones, the bejewelled buckle of a woman's evening shoe and Avery's stethoscope sprawled snake-like across an open box of crystallized figs. A mess, in Robert's amused opinion; and in striking contrast to the careful order in which Avery kept his emotions.

  He picked up the gleaming buckle and turned it about in his long fingers. It was studded with tiny cultured pearls and rhinestones and there was something flashily theatrical about it.

  "All right!" he said, in a suddenly crisp voice. "In the first place she has the audacity to say that she remembers just one thing, her name—and that it's Lygia. My God, Lygia! The last time I came across that name was at school, when we read Quo Vadis. Secondly she comes wandering into the porch of your house in the middle of the night. Why your house in particular, Avery, unless she knows full well that a doctor lives in it, to whom she can quote her carefully rehearsed symptoms? Thirdly," he flashed the buckle, "she comes wearing fairly expensive evening slippers with a cheap little tweed suit, bought off the peg and costing about six pounds. Do you know what I think?" Robert's dark eyes were suddenly without their smile, and the inherent cynicism in his nature was stamped hard upon the well-defined cheekbones, the thinnish lips and the lean jaw. "I think she's some cheap little lady's companion or maid, out to get a bit of fuss and sensation for herself. And I'd say that this buckle belongs to whoever she was working for. Gerda said the slippers were miles too big for her. She said the toes of them were stuffed with tissue paper."

  At mention of his secretary, Avery frowned. "Gerda's bound to be prejudiced against the girl—if you are," he retorted.

  "Why so?" Robert looked mock-innocent. "Gerda's met the girl, I haven't. I knew nothing about her until I got here this afternoon."

  "You know darn well why so!" Avery looked faintly disgusted. "Gerda's so infatuated with you, she can't see straight."

  "The ambitious-minded Gerda is?" For a moment Robert looked lazily interested. Then he said: "The foolish fads women will have! Can't medical science do something about it, old man? Invent a sort of pill to make women fall for the good, sensible types instead of for cads like me?"

  "Let's get back to my amnesia case," said Avery, abruptly rising to his feet and knocking his pipe out over the sweet-scented cherry-wood burning in the big, open fireplace. Although it was August, the evenings had begun to turn decidedly chilly. "The girl isn't faking, Bob. I've examined her too thoroughly for that to be possible—and I'm no country quack, remember. She is genuinely at a loss to know who she is, where she has come from and why she should pick my doorstep to come and collapse on, at half-past ten, man, not in the middle of the night." Avery smiled slightly. Robert, an actor throughout his elegant, deceptively lazy body, was always inclined to exaggerate.

  Avery went on: "That she should choose my doorstep, a doctor's doorstep, puzzled me, I will admit, but all she could say was that she suddenly found herself entirely alone on the moors and seeing the lights of this house shining out like a beacon—you know how Gran will keep those drawing-room curtains pulled wide open —she made straight for the lights."

  Straight for them, he thought, remembering how she had looked last night, this strange visitant from out of the night. Such enormous eyes, the colour of wild violets, and set in a stark-white face. Such frightened little hands, clutching at his shoulders as he had carried her into the house.

  Ellen, his cook, returning from a church-hall meeting down in the village, had come upon the girl sitting on the front doorstep, her head buried in her arms. Ellen hadn't been able to get a coherent word out of the girl, so she had come running here to the library to him. "My word, doctor, but 'tis a queer un you have sittin' on the doorstep," she had burst in with. "Better come quick you had, doctor. The poor creature's ready to throw a faint."

  The faint hadn't materialized, but Avery had known, the moment he picked the girl up and carried her into the house, that there was something seriously amiss with her.

  It annoyed him, therefore, to hear Robert denounce as a phoney this girl he had not yet met. Annoyed him more that Gerda should have regaled his cousin with details of the girl the moment he arrived from London for his weekend at Chase; propitious moment for Gerda's side of the story to be told, for he, Avery, had been out of the house at the time.

  "Women are the devil!" he exclaimed. "They're always so darn ready to criticize and believe wrong of their own sex."

  One of Robert's dark eyebrows rose enquiringly. "Are we back to Gerda?" he drawled.

  "Yes, I'm back to Gerda," Avery grunted, coming to his desk and searching about in the confusion for his tobacco pouch. He found it, strolled back to the fireplace and s
tood with his shoulder against the mantelpiece as he refilled his pipe. "What did she say about the girl—something uncomplimentary, I gather?"

  "Said she was as plain as a pikestaff, but obviously all out to make up to you." Robert's wickedly smiling eyes were intent upon Avery's face.

  "Anything further?" Avery queried sarcastically. "Why, yes. She also said the girl hadn't a penny-piece in her pockets and that she turned pea-green when she heard you had gone into Brinsham to ask the police if there was anyone of her description missing from home or employment."

  "I see." Avery applied a match to his ancient briar, and he looked almost glowering through the clouds of strong-smelling smoke he puffed up about his face. "That part about turning green is perfectly understandable, you know. What young girl wants to be mixed up with the police? But naturally I had to go and ask. I've given them her description and it will, they said,' be circulated through the regular channels. If anyone reports that she is missing, we shall hear almost directly."

  "No one will!" Robert retorted succinctly. "Look here, Bob," Avery straightened from his lounging position and his grey-blue eyes were suddenly stony, "you've no right to make false and spiteful judgments about someone you've never even met. It's darned unfair!"

  "You are taken with the little Lygia, aren't you, old man?" Robert watched his cousin with a sudden alert curiosity. Avery was an extremely wealthy man (his mother had been the only daughter of a well-known brewery baron and then, as heir to the Chase property, he had also inherited a great deal of money from his father), and though his fashionable Harley Street practice had thrown him into contact with quite a few very lovely and designing women, he had managed to steer amazingly clear of all of them. Robert had always been rather amused, in an admiring fashion, by Avery's safe steering of his wealth and his person through the dangerous waters of London society, but he wasn't amused, now, by his cousin's very obvious sympathy for this pasty-faced little schemer with her lost-memory story. Gerda Maitland, who was far too good-looking to be envious of other women's looks, if they had any, had been openly contemptuous of the girl. "A real plain Jane and no nonsense, Robert," she had said. "Black hair without a kink in it and a body like a boy's."

  "When do I get to meet the little Lygia — or don't I?" Robert enquired of Avery.

  At this, Avery smiled slightly. "You'll see her at dinner. She's spending the day in bed, but I've agreed to let her spend the evening downstairs." His eyes travelled his cousin's cynical face and now a glint of warning appeared in them. "And I want none of your darn tricks, Bob. Upset that child and you and I fall out."

  "Child?" Robert reached again for the jewelled buckle that had become detached from one of the absurdly inappropriate shoes this girl had evidently been tramping the moors in. That part of her story was at least true, according to Gerda, for the slippers had been heavily stained with mud and grass.

  Robert flashed the buckle, one corner of his mouth lifting on a sardonic smile. "This is hardly the sort of ornament to appeal to a young person, therefore I'm right in saying the slippers aren't hers, eh?"

  "Perhaps," Avery admitted, with obvious reluctance.

  "Not perhaps, old man—yes!" Robert gazed down at the buckle. "A trifle gaudy this, but worth a reasonable bit. Let's see, the owner could very well be a rather flash, middle-aged party, not too agreeable to work for. One of those demanding and aggressive types — you know the sort — with far too much time on her hands, far too much fat, and a whole lot of envy for anything youthful. Our little girl, then, decides to cut and run…"

  "Oh, shut up!" The seriousness of Avery's blond face broke up into laughter. "You're talking just like a stage detective. But the plain facts are these, the child has amnesia and I intend to look after her until she is either collected by her people or she remembers who she is. I don't care a darn who the slippers belong to; I'm a medic and my first duty is to see that this girl gets medical attention."

  "Then why not send her to a hospital, if she's genuine?" Robert suggested.

  "She's frightened enough without that. Going to a hospital would suggest to her that she's ill. She isn't ill. She's running away from something, or someone, and when she ceases to fear this situation she has escaped from, or this person, she'll remember who she is. She could remember at any time. Tonight. Tomorrow. Next week, maybe."

  "Or never!" Robert tossed the buckle to the desk, where it gleamed and flashed in the bright light of the desk lamp. "Well, it's your adventure, Avery, and who seeks adventure finds blows, as the old proverb goes." He rubbed a reflective finger against the slight bony ridge of a long-healed break in his nose—a fight years ago at school—and smiled slowly and sarcastically at his cousin. "But perhaps you're thinking of another old proverb, the one about advice being something the wise don't need and fools don't take?"

  "Perhaps I am," Avery returned, and his old imperturbability of manner was very much back in place.

  Tinted Venetian chandeliers gleamed over the long dining-room table and an engraved silver bowl spilled green fronds of smilax and the exotic richness of hothouse orchids on to the intricate lace of a Venetian table cloth. The china was Royal Worcester.

  The Chases had been reared to all this opulence and they took it for granted, but Gerda Maitland could still luxuriate in it all, loving the feel of a fine wineglass in her hand, the shimmer of a fine wine through the satin-smooth glass, so cool to the lips.

  Her own beginnings had been comparatively humble, for her father was a post-office clerk at Finchley, where her home was, and her mother had been, at one time, a saleslady in one of the better-class shops in the Finsbury Park area. Gerda had graduated to her position as confidential secretary to the very wealthy, very able Avery Chase by way of a fairly good education, a lot of ambition and a lucky accident.

  While running to catch a bus one wet evening, after having just seen a show with an office girl friend, she had slipped over in the rain in her high heels. She had fallen to the pavement right in front of Avery Chase, emerging at that moment from a Shaftesbury Avenue restaurant with a small party of friends. Avery, who could be slightly gallant after a convivial evening, in a ghost of his cousin Robert's manner, had swiftly set Gerda upon her feet, and after declaring that she seemed to be shaken up and in need of a steadying drink, he had marched her straight back into Bordino's —his friends, very intrigued by Gerda's pink and white loveliness, gaily following.

  From this propitious meeting had emerged the fact that Avery, then in practice in Harley Street, stood in need of a new secretary, his present one being about to desert him to the tune of wedding bells.

  Gerda had taken the job into her smooth white hands like a lush falling plum. Now, four years later, she was firmly established in Avery's household in Devon, an arrangement she liked very much indeed—especially when, as it occasionally did, the household included Avery's cousin.

  Her full lips smiled as she set down her wine glass and glanced across the table at Robert Chase. The black and white of evening wear particularly suited him, she thought. It went so well with that diablerie of his, which seemed to come very much into its own when daylight died outside the windows, and his sleek black head gleamed under the tinted light of the Venetian chandeliers, and his dark face mockingly smiled against the Spanish panelling of this lovely room.

  "Are you sorry the play has closed at last, Robert?" she asked, cutting into her billberry tart.

  "A little, perhaps." His lips quirked on a grin as he watched Gerda insert bilberry tart into her lovely mouth, careful not to let the rich juice stain her lips. "A play that runs two and a half years becomes a habit, a sort of love affair. You want it over, and then when it is over, when the last goodbyes have been said, the last kisses kissed, you realize that you're a little sad and that you're wanting it all to begin again." He smiled lazily into Gerda's blue eyes, with their discreet and attractive application of mascara to darken the golden lashes, and their dusting of grey-blue shadow upon the full, white lids. Then his glanc
e travelled downwards, taking in the glamorous effect of midnight-blue lace over her smooth white shoulders. "You're damnably attractive for a mere secretary, you know, Gerda," he said.

  She flushed with a quick pleasure, and almost as though she couldn't help herself she glanced at the girl seated at Robert's left hand. The girl had her black head bent to her plate, but she wasn't eating. Then, feeling Gerda's eyes upon her, she lifted her head. Their eyes met. It might also be said that they clashed, head-on; blue curiosity in a pink and white face of assured loveliness warring with violet defiance in a thin, uneasy face—the face of a small creature trapped in a corner.

  Then Avery spoke, leaning from his seat towards Lygia: "You're not eating a very big dinner, my dear. Aren't you hungry?" he asked.

  Lygia turned from Gerda with a start. "N-not very, Dr. Chase," she said, and at the sound of her voice Robert Chase's eyes came sharply to the white, brittle line of her profile. She hadn't spoken until now, having acknowledged Avery's introduction of himself with a mere jerky inclination of her head, and the low, musical quality of her voice startled him. He said to her, looking sardonic:

  "Lygia's a devil of a name. Do you fancy yourself as a Roman slave?"

  The smooth black head turned towards him; the wary violet eyes examined the open distrust and scorn written upon his dark face. "I—I don't understand you," she said.

  "Don't you?" His smile was lazy. "If I remember correctly, Lygia was a Roman slave. Nero's minions tossed her to a wild bull, or something like it, and forced her Roman patrician lover, Marcus, to watch the performance. Come now, surely you remember?"

  She shook her black head, while Avery said sharply: "Quit the baiting, Bob, I won't have it!"

  Robert shrugged his shoulders and turned his attention back to Gerda. "If Avery will permit you a holiday tomorrow, my lovely, I'll take you to see that cottage I've just bought. Do you think he will?"