Conscious of the fact that neither Mrs Norton nor Aunt Maud were getting any younger and two young children and an adult represented quite an additional burden on the household, Rebecca had insisted on taking over doing the shopping, which was why she had suggested to the twins that they leave their fishing expedition until the afternoon.
Having arranged that she would have a quick snack lunch in the local market town, while carrying out all Mrs Norton’s and Aunt Maud’s commissions, she arrived home with just under half an hour in which to unpack and put away the shopping and get ready to meet the twins. She made it with only a couple of minutes to spare, hurriedly pulling on a pair of old worn jeans and a thin T-shirt, but when she went downstairs she discovered from Mrs Norton that the twins had already left.
‘I told them they should wait for you,’ she told Rebecca, ‘but so headstrong they are, the pair of them, especially Miss Helen. She said to tell you they’d meet you down by the weir.’
‘The weir!’ Rebecca frowned.
‘They’ve taken the little rods Mr Frazer got for them,’ Mrs Norton added, and Rebecca, who suspected that she would spend far more of the afternoon helping the children to catch their fish than catching any of her own, nodded her head and said quickly, ‘I’d better get down there. How long have they been gone?’
‘No more than ten minutes at the most,’ Mrs Norton assured her.
Telling herself that she was being idiotic to worry, when it was obvious that both children virtually roamed the estate at will, nevertheless Rebecca found as she descended the steep slope that led immediately into the valley that her heart was pounding with nervous tension and anxiety for the twins’ safety.
Approximately halfway down the hill, there was a small gap in the trees and scree through which it was possible to have an uninterrupted view of the weir pool. Out of force of habit, Rebecca paused there.
The pool, always deceptively calm and unruffled on the surface, masking the true danger of the very strong current below, shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. And then, as she watched, she saw something floating on its surface. Her heart somersaulted quickly, her pulses starting to pound with shock as she recognised Peter’s distinctive red and blue lightweight jacket floating on the surface of the pond.
She started to run, automatically dodging shrubs and trees, unaware of scratches and blows to her skin, her one thought to reach that small and all too vulnerable figure floating on the surface of the pond before it was too late. Old habits died hard, and Frazer had lectured them all to good purpose.
At the pool’s edge, she stopped to kick off her shoes and remove her jacket. Her jeans and top would take too long to remove and should not get in the way when she was swimming.
She dived in and swam strongly towards the familiar red blob. After Frazer had warned them about the dangers of swimming in the weir pond, she had always felt an inner terror of the apparently calm water, which seemed all the more threatening because of the placid face it presented to the world while such danger lurked below.
The currents were caused in the main by the sluices which opened to allow the overspill of water to float out through the weir, and after the heavy spring and early summer rainfall the currents were flowing very fast indeed. Rebecca herself could feel the strong pull of them as she swam swiftly towards Peter, praying as she did so that she was not too late to prevent him being sucked into the current and swept over the weir and that he was still alive.
How on earth he came to be in the water in the first place, she had no idea. She knew that the twins had been warned about the dangers of the weir. All she could think was that they had attempted to start fishing without her and that somehow or other Peter had fallen in.
She was close to the edge of the weir now. She could hear the noise the water made as it poured over the edge and dropped well over forty feet into the river below—or was the noise she could hear the terrified pounding of her own heart?
Peter, lighter in weight than her, an inert small body, unable to do anything to help himself, was already caught up in the fast flow of the current, and it was only with a gigantic physical effort that Rebecca was actually able to increase her speed and reach out despairingly to grab hold of the jacket.
In the cold shock of finding it empty, she forgot about the current and her own potential danger and knew only a sharp fearing dread for Peter and his safety. As she clung to the jacket, something hard and painfully sharp rasped her bare arm, shocking her into awareness of her own danger.
The current had caught her and driven her hard up against the barrier of the weir. At the same moment as she realised what was happening, a voice hailed her from the shore, causing her to flounder as she turned her head and stared disbelievingly at the furious dark-haired man standing there. Frazer! Frazer here!
But he couldn’t be. That was impossible—he was in America. As she fought frantically against the current, more frightened now of Frazer’s anger at finding her at Aysgarth than the danger of the strong current, she saw that he had pulled off his jacket and was removing his shoes. She made a last desperate effort to free herself from the current and succeeded in propelling her body out of immediate danger and into slightly calmer water.
It wasn’t enough, though, to prevent Frazer from diving cleanly into the water, and combined with her sick feeling of shock as he caught up with her and firmly took hold of her was an unwanted feeling of weak relief.As he towed her back to the shore, she tried to tell him about Peter, but in doing so swallowed so much water that by the time he had got her ashore, she was too weak to do anything other than retch uncomfortably.
He pushed her unceremoniously on to the ground as she struggled to sit up and tell him about Peter, and then to discover herself the object of a brisk and thoroughly professional demonstration of first aid rendered it impossible for her to do anything other than lie there shivering and sick.
Frazer too was silent, although as she tried to focus on him and his features swam in and out of her dazed consciousness, Rebecca was bitterly aware of the grim look of anger in his eyes.
As she lay there soaked and shivering, she became aware of something else as well. There were two matching pairs of sandals just within her line of vision; two matching pairs of bare brown legs and also two matching pairs of dark green shorts. As she raised her head, she saw the twins standing together looking down at her, and above and beyond her relief that they were safe was the overwhelming realisation that Peter’s jacket had deliberately been thrown into the weir, and she, like the fool that she was, had reacted just as they wanted. What an idiot she had been to believe that Helen had given way so easily!
As she had done before, she acquitted the little girl of realising the true extent of the danger she had been in. No doubt Helen had thought that a thorough soaking and the blow to her pride would probably be enough to send her high-tailing it back to London. She lay back on the ground and closed her eyes. Too much had happened too quickly for her to be able to take it all in.
A feeling of numbness crept through her body, accompanied by an equally unpleasant feeling of nausea. Her ears buzzed, and although she tried desperately to hold on to it she felt her consciousness slipping away. In the distance she heard Peter asking anxiously, ‘She isn’t going to die, is she?’
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN she came round, Rebecca was still lying on the ground. Her body felt icy cold although her head was a little clearer. Something was coming between her and the warmth of the sun. No, not something but someone, she recognised as she opened her eyes and saw Frazer standing grimly over her.
‘What the devil possessed you to go into the pool like that?’ he demanded savagely. ‘You know how dangerous it is!’
‘Peter…’ she croaked, but he overruled her attempt to explain, saying ruthlessly,
‘Peter had lost his jacket—so what? If I hadn’t happened to be on my way down here, you’d quite probably have drowned,’ he told her brutally, and added sarcastically, ‘or were yo
u expecting the twins to jump in and save you?’
Wincing under the bitter lash of his voice, Rebecca struggled to sit up. It was bad enough that he was here at all and had witnessed her stupidity, without her adding to her own indignity and vulnerability by lying on the ground at his feet. She winced as she sat up, the abrasions on her tender skin painful. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the anxious, guilty expressions on Helen and Peter’s faces. Peter looked almost sick with shock and fear. Helen was more stalwart, but there was no mistaking the little girl’s realisation of how very badly her trick could have turned out.
Wearily acknowledging that there was little point in telling the truth—at best he would probably only condemn her for being stupid enough to be taken in by it at the first place, and she felt that the twins had learned a very valuable lesson—without looking at them she said as casually as she could, ‘Yes, it was stupid of me.’
Frazer was obviously not placated.
‘It was more than stupid,’ he told her coldly. ‘You do realise, don’t you, that you could have risked the twins’ lives as well as your own? What if one of them had tried to follow you in there?’
There was more irony in her voice than she knew when she said drily, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’d have done that.’
‘No,’ Frazer agreed icily, ‘they’re far too sensible to do anything so criminally foolish.’
He saw that she was shivering violently and frowned, directing the twins, ‘Run up to the house and ask Mrs Norton to prepare a hot water bottle and a bath for Rebecca, will you?’
Cravenly, Rebecca didn’t want to be left alone with him. The physical danger she had been in might have got her over the initial shock of seeing him so unexpectedly, but she had very little doubt that sooner or later she was going to be called to account for her presence at Aysgarth.