Read Online A Pigeon Among the Cats by Josephine Bell - Free Book Online

gym mistress at one girls’ school in the south midlands before the war and at another in the south-west after I was demobbed and my boy started school.”
    â€œYou were able to pick it all up again?” Myra asked, astonished.
    â€œI did a refresher course. I trained. It was the only thing I could do. I was no good at academic stuff.”
    â€œBut top-class in your own line,” Flo said, admiringly.
    There was a short silence. Then Rose said, “Unless anyone wants to know exactly what I taught at schools I’d rather neither of you explained to them.”
    â€œThey won’t,” Myra said confidently, “They may have had some sort of P.T., even gym apparatus, but I don’t mink the hockey or lacrosse games mistress would mean a thing.”
    â€œDon’t be such a snob,” Flo told her.
    â€œDoes that mean anything these days?” Rose laughed. “Snob, anti-snob! All a mix-up of nonsense, isn’t it? People trying to fit themselves into a class they want to belong to, or think they belong to, or want other people to think they belong to, or …”
    â€œStop!” Myra cried. “My head’s spinning!”
    Gwen Chilton arrived almost first at the hotel. She had been hurrying, partly from fear, but chiefly from curiosity. Owen had told her he would keep in touch but he had not said where he would see her next. It was like him to go to the catacombs, frightening her half out of her wits; coming up behind her, not to pinch her bottom as the Italian boys did, but to whisper in her ear, wanting to know what the old schoolmarm snooper was doing in the garden up above instead of down here where he’d expected.
    â€œShe’s done this place before. She just wanted to rest in the shade, she said,” Gwen had told him.
    â€œRest, my arse,” he breathed, making her giggle.
    â€œHers, you mean.”
    â€œDon’t be rude, darling.”
    Heads turned in their direction. Owen slipped into the darkness, but was soon at her ear again.
    â€œI shall keep in touch,” he whispered this time and she felt fingers at her neck as well as breath on her ear. “So don’t get tangled with the old bitch or we’ll have to eliminate her.”
    He had gone after this and did not appear again until they were leaving the Colosseum mat afternoon. Having made sure she was out of sight of the staircase.
    So was Rose Lawler’s spectacular descent set off by Owen? Several of the tour had asked her if Mrs. Lawler had been pushed?
    She could truthfully say she did not know, but it wouldn’t be surprising, would it? These crowds do push, don’t they?
    But she had a shrewd idea it had been Owen, pushing deliberately. Especially since, that very morning, a small man had pressed a note into her hand as she left the Rome hotel. She had slipped it into her bag and now looked forward to reaching the Assisi lunch hotel before the rest of their lot, to open the note in the safe privacy of the toilet.
    Owen had written briefly: “Meet me Assisi 2.00 p.m. upper church.” He had not signed it or even addressed it in any way inside or out. So how had the little man known her? She shivered, feeling eyes about her in every direction, all her movements watched, enemies ready to pounce at every stage, upon each day of what should have been a safe, if boring, interval in a carefully planned operation.
    But she pulled herself together, as she always had done and so far with more than reasonable success. When she joined the three egg heads, as she now thought of them, she was her most controlled shy self, no trace of the false hysteric who had caused them so much embarrassment from time to time.
    Rose Lawler could only tell herself that Rome had done Gwen good and that must really be Owen Strong’s doing. Time would show if his pursuit of the girl was genuine. They would know that if he turned up in Florence. In the meantime she and her friends