Read Online Damsel in Distress by Carola Dunn - Free Book Online

Geraldine.”
    â€œSurely not, darling. You would have heard from your cousin, or maybe a doctor, not Phillip. You know what an ass he is. No one would leave it to him to contact you. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser—just your line—but I shouldn’t worry about the dowager.”
    â€œNo, I expect you’re right.” Could it be that the Arbuckles had met his family by chance with disastrous results? Daisy debated whether to tell Lucy and Binkie about Gloria. Not her tale to tell, she decided.
    â€œDrive you down tonight, if you want,” Binkie offered gruffly. “Back in time to toddle to the office.”
    â€œYou’re an angel, but Phillip can’t possibly expect me to leave at this time of night, not to mention what Edgar and Geraldine would say if I turned up on their doorstep at dawn. I’ll take the first train in the morning. Where’s the Bradshaw’s, Lucy?”
    â€œYou used it last. Oh drat! The milk’s boiling over.”
    Binkie coped manfully with the emergency, and Lucy made
cocoa with what was left of the milk. Daisy took her threequarters of a cupful up to her den to look for the railway timetable, more to give the other two a spot of privacy than because she was in a hurry to find the best train.
    On her way upstairs, she wondered what on earth had put the wind up Phillip. He was by nature on the phlegmatic side, not easily excited to more than a bit of minor bluster or a temperate enthusiasm.
    Why had he not been more explicit, if not to avoid worrying her? Lucy was right, of course, about Phillip being the last person anyone would ask to get in touch with her if her mother was ill. All the same, Daisy could not help being anxious. She could not imagine why he should tell her to go to Fairacres rather than the Dower House, or even Malvern Grange, if the Dowager Lady Dalrymple were not involved.
    Unless he didn’t want her ladyship to get involved—which suggested a row with his family over Gloria. The question then became, did Daisy want to get involved? To be present at their meeting, to help smooth the way and prevent a row was one thing. Landing in the middle when he was already hock deep in the soup was quite another.
    Sitting down at her desk, she reread the telegram. “Urgent emergency” sounded positively desperate. She had better go, but she’d really give it him in the neck if all he wanted was his hand held!
    Â 
    The train service to Malvern was excellent, the Victorian spa enjoying a renaissance since the Armistice. Reading, Oxford, the long, slow pull up into the Cotswolds and the rush down the steep slope into the Vale of Evesham, with Bredon Hill dominating the plain to the south. A brief stop in Worcester, then over the Severn and Daisy was in her home country.
    At the ripe old age of twenty-five, one ought to be blase, but
she still felt some of the excitement of the end-of-term return from school.
    The rich, red soil, orchards, hop-fields, and market gardens, streams and pastures, woods crowning the low rises, and always the Malvern Hills to the west—this was home. She had climbed the hills, walked and ridden through the woods and fields, cycled along the twisting lanes, through the villages of brick and stone and half-timbered cottages.
    Puffing and sighing, the train drew into Great Malvern station. The porter who opened the compartment door for Daisy greeted her by name.
    â€œMorning, Miss Dalrymple. Mind the wet paint.”
    The pillars and elaborate brackets holding up the roof over the platform had just been repainted red and blue; their fanciful wreaths of ironwork leaves and flowers were glossy green, yellow, and white; men were scrubbing the patina of soot from the walls of the long building, patterned with vari-coloured stone. Daisy stepped down to the platform with an involuntary sense of civic pride in the uniquely decorative station.
    â€œWhat-ho, Daisy!” Phillip loped along the platform