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but her enormous brown eyes were fringed with unfairly thick black lashes. She was small—like Henry—but already at seventeen her figure was perfectly proportioned. The words ‘pocket Venus’ shot into my mind out of some book I’d read, but, after the first surprise of seeing me, she had already collected herself before I had. She said, huskily, ‘Hallo. Thought for a minute it was going to be Mottie. Are you the new secretary? I’m Essie. Sorry, can’t shake hands, I’m dripping gore at the moment.’
    ‘H—hallo ... Heavens, what have you done?’
    I sounded stupid, even to my own ears. And my nursing training was swiftly reasserting itself, at the sight of the red trickle across one grubby hand: Esther was definitely bleeding. Now I was looking, there was a rent in her coat-sleeve as well. ‘You’d better let me have a look at it,’ I said swiftly, but she glanced at her arm with indifference.
    ‘S’all right, t’isn’t much. Blast!’ This was as a drip trickled off her fingers and splashed on the carpet. ‘If you’re not the sort that faints at the sight of blood—’ her eyes assessed me doubtfully—‘you could come and tie it up for me. Only don’t tell. The fuss people make!’ She turned away along the gallery, holding her arm up to stop further drips and talking to me over her shoulder.
    ‘I want to go out again tomorrow, and I know Mottie would try and stop me. Appeal to Pa, or something. It only needs a bit of a bandage, and it’ll stop soon.’
    She seemed to expect me to follow her, and anyway I couldn’t have let her go off without finding out how badly she was hurt. She led me into a room at the end of the gallery—obviously her bedroom, done up in pretty pastel shades with a thick, pale carpet, a frilly bedcover, and a matching frill round a kidney-shaped dressing-table. Esther was happily leaving a trail of mud across the carpet. She said, ‘Bathroom. I’ve got some bandages,’ and led the way to another door, adding, ‘What’s your name, by the way? Sorry, I’ve forgotten what Pa said.’
    ‘Charlotte Armitage. Esther, you’d better get that jacket off and let me see what you’ve done. How did you—’
    ‘Call me Essie. Everyone does, except Pa. And don’t fuss, I only gashed it on a branch. Cora threw me, the wretch.’ She turned to face me in the middle of the gleaming white tiles of her bathroom, her enormous brown eyes studying me. ‘You won’t go green, will you? It’s only a scratch. Perhaps you’d better look the other way while I clean it up a bit—’
    ‘Hardly,’ I said drily, ‘considering—’and then I stopped, memory warning me in time. ‘I did a first aid course once,’ I improvised hastily. ‘So get your jacket off, or do you need help? And have you got some cotton wool? Gauze would be even better.’
    She seemed to have everything—a highly efficient first-aid kit, which led me to suspect she was used to doing secret repairs to her person rather than causing the ‘fuss’ she complained about. Her arm, after she had struggled it out of her jacket and rolled up a bloodstained shirt-sleeve, showed a nasty gash—not deep enough for stitches, but gory enough to give most people pause for thought. Esther, as I quickly gathered, wasn’t most people. She looked at the mess without wincing and with a kind of casual satisfaction as she held her arm over the basin I was filling with water.
    ‘It’s okay. Just slap some iodine on it and tie it up tight, would you? If it isn’t a broken bone or a busted artery there’s no need to worry—that’s what my cousin Dominic always says. He’s Kev’s next brother. Of course, Kev would be useful for this sort of thing, if only he wouldn’t get so pi about it. Besides, he’d go on about it being my own fault—just because Cora’s a devil sometimes. There’s no fun riding a beast that won’t go. Anyway, I’ve told him, if he encourages Pa to get rid of Cora I’ll go out on Thunder, so help