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Harriet slowly. ‘That’s like asking a drowning man if he’d be bored by a lifebelt.’
        It was the first time Cory Erskine had smiled, and Harriet could suddenly see why Noel Balfour had once found him so attractive.
        ‘I suggest you travel up on Sunday,’ he said. ‘There’s a good train at twelve o’clock. I’ll arrange to have you met at Leeds. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve a lot of last-minute things to do.’
        ‘I can’t begin to thank you,’ she stammered. ‘I’ll do everything I can to make them happy.’ As she stood up, she swayed and had to clutch at the edge of the desk to stop herself falling.
        ‘You’d better start eating properly,’ he said, getting out his cheque book. ‘Twenty pounds for travelling, twenty-five pounds in advance for your first week’s salary.’ He handed her a cheque for forty-five pounds.
        Harriet found herself fighting back the tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning her head away. ‘I’m just not used to getting breaks. You can’t give me that much money.’
        ‘I want you to look after my children properly, not just moon around the house. Now, I don’t anticipate Mrs. Bottomley will try and rape you, so I’ll see you again towards the end ‘of February. You’ll probably find it easier to settle in without my poking my nose in all the time.’
        After she’d gone, still stammering her thanks, he sat down to work again. Then, a minute later, he got up and looked out of the window. Harriet was walking down the road. He watched her take the cheque out of her bag, examine it in amazement, hold it up to the light, then give a little skip of joy, so that she nearly cannoned into a passer-by.
        Before she rounded the corner, she turned round to look up at the window, and waved at him timidly. He waved back.
        I’m a bloody idiot, he told himself. I could have got any Nanny in London and I end up with a waif with a baby - which means four children to look after instead of two!
        He looked at the photograph of his wife and his face hardened. He poured himself another stiff whisky before settling down.
        

CHAPTER TEN
        
        
        ONCE the euphoria of landing the job had worn off, Harriet grew more and more apprehensive. She had difficulty enough looking after one baby. What right had she to take on two children, who were probably spoilt and certainly disturbed?
        I won’t be able to cope, she kept telling herself as the train rattled through the Midlands the following Sunday. Each mile, too, was taking her further and further away from Simon, and the remote possibility that one day she might bump into him in London.
        As promised, a car met her at Leeds station and once they were on the road, William, who had yelled most of the journey, fell into a deep sleep, giving the exhausted Harriet a chance to look at the passing countryside. It did nothing to raise her flagging spirits.
        The black begrimed outskirts of Leeds soon gave way to fields and woodland then to wilder and bleaker country: khaki hillsides, stone walls, rusty bracken, with the moors stretching above, dark demon-haunted, Heathcliffe land. Harriet shivered and hugged William closer. No wonder Noel Balfour had run away from such savage desolation.
        They drove through a straggling village of little grey houses and then the road started climbing steeply upwards.
        ‘There’s Erskine’s place, up yonder ont’ hill,’ said the driver. ‘The Wilderness, they call it. Wouldn’t like to live there myself, but these stage folks have funny notions. I suppose you get used to anything if you have to.’
        The big grey house lay in a fold of the moors, about half a mile from a winding river. Surrounding it was a jungle of neglected garden. Pine trees rose like sentinels at the back.
        Harriet knocked nervously at the huge studded door, which was opened by a middle-aged woman with piled-up reddish hair