‘Yes, it’s fine.’ He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. ‘What happened? Did you fall?’
She shook her head slowly, feeling the coarse cotton of the pillow slip abrading her hair. ‘No. I was asleep.’ She had run across the lawn, she remembered that. It had given her a stitch. Then someone had been there, in the study with her. Someone had touched her. Not Luke. Not Lyn. The touch had not been frightening; it was as if someone had been trying to comfort her, to help. She drew her brows together, trying desperately to remember but already she was feeling sleepy again. ‘I can’t stay awake.’ Her mouth refused to form the words properly.
Luke’s face was swimming, suddenly huge, close to hers. ‘I’ll leave you now. You must sleep. I’ll come back later.’ She felt the touch of his lips, but already she was slipping back into the dark.
Later they took her to another ward. Someone smeared her stomach with jelly and ran something cold and hard across it.
‘There you are. Can you see the screen, dear? There. The little mite is all safe, curled up out of harm’s way. See?’
Joss peered obediently at the flickering blurred screen beside the bed. She could not make out anything, but her relief at the radiographer’s words was enormous. ‘Is it all right? Can you tell?’
‘It’s fine. Absolutely fine.’ The woman was wiping her stomach with tissues and pulling down her gown. ‘You’re going to have a beautiful June baby.’
Already they were pulling back the curtains, wheeling her away, bringing in the next patient.
Simon Fraser was waiting for her when they brought her back to her bed. ‘I had to visit another couple of patients, so I thought I’d look in on you again. How are you feeling?’
‘Better.’ Joss eased herself up on her pillows.
‘Good.’ He put his head on one side. ‘Home, then rest for a couple of weeks. I’ve spoken to your sister. She says she can cope with everything. Is that right?’
Joss laughed weakly. ‘She’s very good at coping.’
‘Good. You’ve got to make up your mind to rest, Joss. I mean that.’
When she got home she found that the whole family had been suborned. She was firmly escorted to bed and there, she discovered, she had to stay even when Sotheby’s came to collect the wine from the cellar for the auction.
They told her about it that evening. ‘You should have seen the care they took packing it all up. It was treated like gold dust. They said the labels and capsules had to be kept in as good condition as possible. I hardly dared breathe as I watched them.’ Luke sat down on the bed after he and Lyn and Tom came up when the van had finally left. ‘It could be our bail money, Joss. When he examined it the man from Sotheby’s said it looked good. The cellar conditions are perfect. So, here’s hoping the auction goes well.’
It was something to distract her. And so was the return of David a few days later.
‘Books. Articles. A letter from your new publisher!’ He tipped an armful of things onto the bed and then hauled himself up onto the counterpane next to her.
‘My new publisher?’ She stared at him, hardly daring to hope.
He nodded, clearly delighted. ‘He liked your outline and the chapters you sent him. I think he’s given you a few suggestions in the letter and made one or two notes which he thinks will be helpful. And he’s prepared to give you a contract and a small advance. No –’ He raised his hand to forestall her excitement. ‘It won’t be enough to retile the roof, but it is a start. And it means you have a perfect excuse to lie here in bed composing wonderful prose and be waited on hand and foot by Luke and Lyn while that baby of yours gets bigger.’
Joss laughed. ‘Well, I hope he gets bigger soon. At the moment I’m flat as a pancake. If I hadn’t seen that scan I might have wondered if he was still there.’
‘He isa he, is he?’
‘I don’t know. That was a figure of speech. And a dreadfully sexist one at that.’ She smiled. ‘Sister thought it would be a boy, though. She said boys always give more trouble than girls, the way they mean to go on.’
‘And that’s not sexist, I suppose?’
‘No. That’s observation.’ She was opening the letter David had dropped on the bed. The one with the Hibberds’ colophon.
‘It’s from Robert Cassie himself,’ David put in, watching her face. ‘He was enormously intrigued to hear you were going to set it in this house.’
‘Three thousand pounds, David! He’s going to pay me three thousand pounds!’ She waved the letter at him. ‘You say that’s not much? It’s a fortune! Lyn! Look at this!’ Her sister had just appeared in the doorway with a tea tray.
Tom had scrambled after her. He ran across the room and tried to climb up onto the high bed. ‘Mummy carry Tom,’ he announced, wriggling down amongst her books and papers, and bouncing on the duvet.
‘You mind your little brother, old son,’ David said. He picked up the child and sat him on his knee. ‘Or sister, though heaven forbid that a girl should be so unprincipled as to threaten to arrive early.’ He laughed as Joss leaned forward to smack him.
Joss lay back on the pillows after they had all gone downstairs, Robert Cassie’s letter in her hand, and reread it for the tenth time. A contract. An advance against royalties and an option on her next book; her next book when she had hardly started this one!