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CHAPTER ONE
THECLASSICALMUSICplaying through the sound system—gifted by a famous old girl after her first platinum album—was almost drowned out by the combined din of young voices, the shuffle of feet and the scraping of chairs on the ancient wood floor as uniformed pupils filed into the school auditorium.
Though several of her colleagues were frowning at the noise levels, Gwen barely noticed the racket that echoed off the high rafters of the school’s Tudor hall. Her thoughts were wandering, though not far. The crèche—which had been the deal clincher when she was offered the job at Mere Grange—was not five hundred yards from where she was sitting beside the rest of the staff on the stage.
Despite a disturbed night that had made Gwen fear the worst, Ellie had seemed fine this morning. True, she had been a bit clingy when Gwen had dropped her off in the crèche earlier…but her temperature had been normal.…Gwen had checked it twice, but still the vague anxiety lingered. Was it maternal instincts or just guilt?
The former she’d always assumed to be an urban myth but she was now certain really did exist, and the latter, though she knew it was irrational, she had come to appreciate as a fact of life. Was it just her or perhaps single mums…or maybe all mums? She couldn’t be the only mum who felt that guilty tug every time she left her child in the crèche. For some reason even knowing that Ellie was well cared for and happy there didn’t lessen the feeling.
‘She’ll be fine. Stop fretting.’
Ellie turned to her friend Cassie, the head of English, with a rueful smile. ‘How did you know I was worrying about Ellie?’
‘Love, you’re always worrying about Ellie. You make parenting look easy but it must be tough doing it all alone.’
Gwen brought her lashes down in a protective sweep that shadowed her blue eyes. She had opened up more to Cassie than anyone else, but the other woman still only knew the bare minimum—just that Ellie’s father was not English and he was not in the picture.
Her slender shoulders lifted in a shrug as she pushed away the image of Ellie’s father that had slipped through the mental barriers she had erected, though, as she thought of him every single time she looked into her daughter’s beautiful eyes, it hardly seemed worth the effort.
Before she could be drawn into an internal debate on her past mistakes and awful taste in men—or at leastoneman—a shout emanating from just below the stage made her turn her head.
The same noise had caught Cassie’s attention.
‘I’ll have to go and help,’ Gwen said after a moment. Her classroom assistant, Ruth, was struggling to contain the energy and boredom of a class of twenty five-year-olds who, thanks to someone who hadn’t considered their lack of attention span, had been seated first in the auditorium.
‘Good luck,’ Cassie breathed, tacking on a low-voiced warning. ‘The head will notice you’re not sitting here with the rest of us and he won’t be pleased. He said “allstaff”,’ she quoted, adopting the man’s distinctive clipped delivery.
‘I doubt if one less bowed head is going to stop Lady Moneybags donating the money for the library extension. Anyway, he’dnoticea lot more if one of my lot escapes—now that would make a bad headline.’
Gwen reached the front row just in time to cut off an adventurous member of her class before he slipped through a fire exit.
‘This way, Max,’ she said, touching the top of his curly red hair before she firmly took his hand and led him back to his seat. ‘Oh, you’re sitting next to William...notsuch a good idea.’ A fact that Gwen had learnt the hard way, and in class she now had them sitting on opposite sides of the classroom. ‘Move over, Sophie. Max can sit next to you. Excellent, now don’t move,’ she admonished, before moving down the row to where Ruth was sitting. ‘You almost lost one there.’
‘Sorry, Miss Meredith,’ Ruth said, smiling her gratitude.
Gwen smiled back, though it never made her feel anything but ancient to be called Miss by the young woman who was actually a year older than her. The prestigious fee-paying school was very keen on defined roles and did not encourage use of Christian names in the professional setting or, for that matter, romantic relationships between staff, although blind eyes were turned so long as people were discreet.
Gwen wasn’t interested in being discreet; she was simply not interested at all. In the odd quiet moment she wondered if her libido was dead, but not for long. Those moments were rare and the rest of the ninety-nine per cent of the time she was too exhausted to even think about it.
Even had she trusted her own judgment with men after her experience with Ellie’s father, romance was a pretty low priority for her these days. Now sleep, and maybe finding a few more hours in a day to sit down and read a book or do her nails—these were the things she lusted after. Gwen had well and truly left physical lust behind and she didn’t miss it one bit.
‘No harm done, Ruth.’
‘Max is pulling faces at me, Miss,’ Sophie complained.
‘Max!’
Gwen’s glance moved over the red head of the culprit, who was now looking angelically innocent as she scanned the faces of her charges occupying the first two rows, waiting until she had their attention before she widened her eyes and raised a finger to her lips. The result was nothing approaching calm, but the imminent possibility of someone swinging from a chandelier or making an escape bid receded.
‘It’s a miracle!’ she heard Ruth breathe. ‘How do you do it?’
Gwen rewarded her charges with a nod of approval and, more importantly, promised them a nature walk because they were being so good. She usually found the carrot a lot more effective than the stick. But before she could make her way back to the stage, the sudden lowering of the hum of youthful voices in the room indicated that she was too late to slip unobtrusively back to her seat, so instead she sat down on the bench next to Ruth as the head walked on the stage with their VIP guest speaker.
The head had a voice that filled the auditorium without effort and silence immediately fell. Barely listening to the introduction, Gwen kept her attention on her pupils, while hoping the guest speaker didn’t turn out to be as fond of the sound of their own voice as the head. A five-year-old’s attention span was limited, especially when they were bored, but hopefully they would fall asleep rather than run amok.
‘And now I give you Mr Bardales.’
Bardales...No, surely it was theCavendishPrize that was being given by the benefactor that the new science block was named after?Bardaleswas a very different name with very different connotations for Gwen.
