Chapter 9

Miss Parradine settled her old mother back in to bed, after helping her to the toilet. How she hated this - wiping an old woman's bottom - she, a professional woman! But it was all for the best, of course. The old lady was very wealthy and the greedy Archivist had no wish to be cut out of the Will for being an undutiful daughter!

Angela Parradine, Miss Parradine's sister usually tended to the severely disabled (OK then - "differently abled!") old lady, lovingly and caringly - not because of any thought of future gain, but because she adored her mother and would not desire to be other than at her side to soothe her way and comfort her during her final years, repaying with interest the love she had been shown during childhood. But Angela had been taken very ill and would not be able to resume her duties for some months after a serious operation and lengthy convalescence. So Miss Parradine had been obliged to apply for indefinite Compassionate Leave and come up here to the Western Isles where it seemed to rain and blow a gale all day. What with the wind howling and moaning about the ancient house's windows and the old lady's constant need for attention, she was having a very unpleasant time indeed!

All thoughts of trying to decode the writing on the paper had to be put on the back-burner for the time being. She had got hold of a few books on the subject of ciphers and their decrypting but, as yet, had barely begun to make sense of it all. When the bombshell of her sister's sudden illness had exploded she had been forced almost immediately to come all the way up here to the edge of the civilised world to look after this old fool of a mother, whom she had never much liked, anyway.

Come to think of it, Amelia Parradine had never much liked any of her family. They had all of them, without exception jeered at her for her bookishness from as far back as she could remember. Her sister had played tennis and swum for her country, her brothers had excelled at cricket and played for Middlesex and England and her mother had swum the Channel before she was twenty. Amelia, though, had never been athletic and suffered torment after torment at school and at home for her failure to conform to the lofty ideal of " Mens sanis in copore sano".

It had been with immense relief that she had escaped from a world of cold showers, fresh air and hearty breakfasts to bury herself in the dusty reassurances of the documentary past. Now she was being forced back to the bosom of her family. Was there no justice in this cruel world? It did not occur to the selfish woman that her willing, if minor, part in the miseries being routinely and increasingly inflicted on the Girl might have brought this misfortune upon her, and that these misfortunes were as nothing compared to the daily agony of the Girl's existence.

She had brought a copy of the document with her, but saw that she would have precious few chances to study it before Angela returned in the late Spring of next year - if she was lucky. She turned on the television, to experience some feeling of not being irrevocably detached from the civilised world, and saw that her own part of the country had just endured the first snowfall of the Winter in a freak cold snap that had, as usual, brought the entire South of England to a grinding halt!

The Girl came downstairs early one morning and saw that the gardens were covered in snow, which was still falling, though not heavily. How amazing to have snow before Christmas, she thought. It was certainly a mercy that the Mistress had relented in the matter of the heater in her room. Without it she would surely have perished by this time. The previous ten days had been terribly cold.

The Mistress was very anxious to impress upon the Girl that her instructions as to the limited time the heater could be turned on, were not to be disregarded without impunity. One such demonstration of the Mistress's parsimony had caused her much grief. A week ago Dorothy had burst into the Girl's tiny room at one minute past Five and the heater was still on! No matter that the dutiful and obedient Girl was kneeling beside it in the very act of switching it off, the Mistress's rage had been horrible to behold.

"Wicked Girl! You have wilfully disobeyed me and will be punished."

"I am sorry, Mistress. I WAS just switching it off, though!"

The Mistress hit the Girl a stinging blow on the face, causing her mouth to bleed. She took up the heater.

"For that insolence I am removing this for two days. We shall see how you like that! Maybe when I return it to you, you will be more attentive to my instructions."

The Girl certainly had been more careful once those two torturous unheated nights were over. She had been pinched and blue with cold all night long, shivering convulsively and thinking that the sound of her chattering teeth must be audible down in the town below. The consequent lack of night-time sleep had caused her to doze off a couple of times when doing her kitchen chores, in the blessed heat of that room, thereby earning herself the usual reward for such dereliction of duty. When the heater had been finally brought back, she had been giving a vicious and lengthy strapping by the ruthless Huskisson to remind her not to be so careless again.

As she went to sleep on her first reasonably warm night for three days, her back-side on fire, she thought wistfully of all the ways she would like to be revenged on her three tormentors! Then she counted off the time she had been here already - just over four months - it seemed more like a thousand years!

The Girl had not been into the garden for more than a few minutes at a time, for a couple of weeks, now and it had been so cold that she had been gasping for breath when she had got back inside, to the obvious amusement of Jenkins and Huskisson, who on one occasion had further entertained themselves by locking the door against her and making her wait outside for a few more ghastly minutes, hopping up and down and flailing her arms to keep from freezing. Luckily, there was little do be done, now, until the Spring; and the leaves were few and far between by this time. Today the Girl would obviously not be going outside at all, or so she thought.

No sooner had she lit all the fires and made a start on the breakfast preparations than the loathsome Huskisson, accompanied by the Mistress came into the kitchen. Both were muffled from head to toe in furs. She thought they reminded her of two particularly unprepossessing gorillas she had seen in Africa, where her parents had once taken her for a never-to-be-forgotten holiday as a little girl.