Chapter 3

The picnic lunch took up about fifteen minutes. Gwen seemed inclined to chat for ever and ever and infuriatingly appeared to be utterly oblivious to Harry's growing discomfort. The poor girl longed to be able to get back toher hard work and summon up some body heat before she froze solid. Not before time, Gwendoline got to her feet and haughtily ordered her latest servant to get back to work. Her affability of the past few minutes was frostily banished as if it had never been...

"If you do well this afternoon, I may have a special present for you this evening. Now get on with it and don't disappoint me, Harriet. You've made a very poor start and I'm not at all pleased with you."

The imperious buttocks wiggled their way back to the house. Harriet looked at the departing form and felt deflated and shamed.

"How can I work harder than I already have?", she thought in the uttermost depths of despair. OPur red haired musclewoman longed desperately to please Gwendoline, but she was close to confessing that she would ever be able to.

Jenkins came out and took away the picnic equipment and Harry looked up from her labours and thanked him with a frozen shivering smile and he gave her a look of pitying contempt.

"Mad as hatters this pair - mad as hatters", he mumbled to himself as he made his way back to the warmth of his kitchen.

The afternoon became steadily colder and even though Harry redoubled her efforts to try to stave off the bone-chilling cold which was bit by bit taking over her body, the arctic weather was gradually winning. It felt like ten below after a few hours. The pain in her fingers spread up her hands and then to her wrists and then up her arms. When she was once more approached by Gwendoline, she felt immense relief that the testing first day was over. She reckoned without the hard-hearted Gwen!

"Very good, Harry! You're beginning to get a bit of rhythm into it. I've decided I'll help out for a while - we can still see a bit now that the sky is so clear and the moon is coming up. And I've put on all the lights on on the terrace. Let's get started! Isn't this fun, Harry old thing?"

"Great fun, Gwen. I wouldn't have missed this for anything" She replied sarcastically. Gwen either did not notice the sarcasm in her voice or did not choose to notice. She picked up a pick-axe and expertly drove it into the ground, making it look so easy that Harry felt more inadequately wretched than ever.

And so the hope of warmth was once more deferred for this pain-racked and frozen girl. She recollected that she had a few days earlier been lazily stretched out on a sofa warming herself by the fire, a glass of wine in her hand, reading her horoscope (Nothing in it about this!). Why ever did she let this wretched sadistic madwoman do this to her?

The answer to that, she admitted was that she knew deep inside that this ordeal was just the thing she needed. She had been getting too soft after her return from the journey and much of that remarkable hardihood she had painfully acquired and been so proud of had been lost. Now the process of her hardening-up once more had begun, and with a vengeance! With this thought she vowed she would endure this trial and surive. Harriet threw herself again heart and soul into the work, re-invigorated by having Gwendoline toiling away at her side. Amazingly she half kept the cold from overcoming her, although every second was sheer torture to her frozen hands and feet. And she started to wield the pick-axe so effectivley that even that hyper -critical taskmistress Gwen was moved to congratulate her.

At long last, Gwen tired of the work and the two girls ambled back to the house arms around each others' waists, tired and frozen, but happy to be together again.

Once they were in the lounge and preparing to sink into a soft warm sofa, Gwen went over to the drinks cabinet. She came back with a bottle and two large brandy glasses.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have been so hard on you on your first day. Have a nice brandy, Harriet - you look terrible! This is the present I was talking about - very old cognac indeed!"

Harriet knew what a fine brandy it was and tried to savour the bouquet, but she was so in need of its fiery warmth that she swallowed the precious fluid down in a single gulp, gasping as its life giving heat passed down her throat and diffused itself through her chilled body. Gwen quickly refilled Harry's glass and poured some for herself. She took a mouthful and pressed her opened lips against her friend's sweet, generous mouth and they shared the same measure of the liquid gold passing it back and forth from mouth to mouth feeling the wonderful aroma pass up into their nostrils. Finally they separated, brandy and saliva trickling down their chins and Harry said, after licking brandy from Gwen's mouth, "Yes, you were absolutely right to be hard on me, Gwen. That was just the shock therapy I needed after my late gross laziness. Thanks for calling me yesterday - a few more weeks of idleness and I'd have become a hopeless slob!"

Gwen loooked narrowly at her dear friend and inwardly agreed. Harry's body had lost a lot of its former superb tone. That healthy glow she had acquired in the autumn had completely gone. She hardened her heart against the girl and resolved to put her through as gruelling a time as she could devise, ratcheting up the arduousness of the work and the cold and the discomfort each day. She would drive Harriet into building that longed for super-woman physique and maybe develop something similar of her own at the same time!