Rags To Riches: Her Duty To Please. Michelle Douglas

the car. Is Humphrey coming with us?’

      ‘Yes, he’ll sit at the back with the boys.’

      The boys needed no urging to eat their breakfast, and a few minutes after eight o’clock they were all in the car, with Bas at the door waving them away.

      The doctor took the motorway to Amsterdam and then north to Purmerend and Hoorn and so on to the Afsluitdijk.

      ‘A pity we have no time to stop and look at some of the towns we are passing,’ he observed to Araminta. ‘Perhaps some other time…’

      There wasn’t likely to be another time, she reflected, and thrust the thought aside; she was going to enjoy the day and forget everything else. She had told herself sensibly that she must forget about Piet van Vleet. She hadn’t been in love with him, but she had been hurt, and was taken by surprise and she was still getting over that. But today’s outing was an unexpected treat and she was going to enjoy every minute of it.

      Once off the dijk the doctor took the road to Leeuwarden and, just past Franeker, took a narrow country road leading south of the city. It ran through farm land: wide fields intersected by narrow canals, grazed by cows and horses. There were prosperous-looking farmhouses and an occasional village.

      ‘It’s not at all like the country round Utrecht.’

      ‘No. One has the feeling of wide open spaces here, which in a country as small as Holland seems a solecism. You like it?’

      ‘Yes, very much.’

      He drove on without speaking, and when the road curved through a small copse and emerged on the further side, she could see a lake.

      It stretched into the distance, bordered by trees and shrubs. There was a canal running beside it and a narrow waterway leading to a smaller lake. There were sailing boats of every description on it and, here and there, men fishing from its banks, sitting like statues.

      The boys were excited now, begging her to look at first one thing, then another. ‘Isn’t it great?’ they wanted to know. ‘And it gets better and better. Aren’t you glad you came, Mintie?’

      She assured them that she was, quite truthfully.

      There were houses here and there on the lake’s bank, each with its own small jetty, most of them with boats moored there. She didn’t like to ask if they were almost there, but she did hope that it might be one of these houses, sitting four-square and solid among the sheltering trees around it.

      The doctor turned the car into a narrow brick lane beside a narrow inlet, slowed to go through an open gateway and stopped before a white-walled house with a gabled roof. It had a small square tower to one side and tall chimneys, and it was surrounded by a formal garden. The windows were small, with painted shutters. It was an old house, lovingly maintained, and she could hardly wait to see what it was like inside.

      The entrance was at the foot of the tower and led into a small lobby which, in turn, opened into a long wide hall. As they went in two people came to meet them. They were elderly, the man tall and spare, with white hair and still handsome, and the woman with him short and rather stout, with hair which had once been fair and was now silver. In her youth she might have been pretty, and she had beautiful eyes, large and blue with finely marked eyebrows. She was dressed in a tweed skirt and a cashmere twinset in a blue to match her eyes. When she spoke her voice was rather high and very clear.

      ‘Marcus—you’re here. I told Bep we would answer the door; she’s getting deaf, poor dear.’ She stood on tiptoe to receive Marcus’s kiss on her cheek and then bent to hug the boys.

      ‘And this is Miss Pomfrey,’ said the doctor, and the little lady beamed and clasped Araminta’s hand.

      ‘You see I speak English, because I am sure you have no time to speak our language, and it is good practice for me.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘We are so glad to meet you, Miss Pomfrey, now you must meet my husband…’

      The two men had been greeting each other while the boys stood one each side of them, but now her host came to her and shook her hand.

      ‘You are most welcome, Miss Pomfrey. I hear from Marcus that you are a valued member of his household.’

      ‘Thank you. Well, yes, just for a few weeks.’ She smiled up into his elderly face and liked him.

      He stared back at her and then nodded his head. She wondered what he was thinking, and then forgot about it as his wife reminded them that coffee was waiting for them in the drawing room. Araminta, offered a seat by her hostess, saw that the doctor had the two boys with him and his uncle and relaxed.

      ‘Of course, Marcus did not tell you our name? He is such a clever man, with that nose of his always in his books, and yet he forgets the simplest things. I am his mother’s sister—of course, you know that his parents are dead, some years ago now—our name is Nos-Wieringa. My husband was born and brought up in this house and we seldom leave it. But we love to see the family when they come to Holland. You have met the boys’ mother?’

      Araminta said that, yes, she had.

      ‘And you, my dear? Do you have any brothers and sisters and parents?’

      ‘Parents. No brothers or sisters. I wish I had.’

      ‘A family is important. Marcus is the eldest, of course, and he has two younger brothers and Lucy. Of course you know she lives in England now that she is married, and the two boys are both doctors; one is in Canada and the other in New Zealand. They should be back shortly—some kind of exchange posts.’

      Mevrouw Nos-Wieringa paused for breath and Araminta reflected that she had learned more about the doctor in five minutes than in the weeks she had been working for him.

      Coffee drunk, the men took the boys down to the home farm, a little distance from the house. There were some very young calves there, explained the doctor, and one of the big shire horses had had a foal.

      ‘And I will show you the house,’ said Mevrouw Nos-Wieringa. ‘It is very old but we do not wish to alter it. We have central heating and plumbing and electricity, of course, but they are all concealed as far as possible. You like old houses?’

      ‘Yes, I do. My parents live in quite a small house,’ said Araminta, anxious not to sail under false pretences. ‘It is quite old, early nineteenth-century, but this house is far older than that, isn’t it?’

      ‘Part of it is thirteenth-century, the rest seventeenth-century. An ancestor made a great deal of money in the Dutch East Indies and rebuilt the older part.’

      The rooms were large and lofty, with vast oak beams and white walls upon which hung a great many paintings.

      ‘Ancestors?’ asked Araminta.

      ‘Yes, mine as well as my husband’s. All very alike, aren’t they? You must have noticed that Marcus has the family nose. Strangely enough, few of the women had it. His mother was rather a plain little thing—the van der Breughs tend to marry plain women. They’re a very old family, of course, and his grandfather still lives in the family home. You haven’t been there?’

      Araminta said that, no, she hadn’t, and almost added that it was most unlikely that she ever would. Seeking a change of subject, she admired a large oak pillow cupboard. She mustn’t allow her interest in the doctor to swamp common sense.

      They lunched presently, sitting at a large oak table on rather uncomfortable chairs; it was a cheerful meal, since the children were allowed to join in the conversation. As they rose from the table Mevrouw Nos-Wieringa said, ‘Now, off you go, Marcus, and take Mintie—I may call you Mintie?—with you. We will enjoy having the boys to ourselves for a while, but be back by six o’clock for the evening meal.’

      Araminta, taken by surprise, looked at the doctor. He was smiling.

      ‘Ah, yes, it slipped my memory. The boys and I decided that I should take you to Leeuwarden and give you a glimpse of it…’

      When she opened her mouth to argue,