Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman Read Free

flourish upon their solitude, and a plump young nurse put her head out into the hall. “My, my!” she said, with that rallying brightness which is almost an occupational hazard in her profession. “Two of us here before time! We
are
eager to help, aren’t we?”
    “Yes, aren’t we?” said Kitty like a meek echo, dragging her eyes away from Dominic’s before the giggles could overwhelm them both.
    “If you’d like to get it over with, folks, you can come in now.”
    They went in to the sacrifice together. A row of narrow camp-beds and two attendant nymphs waited for them expectantly, and an older nurse shuffled documents upon a small table, and peered up at them over rimless glasses.
    “Good evening!” she said briskly. “Names?” But she beamed at Kitty and didn’t wait for an answer. “Oh, yes, of course!” she said, ticking off one of the names in her list. “This is a very nice gesture you’re making, we do appreciate it, my dear. It does me good to see you young people setting an example.”
    She was being very matey indeed, Dominic thought, evidently Kitty was really somebody; but then, a girl who drove a Karmann-Ghia was bound to be somebody. But if only the old battle-axe had let her give her name! He tried to read the list upside down, and was jerked out of his stride as the blue-grey eyes, bright and knowing, pin-pointed him and sharpened into close attention. “Name, please?”
    He gave it. She looked down her list, but very rapidly, because she was only verifying what she already knew. “I haven’t got your name here, apparently we weren’t expecting you.” She looked him up and down, and the hard, experienced face broke into a broad and indulgent smile.
    “No, I just came in—” he was beginning, but she wagged an admonishing finger at him and rode over him in a loud, friendly, confident voice which stated positively: “
You’re
never eighteen, ducky! Don’t you know the regulations?”
    “I’m sixteen,” he said, very much on his dignity, and hating her for being too perceptive, and still more for trumpeting her discoveries like a town-crier. She had made eighteen sound so juvenile that sixteen now sounded like admitting to drooling infancy, and his position was still further undermined by the unacknowledged fact that he had been sixteen for precisely one week. This formidable woman was perfectly capable of looking at him and deducing that detail to add to her score, “I thought it was from sixteen to sixty,” he said uncomfortably.
    “It’s from eighteen to sixty-five, my dear, but bless you for a good try. We can’t take children, they need all their strength for growing. You run along home and come back in a couple of years’ time, and we’ll be glad to see you. But we shall still need your parents’ consent, mind.”
    The younger nurse was giggling. Even Kitty must be smiling at him under cover of the gleaming curtain of her hair. Not unkindly, he had sense enough to know that, but that didn’t make the gall of his humiliation any less bitter. And he really had thought the minimum age was sixteen. He could have sworn it was.
    “Are you
sure
? It
used
to be sixteen, didn’t it?”
    She shook her head, smiling broadly. “I’m sorry, love! Always eighteen since I’ve been in the service. Never mind, being too young is something time will cure, you know.”
    There was absolutely nothing he could do about it, except go. Kitty craned round the nurse’s shoulder from her campbed and saw him turn towards the door, crushed and silent. The old fool needn’t have bellowed at him like that. The poor kid was so mortified he wasn’t even going to say good-bye.
    “Hey, don’t go!” said Kitty plaintively after his departing back. “Wait for me, and I’ll give you a lift.” She made it as near a child’s wail for company as she decently could, to restore him to a good conceit of himself, and threw in the bribe to take his mind off his injuries, and the sudden reviving