Ship's Surgeon Read Free Page A

the dock. He was fair and red-faced, around forty and expensively tailored, and at the moment he was alone at a table and looking sideways, towards the ocean. Head bent, she passed on, and walked down to her cabin. She opened the door, blinked in the dimness and drew a sharp dry breath.
    A woman in blue sat on her bed leafing through a magazine. Kristin. The long regular features smiled slightly, the afternoon light slanting through the porthole burnished the dark head so that it was a tiny pool of brilliance in the shadowed box of a room.
    “Surprised?” asked the quiet yet metallic tones that Pat would never forget.
    “Not ... entirely. I knew you were aboard.”
    “Really?” with a faint frown. “You haven’t mentioned it to anyone?”
    “I tried not to believe it.”
    “Why should you do that? We’re not enemies, Pat.” The old spell began to exert itself. A dark spell, that made Pat feel very young, quite stupid and totally unable to deal with this woman who had insinuated herself into Richard Fenley’s heart when he was thirty-eight and she twenty-six. Pat had been ten years old when Kristin came into the house, and from their first meeting she had been attracted and repelled by the woman. At twenty-six Kristin had not been nearly so beautiful as she was now; she had been white and ill-looking and so grateful to the man who had fallen in love with her that she could gladly accept a stepdaughter. Pat had never learned how her father had met Kristin, but as she grew older she realized how it might have happened. A lonely man; a young woman more or less alone in the world who had accidentally come into his life and caught at his heart.
    The change in Kristin had begun almost imperceptibly, soon after the twins had arrived. Kristin hadn’t wanted even one child, let alone two, but she was quick to make capital of the fact that her husband adored them. How fortunate that Pat was there, growing up now and able to look after the brats. Kristin could get out as often as she wished, she could even take a job, modelling for a Kensington store.
    Blithely, Pat had taken charge of the babies; soft, darling babies, especially the one with a squint who always looked cross while possessing the most even of temperaments. In those days, Pat would have done anything for Kristin, who dressed more and more simply and exquisitely, and who dropped a hint one day that she was earning almost as much as Daddy. But only Kristin benefited from her earnings.
    There came a grim period which had puzzled and frightened Pat. Sharp words between husband and wife, long silences; then a demand that Kristin give up working and settle back into the home. And in no time at all after that Kristin had left the house. “For a break from us,” Pat’s father had told her. “She’s tired.” Then that brief return, a patching-up while, covertly, she was amassing all the cash she could.
    Pat steeled herself. “We’re not friends, either,” she said now. “Why are you on the Walhara ?”
    “Because you are, my dear. I had no intention of taking a sea-trip till I visited the shipping offices with Vernon Corey. A travel agent is not good enough for Vernon; he always goes to the shipping company’s offices to make sure that he’s given the stateroom he’s stipulated. He also likes to look at the passenger list. That’s how I learned you were to sail in this ship, though at first I thought the name was merely a coincidence. But my enquiries proved that it wasn’t.”
    “And you actually booked a passage because of me?”
    “I was going by air, in time to meet Vernon in Fremantle, but I decided to change my plans. If I could have persuaded Vernon to postpone his departure till the next ship I’d certainly have done so.” She lifted her shoulders. “He’s a coward—terrified of air travel—so I was caught.”
    Pat’s fingers pressed her eyelids, fleetingly. “Who is this Vernon Corey?”
    “My fiancé. We’re getting married after