Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear Read Free Book Online Page A

have to tread with care, for she knew that in her desire to be of service to men she considered to be the giants of her childhood, it would be easy to interpret the inexplicable as something more insidious.
    She remembered once asking her father how it could be that Eddie’s presence calmed an intemperate horse.
    “Well, Maisie, there’s them who reckon it’s on account of him being born in the stables, and his mother having to take him to work with her when he was just a baby. It was as if he knew he’d have to be quiet around them right from the beginning, or she would’ve lost her job. But later on, I thought about it and I reckoned it was to do with the horses themselves. You see, they don’t think about yesterday, or what’s happening tomorrow, they just want to know what happens right now and if they’ll be safe, looked after. And Eddie was like that too—he’d forgotten a lot of yesterday by the time today rolled around, and he didn’t take on tomorrow before it got here, so they were the same—they took it all as it came, and when he was with them, they knew his mind wasn’t anywhere else. I’ve always thought that calms a horse, if they know you’re right there with them.”
    Despite Eddie’s shyness, he’d always had a hail-fellow-well-met attitude about him; he trusted people. Indeed, it was as if to mistrust would take more from him than he could give; so he carried with him an innocence, a simplicity found in young children. If he had changed in the past month, then something had happened to damage that innocence, and along with it the gift of being able to meet the next moment as if the last had not happened.
    D arling, are you there?”
    “Just a minute.” Maisie stepped out of the bathtub, toweled her body, and slipped into a deep-blue dressing gown.
    “Hello, darling. I’ve missed you.” James stood in the doorway, then came to take her in his arms. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had one of those days.”
    “Me too. I told Simmonds that we’d dine about eight and have drinks about half past seven—how does that sound?”
    “Nothing too formal, I hope.”
    “If you didn’t want formal, James, you shouldn’t have taken on staff and a butler.”
    “I know—I didn’t realize how much I was getting used to quiet suppers at your flat or a visit to Bertorelli’s.”
    It was over a supper of roast lamb with mint sauce, Jersey Royal potatoes, and green beans, that Maisie asked James about John Otterburn.
    “Otterburn? Of course I know him. I don’t see him regularly, but we keep in touch. In fact, funny you should mention him—look here, an invitation arrived today. The Otterburns are having a supper do at their London house. I was going to send apologies, but, well, would you like to go?”
    James knew Maisie did not care for suppers with London “society,” though at the same time, she had been trying to get used to the fact that such occasions were an important part of his business calendar.
    “Yes, I think I would like to go. Who else might be there?”
    “Not sure, probably a government minister or two, some authors, newspapermen. You never know with Otterburn. He likes to put the cat among the pigeons sometimes.”
    “Do you like him?”
    “I do quite like him, actually. He’s a formidable businessman and he has a real knack of being in the right place at the right time—good at procuring businesses, people, and things to make the people and the businesses work very well together.”
    “Did he inherit his company?”
    “His father was a newspaperman who went on to buy the local paper in the town where they lived, somewhere just outside Toronto, I think. John inherited as a young man, then he made the paper turn a profit in a very short time—and sold up in pretty short order. He took the proceeds and came here, to London, though his first newspaper purchase was in the West Country. Then he sort of moved around like one of those newfangled Hoovers that the