The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

Author:Helen Simonson [Simonson, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Sitting on a chair he had dragged into the sun, Harris closed his eyes and tried to ignore the throbbing in his left leg. It had not been hard to keep up with Jock. The man suffered a combination of hangover and withdrawal that caused him to stumble often, to occasionally stop and blink hard to recover his vision, and once or twice to bend over gasping for air and clutching at his chest. Harris had taken the lead, stepping carefully but swinging his stick at a good pace. Leading the way, he had offered one or two words of manly motivation. Jock returned the favor by pushing him along with a robust profusion of profanities. All in all, he had enjoyed the walk out, following the gentle slope of the fields down towards the Morris estate and the distant Hazelbourne airfield. It was the walk back that did the damage. The hill might have looked slight but soon the two of them were finding reason to pause. The rolling land seemed to tip ever upward on a new axis, as grueling as an alpine pass, and by the time they regained the barn, Harris found himself as sweaty and out of breath as Jock. Unwilling to admit he could go no further, he had sent Jock in to take a bath.

His sister arrived in a cloud of dust and Harris could see Constance Haverhill in the sidecar, along with a large hamper and his Gladstone bag. Mortified by his disheveled appearance, he levered his way upright, one set of joints at a time, and hastily tucked in his shirt. He was conscious of being rumpled and possibly odorous. Jock strolled out of the barn, nonchalant in a somewhat cleaner change of clothes, with wet-combed hair and smelling of soap.

“You might want to see to your collar stud, Captain,” said Jock. “The ladies are quick to draw the worst conclusions about a man.”

“You bear complete responsibility for my disheveled looks,” said Harris, fishing about to reattach his collar and wondering who decided it was necessary to make men’s studs fit only the narrow-fingered dexterity of a child. “The smell of carbolic won’t let you off the hook, I can assure you.”

“I’m not here to be charming,” said Jock. “I didnae ask to be here.”

“But they come bearing breakfast, so perhaps a veneer of politeness just until we’ve got a plate of bacon in hand?”

Poppy seemed nervous. She was usually quite bossy, but this morning there was a layer of anxious feminine fussing that seemed to Constance to be quite foreign. She hovered over the carrying in of the hamper and worried over the contents of the bag she had packed for Harris. And she proposed to make breakfast herself as if the domestic sphere were quite normal to her. Her brother laughed out loud.

“Dear me, I fear you are to be punished now, Jock,” he said. “My sister is to torture us by murdering our breakfast.”

“Do go and change, Harris,” said Poppy.

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