Betty Neels - The Little Dragon

She stared at him blankly. “Yes, I did,” and added quickly, “we all did.”

“You passport has been found. The police telephoned this morning…. You’ll have it back very shortly.”

She was conscious of bitter disappointment because now she was free to go back to England, back to her lonely life. She faltered, “Oh, good.”

“Excellent.” Jeroen was leaning over the end of the bed, watching her while she fiddled with the sheets. “Now you can go back to England.”

“So I can.” Her voice was very bright.

“But I’d like you to come back here, Constantia—it has occurred to me that it might be a very good idea if we were to marry.”

Romance readers around the world were sad to note the passing of BETTY NEELS in June 2001. Her career spanned thirty years, and she continued to write into her ninetieth year. To her millions of fans, Betty epitomized the romance writer, and yet she began writing almost by accident. She had retired from nursing, but her inquiring mind still sought stimulation. Her new career was born when she heard a lady in her local library bemoaning the lack of good romance novels. Betty’s first book, Sister Peters in Amsterdam, was published in 1969, and she eventually completed 134 books. Her novels offer a reassuring warmth that was very much a part of her own personality. She was a wonderful writer, and she will be greatly missed. Her spirit and genuine talent will live on in all her stories.

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

IT WAS starting to snow; the feathery flakes fell soundlessly in a kind of slow motion, turning the old-fashioned gabled houses lining the canal into a painting by Pieter de Hoogh.

The girl at the window stood quietly, staring down at the people in the streets below as they bustled to and fro over the narrow arched bridge in front of the house, intent on getting home before the weather worsened. She was a pretty girl, small and slim with nut-brown hair and wide grey eyes heavily fringed. Her nose turned up the merest trifle and her mouth was too wide, although it curved enchantingly. She looked happy too, which was surprising, for Constantia Morley, twenty-six years old and an orphan for twenty of those years, hadn’t a great deal to be happy about.

She had been brought up by an aunt, unmarried and straitlaced, who had tried in vain to make Constantia straitlaced too and quite failed; but she had been kind to her niece after her fashion, and educated her well and raised no objection when Constantia evinced a desire to become a nurse. She had died a year after her niece had taken her finals, and because she had overlooked the fact that the will she had made many years earlier held no provision for Constantia, she had left her nothing at all. The modest amount she had left went to various charities, and the house to some distant relation Constantia had never heard of, who, taking possession of it with almost indecent haste, couldn’t wait to show Constantia the door.

From then on Constantia had lived at the hospital where she worked, on the fringe of London, with plenty of friends with whom to spend her free time but no home or family to visit. But she wasn’t sorry for herself; self-pity wasn’t going to help her to make her way in life, and if she were lucky one day she would marry and have a family of her own. Indeed, she had had several proposals during the last few years, but although she had liked the proposers well enough, none of them had swept her off her feet, and she wanted to be swept off her feet…

By the time she had reached her twenty-sixth birthday she was beginning to wonder if she was expecting too much of life, and egged on by a restlessness she couldn’t understand, she gave up her post as Sister on the medical wards, and went into private nursing. She had been told at the time that it wasn’t the life for her; she was a good nurse and used to hard work and the pressures of a busy ward; she would be bored. But she hadn’t been bored, although she was willing to concede the fact that life wasn’t all roses.

She had had a variety of patients during the last six months, spending the first few weeks in a Scottish castle miles from anywhere, followed by a mercifully brief period in a remote Welsh cottage with no telephone, a very sick patient and only a deaf old woman for company. Then there had been a wholesale grocer in the Midlands who worried unceasingly about his money, and then a small spoilt girl in Bournemouth and a charming old lady in a London flat. And now here she was in Holland with what she had to admit was the worst patient of the lot.

She turned away from the window at last; her sharp eyes had seen Doctor Sperling’s Renault coming over the bridge. He would be at the house in a few moments now and she must go down and meet him in the hall. It was one of her patient’s little foibles that Constantia should always be waiting for the doctor; she had to wear uniform too, which, when she considered how little nursing there was to do, seemed ridiculous. She suspected that she was a prestige symbol and that her cap and apron were needed to substantiate her patient’s boasting.

She reached the dark hall just as Nel, the elderly maid, opened the door and the doctor entered.

He was a man of middle age, tall and balding and, Constantia had to admit, as fussy as an old woman. He greeted her with a condescension which made her grit her small even teeth, remarked on the inclemency of the weather: ‘It is, after all, the last day of February,’ he informed her in the manner of someone handing out vital information, and then, divested of his coat and hat: ‘You will lead the way to your patient, nurse?’

He had said that each day for just over a week and she had answered, just as she had done each time he came, ‘Of course, Doctor,’ and led the way upstairs again to her patient’s room.

Mrs Dowling was lying on a day bed drawn up to the old-fashioned stove. She was a thin woman, made even thinner by the diet she had insisted upon keeping to until it was discovered that she was a diabetic. Her hair was grey, curly and short and her features strong, with a perpetual expression of annoyance upon them. Her voice was loud, penetrating and bossy.

She responded to the doctor’s greeting with a languid nod and broke at once into complaint. ‘You really must explain to Nurse, Doctor Sperling, that I am quite capable of compiling my own diet.’ She didn’t look at Constantia as she spoke, indeed she could have been invisible. ‘And you must do something about my headaches.’

Doctor Sperling put his fingertips together and looked wise. He said, in almost perfect English: ‘Dear lady, your condition, unless controlled by insulin, would be cause of those headaches. You must allow me to guide you in the matter. I will discuss your diet with Nurse and see what alternatives there are to the diet I prescribed. And now you must tell me how you feel today, Mrs Dowling.’