Sara Craven - Strange Adventure

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Former journalist SARA CRAVENpublished her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.

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TITLE PAGE Strange Adventure Sara Craven www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Former journalist SARA CRAVEN published her first novel ‘Garden of Dreams’ for Mills & Boon in 1975. Apart from her writing (naturally!) her passions include reading, bridge, Italian cities, Greek islands, the French language and countryside, and her rescue Jack Russell/cross Button. She has appeared on several TV quiz shows and in 1997 became UK TV Mastermind champion. She lives near her family in Warwickshire – Shakespeare country.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

ENDPAGE Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

COPYRIGHT Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

THE last triumphant chords of the sonata died a lingering death, as Lacey stayed her fingers on the piano keys, savouring their harmony.

For a moment she sat motionless as silence surged back into the small room set aside for music practice at the convent of Our Lady of Grace, then with an impatient movement she thrust back under her Alice band the long lock of silver-gilt hair which had come loose while she gave herself to her music. She was thankful that Sister Thérèse had not been within earshot of this particular performance. Too much passion, too much feeling and too little technique would have been her verdict.

She got up from the piano stool and walked across to the square-paned window that overlooked a small corner of the convent garden and the high wall that surrounded it.

She thought, as she had begun to think so often in those long months since her seventeenth birthday, ‘I could be safe here always.’ And, as before, she noted ironically that she had said ‘safe’ and not ‘happy’.

To the other girls at this convent boarding school, it would have seemed incredible that Lacey Vernon, cherished only daughter of an English merchant banker, could possibly lack any kind of security. Lacey could see a dim reflection of herself in the wintry panes. The dark blue dress with its decorously fashionable length and neat white collar. The dark band holding the smooth, shining fall of hair hanging below her shoulders.

Alice in nowhere land, since … Since when?

Since that terrible day at the Conservatoire when the so-eminent professor had dismissed kindly but quite finally her hardly expressed hope to become a concert pianist?

‘A charming talent—but not the steel, the fire that takes one to the top. For that one requires a special genius which few possess. Which you, ma soeur ,’ he threw a darkling look at Sister Thérèse, quietly self-contained in her dark habit, ‘might have possessed, had it not been for this—calling of yours.

‘But for you, my child.’ He laid a hand for an instant on the bowed fair head. ‘I must speak the truth. Look at that little hand. It can span an octave at the most. For many of the great works, more facility would be needed. Content yourself that you will always play better than most of those you will meet, and leave the concert platform for those with the strength to bear its demands.’

She had not cried. The nuns would have deplored such an unseemly display of emotion. Even Sister Thérèse had not shown a flicker of reaction to this crushing of the hopes of her star pupil—or even regret for the career that might have been hers, Lacey recalled wryly. All she had said on the long drive back to the convent had been, ‘It is God’s will, my child.’

Lacey had often wished since that she could achieve that kind of acceptance. It had been hard not to rebel when she had written to ask her father if she could opt for the commercial training offered to the older pupils instead of the more usual course in the higher flights of home economics designed to prepare the majority of the girls for the day when they became wives and hostesses. But the reply from home had been as unexpected as it was unwelcome. There were no plans, ran her father’s letter, for her to be employed in a secretarial capacity in his firm, or any other, for that matter, and any such training would be a complete waste of time. She would please him far better if she concentrated on the domestic side of the course in her last months at the convent as Michelle would no doubt be glad of some help with the entertaining.