Nurse with a Dream by Norrey Ford Page A

deuce do you mean by climbing Black Crag alone when I’d told you it was dangerous?”
    Jacky gaped with astonishment and indignation. He sounded so angry. Before she could answer he turned on Liz. “Don’t stand there breathing down my neck, Nurse.” Liz went scarlet, as if her collar were too tight. She, too, melted away. The man turned to Jacky. “Well?”
    “Don’t shout at me,” she said crossly. “It makes my head ache. You won’t make my memory come back by yelling at me. All I have to say is that I’m certain I didn’t climb your old Black Crag by myself, and I’m certain I didn’t fall off it.”
    “But you left me a note, to say you were going to attempt it. That’s why I was there so soon. If you hadn’t left the note, you might have been dead of exposure by the time we found you. It all tied up with what you said to your cousin, about ‘you couldn’t wait to see it’. He thought you’d gone to the Bubbling Well.”
    Jacqueline knew she was going to do one of two things—cry or lose her temper. Why didn’t someone explain to her, instead of shouting and bullying like this, and jabbering a lot of nonsense she didn’t understand?
    She lost her temper. “Listen—I’m not such a fool as to climb a crag I don’t know, and alone, if it’s dangerous. That’s a fool’s trick and I know enough not to try it. I hate rock-climbing, anyway—and if the wretched thing is as dangerous as you say, why wasn’t I killed, or at any rate more seriously injured? Dr. Parsons says I haven’t broken anything. My arms were badly scratched; why weren’t they broken?”
    He tilted his chair back dangerously on two legs. “But I found you unconscious at the foot of the crag. How did you get there, if you didn’t fall from it? The scratches”—he shrugged—“that’s obvious—the heather did that.”
    She said in a low, angry voice, “Has it occurred to you that I didn’t necessarily fall from the rock? No, it hasn’t! Has it occurred to anyone that I’m more anxious than anybody to know what happened? I’ve lost a whole weekend of my life, and I want to know where it is.” Her lips trembled and for a moment she could not speak. There was a troublesome lump in her throat. She thought she heard a strangled sort of yelp from under Bridget’s sheet, but was too busy groping for a handkerchief to glance across the room.
    A large handkerchief was pushed into her hand. “No, it hasn’t occurred to us,” her visitor said gently. “We’ve been too worried about ourselves and how the hospital would come out of this. We never considered your point of view.”
    The change of voice caught her attention. She stared at him a long moment, while a shaming blush started in her throat and spread slowly up to the roots of her hair. She pressed the cool linen to her burning cheeks. “It can’t be!” she murmured, though she had no real doubt.
    This was the man in her dream, and to make her even more certain, she saw the tiny scar near his chin. Was the dream true, then? Had he carried her so gently in his arms, her head on his shoulder?
    He leaned forward. “You recognise me, don’t you?”
    “I—I think so.”
    “Good, good. We were together at the Moor Hen Inn on Saturday. Then you collected your luggage, leaving a note in my room saying you thought Black Crag would be fun. So Lance and I struck across country for Black Crag, expecting to get there in time to scold you for being such an ass. Instead we found you unconscious at the foot. And jolly lucky for you we did.”
    “Did you—pick me up?”
    “Certainly I did. You opened your eyes, took one look at me and went off again. Lance went to fetch a stretcher and telephone for an ambulance. He met your cousin in his jeep, half frantic with worry. He’d come to make up a search party. He’d been to the Bubbling Well to look for you.”
    “Bubbling Well? Give me time and it will all sink in. My cousin—did I go to Timberfold?”
    “That’s