Under a Pole Star

by Stef Penney

Genres: Historical Fiction; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Flora Mackie first crossed the Arctic Circle at the age of twelve. In 1889, the whaler's daughter from Dundee, sets out to become a scientist and explorer. She struggles to be taken seriously, but determination sees her through to head the British expedition. Geologist Jakob de Beyn joins a rival expedition, led by the furiously driven Lester Armitage. When Jakob and Flora's paths cross, it is a fateful meeting. All three become obsessed with the north; a place where violent extremes exist side by side.

Release date: November 3, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 608

Sample

Prologue

McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, 40˚0’N, 74˚35’W

April 1948

The aeroplane, a modified Douglas C-47 Skytrain, is a fat, shining cigar of aluminium, brilliant in the sun. The word Arcturus is stencilled on the fuselage in a confident upward sweep. The journalist has done his homework, but there are things he does not know: for example, that grease monkeys spent days polishing the skin, and that the name has been added especially for this trip – a celestial name deemed more heroic and appropriate than the boring clutch of numbers on its tail. The Skytrain was a bomber throughout the war, but now it is carrying an overtly peaceable cargo; there are air force men, it is true – weary-­eyed, beribboned and grizzled – but there are also scientists from several universities, a camera crew from ABC, the journalist.

The film crew takes some footage of the scientists standing by the plane. When ordered, they wave and smile, raggedly, never all at the same time. The air force men stand to attention until their commander smiles – then the rest of them relax a little, but not as much as the civilians. There is one last arrival – a special guest – a British woman of advanced years, who was known, for a time, fifty years before, as the Snow Queen.

When the old lady – white-haired, erect and rather forbidding – is introduced to the scientists, the Harvard physicist claims that his father met her many years ago and had spoken of her to his family. The Snow Queen nods and moves on, giving no indication whether she remembers the father, or was even listening to what he said. The film camera whirs, recording the handshakes. The journalist thinks that, in the resulting film, there will be a graphic of a globe, a tiny plane crawling over it, dragging a dotted line across the world. The thought thrills him.

.

At last they are ready to embark. Randall is nervous – not of the flight, not really, although it is his first – but because he wants to bag a seat next to the old lady. He has been thinking about this meeting for months. She doesn’t look at him as he sits down, but stares out of the window. He buckles himself in, opposite the oceanographer from Harvard, behind the civilian whose field of expertise no one seems quite sure of, who is engrossed in an automobile magazine. They take off with a tremendous roaring, a steep upward trajectory that drags him back in his seat. His scalp prickles. Quite quickly, the nose of Arcturus levels off, the plane swings round, and fierce sun stripes the cabin, blazing off one face after another.

.

Randall turns to his neighbour and attempts to start a conver­sation, rather hampered by the din of the engines.

‘I have some of your old press cuttings,’ he shouts.

She frowns, probably because she can’t hear a thing.

‘Your press cuttings!’ he yells.

She frowns some more.

‘It was such an exciting time. You knew everybody.’

‘Who are you?’ she asks, although they were introduced on the ground.

‘Randall Crane . . . Crane! Hi! I’ve been commissioned to write up the trip for World magazine.’

‘The journalist.’

She might as well have said, ‘A cockroach,’ or ‘A hernia.’ Something decidedly unwelcome. She looks away, through the window next to her, to where sunlight burns on a smooth field of white cloud.

‘It’s beautiful! Is this what the Arctic looks like?’ He leans towards her, eager and also moved, made almost breathless by the strength of the light, the hot blue of the sky. After the visceral experience of take-off, it feels as though they aren’t moving at all.

‘You’ve never been there.’

‘No,’ he admits, cheerfully. He can’t help grinning. He has been told he has a winning smile. ‘I can’t wait to see it. I hope you don’t mind me saying: I’ve been reading about you.’ Does she cock her ear towards him, slightly? Flattery never fails with these old birds. ‘You were a superstar. You knew all the explorers, didn’t you? Armitage, Welbourne, de Beyn and the rest? It was an amazing time. All those discoveries. You were a pioneer.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘And the . . . the controversy – I’ve always been fascinated by what happened. What was your take on it?’

He could slow down – should, probably – but he’s so full of energy; it bubbles up through him like an unstoppable spring.

‘What controversy?’

‘The Armitage–de Beyn controversy . . . The mystery over what happened to them. You knew them, didn’t you?’

‘Goodness! It’s such a long time ago. They’re all dead, except me.’ The way she says this – it is impossible to tell whether she feels satis­faction or regret. ‘What does it matter now?’

‘Doesn’t the truth matter?’ He gazes hopefully at her eyes, which avoid his, and give nothing away. ‘No one seems to know what really happened. I’d love to know what you think, as someone who was there.’

‘“What really happened”?’ She smiles, not at him, but for herself. ‘You flatter me if you think I know the truth.’

‘I’d like to know your opinion. Could I talk to you about it?’

‘It’s very noisy here.’

‘Oh, yes – not here, of course. It is noisy, isn’t it?’

.

The Snow Queen leans her head back against the seat, her eyes angled out of the window. She looks tired – but, to Randall, from his unassailable vantage point of twenty-seven years, old people always look tired. She must be – what? – seventy-seven. Older than his grandmother, Lottie. Her hair is as white as the clouds outside; her eyes, dark grey, unreadable, like boring pebbles. She wears discreet make-up, so she cares what people think. That gives him hope. He has done his homework on her, too: read her books on the north and trawled the archives for contemporary accounts. Newspaper reports from the 1890s described her as beautiful, although he found this hard to verify from the accompanying photographs – usually blurred and tiny; she tends to be one of a group of white-faced people staring at the camera, wearing hats. Lined up at the gunwale of a ship. Standing on a quay. At the front of a lecture theatre. But there was one portrait, taken when she was in her early twenties: it is a studio-based fantasy, wherein the girl known as the Snow Queen poses stiffly in front of a painted icy landscape, her round, smooth face emerging from a halo of furs, lips closed, her eyes fixed on an imaginary horizon. A thick snake of hair winds over her shoulder. Handsome, rather than beautiful, in his opinion. If Randall stared at the picture for long enough, he felt he could discern something in the wide-open eyes, but what was it? Arrogance? Ambition? Alarm? Almost any emotion, once he thought of it, could be imputed to those frozen features. Like most old portraits, it tantalised and revealed little.

In the seat next to him, the Snow Queen’s eyes are closed. He cannot see the girl she was in her face. He suspects she is not asleep. His grandmother claims never to sleep – says you dispense with the need when you get old. Randall looks around him. Some of the scientists are dozing; some reading magazines (not World magazine, he notes). He is not in the least discouraged. They have hours to go before they reach their destination.



Flora Cochrane (her name has been many things, but this is the one she will have when she dies) awakens with a jolt. She was dreaming about places and people she has not dreamt about for decades. Her mouth tingles with the remembered pressure of warm flesh. A surge of erstwhile feeling has washed through her. Years since she had such a dream. For a moment she cannot think where she is. An infernal noise hammers her brain. The surroundings are distressingly bright. Then the lissom feeling in her body evaporates, and she remembers that she is old. A juddering – ah, yes, she is on the plane. Arcturus. She looks round to see the absurdly young man next to her; he turns towards her, too quickly. She keeps her eyes unfocused as she scans the cabin, wondering if she moaned in her sleep. No one is looking at her. They couldn’t have heard her anyway.

‘We’re just coming down to Newfoundland, now.’

He leans towards her and shouts in her ear. Flora nods minutely without meeting his eye, hoping he won’t start another conversation. She would like to go to the bathroom, but doesn’t remember anyone mentioning whether there was one on board. Although she was once used to it, it is still tedious to travel in all-male company. As they descend through a layer of clouds, the plane performs a series of bumps and bounds, like a small ship in a crossing sea. All very interesting, this mode of travel. They have come over a thousand miles in just a few hours. Think of all the walking that would have entailed. Even sailing, travelling at the speed of the wind, it’s a distance that would have taken days. Now she leaves the wind far behind. It is as well she is speeding up, she thinks. At her age. The thought slots into her head: how he would have loved this. He would have laughed with delight . . .

‘What’s funny?’

The young man is smiling, tenacious. But his familiarity is less irritating than she would have thought. There is something charming and puppyish about him; perhaps it is his brown eyes, or his hair, which flops across his forehead, untamed by the pomade he uses; or his slightly buck teeth, eager to show themselves.

She shakes her head and points to her ear – the engines are roaring harder. He nods and gives her his pretty smile, biding his time.



RCAF Station, Gander, Newfoundland, 48˚57’N, 54˚36’W

They have landed at an airbase by a crooked-finger lake in Newfoundland, which, though far from luxurious, is designed to cater for women as well as men. They even rustle up a woman for her, to show her to her quarters and explain how to put on the extraordinary padded garment they expect her to wear tomorrow; it looks as though it were designed for giant babies, or lunatics. The woman, who has solid-looking hair and a smear of lipstick on her teeth, shows her how to put it on. There is a flap that zippers open and shut around the bottom, ‘For, y’know, emergencies? We recommend you practise while you’re here, to get the hang of it.’ She is tactful enough about it, but still.

‘How long is it since you were up there?’ the woman asks – someone did introduce them, but Flora has forgotten her name.

‘Oh, hundreds of years. During the last ice age.’ She smiles to show it is a joke rather than a put-down. The woman laughs, mechanically, without humour. Flora has never been good at humour. She tried it for a while, in her twenties, then gave it up. She decides to make amends. ‘I’m surprised they asked me. That there wasn’t anyone more . . . important.’

‘Not from that time. You’ve outlived them all,’ says the woman, smiling. ‘Good for you.’

Flora is annoyed.

‘You know,’ the woman goes on, ‘When I was young, I read about you and your expeditions. It was so inspiring to think that a woman could do that, even then.’

‘Well . . .’ Perhaps she has misjudged her. ‘It wasn’t easy. I’m sure it’s not easy now.’

‘No. Things changed a bit during the war, but since then, when all the men came back, we’ve kinda had to get out of the way, if you know what I mean.’

She does up the zipper with a noisy flourish. Flora isn’t sure she does know what she means, but nods.

‘Thank you. I think I can manage now.’

‘We’re having dinner in an hour. I expect you’d like to get some rest before then. If you need anything, just holler.’

As she closes the door, she finally remembers the woman’s name – Millie . . . Mindy . . . something childish like that. She is aching to lie down. Sleep. Perhaps recapture that feeling from the plane . . . Then, afterwards, maybe she will allow herself to have a cocktail. One of those sweet, deceptive things she had in New York. She stretches out on the bed with a sigh of relief.

It will be twilight for hours. The clouds have gone. The air is very clear and still. She hasn’t seen air this clean for years, but then it is years since she has been this far north. Through the window, she acknowledges the faint, familiar stars as they rise. There is Arcturus, which the Eskimos call the Old Man, Uttuqalualuk. She cannot remember the names of the people she met earlier today, but those names learnt so long ago, she has never forgotten. There, just above the horizon, is the Old Woman – Vega. The Caribou, known to others as the Great Bear. Cassiopeia: the Lamp Stand. And, just rising now, with its faint hint of red, the ghoulishly named Sikuliaqsuijuittuq – the Murdered Man.

She opens the window and leans out, inhaling the chill blue air. She cranes her neck to look for Draco, coiling around Polaris, and searches for Thuban, its once and future Pole Star. She stares until her eyes water, but it must be too early, too light, or perhaps her eyes are too tired, and she cannot find it.

.

Since she knew she was coming on the flight, she has been thinking again of that time. She closes her eyes and can see the valley spread out in front of her: duns and greens and greys; minute jewels of colour; the lake of breathtaking blue. Impossible Valley, they called it. But it was possible, if only briefly.

Recently, her old friend Poppy fell ill and Flora had managed to see her, before it was too late. Lying in bed, looking tiny and somehow both sexless and ageless, she had talked calmly about her approaching death. She believed in heaven. She knew that she would meet her sons there: reluctant soldiers, unwitting martyrs.

Flora nodded but could not in her heart agree (though who was she to say what Poppy did or did not know, or which of their beliefs was true?). She would like to believe in heaven, of course, but that has always seemed too easy, too trite; if it were true, why would one go to all this bother down here? Besides (she thought, but did not say), heaven is here on earth. She knew; she had been there.

PART ONE: A PEG, SHAPED LIKE A WHALE



Chapter 1

At sea, North Atlantic

Summer 1883

This was a list of the things that Flora stole on her first voyage. There were other items, but she only wrote down her favourites. For years, until it disappeared, she kept the peg whale as a talisman – it was carved of a pale, close-grained wood, very smooth, with the merest blunt suggestions of head, fins and tail. The eyes and blowhole were burnt in with a hot awl. It fitted beautifully in her fist. She had coveted it when she saw it in a boat-steerer’s hand, and when she found it lying in the scuppers, she pocketed it without scruple. It was forfeit, on its way back to the sea; she felt she had the right.

.

Flora Mackie was twelve when she first crossed the Arctic Circle. The previous November, her mother had died, and her father did not know what to do with his only child. He was the Dundee whaling captain, William Mackie. Flora took after him in looks and brusqueness of manner, and showed no sign of her mother’s grace. Elsa Mackie had been a pretty woman who delighted in her decorative capacity. Her husband was proud of her, but a whaling captain’s wife in Dundee – no, anywhere – had limited opportunities for displaying her charms. She had been horrified by the process of producing Flora, and was critical of the results, having a tendency to bemoan her daughter’s shortcomings: chiefly, hoydenishness and a thick waist. Before Flora could talk, Mrs Mackie had developed mysterious, lingering ailments, and left Flora’s upbringing largely to a nursemaid, Moira Adam, who was efficient, but had a heart of Doric granite. In the last weeks of Mrs Mackie’s life, after the captain had come home from a successful season in the north, he and his daughter sat together in the front room while, upstairs, Mrs Mackie consulted a succession of doctors. When she died, the widower was not so much grief-stricken as haunted by guilt – if he had stayed at home instead of leaving her for up to two years at a time, he thought, she might not have died. What if the same happened to Flora?

Other captains took their wives north, he reasoned – to himself, since he was not a man people argued with openly – so why should he not take his daughter? He had been in the Davis Strait so many times it no longer seemed to him a particularly hazardous place. People talked, although, having few friends in the town, he did not know this. He should have farmed her out to a relative, they said. He should have sent her to a boarding school, a foster home, a convent. But Captain Mackie did not know what people said, and would not have cared. He had spent most of his life on board ship, where, for the last fifteen years, he had been captain and absolute ruler under God; he was accustomed to getting his own way.

.

So, in April of 1883, Flora and her father set sail from Dundee in the whale ship Vega. No good would come of it, people muttered. What they meant by this, no one was prepared to say, but she was a young girl on a ship full of men, going to a land of ice, a sea of blood. It was unprecedented; it was immoral, in some way. It was definitely wrong.

Much of Captain Mackie’s confidence in his daughter’s safety lay in his ship. The Vega was a Dundee-built steam barque of 320 tons, from Gourlay’s shipyard, her hull reinforced with six-inch-thick oak planks. Her bows and stern were doubly reinforced – her bows were three feet thick – and twenty-four-inch-square oak beams, each cut from a single trunk, were placed athwart-ships to brace her sides against the pressure of converging ice floes. Captain Mackie, who had sailed in the seas around Greenland for the best part of thirty years, thought her the finest ship Dundee had produced. He was an owner-captain; that is to say, he owned ten sixty-fourths of the Vega, but he loved all of her, with a proprietor’s love, as well as the love a captain feels for a brave, willing boat. He had captained her for nine years, and was convinced that, in her, Flora could come to no harm. He couldn’t have placed the same confidence in some of the other ships, now – naming no names, but glancing at the aged Symmetry, not to mention Peterhead’s wicked old Fame . . .

The Vega was neither large nor beautiful – Davis Strait whalers were, on the whole, small, stout and slow – but to Flora she was marvellous: massive, dense; the weight and heft of her oak awe-inspiring. She loved the thickly varnished gunwales that she could barely see over, smooth and slightly sticky to the touch; she loved stroking the silky brasswork, rubbed to a soft, liquid gloss. When no one was looking, she straddled the enormous ice beams, unable to imagine anything that could vanquish them. And she loved her name. The rest of the fleet had names like Dee, Ravenscraig and John Hammond, so the Vega felt to Flora like a doughty wood-and-pitch ally: the sister she had never had and, in the relentlessly masculine world of the north, a female confederate she would appreciate. And, from the first time she walked up the gangway, she even liked her smell: dark and bitter, of tar, salt, coal and – faint after a winter in dock – a hint of her summertime carnage: the smell of fat, blood and death.

.

With fifty men and a girl on board, it was a crowded ship. Often she was, nominally, alone – in the cabin, when she was working on her books – but wherever she was, she could hear a full symphony of human noises. Apart from talking, shouting and occasional, quickly hushed, swearing, all day and night there were grunts, groans, farts, laughter, cries, snores and sounds less identifiable. Flora heard much cursing through the wooden walls. She pretended, if her father was around, that she couldn’t hear it – and if it was unmistakable, that she did not understand it. In that way, the ship was no different to the streets of Dundee.

Her father did his best. She shared with him the tiny great cabin, divided down the middle by a blanket that slid back and forth like a real curtain. She had a cot slung from a beam, so that it stayed more or less level while waves pitched and rolled the ship. It had lipped sides like a tray, and she swung in it,wrapped in blankets, and later on in furs, like a sausage in bacon.

While still in Crichton Street, she had heard – she was a shameless eavesdropper – all sorts of gossip about sailors which fuelled her imagination. Sailors did vague, excitingly terrible things to young girls, but on the Vega they were kind and deferential. Just in case, Flora had prepared herself with a weapon: a penknife that lived on a thong around her neck, under her chemise.

In her heart of hearts she did not believe that any harm would come to her from the crew; apart from their kindness, she knew she was not alluring, being plain and thickset, with a round, whey-coloured face and stone-grey eyes. She had learnt early in life that there were those who were caressed for their physical charm (like her mother), and those that were not; those who drew glances in the street, smiles from strangers, favours – and those who passed invisibly, like ghosts. She was used to being invisible. But it was as well to be prepared, and, in her imagination, she could be (why not?) golden-haired and fragile, with a heart-shaped face and violet eyes, like the diminutive heroine of her favourite book, Poor Miss Caroline. Never mind that she had never met anyone with violet eyes (nor, come to that, a heart-shaped face). There were nights when she swung in her cot, imagining assault from faceless assailants – imagining, too, her violent, blood-spattered response. She enjoyed these thoughts. Sometimes, rocked in the resounding darkness, she allowed herself to be overpowered. She enjoyed those thoughts, hazy though they were, also.

.

Captain Mackie ensured that Flora maintained an education of sorts. By the end of their voyage, she should have read the Bible, preferably learning the Gospels by heart, have studied the glories of God’s creation in the form of the natural world, and have an idea of All the Things That Have Occurred Up to This Point. He insisted that she keep a journal describing what she had read, proving that she understood it. He bought a number of notebooks for the purpose.

Flora stared at engravings of plants and birds. Today I studied Passiformae, she wrote in the journal entitled, What I Have Learnt, by Flora Elsa Caird Mackie. They are Perching Birds. There are very many species of them. E.g. Blackbirds. This seemed to keep her father satisfied. She worked her way through A Child’s History of the World, and thus knew that history started with the Egyptians, followed by the Greeks and the Romans. Then there was Jesus, after which, things went downhill. A Child’s History was tantalising but vague. She had the impression that history got more boring the nearer it came to the present day. By their own century, long gone were gladiators, embalmed cats and cups of hemlock, replaced by monarchs who no longer wanted to murder each other, ever-increasing agricultural yields and the spinning jenny. Flora was disappointed. She longed to know more: how exactly did gladiators kill each other? How could a Pharaoh marry his sister? What did hemlock taste like and how long did it take to die? (Did you vomit, suffocate or bleed to death?) On these subjects, and much else of real interest, A Child’s History was mute.

.

On the second day out of Stromness, Flora took another of the notebooks, and paused for a time before opening it. She was thinking about the groaning she had heard on the other side of the bulkhead the previous night. Her father slept, snoring quietly. She had been obscurely afraid, wondering if the man was ill, but fearing, in a way that she could not identify, that he was not. She did not sleep for the rest of the night.

She did not write anything on the cover of this notebook, but opened it at the back page and started to scribble in tiny, terrible writing. Perhaps she did this because, in a place where privacy and solitude were illusory or impossible, Flora had a need for secrets. So, on the day she had breezed through the order of passerines, read a chapter about the Greeks and skimmed through part of Matthew’s Gospel, she took the nameless diary and wrote, I don’t like birds. They don’t have fur and I don’t like the way they look at me. The only birds she saw now were the gulls (definitely not passerines) that landed on the ship’s rail – you could argue that they perched there, but somehow not in a way that counted – and stared at her with glassy, impudent eyes.



The Vega’s officers – harpooners, boat-steerers and line managers – were all from Dundee and the Fife towns – Cellardyke, Pittenweem, St Monance; but the oarsmen were Orkadians. Out of fifty men on board, eleven were called John, seven Robert. Flora made friends with the youngest Robert – a first-voyage apprentice from Dundee, called Robert Avas. Robert was a year older but some inches shorter than Flora. He had the white, pinched-faced look common to children from the fish market, but an irrepressibly sweet nature and boundless enthusiasm. He had never heard of the Egyptians, and thought that Newcastle was the capital of London. Flora was mightily impressed by such ignorance.

‘I could teach you to read,’ she said, when they had known each other a week.

‘Read? For why?’ he asked, grinning.

‘So . . .’ Flora was taken aback. ‘So that you could read.’

‘What would I read?’ he asked, genuinely curious.

She paused, wondered what would hold the most appeal. ‘Well . . . newspapers.’

‘Ach, they’re fu’ o’ nonsense.’

She shrugged. ‘Stories. About sailors . . .’

‘I reckon I’ll get to know enough about them as it is.’

A tremendous noise broke over them like a wave: loud, deep cries came from the fore-rigging – the Orkneymen were raising sail, chanting a mysterious incantation that contained no words you could pin a meaning to. Flora stared at them with a kindling of unease; the ­Orkney­men were big – taller and broader than the men she was used to. They had sandy hair and raw, reddened skin; jutting cheeks and brows. They spoke a different language. Their chant had a glamour that stirred something inside her.

‘Can you understand them?’

Robert turned candid blue eyes on her. ‘Vou, vou!’ he shouted, imitating the men’s weird cries. He laughed and shrugged.

The time they spent together was irregular and liable to be broken off at any moment by yelled commands; Robert would leap to his feet and scramble up the rigging, or disappear below. Flora experienced frustration at this, not envy; it wasn’t that she particularly wanted to climb the rigging, but, as soon as he turned away, she knew Robert forgot her existence. He had a place in the running of the ship, which she – a supernumerary, and a girl – did not.

Her only other friend on board was the surgeon, Charles Honey. Like most surgeons on whale ships, he was a recent medical graduate without the means to buy a practice. He was twenty-three, but looked younger, with a fresh complexion and an air of bewildered innocence. For the first two weeks he suffered from appalling seasickness, and the sounds of his misery could be heard throughout the ship. At first, the sailors were sympathetic, but after a few days their sympathy turned to hilarity. Captain Mackie spoke sharply to the men, but was tight-lipped. He hadn’t been able to find anyone else. Since Honey was usually on his own in the sickbay, Flora wasn’t afraid of seeking him out, and since she was a little girl, and not a pretty one, he wasn’t afraid of her being there. He was the least alarming of men: slight, gentle, hesitant. He blushed easily.

.

It was in the sickbay that she first became aware of Ian Sellar. They were beating into a north-westerly at the time, the Vega straining at her seams. Honey’s bottles and jars rattled in their cages; on a lee lurch, a mug of coffee skated down the slope of his desk, slopping its contents but holding its footing.

Flora was perched on the sickbed, her back braced against the cabin wall, pestering Honey with questions about dissecting corpses. She had ascertained during previous interrogations that medical students did this, but he was prevaricating – he was, in short, lying to her. As the captain’s daughter, she had a certain borrowed authority and he was unwilling to put her off, but he was also worried that the captain would be angry if he filled his daughter’s head with nightmares.

‘What force of wind is this?’

He treated Flora as a conduit for her father’s seafaring knowledge, a tendency she did nothing to discourage.

‘Oh about’ – another lurch as the North Atlantic slapped the ship in the bows – ‘a force six . . . or five. Five, I’d say. It could get very much worse.’

‘I do hope not, or I fear for my medicines.’ He looked up rather wildly. The wind sang its mournful song in the rigging. Flora was pitiless.

‘But have you cut up a woman’s corpse?’

‘Heavens, Flora, why would you want to know such a thing?’

‘You have to learn about their insides, and their insides are different to a man’s, aren’t they?’

She looked at him, sly. It had, initially, been easy to make Dr Honey blush, but he was getting wise to her.

‘I’m sure you know far more than you let on, Miss, and you are ragging me.’

‘I’m not! I might be a doctor one day. I want to heal people. Without knowledge, you cannot heal the sick, can you? What do you think? Would I ma