One Foot in the Grave by Peter Dickinson

Lord Hawkside’s horses before the coach race, because Sir Napier knows that she’s not even Lord Hawkside’s sister. Had there been any hints of this? If so, Maisie hadn’t included them in her retellings. Now, why was Sir Napier going to all this trouble and making a play for Marianne as well, despite her obvious poverty? Because … because when Lord Hawkside married … no, when Marianne married, then Mr. Jethro would produce the secret papers referred to in old Lord Hawkside’s will, which proved that she was the true. …)
    â€œWhat’s the story called, Maisie? I’ve forgotten.”
    â€œThe Owner of Wildfire.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œShall I tell you what’s happened so far?”
    â€œPlease.”
    For the moment the desert was not so dreary. There was a mirage. Bath, and Pall Mall, and the brooding mansion on the moors, all wavered into faint being. It was more amusing to watch them, despite their unreality, than to peer through their image at the true bleakness beyond. Pibble listened with care, and was gratified when Marianne met and recognized Old Frost, Lord Hawkside’s former groom, sacked for theft and now begging in the streets. He would know about how the wager had been rigged.
    â€œI’m sure Old Frost never stole anything,” said Maisie.
    â€œI expect the Comtesse framed him,” said Pibble.
    â€œOh, do you think so? Why? She’s got to have a reason.”
    That was the point. That was what gave the mirage its apparent solidity and at the same time proclaimed its unreality. Everybody had reasons for everything they did. Even Lord Hawkside’s puzzling fits of moodiness would be explained in the end as coming from purely practical causes, which could be put right by an adjustment of the machine. When it was all worked out, the plot would have the rightness of a solved crossword, and about as much meaning.
    â€œDo you tell Dr. Follick all this?” he asked.
    â€œI used to. Then I stopped.”
    Made fun of her, no doubt. Or did he? What did Toby, with his passion for clinical gadgetry, make of his unclinical, non-robotic nurse? On Pibble’s visits to the surgery he had made no attempt to work her into his act, which he could easily have done—the conjurer’s assistant, beautiful but dumb. In fact, down there Maisie seemed like a different person, unobtrusive, competent, almost brisk. “Of course she adores him,” Jenny had once said. “He likes being adored. If he had a dog it would be a red setter, a real sop hound. She’s a bit like one, isn’t she? I’m a terrier—yap, yap.” They had gone on to consider the doggy equivalents of the other nurses, and Pibble hadn’t registered till now how perceptive she’d been about Maisie. There was nothing to prevent Maisie being a good nurse, just as red setters—all flop and sentiment at home—are presumably competent gun dogs.
    His interruption seemed to have blocked the flow of the story. He watched her drifting round the room, pushing the chairs about, apparently quite absentmindedly, but in fact returning them to their normal positions, then counting out his pills from the drug locker concealed behind the wall mirror—a typical Flycatchers arrangement, meant to hide even from the sick the paraphernalia of their sickness and the obscenities of age. If Tosca had really made a list … yes, she would be near the top of it. Not as beautiful as Debora or Pauline, not as pretty, even, as Jenny, but somehow closer than any of them to the fantasies of lust. How old—how past it—did you have to be to consider such a question quite objectively? Perhaps the time never came. Pity …
    Tiredness swept over him once more. He pushed the tray away and let himself slide a little down the pillows. Maisie, who had been looking out at the cedar, apparently lost in a dream of Regency intrigue, noticed the movement at