"If you do well this afternoon, I may have a special present for you this evening.  Now get on with it and don't disappoint me, Harriet.  You've made a very poor start and I'm not at all pleased with you."

The imperious buttocks wiggled their way back to the house.  Harriet looked at the departing form and felt deflated and shamed.

"How can I work harder than I already have?", she thought despairingly.  She longed desperately to please Gwendoline, but was close to despairing that she would ever be able to.

Jenkins came out and took away the picnic equipment and Harry looked up from her labours and thanked him with a frozen shivering smile and he gave her a look of pitying contempt.

"Mad as hatters this pair - mad as hatters", he mumbled to himself as he made his way back to the warmth of his kitchen.

The afternoon became steadily colder and even though Harry redoubled her efforts to try  to stave off the bone-chilling cold which was bit by bit taking over her body,  the arctic  weather was gradually winning.   It felt like ten below after a few hours.  The pain in her fingers spread up her hands and then  to her wrists and then up her arms.  When she was once more approached by Gwendoline, she felt immense relief that the testing  first day was over.  She reckoned without the hard-hearted Gwen!

"Very good, Harry !   You're beginning to get a bit of rhythm into it.  I've decided I'll help out for a while  -  we can still see a bit  now that the sky is so clear and the moon is coming up.  And I've put on all the lights on on the terrace.   Let's get started!  Isn't this fun, Harry old thing?"

"Great fun, Gwen.  I  wouldn't have missed this for anything" She replied sarcastically.  Gwen either did not notice the sarcasm in her voice or did not choose to notice.  She picked up a pick-axe and expertly drove it into the ground, making it look so easy that Harry felt more inadequately wretched than ever.

And so the hope of  warmth  was once more deferred for this pain-racked and frozen girl.  She recollected that she had a  few days earlier been lazily stretched out on a sofa warming herself by the fire, a glass of wine in her hand, reading her horoscope (Nothing in it about this!).  Why ever did she let this wretched sadistic madwoman do this to her?

The answer to that,  she admitted was that she knew deep inside that this ordeal was just the thing she needed.  She had been getting too soft after her return from the journey and much of that remarkable hardihood she had painfully acquired and been so proud of had been lost.   Now the process of her hardening-up once  more had begun, and with a vengeance!   With this thought she vowed she would endure this trial and surive.  Harriet threw herself again heart and soul into the work , re-invigorated by having Gwendoline toiling away at her side.  Amazingly she half kept the cold from  overcoming her, although every second was sheer torture to her frozen hands and feet.   And she started to wield the pick-axe so effectivley that even that hyper -critical  taskmistress Gwen was moved to congratulate her.

At long last, Gwen tired of the work and the two girls ambled back to the house arms around each others' waists,  tired and frozen, but happy to be together again.

Once they were in the lounge and preparing to sink into a soft warm sofa, Gwen went over to the drinks cabinet.  She came back with a bottle and two large brandy glasses.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have been so hard on you on your first day.  Have a nice brandy, Harriet - you look terrible!  This is the  present I was talking about - very old cognac indeed!"

Harriet knew what a fine brandy it was and tried to savour the bouquet, but she was so in need of its fiery warmth that she swallowed the precious fluid down in a single gulp, gasping as  its life giving heat passed down her throat and diffused itself through her chilled body.  Gwen quickly refilled Harry's glass and poured  some for herself.  She took a mouthful and pressed her opened lips against her friend's sweet, generous mouth and they shared the same measure of the liquid gold  passing it back and forth from mouth to mouth  feeling the wonderful aroma  pass up into their nostrils.  Finally they separated, brandy and saliva trickling down their chins and Harry said,  after licking brandy from Gwen's mouth,  "Yes, you were absolutely right  to be  hard on me, Gwen.  That was just the shock therapy I needed after my late gross laziness.  Thanks for calling me yesterday - a few more weeks of idleness and I'd have become a hopeless slob!"

Gwen loooked narrowly at her dear friend and inwardly agreed.  Harry's body had lost a lot of  its former superb tone.   That healthy glow she had acquired in the autumn had completely gone.  She hardened her heart against the girl and resolved to put her through as gruelling a time as she could devise,  ratcheting  up the arduousness of the work and the cold and the discomfort each day.   She  would drive Harriet into building that longed for super-woman physique and maybe develop something similar of her own at the same time!

"Let's make you into a woman of iron in the coming months, Harry - and maybe I could do with a bit of hard work myself after being stuck behind a desk all these weeks.  We'll go out in the morning and work together all day , side by side.  Now, let's get up to bed - work hard and play hard, Harry - don't you agree?"

As they lay side by side, Harry massaged her arms and groaned inwardly.  She ached all over and her body was burning up after coming out of that mind boggling cold.  She touched her stomach and then caressed Gwen's warm belly.  Her heart missed a beat as she felt that rock-hard wall of abdominal muscle.

"You're bloody strong,  aren't you Gwen?" she whispered.  "You haven't been neglecting yourself like I have - that's for sure!"

"Strong enough to work you into the ground tomorrow, my love.  You'll never keep up with me!  You'll see."

For what ever reason, Gwendoline soon fell asleep and made no attempt to make love - for once in her red-bloodedly  voracious life.  Harry  leant on her side and looked at those lovely features  in  peaceful repose.  She bent over that well-loved face and felt Gwendoline's gentle breath on her cheeks.   The new Countess still had a few very faint traces around the eyes of the two batterings she had taken back in November and  mid December from that irate wife and the seven fighters, but you would have to look pretty closely to notice them and they had faded a lot since she had last seen her at her late father's funeral, when darling Gwen  had been so heart-breakingly beautiful in her mourning black.

 She certainly seemed to have bounced back from that shocking bereavement, thought Harry.  Harriet had heard from others how quickly Gwendoline had taken up the reins of all her late father's many enterprises and astonished everyone by her canny handling of a very dangerous situation for the beleaguered estate.

 When at school she had always admired Jessica and Gwen and regretted not being in their magic circle.  All the pain and hardsip she had been through to secure their acceptance as an equal had been well worth it.  As she lay there, she recalled the time they had held her in freezing water as  retribution for tricking them into fighting each other, even pushing her head under the surface, and the days when Gwen had punished her for her tactless reminder of her necessary, but painful breach with Jessica.  That had been an horrendous time, but she would happily have gone through even worse if need be to secure the trust and love  she now had.

  And now she would be able to help darling Gwendoline shape her ancestral home and these magnificent gardens into what she wanted  for the new generation - she closed her eyes and fell asleep,  impatient for  morning to come -  ice and frost or no ice and frost!  Tomorrow she would have Gwen, her lovely,  delightful Gwendoline at her side all day!

She awoke when Gwen mischievously pushed her still sleeping form off the bed.  Her friend leaned over her and laughed merrily as a surprised Harriet scrambled to her feet, shaking the sleep out of her head.  She grabbed the other girl's shoulder and tried to pull her onto the floor with her.  Gwen willingly permitted herself to be pulled on top of warm laughing Harriet and they rolled around in mock combat for a few minutes, before kissing tenderly and getting back on the bed,  making that intoxicating love which Gwendoline had been too tired for only a few hours previously.

At six o'clock sharp there was a knock on the door and the unsmiling Jenkins brought in an early morning cup of tea and a continental breakfast.  This austere meal was all that a health conscious Gwendoline considered appropriate. Harriet was, perforce,  obliged to partake as well.  It hardly seemed to her to be a good way  to prepare her body for eight hours hard labour in the freezing cold, but she knew it was fruitless to argue.  They had fun, though, eating it together on the bed, hip touching hip, feeding each other saliva-soaked bits of croissant and all the while  playing footsie,  giggling like the two schoolgirls they had so recently been.

Neither girl wanted to finish this delightful meal too early but when Gwendoline perceived that it was beginning to get light, she got up and pulled Harriet by the hand to the bathroom where they both got ready for the coming day's frozen  hard labour.

Within minutes they were out in the half light.  It was  bitterly cold; a  hard,  frosty morning.  Soon the sound of iron striking at iron hard ground rang out for all those to hear who were foolish enough to be awake at such an ungodly hour.