The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [0]
A Novel
Margot Livesey
www.harpercollins.com
Dedication
For Roger Sylvester, 1922–2008
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.
—“REQUIEM,” ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Epigraph
Contents
Dedication
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part II
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part III
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part IV
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Part V
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Margot Livesy
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
chapter one
We did not go for a walk on the first day of the year. The Christmas snow had melted, and rain had been falling since dawn, darkening the shrubbery and muddying the grass, but that would not have stopped my aunt from dispatching us. She believed in the benefits of fresh air for children in all weather. Later, I understood, she also enjoyed the peace and quiet of our absence. No, the cause of our not walking was my cousin Will, who claimed his cold was too severe to leave the sitting-room sofa, but not so bad that he couldn’t play cards. His sister Louise, he insisted, must stay behind for a game of racing demon.
I overheard these negotiations from the corridor where I loitered, holding my aunt’s black shoes, freshly polished, one in each hand.
“In that case,” said my aunt, “Veronica and Gemma can walk to the farm to collect the eggs.”
“Oh, must I, Mum?” said Veronica. “She’s such a—”
The door to my uncle’s study was only a few feet away, across the corridor. Hastily I opened it, stepped inside, and shut out whatever came next. Not long ago this room had been the centre of the house, a place brightened by my uncle’s energy, made tranquil by his concentration as he worked on his sermons, but last February, skating alone on the river at dusk, he had fallen through the ice, and now I was the only one who spent any time here, or who seemed to miss him. Just inside the door was a pyramid of cardboard boxes, the remains of my aunt’s several recent purchases. But beyond the boxes the room was as he had left it. His pen still lay on the desk beside the sermon he’d been preparing. At the top of the page he had written: “Sunday, 16 February A.D. 1958. No man is an island.” A pile of books still sat on the floor next to his chair; the dead coals of his last fire crumbled in the grate. To my childish fancy, the room mourned him in a way that no member of his family did, certainly not my aunt, who dined out two or three times a week, played bridge for small sums of money, and since the season started, rode to hounds whenever she could. At breakfast that morning, she had said I must no longer call her Aunt but ma’am, like Betty the housemaid.
Setting the shoes on the floor and trying not to imagine how Veronica had finished her sentence—such a copycat? such a moron?—I read over my uncle’s opening paragraph. “We each begin as an island, but we soon build bridges. Even the most solitary person has, perhaps without knowing it, a causeway, a cable, a line of stepping-stones, connecting him or her to others, allowing for the possibility of communication and affection.” As I read the familiar phrases I pictured myself as a small, verdant island in a grey sea; when the tide went out, a line of rocks surfaced, joining me to another island, or the mainland. The image bore no relation to my present life—neither my aunt nor my cousins wanted any connection with me—but I cherished the hope that one day my uncle’s words would prove true. Someone would appear at the other end of the causeway.
I stepped over to the bookcase