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By Root 776 0

have a fancy job, a wardrobe full of suits, but that day we went to the Brough of Birsay you spoke to me as if we were equals—not employer and employee. Then the moment we got back you became all-important and busy. You couldn’t take five minutes to tell me you were leaving, like any friend.” I felt him shift in the seat beside me, about to speak, but there was no stopping now. “And then you just show up again, with no warning, and you expect me to be thrilled. I have a life too. It doesn’t begin and end with your comings and goings. How would you feel waiting day after day for someone who seems to have forgotten you exist? I may be your employee but I have opinions, thoughts, feelings.”

Before I could say more his arms were around me. I could feel him shaking with what, after a few seconds, I recognised as laughter. “So you waited for me,” he said, “day after day. And day after day I was working as hard as I could, struggling to get back to you.”

The house was not in any danger, he told me. He’d let everything go before he sold the estate, but it wouldn’t come to that. “I didn’t mean to tease you, but I didn’t know if you cared for me, if you would care for me even if I weren’t your employer. To you it probably seems like the natural order of things that I own Blackbird Hall, but this house, everything, was always going to be Roy’s. At school he won the same prizes our father had; in the war he won the medals. Then he drove his car off the road and my parents were left with me, the second-rate son. No prizes, no medals, not even a good degree. I only got a two: two.”

He laughed again, giddily, as if he were opening presents very fast. “Nobody gives a damn about these things—two: one, two: two—but my father behaved as if the heavens had fallen. Being an orphan, Gemma, you don’t know what it’s like to have someone looking over your shoulder, judging everything you do. And when they’re not there, you do the job for them: tell yourself, over and over, that you’re not good enough. I left university determined to prove myself, and I did, but in a world my parents didn’t understand, or give a ha’penny for. Once I sailed into Stromness on a friend’s yacht. The first thing my father said to me was that the Sinclairs weren’t show-offs. For a decade I only came here for funerals. By the time I realised what was happening to Alison it was much too late.”

“Whatever you did or didn’t do for Alison,” I said, “you have a second chance with her daughter. Nell can be happy, she can do the things she wants to do.”

“She can,” he said gently. “All I’m saying, Gemma, is please don’t put me on a pedestal. I’ll have farther to fall. I own Blackbird Hall and you work here, but it could easily be the other way round. When I saw you this morning, standing up to Seamus, not caring that he was twice your size, I knew you were braver than I could ever be.”

I started to protest—I hadn’t been brave; I’d been angry—but he interrupted. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I had to go back to London. I’m forty-one years old and I’ve got used to doing what I please, not consulting anyone, but I never meant to take you for granted.”

“I forgive you,” I said and, miraculously, I did. The hard rock of anger that had stood between us since I saw him sitting on the bench under the trees rolled away.

He kissed me and slipped his hand down the front of my nightdress. I still had limbs, organs, feet, eyes, but the only part of my body I could feel was the few square inches where his hand pressed against my skin. I willed him to go on but suddenly he grew still; his hand was gone.

“No,” he said. “This is going to be different, totally different.”

He lifted me off his lap to one side of the chair, stood up, and walked to the fireplace, the window, the door, the window again. “I feel,” he said, “like I’m about to jump out of a plane.”

He stopped walking and stood before me. “Sweet girl. How I wish I was your age and knew what I know now. You must go back to bed. I promise there’ll be no more coming and going without consulting you.”

“And no more lies?” I said.