The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [102]
I could feel Mr. Sinclair’s eyes searching my face. Neither of us spoke for what seemed like a long time. “There is one thing we can do,” he said slowly. Then he uttered a four-word question that I had read in dozens of books but which neither of us, in all our conversations, had ever mentioned. The words scattered to the corners of the glowing room. Once again I pictured the two of us from the point of view of a lark, standing in this room, in this house, surrounded by the farm, the island, the incessant sea.
He knelt at my feet. “Will you?” he said again. His eyes, looking up at me rather than down, were boat-shaped. I allowed myself to sail in them towards the edge of the known world.
I set down the empty wine-glass. “On one condition,” I said. “Actually two.”
“Two!” His teeth gleamed in the light. “She drives a hard bargain.”
I held up my fingers. “One, I get to go to university. I have to pass the exams, but if I pass, then I get to go.”
“I’ll even help you study, but no going off to a hall of residence. You have to live with me.” His dark eyelashes fluttered. “And what is two on this dreadful list?”
“Nell won’t be sent away to boarding school, unless she wants to go.”
“Gemma. How could your parents have known that you would turn out to be like your name?”
“They didn’t. Gemma was my uncle’s choice. My parents gave me another name.” I reached down to help him to his feet.
“What is it?”
The name was there, waiting, but everyone who had ever known it was dead. “I’ll tell you,” I said, “the night we’re married.”
I expected him to argue, but an expression akin to relief came over his face. “I’ll tell you my secrets then too. I have done things I’m not proud of, that might make you like me less.”
I thought of Coco and of all the women who had surely come before her; he had told me about some of them: a secretary named Lydia, a debutante named Henrietta. I thought of what Nora had said about how he used to be a hellion, of the ways he had failed his sister and his parents. And I offered the words Miriam had drilled into me that first Easter when she was helping me catch up with my lessons.
“ ‘Love is not love,’ ” I repeated, “ ‘which alters when it alteration finds, or bends . . .’ ” But the next line was gone; even conjuring up Mrs. Harris’s beady gaze did not bring it back.
“Something about tempests, I think,” said Mr. Sinclair. “So there is nothing that could change your feelings for me? Swear to me that is so, Gemma.”
Looking at the face I had first glimpsed by the light of a torch and was now licenced to look at freely, I saw emotions that I couldn’t name. Just for a moment I pictured the boy in the raspberry canes, bending over Drummond with a tortured expression. But the boy was a stranger; why should I understand his feelings? Now I had to believe that what drew Mr. Sinclair’s mouth tight, what darkened his eyes, was some mysterious aspect of adult affection that I would soon understand.
“I swear,” I said, “but you must swear too. I’ve done things which I regret.”
“Sweet girl, what on earth could you have done that you regret?”
“Don’t treat me like a child. I may be younger than you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a past, haven’t made mistakes.”
He began to promise that he would never again treat me like a child but I interrupted. “You’ll break your promise a hundred times. Please swear the one thing I want. That you won’t allow anything, any secret, to change your feelings for me.”
“I will,” he said, “be constant as the northern star.”
It was the most felicitous of oaths. I told him then about my parents and how they had survived their long engagement by looking at the North Star, the one thing, despite the eight hundred miles between Scotland and Iceland, that they reliably had in common. When I finished, he told me about a day during his boyhood when he and Alison had been playing on the beach. Suddenly half-a-dozen rocks had come whistling out of the sky.
“We thought the Germans were coming,