The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [105]
“Touché. I was going to say I’m too old to understand.” He planted a kiss near my ear. “You’ve done wonders with her, but she should go to school, have friends her own age. And if you want to go to university you’ll have to study. You won’t be lonely, I promise. I have lots of friends. You already know Colin and Jill.”
But they don’t see me as a friend, I wanted to say; they see me as the au pair. All the items on my list were still true—I was a girl with no money or obvious talents; he was a middle-aged man with both—and in London there would be new entries.
As we spoke, the rustling in the branches overhead had been growing louder; the leaves too were having a conversation. Now Mr. Sinclair looked up. “My great-grandfather planted these trees on his wedding day,” he said. “Heaven knows the secrets they could tell. Come, let’s walk.” Arm in arm we began to circle the house, dodging the croquet hoops that still dotted the lawn.
“I know you love this place,” he said. “It’s one of the many bonds between us. And we’ll come here often. But if we stayed now it would be hard for our friends and neighbours. By going away we give them time to get used to our new situation, and you and I get a chance to practise being in the world together.”
“Vicky thinks we have to get married,” I said.
“We do, but not for the usual reason.”
We passed the fountain, and I caught the musty smell of the basin full of water after the recent rain. Tonight Seamus’s window was dark. Was he lurking in there? Or walking the cliff tops towards some secret tryst? I could not imagine any possible world in which he would welcome the news that I was the future mistress of Blackbird Hall. The wind was still rising, rushing past the house, rushing past us and the flowers in the garden, the grass in the fields. I heard a sheep bleating and, for a few seconds, the sound of Vicky’s radio. Around the corner came a small white figure, moving over the lawn towards us. Even as I gasped I recognised Nell.
“What are you doing here?” I said, letting go of Mr. Sinclair and hurrying to meet her.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She threw her arms around me. “I couldn’t find you.”
“I went for a walk with Uncle Hugh. Vicky was nearby.”
She pushed her head against me. “Mummy went for walks,” she said in a muffled voice. “She went for a walk the night she died.”
I felt Mr. Sinclair beside me, his hand on my arm, squeezing.
“Did she?” I said gently. “Do you know where she went?”
“She said she was going to the river, but sometimes she said that and changed her mind. Sometimes she came back smelling of smoke from the pub. But she didn’t smell smoky that night.”
The wind tangled my hair across my face. Mr. Sinclair’s grip tightened. There was another question, something else he wanted me to ask. “Did she go alone?” I suggested.
“She wouldn’t let me come.” Nell spoke more loudly as if rehearsing an old argument. “He said the same when he brought her home. Not the same,” she corrected, “but that she’d said the same to him.”
I felt Mr. Sinclair’s breath hot against my ear. “Ask her who ‘he’ is.”
I did.
“You know,” Nell said. “We see him all the time, with the cows.”
For a moment I had no inkling who she meant. Then, even as I heard Mr. Sinclair whisper, “Seamus,” I understood.
chapter twenty-four
I took Nell back to bed with me, and in the morning she was propped up beside me, reading. “You slept in, lazybones,” she said. As we washed and dressed, she chattered away. She could hold her breath for forty-nine seconds; she was going to give her doll, Cilla, a new name. What did I think of Lulu? Or Dusty? When I asked if she remembered coming out to the garden the night before, she said yes, it was so windy she had wanted to pretend to be a pony. “I wanted to trot around,” she said, “and toss my mane.” Before I could ask further questions, she added that she’d been thinking about what to wear at the wedding and she’d decided on the pink dress with smocking