The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [30]
I did not. I was so upset about Mr. Donaldson that I had barely heard a word. “Punish me as much as you want, Miss Bryant,” I said, “but please let Mr. Donaldson keep his job.” I fell to my knees and clasped my hands.
She gave a small sigh, like the sound of a swing door closing. “You still don’t understand. Mr. Donaldson has already lost his job, and you will do what I say.”
“And what if I don’t? What will you do then? Kill me?”
For a few seconds Miss Bryant’s mask cracked—I glimpsed amusement or perhaps surprise—then, once again, she was impervious. “This is the temper your aunt warned me about,” she said. “You think yourself hard done by, but you forget you have shelter, food, clothing. To give you a glimpse of how much you still have to lose, for the next fortnight you will have nothing to eat but bread and water. You are dismissed.”
I thought about touching my forehead to the carpet, practising patient opposition like Gandhi, but I knew that nothing I said, or did, would make a difference. My pleading interested her; it did not move her. She sat down at her desk and turned to her next task. The carpet swallowed my fourteen footsteps. I opened the door as quietly as possible.
Outside Ross was leaning against the wall, arms folded. “Someone’s been a bad girl, very bad, I’d guess, from how long she kept you.”
“Why do you stay here?” I asked as she led me towards the stairs. “You’re almost a grown-up. You could leave, get a job.”
She did not answer, and I thought she too was going to ignore me, but halfway down the stairs, where no one could come upon us unexpectedly, she stopped and turned to me. With a stair between us, her face was level with mine. “I did leave once,” she said, “a couple of years ago.” She had hitchhiked to Edinburgh, sleeping one night in a sheepfold on the moors, and tried to find work in a hotel or a shop, but everyone wanted references. Her shoulders hunched as she relived her unhappy experiences. “I even tried”—her voice grew still lower—“to be a pros-ti-tute but I didn’t have a clue how to go about it.”
For a moment I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I understood she had meant to do that terrible thing I read about in books: sell herself. Staring into her muddy brown eyes, I briefly forgot my own troubles. If she had been short of sympathy, so had I. She was awkward, plain, slow at book learning, and she knew those things about herself. She was as much alone in the world as I was and she had never, even for a few years, experienced the kind of love I had had from my uncle.
“Next year,” she went on, “when I’m eighteen Miss Bryant will give me a reference. I can work as a chambermaid.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“Who’d want to be a chambermaid?” Her chipped tooth glinted. “So did you have a plan?”
“I thought there was someone who would help me, but all I did was get him in trouble. Miss Bryant says he’s going to lose his job.”
“Girls have to watch it. We can get blokes into trouble just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Mr. Milne is here because there was a fuss about a girl at his last job. And some of the other staff have had wee accidents. That’s how they ended up at Claypoole.”
Listening to Ross, I understood how clever Miss Bryant was; like Nero or Claudius, she had created her own empire of fear and favour. “Will you help me send a letter?” I said. “I can’t bear to think of Mr. Donaldson being fired and not even knowing why.”
It was as if I had hurled a brick. “You’re nuts,” Ross spat. “Stark, raving bonkers.” She seized my arm and dragged me down the remaining stairs to the