The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [61]
Later I would learn that the drive took less than an hour, but on that first evening it seemed longer than all the rest of my journey put together. Bitterly I recalled Miss Seftain’s comment about how dependent an au pair was on her employers. I was marooned, as surely as Robinson Crusoe. We passed the lights of a few isolated cottages, one or two other cars, but mostly dark fields. With no warning, Seamus turned off the narrow road onto a narrow track. We bumped along until a metal gate barred our way.
“What are you waiting for?” he demanded. “Open the gate.”
I got out to do his bidding. As I struggled with the bolt, I felt his scornful glare, stronger than the headlights. I was small, I was useless, I was not what they had paid for. Finally the bolt relented and, stumbling in the mud, aware that my new shoes would never be the same, I pushed open the gate. The Land Rover roared through, drenching me.
I stood there, wiping ineffectually at the damp patches on my coat. Then I walked towards the passenger door with deliberate slowness. I was almost there when Seamus’s door flung open. “For God’s sake,” he yelled, “close the gate.”
“Close it yourself,” I said.
He did.
When we were once again jolting along, the night seemed even darker. At last we pulled onto a gravel drive. A house loomed white in the headlights. We stopped. I climbed out, walked over to the only door I could see, and rang the bell. I just wanted to get the whole thing over with. Let Miss Sinclair dismiss me. I would return to Stromness, sleep on a bench in the harbour, and take the first ferry back to Thurso. The door opened. A woman, almost as tall as Seamus, was looking down at me.
“Gemma,” she said. “I was beginning to worry something had happened.”
“Are you Miss Sinclair?”
“Vicky. Why do you have mud all over you?”
“Your brother, if that’s who he is, splashed me when I was opening the gate.”
Vicky spread her hands and I saw that they were covered with flour. As I was to learn, she seldom apologised for Seamus—it would have been an endless task—but she did apologise for not coming to meet me. “One of us has to be here for Nell, even when she’s hiding in her room. Come in.” She stepped back, and I crossed the threshold of Blackbird Hall.
On that first evening I barely noticed the hall, with its grand piano and comfortable armchairs; what caught my attention were the trousers, very like my own, that Vicky wore beneath her flowery apron. As she led the way to the kitchen she asked, How was the crossing? Was I hungry? Had I seen the Old Man of Hoy? Oh, no, of course it was dark. Would I like a bath? Supper? She was as talkative as her brother was taciturn, and her voice was as warm as it had been on the phone.
“Let me just wash my hands,” she said, “and I’ll show you your room.”
In the kitchen I smelled a fragrance I had not encountered since Yew House. “You’re making bread,” I said. The weight of my despair rose an inch.
“In your honour.” She smiled, and I saw that I was guilty of what I had accused Seamus of: confusing size and age. She was much younger than her brother. Indeed that evening, with her glowing cheeks and thick brown hair falling to her shoulders, she looked barely older than the prefects at Claypoole. Later she told me she was twenty-seven.
Like Mr. Johnson, she offered tea, and this time I accepted. I didn’t care for the bitter liquid but I knew that enjoying it was a badge of adulthood. Under Vicky’s direction I moved the kettle to the centre of the hob, warmed the pot, and measured out the tea-leaves. With two spoonfuls of sugar, the result was drinkable. Meanwhile she punched down the dough and asked what the Borders were like. I told her about the soft, rounded hills, the remains of volcanoes—volcanoes in Scotland, she exclaimed—and the green fields. I described the abbeys the regular girls had visited on school trips, and Sir Walter Scott’s house.
“We have all his novels in the library,” she said. “I’ve never read a sentence. Maybe because our English teacher was always going on about Ivanhoe.”
“You have a library?