The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [67]
“You have to tell him not to bite me,” I said, standing up.
“Maybe.” She giggled. “Be a good dog, Tink.”
I knelt down and cautiously reached out my hand. “By Tinker’s head,” I said, “I swear to read for an hour a day if Nell will do her lessons every morning, except Sunday.”
Then I announced we would begin that day. As I read, Tinker slept and Nell listened, her face mirroring whatever was happening to Pippi. When the clock struck, I closed the book, fetched us both elevenses, and led the way to the schoolroom. The next day Nell knocked on my door and asked what she should wear to church.
chapter seventeen
One day, one bargain, did not, of course, resolve all difficulties. Nell had never learned to concentrate, and sitting still, even for twenty minutes, was a struggle. She knew the alphabet but could read only a few words haltingly; when she wrote her own name the ls threatened to topple; her arithmetic depended on her fingers. Her table manners were terrible. She was cheeky and thoughtless. She hated to take baths or wash her hair. Some days we had trouble getting through ten minutes of lessons, and the weather raged inside and out. But over the next weeks and months she gradually became a better pupil and I became a better teacher. Together we tackled sums, reading, writing, grammar, tracing, nature, history, geography. Sewing I left to Vicky. Scripture I ignored.
By late March the grass was greening, and along the garden wall the jasmine and crocuses were in bloom. Leaves began to unfurl on the beech trees; one was copper, one green. Robins, blue tits, sparrows, chaffinches, wagtails, and thrushes came and went in the garden but no blackbirds. When I asked Vicky, she said a few years ago a pair had nested in the copper beech, but they weren’t common. “The first Mr. Sinclair named the house on a whim. I doubt he knew a blackbird from a crow.” Lambs started to appear, and Seamus had Tinker working in the fields with the other two collies. I had long given up locking my door, and in the mornings Nell would climb into my bed to turn the pages of one of her books and invent a story. We got up at seven-thirty, had breakfast, fed the hens, and collected the eggs. She was surprisingly fearless about slipping her hand under a broody hen. I followed Miss Seftain’s advice—we exchanged letters once a fortnight—and made sure to start lessons at nine every morning and keep to the timetable I had pinned on the wall beneath the schoolroom clock. Like Miriam, Nell gave up easily in the face of difficulties, but when properly praised, she redoubled her efforts.
In the garden shed I discovered a brand-new child’s bicycle: a Christmas gift from Mr. Sinclair. When I asked why she never used it, Nell said she couldn’t be bothered, which I guessed meant she didn’t know how. In the course of an afternoon, with me running back and forth across the grass holding the saddle, she mastered the skill and was thrilled. Another bike, for guests, Vicky said, was only a little too large for me. I lowered the saddle, and we started going on expeditions.
I took pleasure in all this, and in Vicky’s praise: “Mr. Sinclair won’t believe his eyes.” I began to long for a visit from our mysterious employer. Several photographs hung in the library, and Nell had pointed out her uncle to me. In one picture he was playing badminton; in another he was walking on a beach with two men and a woman; in a third he was sitting on the bench under the beech trees, a book in his lap. The pictures were small, and all I could see with certainty was that Mr. Sinclair had dark hair, square shoulders, and good taste in white shirts. Nell said that he always beat her at Monopoly and, she added with a sly glance, he often let her stay up late. Besides regular lessons I had introduced a regular bedtime.
In the evenings, after Nell was asleep, I sometimes kept Vicky company while she made her shell flowers. The pink and white shells came not from the cove but by mail from Glasgow, and she sold the resulting