The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [74]
I saw him only fleetingly until Sunday, when he occupied the front pew and read the first lesson: Samuel 1:17. I had last heard the story of David and Goliath when my uncle preached on how the small and weak can triumph over the large and strong. He had described David putting aside his borrowed sword and choosing five smooth stones from the brook. Now, seated next to Nell, I recalled how I had gone down to the river that afternoon, found five stones, and made a sling. But it had proved surprisingly hard to hit even a tree, let alone my cousin Will. “Come to me,” read Mr. Sinclair, “and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.” His voice was like a river: swift, bright, confident. As he turned a page of the Bible with his bandaged fingers, I thought, I was there when that happened; no one else was.
On Monday, when I bicycled into the village to post my letter to Miss Seftain, I heard a voice shouting, “Hello, hello.” The Gypsy boy I sometimes saw riding the pony was running across the field towards me. I paused astride my bike.
“My mam says he’s back,” he said breathlessly. His cheeks shone like apples beneath his ginger hair.
“If you mean Mr. Sinclair, he arrived last week.”
“My mam needs to talk to him.”
“Ring the doorbell, like everyone else,” I said, preparing to pedal away.
“But what should she bring him? A fish, nice and fat, wrapped in seaweed? Or honey from the moors?”
“Bring him a fish,” I said impulsively. “He can have it for his supper.”
Before I could add that I was no expert on Mr. Sinclair’s tastes, he was thanking me and darting away across the field. At the post office the postmistress too asked about Mr. Sinclair. She’d heard, she said shyly, that he had a new job that involved meeting the Queen. “Has he said anything about Her Majesty?”
“Not in my hearing.”
“If he does, could you ask how tall she is? My sister says she’s her height and I say she’s mine.”
I promised to ask if I had a chance. As I bicycled home, I pictured Mr. Sinclair bowing to a woman on a throne. She would confide her worries about the theft of the World Cup and the general election and he would give sage advice. But in the days that followed there was no opportunity to enquire about his relations with the monarch, or anything else. Once he emerged briefly from the library to admire Nell’s roller-skating. Another time he came to the schoolroom, but only long enough to hear her six-times table. I knew from Vicky that he might leave at any moment—“I’ll see his luggage in the hall one morning,” she had said—and I began to devise lessons that required visits to the farmyard. I had Nell draw a map of the buildings, and we wrote a story about the rooster. One afternoon when we were playing with the ginger cat’s kittens, Vicky appeared, a bottle of milk in each hand.
“Would you like to see the latest orphans?” she said.
She led us to a stall in the barn where two calves, both black and white, their heads much too large for their small bodies, wobbled on sticklike legs. Vicky gave Nell one bottle and then, seeing my face, offered me the other. The calf sucked intently, gazing at me with its dark eyes. When the milk was gone, it nuzzled my hand. That evening I suggested to Vicky that Nell and I take over their feeding.
“That would be grand,” she said. “I’m so busy with all this company I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on.”
Nell was delighted by our new project. She named the calves Petula and Herman and drew a portrait of each of them. We measured their height at the shoulder and, with much laughter, their girth and made a chart on which to plot their growth; at first the calves had to be fed four times a day. Still I glimpsed Mr. Sinclair only occasionally, talking