The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [85]
I had not seen dancing since I left Yew House. Now I watched with pleasure the way the men and women swung unerringly from partner to partner and how the music made possible a kind of order absent from everyday life. One day, I thought, I would go to a party like this and dance the night away with people who treated me like an equal. I would be beloved and regarded. At eleven o’clock the buffet was served, and I ran in and out, carrying cups of tea. Suddenly—I was refilling a milk jug—I realised I had forgotten the calves.
I went at once to make up the bottles. Outside I discovered a fine drizzle was still falling. Following the beam of my torch, I made my way to the farmyard. A hen clucked as I passed the henhouse. In the barn something rustled: probably a rat, probably two rats. I pointed the torch straight ahead until I reached the stall by the door. That morning the calves had been asleep in the straw, but now, wherever I shone the light, the stall was empty. Furious, I strode from the barn across the farmyard. Once again Petula and Herman struggled through the mud towards me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Clumsily, leaning over the gate, I managed to give each a bottle.
I was in the cloakroom, levering off my Wellingtons, when Nell bounded in, nose pink with excitement, ears askew. While I was gone, she told me, a Gypsy woman had knocked at the door of the hall. She had walked over from the encampment by the village and offered to read the ladies’ hands. Only the ladies, she insisted. She had set herself up in the alcove off the hall. Mrs. Laidlaw had stoutly refused to consult her, and Rosie had said that, as a married woman, she already knew her fortune, but a woman named Frances had gone, and then Coco urged Jill to go and, when her sister returned flushed and smiling, went herself. The girls at Claypoole had sometimes asked Cook to read the tea-leaves, and, before crucial hockey matches, they had plucked the petals off daisies. Neither strategy had struck me as remotely reliable, but a real fortune-teller might be different. That night I would happily have given someone sixpence, even a shilling, to tell me what the next year would bring. “Is she still here?” I said.
“No, she’s very cross,” Nell said, and I realised she was talking about Coco. When she rejoined the party, she had asked the musicians for an eightsome reel. Then, despite the rain, she had vanished into the garden.
“And where is your uncle?”
“He disappeared,” she said, which I took to mean he had followed Coco.
Please don’t, I thought again. “How about we go to bed,” I suggested. “It’s nearly midnight.”
Nell swished her tail at me. “Don’t you be cross too. I asked Todd to play a special song. We have to listen. Put your ears on.”
The library was lit now only by candles and a standard lamp beside the musicians. They were playing a song I had heard on Vicky’s radio and sometimes coming from Nell’s room: “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Many of the guests had left after the buffet and there were only half-a-dozen couples. In the dim light I made out Jill and Colin wrapped in each other’s arms. Rosie and Dale were waltzing stylishly, the Laidlaws awkwardly. Mr. Sinclair and Coco were still missing. I took Nell’s hands and we began to circle the room. As we came near the musicians I felt Todd—almost handsome in his white shirt and kilt—watching me. I blew him a kiss.
“Look,” said Nell, “there’s Vicky.”
And indeed Vicky was waltzing with a man. One of the guests, I thought, until they turned and I recognised Seamus. His hair had been trimmed, and his face, freshly shaved, shone. Brother and sister, they made a striking couple: tall and strong and matching each other step for step. Also striking was the expression on Seamus’s face, some combination of melancholy and joy I had never seen before. I steered Nell away. We were at the far end of the room when the overhead lights