The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [9]
“Give me five minutes with Gemma,” said Dr. Shearer.
She glanced at her watch and folded her arms.
“I meant,” he said, “five minutes alone.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t want her telling you stories. Charles used to say she had a vivid imagination, but sometimes I think she doesn’t know the difference between truth and falsehood.”
I struggled to sit up, but the doctor’s hand on my shoulder restrained me. “Please, Edna,” he said, “trust me to know my business. No one likes to answer questions about their digestion in public.”
This was not, in fact, the case at Yew House. Until a couple of years ago my cousins had reported daily on whether they’d done number one or number two; the latter earned a sweet. But my aunt seemed reassured and left the room. As soon as the door closed, Dr. Shearer pulled over the chair.
“I was a great friend of your uncle’s,” he said, “and I’ve seen some of what’s happened to you since his death. Tell me, are you happy here?”
“How can I be happy when I’m treated as if I’m stupid and a burden? No one here cares whether I live or die.”
The doctor did not contradict me. “Would you like to go away to school if such a thing were possible?”
Remembering my conversation with Mrs. Marsden, I said yes, I’d even go to an orphanage. “At least I’d have orphan friends who wouldn’t despise me.”
Dr. Shearer smiled. “I don’t think that will be necessary. There are boarding schools where they have scholarships for girls like you who are bright but have no money. I happen to know of one, and I’ll ask your aunt if you can apply.”
He took off his glasses and polished the lenses, first one, then the other, with a handkerchief before returning them to his nose. “Mrs. Marsden told me that when they found you in the sewing-room you were lying on the floor saying, ‘Please don’t touch me. Please don’t hurt me.’ Did you see something? A mouse? A rat?”
“There was a figure,” I said slowly. “Like a person, but very tall. I couldn’t see its face.”
“The sewing-room is small.” The doctor’s hairy nostrils quivered. “Whoever it was must have been almost as close to you as I am now. How is it that you couldn’t see its face? And surely you must know whether it was a man or a woman?”
His question brought back a story, a story I still remembered even though the teller, surely my father, had long vanished. “In Iceland,” I said, “a person made of snow visits houses when something bad is going to happen. Sometimes it appears as a man, sometimes as a woman. Whoever was in the sewing-room didn’t want to be seen clearly.”
“Did it speak?”
His newly polished glasses reflected my own pale face. The figure had spoken; it had used my name—not Gemma, but the name my father and mother had called me, which no one ever used anymore—and it had told me to be careful. I stared at my miniature self in the shining lenses behind which lay the doctor’s kind eyes. If my uncle had been there I would have told him everything, but if my uncle had been there the figure would never have come. He had kept certain things away, just as the rowan tree beside the front door of Yew House kept witches at bay. And the doctor, however kind, was not my uncle.
“No,” I said. “It didn’t speak.”
“Did it threaten you?”
“I was frightened but it didn’t do anything frightening.” I closed my eyes, hoping for another glimpse of the figure, another phrase, but all I could see were the shelves of linen rising into the darkness. The doctor was still watching me when I looked up again.
“Perhaps,” I suggested hesitantly, “it was trying to take care of me.”
chapter four
I stayed in bed for several days, enjoying my solitude. I was not, by nature, someone who liked being alone—after even an hour or two I yearned for company—but I wanted to hold on to whatever had happened in the sewing-room. So I read and dozed and ate the soups and milk puddings that Mrs. Marsden carried up to me. When she wasn’t too busy she would perch on the edge of the bed and tell me an Orkney story: one day she described a woman who married a seal; another, the big storm that