The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [94]
I was still in a state of furious confusion when I reached the schoolroom. The sight of a single silver grey feather lying on the table stopped me. I picked it up, wonderingly; the barbs and barbules were perfectly aligned, as if the seagull had dropped it there five minutes before. Surely it was a message, but what did it mean—I have flown? I will return? My soul is here?
I was still holding it when Nell pranced in, wearing her new green pullover. “Pretty,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the fairies brought it?”
“Can I keep it?”
“Let’s put it in our collection,” I said and placed it with the various shells and rocks we’d gathered on the mantelpiece. As we settled to copying sentences I found myself thinking again of all the stories about women turning into trees, gods into swans. Perhaps the Brough of Birsay had transformed Mr. Sinclair and me not into, say, a skua and a kittiwake, but into two people who could embrace each other. Now, back on the mainland, we had resumed our habitual forms: employer and au pair.
In the days that followed I kept diligently to my tasks and my teaching but the hours limped by, especially after Nell had gone to bed. I often stayed up late, reading in the library. Sometimes I prowled the garden, or walked down to the cove. I would come back to find the house dark save for two lights, one outside Nell’s room, the other shining from Seamus’s quarters. What kind of farmer stayed up late? I wondered. On several occasions, searching the library shelves, I had noticed a book in a different place, or gone. I doubted Nora’s dusting was the cause, and Vicky, like Matron, read romantic novels about lairds and nursemaids. That left only Seamus, but I couldn’t picture him reading Childe Harold or The Moonstone.
One night I rediscovered the history book I had consulted about Skara Brae. Examining the illustrations, I came across a photograph of a group of standing stones named the Ring of Brogdar. “Legend has it,” read the caption, “that the Ring can grant wishes and cure minor ailments.” The next day I borrowed a map and, leaving Nell with Vicky, bicycled the eleven miles to the Ring. It stood on a narrow strip of moorland between two lochs. I walked the sheep path that circled the stones until I came to the tallest one, grey and patterned with lichen. I laid my hand on the stone—it was surprisingly warm—and made my wish. Please, please, please, let Mr. Sinclair return.
The next morning I awoke to a frenzy of bleating. When I stepped outside, the farmyard and surrounding fields were filled with sheep, crying anxiously as they waited to be sheared and dipped. Seamus was doing the shearing. He stood astride each sheep, bending down so that his checked shirt fell open almost to the waist, and ran the clippers over the animal, skillfully circling the legs, neck, and tail. The dirty grey wool fell, like a discarded garment, to the ground and the sheep emerged, half the size and pristine white. Before it could recover, the boys seized it and shoved it down a chute into a trough of pungent, murky dip. For a few seconds every part of it was submerged. Then it surfaced, blinking, the dip streaming off it. The last part of the ordeal, the branding, happily involved not an iron but a dab of red paint on the rump.
I stood watching, dumbstruck at the spectacle. I knew that the sheep were not permanently injured, indeed perhaps they were glad to be rid of the smelly coats they had worn all winter long, but the way Seamus seized each animal and forced it to