The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey Page A

a patient teacher and made sure that I understood each lesson. She forced me to recite the two Shakespeare sonnets they’d studied in English until I was word-perfect. When she was satisfied with my efforts she showed me the scales she knew on the piano.
    In return I tutored her in arithmetic. She was afraid of numbers the way some people are of spiders. The sight of them made her want to hide. What I loved about them, their clarity, was for her duplicity. Behind an innocent 2, or 5, or 9, she spied a mass of traps and pitfalls. Mrs. Harris had told her she was stupid so often that she had given up trying to work through even the simplest problem and instead guessed wildly, expecting to be wrong. I tried to be as patient with her as she was with me.
    Sometimes as we studied, Ross loitered nearby, and once when we were doing long division I asked her to join us. I knew from watching her attempts to double a recipe for Cook that she struggled with both reading and arithmetic. “I did this stuff ages ago,” she said, but she sat down at the table. Miriam slid over a page torn from her notebook and a pencil. I set a problem, 132 divided by 11, which I knew they would both find hard. Miriam managed to take 11 from 13. Ross chewed the end of the pencil.
    â€œCome on, Ross,” I said smugly. “What’s the first step?”
    â€œI don’t need to learn your stupid baby sums.” Flinging down the pencil, she ran from the room.
    â€œGood riddance,” I said as the door banged behind her.
    But Miriam’s eyes grew wide. “She scares me.”
    From my first day at the school Ross had dominated my life. She bullied me in small ways, telling me to hurry up, not to be such an idiot, and she protected me in large ones. I had never stopped to wonder what I had done to earn her attention, nor whether she might want anything in return. Now I assured Miriam that there was nothing to worry about; like the rest of us, Ross hated Miss Bryant; she had even tried to run away.
    â€œI remember that,” said Miriam. “She looked so hang-dog when the police brought her back. Still, people don’t always say what they mean.”
    â€œSo,” I prompted, “eleven from thirteen leaves two?”
    M iriam too had lost her mother, although not until the summer she was four. I envied her her hazy memories of being sung to sleep and of tending some tall blue flowers in the garden. Since then she had been brought up by her father, a livestock auctioneer. They lived in Galashiels, the town I had seen from the train.
    â€œAll the farmers say that if anyone can get you a fair price for a cow it’s Goodall. He likes cattle more than children.”
    He had enrolled her at Claypoole when she was eight, the autumn after she broke her leg. She’d been visiting a farm with him when a horse kicked her.
    â€œI hate horses,” I said. “Big, stupid animals. Did it hurt?”
    Miriam smiled. “I like that you hate them too. Half the girls here are horse-mad. At first it didn’t hurt much more than the time I fell off the garden wall, but it got worse each day instead of better.”
    Her father, she explained, was afraid of doctors—he insisted they’d killed her mother—and he hadn’t taken her to one until she finally collapsed on the stairs. “He felt terrible when they showed him the X-ray. I was on crutches for four months.”
    She went home only twice a year, for a week at Christmas and two weeks around her birthday in July. Don’t you mind? I asked, but she said no. The house was freezing, her father was mostly gone, and she’d come home from her first term at Claypoole to find that her beloved spaniel, Spencer, had been put to sleep. She looked so sad as she said this last part that I told her one of Mrs. Marsden’s stories about a selkie, a seal-woman. “She had brown hair and brown eyes like you,” I said. “Her name was