Free Miss Appleby's Academy by Elizabeth Gill Page A

wouldn’t let herself; she held his eyes with her own.
    ‘I have insisted on nothing,’ he said softly. ‘I’m trying to help you, I’m a better man than my father.’
    Emma wanted to hit him.
    ‘How could you say such a thing?’
    ‘Because it’s true. He was never as good as you thought he was.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I went through all his papers after he died and some of them made very pretty reading. Believe me, Emma, I want you to marry a good man who will look after you.’
    ‘What papers? Where are they?’ Emma was reminded of the last conversation she had had with her father. Shehad not forgotten what he had said about wishing that he had behaved differently.
    ‘I burned them.’
    ‘You’re a liar!’
    He moved. She thought he was going to come around the desk and hit her for the first time since they had been small children, and she thought at that point if she had moved too, if she had shown fear of any kind, he might have done it, but she stood there.
    Nobody said anything for so long that Emma began to tremble. She couldn’t control it, her whole body was in shock. He picked up a pen and threw it down again and he looked at it and at the desk and then back at her and he said quite clearly, ‘I have never lied to you, whatever you think of me. I burned the papers because I didn’t want you to find them. I didn’t want you to know what kind of a man he was and I wasn’t ever going to tell you, and even though you accuse me of awful things now I won’t.’
    ‘Why not? Why should you try to shield me from the truth if you think it’s so, and what kind of being do you think I am that you should take from me the right to know?’
    ‘Because I care for you,’ he said, and that was when Emma cried.
    *
    Emma was even more angry now and determined to leave. Laurence had treated her like a possession, like something he could control, and he had talked of their father in thatawful way. She thought how happy they had been as children and she wondered how he could do such a thing. She had made him angry and he had not cared what he did or said.
    The next day she went into Verity’s bedroom and lifted the lid on the jewellery box. Verity did not even lock it or put away the valuable things. She had so much trust, and why should she not? There was little enough crime in New Haven, no one had much worth stealing. When the people went out to church they did not lock their doors.
    There was a further problem. Such distinctive pieces would surely arouse suspicion should she try to sell them locally, yet what else could she do?
    Frustration became her main mood. Emma put the pearls from her mind, but the idea surfaced again when she went to bed. She could not steal from her family. Her worse self told her that they had stolen from her – her house, her future even. That was petty, she argued. She fell into a doze about an hour before they usually got up and it was as if the almost sleepless night had made all the difference. When she awoke from this doze she could see everything clearly before her. She had no alternative; they had left her none. She waited until Laurence had gone to work, until Verity was gone to the shops with a brief goodbye, and then she went upstairs.
    Emma could not believe the person who picked up the pearls. Further over on the window ledge was a box into which Laurence emptied the loose change from his pockets, and since there was a good pile she took thattoo. She stowed the pearls in the bottom of her suitcase and she put only what was really necessary on top, a few clothes, fewer books, her mother’s pearls, she didn’t see the irony quite, and then she left. It would be some time before they knew she was gone. Verity was going to have lunch with some friends and she would no doubt stay there half the afternoon, gossiping. The roads were dry and the streets were deserted. She took the first train to Boston which was the nearest place she could take a ship for