Free Child Friday by Sara Seale Page A

know. But that’s natural at first. You have an uneasy gift for knowing without seeing. That can be disconcerting to a child. ”
    “And to you, too?”
    “Quite often, but perhaps half the time you’re only guessing.”
    “Perhaps I am. Well, Emily, I think Louisa Pink would consider this exchange between employer and employee rather odd, don’t you?”
    She glanced at him quickly.
    “Have I been—unprofessional?” she asked, and he smiled.
    “It depends what you mean by that,” he observed softly, and turned to leave the room.
    It seemed to Emily that she was becoming trapped by her own desire to give; to Alice who flattered her sense of necessity, even to Dane who did not. Pennyleat, old-fashioned and comfortable, was a haven from the uncertainties and make-shifts of the world she had known, Dane and his silently padding dog symbolic of the cruelty of life. It was all a little unreal.
    M rs. Pride and Shorty still maintained their hostility but Mrs. Meeker, the daily help from Pennycross, was a Devonshire woman of comfortable habits. She would always stop work for a gossip and a surreptitious cup of tea away from the kitchen, and it was she who confirmed the fact that the shutters had indeed been taken down from the house across the moor.
    “They do say old Mrs. Mortimer be coming home at last from they foreign parts,” she told Emily one morning. “Leastways, house is being opened up again and the workmen in, so shouldn’t wonder if ’tisn’t tru e. ”
    “She might have sold it,” said Emily, unwilling for Dane’s s ake that old Mrs. Mortimer, whoever she might be, should return to disturb him.
    “Her wouldn’t do that!” Mrs. Meeker exclaimed with proper indignation. “Mortimers have been at Torcroft for generations. Her’s not much herself, not being proper family, but her wouldn’t sell on account of the nephew’s expectations.”
    “Expectations?”
    “The house itself when the old lady dies. There bain’t much money — never was.”
    “Did Mr. Merritt know Mrs. Mortimer?” Emily asked, wondering why Dane should resent an old lady who had been abroad for years.
    “Oh, yes, but that was in Mr. Carey’s time afore I worked here.” Mrs. Meeker shot Emily a sly look, then evidently decided not to enlarge any more on past history.
    “Poor gentleman,” she said, attacking her dusting again with unaccustomed vigor. “ ’Twas proper cruel to lose his sight like that. If it had been known then as Mr. Carey was going to leave him the place and his money when he died, things might’ve been different.”
    “What things?” asked Emily, but Mrs. Meeker became vague and then embarked on a long and involved account of the doings at the village public house on Boxing Night, from which it was impossible to wean her.
    “Your Mrs. Mortimer is coming back,” Emily told Alice the following afternoon, but the child only replied without much interest:
    “Is she? But she isn’t my Mrs. Mortimer, Emily I don’t remember her.”
    It was New Year’s Eve and Emily felt unaccountably d epressed. If she had been in London she would have joined the crowds in the streets tonight and seen the New Year in . There was something sad, she thought, about going to bed and letting the midnight hour slip away unnoticed. She asked Alice if such was the case at Pennyleat, knowing that it probably was.
    “Uncle Ben used to keep it,” Alice, her eyes suddenly alight at the memory of the rare treats which had come her way. “Mrs. Pride used to wake me at a quarter to twelve and bring me downstairs, and the gardener came in with a piece of coal for luck and then we all, drank hot punch and welcomed in the year.”
    “And now?”
    “Oh, now we just go to bed. Uncle Dane says there’s nothing to celebrate.”
    Emily felt an unreasoning anger with Dane.
    “It’s defeatist,” she told him, tackling him while she was still in the mood. “There’s always something to welcome the New Year in for— always