Read Online Grace Hardie by Anne Melville - Free Book Online Page A

sleep.’
    â€˜I want Mama.’
    â€˜Run along back to your classroom, there’s a good girl.’ Grace felt herself being pushed, kindly but very firmly, out of the room. Once again a door was closed, shutting her out.
    Banished to the corridor, Grace stamped both feet in frustration. What right had a stranger to keep her away from her mother? She tried the door again and found that it was not locked, so for a second time she went into the dressing room. Nurse Bruton had disappeared, but the way to Mrs Hardie’s bedroom was still barred, this time by Milly.
    â€˜I want … I want …’ Grace struggled to force thewords out. But the wheezing in her chest, which had begun when she first saw Pepper’s body lying on the ground and which had been made worse by her run up the hill, seemed no longer to be only inside her body, but to encircle it like an iron band which was being slowly tightened. She was unable to speak; almost unable to breathe. Milly’s eyes widened in alarm.
    â€˜Stay just where you are, there’s a good girl,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and fetch the doctor to you. He’s but this minute left your mother.’
    The nurserymaid hurried away, leaving unguarded the connecting door to Mrs Hardie’s room. Grace took two steps towards it but then was forced by a lack of breath to stop. Her wheezing was so loud and painful that perhaps it disturbed the new baby, who began to cry. The sound resembled the mewing of a kitten, reminding Grace how she had first held Pepper on her lap just after she had seen Jay for the first time in this same cradle. But Pepper was dead. She would never hold him again.
    She looked down at the baby, whose red and wrinkled face screwed up as he cried. How could anyone want a baby as ugly as this? And why had Mama not insisted on having a girl, when that was what she had asked for and as good as promised? There were enough boys in this family already: horrid, rough, cruel,
hateful
boys. This new one should be sent back to wherever he had come from. Grace gave a petulant push at the cradle before forcing out another wheezing breath.
    A crash was followed by a single cry. She had pushed harder than she realized, overturning the cradle and throwing the baby to the ground. A soft white shawl had been wrapped round his body and the top of his head, but he had fallen out sideways, banging his forehead on the ground. Had she killed him? It was not his fault that he had been sent by mistake. What should she do? Whomshould she tell? Guilt paralysed her, rooting her to the spot.
    She heard a footstep behind her and felt someone brushing past. It was Kenneth. Following her, he must have seen what happened. He wasted no time in talking, but set the cradle upright again. Then, bending to the floor, he carefully picked up the baby. Grace put her fingers to her mouth and began to bite her nails without noticing what she was doing. The baby’s head, unsupported by Kenneth’s arm, hung downwards just as Pepper’s had done when Frank was about to put him into the grave. There was no arrow and no blood; that was the only difference.
    Now Kenneth was tugging at the shawl to make it look as though it had not been disarranged. Grace tried to help him; but, although most of her body was hot and sticky, her fingertips were as cold and clumsy as though she had just been making a snowman in December.
    Kenneth looked at her across the cradle and the motionless baby. He was not interested in his new brother, any more than Grace was, as his anxious brown eyes appealed for understanding.
    â€˜Pepper was an accident too,’ he said. ‘We’re all sorry.’
    Grace was unable to answer. She had begun to cough, trying to expel the heavy weight which was clogging up her lungs, and in between the paroxysms her chest heaved with the desperate need to snatch a breath. She had to hold on to the edge of the cradle if she were not to collapse on to