Little Girl Lost by Val Wood

Author:Val Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473509511
Publisher: Transworld

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Christmas Day was dismal for Margriet. Although her mother had given her a box of French bon-bons obtained from an advertisement she had seen in the London Illustrated News, and several books she had ordered by post from a bookseller, she still felt unhappy. She missed her papa so very much. Because her mother still couldn’t go out into the world, they couldn’t even go to the Christmas morning service.

‘I don’t think that life will ever be happy again, do you, Mama?’ she said as the two of them sat down to a breakfast of crisp bacon and coddled egg.

‘It will be different, certainly,’ Rosamund answered. ‘But you will be happy one day, I expect.’ Privately, she wondered if she herself ever would be or indeed had ever been truly happy. If she was honest with herself, she didn’t think she had that joyfulness of spirit that most people seemed to have, at least at some time in their lives.

‘Will I?’ Margriet said. ‘Will I ever be as happy as when Papa was here?’ Her mouth trembled as she spoke and her eyes filled with tears. ‘I don’t think …’ she shook her head and swallowed, ‘I ever will be.’

Rosamund didn’t know how to respond. Having had a distant, disinterested mother herself, she didn’t know how to console her, so she simply said, ‘Get on with your breakfast, Margriet, before your eggs go cold.’

Florrie had been given the day off to visit her sister and wouldn’t be back until the evening, so Margriet didn’t even have her company after breakfast. Cook was roasting the Christmas birds, pheasant for Margriet and her mother and a fowl for herself, Mrs Simmonds and Lily, so they wouldn’t want her in the kitchen, and her mother had gone up to her own small sitting room to read and sew.

Giving a huge sigh, she picked up the books that her mother had given her and carried them up to her room. Lily had lit the fire and it was blazing away merrily so she sat down and idly turned the pages. Miss Barker had said she might find consolation in books and words; she thought of the teacher’s sympathetic understanding on her return to school, and her advice that she should try to take comfort from happy memories of her father. One of the books contained an anthology of poetry, ballads and sonnets from Tennyson and Thomas Carlyle and other writers of long verse, but some were sad and others she didn’t understand and she wasn’t in the mood for reading anyway.

She shuffled down in her chair. She could paint or draw, she thought, or start the sampler her oma had sent her as a Christmas present. She had said that embroidery might help to take Margriet’s mind off her sorrow, but it wouldn’t, Margriet thought miserably. She didn’t think anything would.

Although she wasn’t cold, she pulled a shawl over her shoulders and stared into the fire. The sun was shining outside her window and creating coloured motes that danced around the room.

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