Was she in pain or was it just disapproval for her correspondence with Delphi and where it had led? Miss Lott pinched the bridge of her nose, then lifted her head with an all too brief smile.
‘I doubt either of us will sleep actually. Who’d have thought it – both of us to leave in the morning. Would you care for a walk?’ Miss Lott led the way around the balustrade of the grand staircase.
Outside, footsteps crunching on the gravel path, Natalie tugged her dressing-gown belt tight. Miss Lott walked carefully ahead of her down the driveway, one hand on her hip, the other holding a lantern in front of her to light their path to the Principal’s Lodge near the entrance.
‘I suppose you should have changed out of your bedclothes.’ Miss Lott looked into the darkness. ‘We look a curious sight I’ve no doubt.’
The Lodge was an old turreted gatehouse at the foot of the driveway to the mansion house, a round building, like a dislodged chimney stack. Miss Lott unlocked the door and cut across the patchwork of rugs to the side of the room that made up the small kitchen.
‘I was here earlier, when you were trying to find me.’
There were rumours about the Lodge, but she’d never before been inside the heather-scented sanctum. She waited in front of an armchair covered in a red tartan blanket, while Miss Lott made the tea. It felt magical, like the inside of a fairy’s toadstool. She never wanted to leave.
The bookshelves ran around the concentric walls, lined mainly with anatomy and physiology and college yearbooks, breaking for the rope handrail lining the stone staircase that led to what must have also been a single, cornerless bedroom. There was another door next to the kitchen area that Natalie assumed must lead to the outhouse, where there was a small fenced-off yard and a storehouse out the back, hemmed in by the woods. The gate to the yard was always locked from the path.
Miss Lott sagged with the weight of loss. She was already unwell and now Natalie was adding to her woes. Her curls had completely relaxed now, her papery skin was pale and the pouches beneath her eyes a deeper purple.
The kettle sung and Natalie brewed the tea and set the pot on the sideboard next to a framed picture of a woman who looked quite like Miss Lott, only she had a young boy on her knee and her hair was longer. This must be the sister from Scotland, on her way now to collect Miss Lott and take her away.
Miss Lott pulled the pearl earrings from her earlobes into her palm and sat back in her armchair, lifting her feet on to a small leather footrest.
‘I feel I must take some responsibility here,’ Miss Lott sighed.
‘Not at all. It’s my fault…’ Natalie cut in. ‘I shouldn’t have gone, and I shouldn’t have lied to you.’
Miss Lott raised her voice and then squeezed her eyes shut. ‘No. You should not. You were to be my legacy.’
So deceitful. So ungrateful. If only she’d had as much commitment to the college as Miss Lott. Her legacy was wasted on Natalie.
‘You were such an odd young girl when you came here, desperate not to be with your brother, longing for company. Forever looking over your shoulder for a boy to take you away from it all. You needed a home and family as well as a place of work. I sensed that from the start. And I still sense that while you’re happy here, the college isn’t enough for you. You feel too cut off.’
She didn’t need to deny it; Miss Lott had understood her all along, she reflected, while filling their cups.
‘For all its faults this is my home and I don’t want to leave.’
Her tea was too hot to drink. She set it on the floor by her feet and thought about pulling the blanket over her knees.
‘Neither do I, my dear. Neither do I. But perhaps you courted this scandal because deep down you wanted an adventure and you weren’t ever going to be bold enough to break free yourself.’ Natalie said nothing. Perhaps she had flirted with danger. It was difficult to even admit it to herself. ‘The most productive thing you can do is think about your future, how you’re going to put a roof over your head.’
They fell into a silence that was only interrupted by gentle slurps from their teacups.
After a short while Miss Lott set her cup down on the table beside her.
‘Enough of this talk. I brought you here because I want to show you something.’
In the small yard at the rear of the Lodge, Miss Lott pulled a key from her pocket to unlock the padlock, held the lantern to the lichen-mottled wooden gates and pushed them open. The yard was bricked and uneven and hard to negotiate in the dark. Behind a shadowy open barn, they came to a concrete shed with a corrugated and rusty tin roof. Miss Lott produced another key and unlocked the wooden door.
‘Look at that beauty.’ She held her lantern up in the dark to shed a pocket of light on a white dust sheet with handlebars loosely described beneath.
‘It’s a motorcycle?’
Natalie often heard an engine ratcheting down the lane at the weekend, but she never imagined that it was stored on the college grounds.
‘A beautiful machine, with its own personality. Just like the college.’ Miss Lott walked into the dank building, not much wider than the motorcycle, and peeled back the dust sheet to reveal the handlebars and then tossed the sheet further still so it travelled beyond the seat and the back wheel and fell in a heap behind it.
‘It’s mine, you know.’ She lifted the brown leather helmet and goggles from where they hung on the handlebars and put them on.
‘Yours?’
Miss Lott handed Natalie the lantern and hoisted up her nightgown. Natalie turning so as not to see anything she shouldn’t as Miss Lott sat astride the saddle.
‘Oh, Miss Lott.’ The image of her in her nightgown, helmet and goggles was too much.
‘I’m not strong enough to handle her now. Mr Lovett keeps her ticking over. He loves this motorcycle as much as I do.’ She pointed out of the door towards the main building. ‘But those Sunday afternoons you imagined me leaning over an interminably dull cross-stitch. Do you know where I’ve been? Out on the open road. I rather like angling. You didn’t know that about me, did you? I strap my equipment to my back and off I go. It’s made me feel alive to do something I love. Taking the stopper out of the bottle’s neck.’
‘It looks such fun.’
Natalie tried to reconcile this image of Miss Lott against the person she thought she’d known for so many years. How could she not know this about her? Had she been blind to seeing Miss Lott in any other way than the image of a spinster college head that she’d decided on? The perception she resented others holding about herself.
‘So I do understand, you know. How you might find the college to be stifling.’ Miss Lott dismounted, beckoned Natalie over and took the lantern.
The seat was a little hard and uncomfortable. It wobbled on the stand and needed her to hold the handlebars to keep it upright. She imagined the engine at full throttle. How had she never seen Miss Lott riding this? Perhaps she had; perhaps Miss Lott had driven past her on the lane and she’d not even noticed it was her beloved Principal beneath the helmet, because she was the last person she’d expect to be riding it.
‘I want you to have her,’ Miss Lott said. ‘When I’m gone. She’s given me such pleasure and I hope she does the same for you.’
‘Oh!’
Was that all she could think to say? She didn’t actually need anything to remember Miss Lott by; she’d shaped her life so much already.
‘Mr Lovett will take care of her until you are settled, and when you come back he will give you a lesson, show you how to set her up and kick-start the engine, and you will need to think about a licence if you want to keep her.’
What a gift! She ran her fingers across the smooth enamel of the engine’s shell,