Cave of Secrets Read Online Free PDF Page A

play that game?’
    ‘I don’t play games,’ said Donal. ‘I work. Today I’m harvesting the shore.’
    ‘I thought your work was guarding the cave,’ Tom teased.
    ‘That’s part of it. So is gathering seaweed, and collecting firewood, and catching fish, and mending nets, and helping repair boats, and–’
    Tom stared at him. ‘You really do work.’
    ‘We work all the time.’
    ‘We?’
    Donal put two fingers in his mouth and gave a piercing whistle, quite unlike the one Tom had practised. Within moments a tiny girl came scrambling over the stony barrier at the other end of the beach. The mass of tumbled boulders seemed no obstacle to her.
    She wore a simple, homespun gown. A flannel petticoatpeeped from beneath the hem of her skirt. Tied around her waist was a blue apron the colour of her eyes. She had made a sling for carrying driftwood by holding up the corners of her apron. Seeing the stranger, she dropped the wood with a clatter. ‘Who’s that, Don-don?’
    ‘Tom Flynn,’ Donal said. ‘He’s all right, he’s my friend.’
    The little face peeping through tangled curls broke into a smile. ‘Tomflynn,’ the child said, running the name together to make a single word. ‘Hello, Tomflynn.’ She bent to gather up the spilt wood.
    Tom crouched down to help her. She pushed him away with a grubby little hand. ‘Don’t need help,’ she cheerfully asserted.
    Tom looked up at Donal. ‘I suppose this is Maura?’
    ‘She is Maura. Isn’t she a clinker? There’s no finer cailín on this side of the bay.’
    The little girl fixed bright blue eyes on Tom’s face. ‘Mine,’ she declared, reaching out to grab the piece of driftwood in his hand. In the next breath she said, ‘Are you a prostint?’
    ‘A what?’
    ‘She means a Protestant,’ her brother explained.
    ‘I’m a Catholic,’ said Tom. ‘Does it matter?’
    ‘Not to us,’ Donal told him.
    Tom spent a morning like none in his memory. Maura insisted on looking for ‘pretty’ seashells. Tom’s first discovery was a glossy, cone-shaped shell vividly striped with orange.Even Donal was impressed. ‘I’ve never seen one like that before. Have you?’
    ‘I’ve never seen any seashells,’ Tom admitted.
    The other two looked at him open-mouthed. He did not know whether to be proud or embarrassed.
    They gathered more driftwood from the beach and showed Tom how to harvest seaweed. The driftwood was for fuel, Donal explained, and the seaweed would go into the cooking pot.
    ‘I didn’t know you could eat it,’ said Tom.
    ‘You have to know which ones,’ the other boy told him. ‘Some are good for eating and others are good for healing.’
    ‘What else do you eat?’
    ‘Ev’ry fish there is,’ Maura piped up.
    Donal laughed. ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t eat a jellyfish even if you were starving to death. But mackerel, áthasach ! Great food. We eat mackerel from summer’s end until Christmas. We eat herring too, and cod and pilchard and seal meat, and badger when we can get one, and birds’ eggs and every kind of shellfish …’ he interrupted himself to point to a jet of water spurting from a hole in the sand, ‘… like that one. There’s a razor clam.’ He pounced as swiftly as a cat, and stood up holding a long, tightly closed shell.
    That day Tom received a thorough instruction in the varieties of shellfish which made the bay their home. Mussels and limpets and cockles and winkles, shrimp and crabs and evensea urchins, which were terrifying to look at but ‘’lishus!’ according to Maura. Tom had thought of Roaringwater Bay as nothing more than a vast sheet of water. Now he realised it was an immense larder, filled with items more interesting than suet pudding.
    Again and again his eyes returned to the gleaming expanse of the bay. The dancing waves, the shifting clouds. The constant interplay of birds in the air and along the shore. Kittiwakes and blackbacks, terns and shags and cormorants. Larks soaring