Eve and Her Sisters Read Online Free PDF

sunshine and dry air created trembling heat hazes and by midsummer’s day everyone was longing for a good thunderstorm to clear the air. None more so than poor Phoebe. Josiah’s wife was now in her last week of pregnancy and constantly exhausted, her tiny frame dominated by her huge belly.
    Eve had become fond of Phoebe whom she had found to be very childlike in spite of having just had her twentieth birthday at the end of May. Phoebe constantly needed her husband’s approval in everything she did, and the more Eve had got to know the couple, the more she had been drawn to Phoebe and the less she had warmed to Josiah. She couldn’t put her finger on why exactly. Josiah was always friendly and Mary blatantly hero-worshipped him, partly due, Eve suspected, to the little presents of sweets and chocolate he always seemed to have in his pockets for the child.
    When she turned into the back lane her nose wrinkled at the stink from the privies. No amount of hot ashes could neutralize the smell of human excrement with the heat so intense. She thought of the Cunninghams’ garden, the herbaceous borders full of lemon verbena, mignonette, lavender and all manner of sweet scented flowers, and the walls thick with climbing roses and jasmine. As had happened more often of late, her mind moved along an uncomfortable tangent.Why should families of ten or twelve be living in four rooms - two, some of them - with nowhere for the bairns to play but the narrow back lanes and alleys, and people like the vicar and his wife have all that space and a beautiful garden they rarely ventured into?
    She knew what the vicar’s answer would be should she put the question to him. She had got to know his opinion about lots of things over the last months by listening to snippets of his conversation with friends who called at the house.
    The vicar was of the mind that God decreed one’s station in life and if one was wise, one stuck to it. The poor, she had heard him declare when a group of them were discussing the Royal Commission’s proposals regarding the workhouses, were naturally of lesser intelligence and morally and physically enfeebled. Therefore it was every good Christian brother’s duty to treat them with kindness but firmness. She hadn’t agreed with this. She was discovering she didn’t agree with much that the vicar said.
    She reached the gate leading into the Finnigans’ back yard. Even after four months it still felt strange not to be going next door, into the house where she had been born. Another family were living there now, they had moved in the day after she and her sisters had moved out. McCabe was their name and they seemed nice enough, although apparently Mr McCabe drank like a fish on pay day and his wife or one of the bairns had to go and get him out of the Frog and Fiddler every Friday night.
    She was about to thrust open the gate when Nell, who had been playing with a group of bairns further up the lane, called her name. ‘Eve! Eve, I’ve been waiting for you to come.’
    As Nell reached her, Eve said quietly, ‘Why aren’t you inside helping Phoebe with the dinner? I told you she’s ailing, what with the baby an’ all. She looked bad this morning.’
    ‘It wasn’t me, Mr Finnigan said to play outside.’ Nell’s voice was indignant. ‘Phoebe was in bed when me an’ Mary got home from school, an’ her mam was here. She’s took the twins home with her.’
    ‘Is the baby coming?’
    ‘No, least I don’t think so. Phoebe’s just feeling tired with the weather an’ all, her mam said. We stayed in the house till Mr Finnigan got home. The dinner was all ready to put in the oven, Phoebe’s mam had done it. Mr Finnigan said Mary would help him see to it and set the table and everything an’ I could go out to play. It wasn’t me who wanted to go, Eve.’
    ‘All right, all right.’ Eve was frowning but not at Nell. She wished Josiah would not persist in making fish of one and fowl of the other, but it was