Sea Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Prout house and no farther.
    When we were let out mid-morning, the seals were thick in the main way, halfway up the hill. By the end of the school day, they had reached the gate, and one silvery lump had lollopped right in and lay huge there, and Mister Wexford must stand between us and it as we skittered and squeaked past, to keep the fainter-hearted girls and the tinier boys from refusing to leave altogether.
    When we reached home Mam told us of the bull, who had come ashore and been flinging himself about on the sea front, terrorising people and breaking one of Fisher’s little carts. Until then, I had had a plan to amble down to the sea and perhaps attract them out of the town, but this now became too terrifying to enact. I fell to bed, curling to the wall and covering my face, exhausted from being engulfed and poured-through by this invisible brightness. I refused to go to my chores or even to take my hands from my face. Sisters came and went, discussing me, feeling my forehead, scolding me for my laziness, but they could not shame or persuade me up. I slept, and that was some relief; I woke and lay with my eyelids tight shut against the flickering, listening to the seals gather in the lane outside, shifting and sliding on the cobbles, and every now and then one giving its horrible cry. Through the roaring of a wind that everyone else was deaf to, I heard my sisters and mother at the door, people outside conversing, a group of men come down from Wholeman’s and trying to herd the animals away with cries and switches. Would this never stop, this flaming and the shivering around me?
    I lay there in my shame and fear all the rest of the day, except for some moments spent at the front door in terror at how thickly the seals lay now. People stood around them, manoeuvred among them, calling out to each other and laughing at this great joke.
    ‘What about all their babies?’ I said to Bee. ‘Back there at Crescent in the nursery. Do they not care that their babs will starve without them?’
    She laughed and waved out over the crowded lane. ‘Clearly, they’re worried half to death!’
    I went back and hid in my bed again. Mam made the girls brew me up her tonic tea. They made it 1 exceptionally strong and bitter, and I drank it down without protest; it seemed only a fair punishment for what I’d brought on the town. Then I turned away again, and covered my face.
    ‘Come, Missk, you have no fever,’ Tatty said, feeling the back of my neck, seeing as my forehead was pressed against the wall.
    ‘Everything’s jumping about,’ I said. ‘My head is full of it, and it’s worse when I look around.’
    There was talk of doctors then, and brain fever, and never had I wished so hard to be ill of something like that, some ordinary earthly illness. But as I did not rave or vomit or burn, Mam did not think my illness worth the bother of doctoring yet, and she and the sisters only came and went, regarding me suspiciously and making their suggestions. ‘She is certainly distressed,’ I heard Mam mutter in the hallway. ‘Is someone at school tormenting her?’ And Tatty said back, more loudly, ‘She is just a lazy lump and needs a whipping.’
    I hardly cared what they said or thought, as long as they let me lie eyes-covered, out of sight of the seals, away from any light that would smear and flutter at the edges.
    In the morning seals carpeted our lane. I got up, for if I stayed abed and the seals lay around me rather than struggling up to the school, it would be clear whom they were fixed on. So I suffered through another flaring day, grimly watched the fearful laughing and daring of the other children towards the seals. And I took to my bed again that afternoon. My sisters left me to my miseries, which bored them now.
    Towards evening, through my half-sleep I heard a knock at the front door. Then the door to the bedroom was rattled and opened, and lamplight shone on the wall above me.
    ‘Missk, Missk?’ said Dad.
    I