Sea Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page B

everyone to see?’ She puffed with rage next to me.
    ‘I did not mean to,’ I said humbly. ‘I did not intend — ’
    ‘But you did.’ I twitched again as Mam swept away to the door. ‘You did anyway, whether you meant it or not.’
    Then she was gone, and Dad was back in the doorway. I lifted the toffees into the lamplight, showed them to him. We looked helplessly at each other.
    Then Mam returned; she showed him something. ‘From that gash Billy had,’ she said, ‘down his leg, mucking about in the mole-rocks that time.’ She threw it across to my bed, and the bandage unrolled, and would have gone off the side if I had not caught it. ‘Tie it up like he told you,’ she said shrilly, ‘crossed front and back. And wear it day and night. I’ll not be shamed like this again. Leave her the lamp,’ she said to Dad, her voice low again, as if it came from a different person. She snatched the lamp from him and put it just inside the door as if she were too afraid or disgusted to come farther into the room. With a last glare at me she pulled the door closed, and I heard them go away to the kitchen, and my sisters’ breathless questions begin.
    ‘Toffees.’ I whispered, the word as weighty and rich in my mouth as the box felt in my hands. I put it aside and picked up the roll of bandage. I remembered Billy’s cut shin. He had not cried or dramatised over it, but only admired the length and depth of the injury, the gleam of bone at a couple of places in the sponged wound. He had hissed through his teeth as Mam had bound him up, bound the sides of the wound together to heal. He had been such a boy about it, dry-eyed, set-jawed, smudged with blood.
    I shook out the length of bandage, found the middle point and put it upon one shoulder. Aslant down to my waist, front and back, I took it, crossed the bands and brought them about my middle, slanted them up the other way.
    The instant they met at my ear, quiet fell inside me, and the lightless flaring went out of all things. My heart continued pounding hard for a time, but as the stillness went on, it too eased. I held the ties together, and I wept a little at the terrors I had undergone these past two days, at the relief from them, at the simplicity of the remedy, and with gratitude towards Ambler’s Gran-Nan Cartney who had been kind and bull-headed enough to have it brought to me. Through the wall to the kitchen came the murmurings of my sisters aghast and agog, the rumble of Dad reassuring them, quiet snaps now and then from Mam. I rose and undressed in the reawakened roaring, wound the bandage again and this time tied it, pulled on my nightgown over it in the wondrous peace, folded away my clothes and hid the toffee-box among them. I laid myself to bed in the lamplight and the quiet and the blessed solitude, and before long was properly asleep.

    A high-summer morning. Tatty was first at the door.
    ‘Oh, but look!’ She let the door swing wider and bobbed down out of sight beyond the others. ‘What’s this? A delicious thing . Oh, there’s a note. Oh!’ The note must have dived off in the breeze, for she leaped out the door.
    We crowded onto the step and watched her chase it along the street, and stamp it stopped. She carried it back, in her other hand a glazed bun with jewels of rock-sugar scattered over the top. She scowled at the paper, straightening it with the littler fingers of her bun hand. ‘It doesn’t make sense — Oh, I have it upside down, is why. So: “For the… For the…”’ She stopped to scowl some more.
    ‘Let me see.’ Ann Jelly tipped herself off the step.
    But Tatty held bun and note away from her. ‘“Little”, is what it says! “For the little one.” The little one?’
    ‘That has to be Misskaella,’ said Lorel.
    They all drew away from me, looked down on me.
    ‘I’m not little.’
    ‘Not widthways, it’s true,’ said Billy. ‘But height-wise you’re the littlest in this household, not counting the odd mouse,’