The Linnet Bird: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

be anything but hungry with such food put before me, and in the presence of such company?”
    He’d studied me then. “You are undernourished, that I see. But there’s another kind of hunger, Linny, a wary hunger for learning, for understanding, that I also see there on your face.”
    I raised my glass to my lips, just letting the crimson liquid touch them before I returned the glass to the snowy tablecloth. “That may well be,” I answered. “Perhaps I have a hunger of the soul itself.” I was repeating, word for word, what the anemic young man at the table behind me had said only moments earlier. I had no idea what it meant, although of course I knew what a soul was. I still faithfully attended Sunday services at Our Lady and St. Nicholas.
    He laughed then, his hair damp with sweat, pomade melting down his neck, his round face reddened by the many glasses of port and brandy he’d drunk, first in the hotel room and then with dinner. “You’re a clever little minx, I’ll give you that. Come now, give me your best Irish voice, for I’m feeling a little homesick tonight.”
    I recited a poem and then told him some silly social snippet I’d overheard, mimicking his own Irish cadence, for it came easily to me, creating the exact intonations of other voices.
    He nodded, smiling broadly and fondly, shaking his head as if amazed. “Aren’t you a wonder, then. How do you achieve that exacting pattern? Pure Dublin, it is. It’s as if you’ve spent all your young days taking tea on Grafton Street.” And then he summoned the server for a dish of pears and cream for me and brandy pudding with hard sauce for himself, and there was no more tedious talk.
     

     
    I MISSED SPENDING TIME with my old friends. At the bookbinders I had two friends I’d worked alongside—Minnie and Jane. Minnie was a year older than me, Jane a year younger. We had sometimes left the bookbindery together, four hours before our mothers were allowed to leave, and had lingered along the streets on the way home, talking—or perhaps only pretending—about the fancy hats and beaded reticules we would someday own, or what we would imagine to be the finest meal in the world, or other fanciful dreams of young girls. Sometimes we held hands, as true friends do.
    But there was no time for friendship now; I had to rush straight off from work to prepare our plain dinner and eat and change before I was taken out by Ram each evening. Minnie and Jane accepted my story of having to hurry home to serve my stepfather his dinner or face the back of his hand and they still smiled at me often at work, but I keenly felt the loss of their companionship in my life.
    Adding to my loneliness was missing the visits with the neighbors. Some evenings when the weather was mild, Mother and I had stood out in the court with other women and girls who lived in Back Phoebe Anne. I would stand beside Mother, who usually worked on a bit of darning or sewing. Other women held or nursed their babies or caught up on their mending, like Mother, and we all absently watched the younger children play their skipping and hopping and stone-tossing games. I listened to the local gossip—who had been seen with whom, what arguments had been heard through the thin walls, whose baby was sickening, and whose old gran was dying in bed. Although the other women were coarser than Mother, most with missing teeth and loud guffaws of laughter and cheeks or bottom lips stuffed with chewing tobacco, it had still been a pleasure to lean against the walls and spend a companionable half hour before bed.
    Now I’d pass those women with my head down, following Ram, sure they knew what I was off to do in my clean dress and carefully plaited hair. I often heard whispers and mutterings and knew I was now one of the regular sources of gossip, but no one ever stepped forward to speak to me or to ask how I was doing. They knew their place, these women.
    But I believe it was Mae Scat, from the cellar across the