A Waltz for Matilda by Jackie French Read Free Book Online Page B

and Irish. Why should he know Mr Ah Ching?
    ‘Sorry, missee.’ He stood there, as though considering her. ‘You need help?’
    Was it so obvious? She stood up uncertainly, brushing crumbs off her skirt. ‘I need to find my father, Mr Jim O’Halloran.’
    He looked around the empty street. Yells and cheers came from inside the hall, even louder now. She had a feeling that more spirituous liquor was being drunk in there than Aunt Ann had ever dreamed of. ‘Mr O’Halloran of Moura?’
    ‘You know it! How do I get there? Is it far away?’
    He seemed to come to a decision. ‘You get in cart.’
    ‘You’ll take me there?’
    He neither shook his head nor nodded. ‘You get in cart.’
    She hesitated. What if Aunt Ann was right? What if he was going to kidnap her and sell her as a slave? No one knew she was here. No one would even look for her. She would just vanish in the darkness.
    Laughter erupted behind her. Two men lurched out of the hall, each carrying a stone jug. The stench of old sweat and spirituous liquor grew stronger. ‘Hey, lassie,’ called one of them. ‘All alone?’
    Suddenly the risk of being kidnapped by a white slaver felt less likely to harm her than sitting here unprotected in the darkness.
    She stepped toward the cart.

Chapter 7
    She ran through the smoky lanes, lost. Somewhere in those faceless houses were Mum, Aunt Ann, Tommy, her father too. She only had to find them.
    No, she wasn’t lost. They were lost. She was asleep in bed. Soon Mum would wake her to go down to the factory. Matilda pulled the sheet over her head. She’d just sleep a little longer.
    She woke, abruptly. It was a blanket, not a sheet … no, not even a blanket, just a hessian sack. At least it looked fairly clean. She was still in the vegetable cart, her head on her bundle. The warmth was sunlight, not a bed. The world smelled of fresh soil and — cabbage?
    Flies clustered at her eyes as soon as she opened them, hunting for moisture. She rubbed them away and felt the grittiness of dust. She sat up and looked around.
    The sun was just rising, washing its light across the land. She was in a garden, or rather a farm, vegetables all around her. Cabbages, carrot tops, pumpkins curled among the flat leaves of other vegetables she couldn’t recognise, some with silver-purpleflowers, a shock of lushness among the grey of dirt and clumps of grass. Hens scratched in the dirt behind a rough branch fence.
    Beyond the vegetables flowed a shallow river, wide as a city block, winding through broad flats of bright white sand. Light glinted on a thin channel of water, curling through the sand and then through dirt, till it reached the garden.
    She turned her head and saw a hut the size of a carriage house, with bark walls and a bark roof. Beyond the hut two men, both dressed in black, bent over the vegetable beds, each hacking at the soil with some sort of long-handled tool.
    One of them was the man she had met last night. What magic did they have to create such greenery in a dead land like this?
    She shifted uneasily. She needed to use a chamber pot. Now. Should she go into the hut and try to find one? But you couldn’t just use a stranger’s chamber pot, especially a man’s.
    Maybe she could squat unnoticed among the cabbages. She slid down from the cart, and waited for the men to look at her. But they seemed intent on their work. She crouched down among the tallest cabbages, straightening her skirt when she’d finished, and scuffled over the wet patch with her shoe.
    One of the men looked up. She flushed, glad he hadn’t looked a few seconds earlier. (Or had he been watching out of the corner of his eye, carefully looking the other way to give her privacy?)
    He said something to the other man then stepped over to her, still holding his hoe.
    ‘Qing An.’ She hoped it was still the right thing to say, early in the morning when you’d just squatted among someone’s cabbages. ‘Please. We go to Moura? Find my father?’
    He