Alchemy and Meggy Swann by Karen Cushman Read Free Book Online Page B

wart-necked mammering clap dish."
    They walked in silence for a moment through a river of garbage. Not everyone would have laughed at her insults, Meggy thought. "You be ever merry and good tempered, Oldmeat," she said, "no matter if I am calling you names or Mistress Grimm is commanding you. How is that?"
    Roger lifted his cap and scratched his head. "My father died when I was but twelve, and I was plucked from school and made clerk to a lawyer, who beat me fiercely on cold mornings to warm himself." He grasped Meggy's elbow and steered her clear of a mud hole one could sail a ship in. "A twelve-month of that and I ran to London. Now I do what I will and have what I will and no one beats me. Why would I not be merry?"
    "Well, your sweet disposition aches my teeth, you canker blossom." Meggy stumbled over a dead dog left to rot in the street. "Fie upon this dirty city," she shouted, "home to every kind of dirt, muck, and slime God ever created."
    "That may be so, but you will come to love her as I do," Roger said. "London is a fair that lasts all year. Around every corner is something wondrous—here a man with a dancing monkey, yon our good Queen Bess in silks and satins on a fine white horse. This way there's a hanging at Tyburn, that way fire eaters and rope dancers and the puppeteers in Fleet Street." Gesturing grandly, he nearly knocked Meggy into the teeming gutter.
    "'Tis all here," he continued, "the fine and the ragged, the rotten and the pure. London may reek with old dirt, but her streets are filled with new hopes, new dreams, and new ideas. You are fortunate to be here, Margret Swann."
    Fortunate? Meggy was unconvinced. She had ever found fortune to be fickle, false, and harsh, and belike it would be no different here in this London.
    Meggy was weary and trembling with pain by the time they reached the little house on Crooked Lane. As they stopped before the door, Roger motioned toward her walking sticks. "How did it happen that you ... that your legs..." He blushed. "Or am I too bold?"
    "You are." He turned to walk away. "I was born so," she said to his back. "I be the most luckless person God ever did make. Or curse."
    "Not so luckless," Roger said, turning toward her again. "You could also have gut griping, ruptures, catarrhs, and gravel in the back, lethargies, cold palsies, and sciatica. You might suffer from the wheezing lung or a bladder full of impost-hume or a dirt-ridden liver."
    "Go to! I do not—"
    "Or pustules and pimples and pocks, cankers and rashes and St. Vitus' dance."
    Meggy leaned on her sticks and kicked out at him. "You are being waggish, Oldmeat," she said, "but I cannot share the humor. I cannot walk without pain, nor run, nor dance. I am called names in the street and spat upon. My mother sent me away and my father does not want me. I have nothing and no one."
    "Nay, you have a friend."
    "Aye, Louise, but she dwells elsewhere now."
    "Not the goose. Me," he said. "Roger Oldham, at your service." With a little bow, he turned and strode away.
    Meggy was struck right speechless. She opened the door to the house at the Sign of the Sun with the sense that she had left something unfinished. Something important. "Good thanks to you, Oldmeat, for seeing me home," she called after him. He lifted his cap in salute but did not turn around. "And for the coins." He lifted his cap again. "You may call me Meggy, if you will." And he lifted his cap once more.
    Meggy watched him go. She had faced him with her fists up as always, but Roger had stood firm. 'Twas like poking a porridge, she thought. It did no harm to the porridge but only made her feel sticky.
    As the room grew dark, Meggy wrapped herself in her cloak and lay down on her pallet. She faced a night alone, without Louise. The girl missed the warmth of the goose's body, the soft huffing of her breath, even the furious scritching and scratching after bugs in her feathers. What did Louise right now? Was she nestling with someone else? Meggy's belly