Christmas Wish by Lizzie Lane Read Free Book Online

with the effort. Her eyes were blinded by snow and a biting wind.
    Narrowing her eyes she looked for a landmark pointing the way back to her aunt’s house. There to her right was the Red Cow, to her left the coffin makers, a light shining from a small window, snow heaped up in drifts against the door.
    There was not another soul in sight and the whole world seemed to have fallen silent; no sound from the pub, none from the workshops of the coffin maker.
    A drift of snow, pure white and unsullied by footprints or cart tracks, suddenly moved then split open. Four ragged figures emerged like carrion chicks from a single, shattered egg. Boys. Four boys.
    Magda backed away, her small hand held high, palm facing her attackers. ‘Touch me and I curse you.’
    Her voice was true and clear, slicing through the cold air like a meat cleaver through butter.
    She wasn’t sure she could curse them, but her aunt had told her she was cursed; cursed with foreign blood and the daughter of a witch. So what if she played the part? Well, if these louts believed it too, so much the better.
    Moving sharply to avoid her attackers she dislodged the hood of torn blanket that had covered her head.
    No longer covered by the scrap of blanket, a shock of silkyblack hair fanned out around the girl’s face, the wind making it into long, gauzy streamers, as fine and floating as butterfly wings. The boys paused, their rags blown aside by the wind exposing dirty knees and thin legs. One of the boys was wearing what looked like the coat of a merchant seaman with brass buttons and a torn hem. It reached to his grey socks, which lay in folds around his ankles.
    Watching from her window, Winnie shook her head. If the girl would just throw the bread down, they might leave her alone. With the exception of the Fitts boy, the tallest and strongest of the group, the others were from poor families. Fitts’s son would be their ringleader, of stockier build than the others and possessing his father’s arrogant gait, his shoulders rolling from side to side as he took measured paces towards the girl.
    There was no reason for Winnie to be noticed for she made no sound and barely moved.
    ‘None of my business,’ she muttered and spit into a lace-edged handkerchief.
    She was about to turn away, to go into the parlour and tidy it up ready for visitors when a memory came to her.
    The vision was familiar, though usually it only surfaced in the dead of night.
    Shaking her head she mopped the sweat from her brow with the back of her mitten-clad hand. Why had it suddenly come to her and why did it make her feel this way? What did that snippet of a girl and her own long-endured nightmare have in common?
    Her eyes, blurred with sudden moistness, went back to the window. The frost curtailed clear vision, the small hole too small to see much, but she knew what was happening out there. The weak would be in danger of going under. The loaf would be taken from her and she’d be left cut and bruised, andthat was before Bridget Brodie got hold of her. And as for that brat Bradley Fitts …
    Before she even had time to consider what she was doing, her gnarled fingers, as knobbly and thin as winter twigs, were wrestling with the door bolt.
    Liberally smeared with goose grease, the bolt slid back easily, the door flung open and the snow and cold of the outside, plus a small girl wrapped in a worn blanket, fell in, still clutching a loaf of bread.
    Winnie waved her stick at some of the poorest, most wretched boys in the city, and that singularly wicked one, Bradley Fitts. Like his father he bullied the destitute with promises of taking whatever they wanted from them that had.
    Winnie was like a fury in old-fashioned black shawl and dark purple dress, waving her stick and yelling at the top of her voice.
    ‘Away with you devils or I’ll be setting the Peelers on you.’
    At the sight of her, it was Bradley Fitts who shot off first. One thing he didn’t do was take the blame for