Maggie's Door by Patricia Reilly Giff Read Free Book Online

Anna had said, and given all of it to him.
    “I have no food to spare,” Nory told Mrs. Mallon. “What I have is not for you or me. It is for him.” She thought about the meat, but she’d wait to give it to him later in the morning, or even when the sun went down, to hold him through the night.
    Mrs. Mallon sat opposite them, her hands pulling at a clump of grass.
    “I will help you fix the cart somehow,” Nory told her. “And we’ll go on.”
    “Go on?” Mrs. Mallon put a blade of grass into her mouth. “I tried to pull the cart over a rock and now the axle is broken. It will be here until someone cuts into it for firewood and the nails rust away in the field.”
    Nory took a breath. “I’ll carry Patch then.”
    Mrs. Mallon looked at the board and then at her foot. “You will never—”
    “I will,” Nory said, hearing Anna’s voice in her head. “My foot is better now. I won’t need the board.”
    “I will walk back to my house in Maidin Bay,” Mrs. Mallon said. “I won’t be alone. Anna is there still. If I don’t die on the road, I will die at my hearth.”
    Nory shook her head. “The roof will be tumbled. Your house will be finished, and the English will never let you stay there. Come with me. Together—”
    But Mrs. Mallon went to the cart and came back with pieces of paper fluttering in her hands. “Papers that would have taken us on a ship to America,” she said. “I won’t need them. Sean won’t. But Patch . . .” She handed them to Nory, then touched the top of her head as she went heavily past her down the boreen and was gone.
    “Don’t go,” Nory called after her. “Please stay with us. Please . . .”
    She shivered. Could Mrs. Mallon really be gone? Had she really left them? Nory closed her eyes, thinking of Anna and then Granda.
    “Patch, you are a great boy,
a stór,
” Nory said, turning back to him. “You will put your arms around my neck and your head on my shoulder. You will hold on to me and I will take you to the ship, and to Maggie.”

ELEVEN
    SEAN
    Liverpool. A strange word, an English word. Streets were filled with lodging for those who had money. Men in aprons sold skillets, and pots, and blankets so thin Sean could see through them. Great crowds of people wandered among carts and bales of hay. Men shouted, animals lowed, and in the harbor were great ships. People around them were speaking in English, that strange language.
    He breathed in the smells of the water, and filth, and food. Food was being sold from carts and small tents.
    If only he could have a bite of bread, a potato, or a bit of fish.
    Garvey stood next to him.
    Sean took a breath. “I must find my family,” he said. “They’re ahead of me somewhere, I think.” His mother was strong. He held on to that. He looked away so Garvey couldn’t see his eyes.
    Garvey scratched one of his large ears. “You’d have to look at every face, every soul who is here in Liverpool, and it seems as if it is the entire world.” He put his hand on Sean’s shoulder. “I will spend my last wee bit of money on a fish that swam in the sea this morning and jumped into the net with me on his mind.”
    His brothers had caught fish in their curragh, Sean thought, white-bellied fish that they salted and mixed with potatoes. But that was before the potatoes had failed. That was before the English had taken their sturdy curragh and locked it on the quay to pay the rent.
    Garvey turned aside to dicker with a woman over the price of the fish. He came back a moment later, pulling the fish apart in his hands, and gave a strip to Sean.
    Sean took it in his hands, feeling the softness of it, smelling the sea in it. He held it in his mouth then, not chewing. He had never tasted anything as good as that bit of fish on his tongue, against his teeth, on the roof of his mouth. “I thank you, Garvey,” he said.
    But Garvey was pointing. “The ship!”
    An old dark ship, Sean thought, with sails limp and clinging to the wooden