The Mersey Girls by Katie Flynn Read Free Book Online Page B

you’ve finished your bread and cheese?’

    Because of the good report Lucy had no difficulty in abandoning the rest of her tasks once she had helped to clear away the tea things. Hurrying round to the Kellys’ cottage she found Mrs Kelly scrubbing the kitchen floor whilst Mr Kelly dozed in a chair.
    ‘Caitlin’s out the back,’ Mrs Kelly said before Lucy could so much as open her mouth. ‘Give her a shout, alanna, she’s givin’ me a bit of a hand cuttin’ mint, that’s all.’ Mrs Kelly was a great one for bottling and preserving, drying and jellying, and Lucy quite envied Caitlin, who would be somewhere out in the garden cutting the mint which would be hung in bunches from the kitchen ceiling beams throughout the summer and allowed to dry. Once it was like tinder it would be crushed, sugared, vinegared and packed into small jars which would last for the whole of next winter, enlivening mutton dishes and giving an added piquancy to vegetable stews.
    ‘Caitlin, is that you?’ Lucy said to a patch of vigorously shaking cabbage plants, but it was only Mrs Kelly’s one-eyed cat, who was sharpening his claws on a woody cabbage stalk. He gave her a mean look out of his one eye and stalked away from her, tail straight up, feet turned out, fur well fluffed, outrage in every line of his body.
    ‘Lucy?’ Caitlin’s head appeared from the middle of what looked like currant bushes. ‘Want to give me a hand?’
    ‘I don’t mind,’ Lucy said, pushing her way through the vegetables until she reached her friend’s side. ‘Your mammy said you were cutting mint. Shall I bunch them for you?’
    ‘Sure,’ Caitlin said, cutting another stalk and handing it to Lucy. ‘You’re early, aren’t you?’
    ‘It was me report,’ Lucy told her. ‘Me knees fair shook – ‘member the stockings? And the bits of chalk I nicked to make indigestion medicine? But she was really nice, she gave me all A grades except for sums, and she couldn’t have give me higher than a B for that, not without perjuring her soul, as the priest would say.’
    Caitlin sat back on her heels and pushed her lank brown hair out of her eyes. She grinned up at Lucy. ‘Told you she wasn’t a bad woman,’ she said righteously. ‘I got mostly A grades as well, Mammy’s ever so pleased and Daddy, too. So d’you want to ask if we can go off for the whole day, tomorrow, instead of waiting until after our dinners? We could really cover some distance in a whole day.’
    ‘That’s why I came round,’ Lucy admitted. ‘I’ve already asked; Maeve said she was sure it would be all right. Go on, if Mrs Kelly’s in a good mood she’ll likely say yes as well.’
    And so it proved. ‘But no drownin’ yourselves in the lough or gettin’ into bad company,’ Mrs Kelly warned. ‘Is Miss Maeve puttin’ up enough dinner for the both of you? Right, then you can have a bag of me dried apple pieces and a bottle of me lemon barley water.’
    Polite thanks were chorused and then, as the sun was setting, Caitlin, as the elder, offered to see Lucy home.
    ‘It’s funny how your mammy always tells us not to drown ourselves or get into bad company, and Maeve always says to take care of each other and not to play with fire, isn’t it?’ Lucy said as they ambled across the farmyard in the dying sunset. ‘Yet it’s my mammy who got into bad company, and my daddy who was drowned. I don’t really understand grownups at all, do you?’
    ‘I don’t want to understand ’em; we’ll be grownup ourselves quite soon enough – too soon,’ Caitlin said promptly. ‘There’s your back door, alanna; get indoors, then I’ll run home and we can light our lamps and wave.’
    This was another tried and true activity. Lucy had a little room up under the eaves of the old stone farmhouse with ivy constantly trying to block out her light. Caitlin was in an even smaller room in her parents’ cottage with a tiny window cut into the thatch. But when they lit their lamps the glow