The September Girls by Maureen Lee Read Free Book Online

dead were buried in sacks instead of caskets and walked slowly back to Upper Clifton Street, Cara asleep against Brenna’s heart inside the black shawl. She was such a good baby, getting bigger and heavier by the day, full of beans when she was awake and thriving faster than Fergus and Tyrone had ever done due to all the milk her mother drank - Nancy brought round a whole pint a day.
    ‘What’s going to happen to us, Colm?’ Brenna asked. It was almost November, a whole month since they’d come to Liverpool. Now the weather was getting colder. She dreaded to think what it would be like when winter came.
    ‘I don’t know, luv,’ Colm sighed. He wasn’t normally a sighing man and looked at the end of his tether. No one could have tried harder to find proper work. And no one could have been more patient than Brenna, never complaining when he came home penniless after another fruitless day.
    ‘I’ve thought of something we can do,’ she said. She’d thought of it before, but hadn’t mentioned it, knowing it would upset him. ‘I can go cleaning. Didn’t I clean for Miss Francesca O’Reilly for all of seven years? I can do it again and take our Cara with me, and you can still look for work.’
    Colm’s face went so red she was worried he was about to have a fit. ‘No,’ he said angrily. ‘I’m not having me wife keeping me and me kids. If I’ve not found a job by Christmas, I’ll just have to think of making money some other way, even if it’s only enough to get us back to Ireland.’
    ‘What other way?’
    ‘Never you mind,’ he said, so brusquely that her blood ran cold.
    ‘You’re never going to do anything underhand, Colm Caffrey?’ He’d mentioned more than once that not all the meat in the markets where he sometimes worked reached its rightful destination. The odd side of beef would disappear and be sold on the sly at a knockdown price. Colm, as honest as the day was long, considered it a quite disgraceful practice.
    He put his arm around her shoulders and gave them a squeeze. ‘I said, never you mind, Bren.’
     
    They made a handsome couple, Marcus thought as he followed half a street behind. The husband was tall and as thin as his wife, with coal-black curly hair under a tweed cap. There was no collar to his shirt and his elbows jutted sharply through the holes in his jacket sleeves - the holes had been patched, but now the patches were hanging off. Unlike Marcus, whose own features he’d always considered rather coarse, this man’s were perfectly regular, almost refined. ‘He’s a fine young fella, Colm Caffrey,’ Nancy had said. Had the pair been dressed differently, they could have been a duke and his lady out for an afternoon stroll.
    He’d been surprised, while sitting in his usual place by the window in the Fish out of Water, when she had come out of the house accompanied by her husband. He had followed as far as the cemetery and saw them disappear behind the hedge to the place where the nameless and the dispossessed were laid to rest. They must have come to see the brother being buried, the one who had gambled away their precious money - Nancy continued to keep him up to date with news of the Caffreys, possibly in the hope he’d come riding to the rescue of her new friends.
    Marcus scoured the Liverpool Echo every night to see if the murderer had been caught, but there’d been no mention of it: the police probably had more to do with their time than spend it searching for one wastrel who had killed another.
    The two people in front were talking animatedly. Then he put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her affectionately. They stopped and looked down at the baby in her mother’s arms, then continued with their walk.
    What must it be like to share one’s thoughts and most intimate feelings with another human being? Marcus couldn’t imagine it, yet there was something awfully appealing about having someone to talk to, someone who would listen while you tried to explain