Friends Indeed by Rose Doyle

Author:Rose Doyle [Doyle, Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 034077133X
Published: 2019-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sarah

The horsecar went back across the plains at a canter. For a while after its tail disappeared from sight I could still hear the wheels, the whip cracking the air. Then there was silence. Even James had stopped crying.

The women stood watching us.

And we stood watching the women. The children came closer. They were curious and giggling and the oldest, a girl of about eight, touched Allie's dress.

'Did you make it yourself?' She fingered the flounce around the hem. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick and black with dirt. 'You must be very clever.' Her inky blue eyes followed the lines of the dress upward, past the pleating and fluted beading to the rows of blue velvet. 'And rich too.' She looked into Allie's face before touching the flounce again. 'It's a lovely thing.' She stepped back. Her admiration was matter-of-fact, not awestruck at all.

Allie's cheeks had flushed pink. I'm sure mine did too. Dressed in our best street clothes and facing those half-naked women and children, the three of us looked foolish. With the Paris shawl about my shoulders I felt like a Christmas tree but Allie, in her velvet and beading, looked even more at odds. The flush in her cheeks deepened. She said nothing.

'Is there a Nance Reilly here?' Beezy, smoking and calmly surveying the women, spoke loudly. Removing her rings hadn't made her any less conspicuous. If I was a Christmas tree then she, in her red satin with the silvery feathers, stood out like a lighthouse.

The thought came to me, cold and frightening, that the women watching us had probably been dressed as we were now when they'd arrived on the Curragh. They'd hardly planned to end up the way they were.

In the shelter of the hollow the smoke from Beezy's cigar hovered and coloured the air blue. The nests, now we were this close, were easy to make out. They were made from furze, piled into the shape of an upside-down bowl and with makeshift doors. Small fires smouldered in the doorways of most of them. Clothes were spread to dry on bushes everywhere.

'Who wants to know about Nance Reilly?'

The voice which called out belonged to the woman we'd seen crawling from a nest. She was tall and thin, with sandy hair and skin as worn-looking as her frieze petticoat.

'Beezy Ryan wants to know.' Beezy didn't move, 'I was told by Hannah Doherty you might be here. We need shelter for the summer months. She said the women here weren't the kind would turn us away.'

'How's Hannah getting on these times?' Nance Reilly watched Beezy closely. Scrawny and worn she might be but something in her reminded me of my mother. I think it was the way she held herself so straight.

'Hannah's not so good.' Beezy shook her head. 'Her baby died. She's with the nuns in a Magdalen. I was there myself, for a while.' She touched her scarred face. 'So were my companions.' She jerked her head sideways at me and Allie.

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