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

first by the hair and then by the sleeve of his jersey to drag him up and up and finally into the currach.
    He’d had a bald spot on his head all that fall, and Nory had teased him that he looked better without that mop of red hair.
    Nory.
    If only he could tell her about the things that had happened to him.
    He worked from halfway through one night until late the following night. He remembered Mam saying,
“I work from dark to dark.”
He could almost see her, hands on her hips, angry. But he couldn’t even see the dark, couldn’t see the day.
    He was in the galley with only the flame from the lamps to brighten it, or in the passageway to bring tea to the families that were rich enough to have their own cabin. It was Garvey who went up on top and told him when the sun was shining or the rain spitting.
    What Sean did was stir pots of soup for those rich families who had shoes and rings, unlike the poor wretches that he caught glimpses of between the decks. There were two different worlds on the ship, almost like the green world of water he had seen against the clear world of air up above.
    The pots he stirred were never empty; they were filled with shreds of meat, and old vegetables still covered with some of the gritty soil they’d been taken from, and water they kept adding to the top.
    He dipped endless ladles into those pots to pour into thick white bowls and then brought them to rich men’s cabins. Sometimes he and Garvey dipped their fingers into the soup to pull out a small chunk of yellow turnip as it floated by, or a cabbage leaf. Their fingers had blisters, but it was worth it to have their stomachs filled, as long as the cook didn’t see what they had done.
    The cook was a massive man who ate more than six passengers put together, and chewed endlessly with his great toothless mouth open and soup running down his beard. He threw knives and plates, and kicked and punched at anyone nearby when he was angry.
    Sean felt a sharp clout on the back of his head. “You can dream with the fishes,” the cook said. “I’ll send you up top with the garbage to be thrown overboard.”
    Sean bent his head. “Yes, sir.” He wondered if the cook could do such a thing; he shuddered as he thought of that green world and the blackness underneath as he was pulled down into it.
    Quickly he filled bowls with tea, black as the tar on their old currach. He darted around the cook as he took three of the bowls on a tray and left the galley to bring them to the book cabin. He called it that because the man who stayed there with his wife and daughter was always bent over a huge book, mumbling and nodding, and next to him was a young girl who had a book of her own. Younger than he was, eight maybe, and she could read.
    The woman was still sick when he knocked at the door. The room smelled of vomit, and she shook her head wearily. “No tea,” she said in English. “I can’t look at it.”
    Sean thought there was something wrong with the woman anyway. A walking stick was propped up near her bunk.
    But the little girl wasn’t sick. Sean couldn’t imagine her sick. She looked up from her book, curling a piece of her hair around her fingers. “Tea,” she said, looking down at his bare feet.
    The man held out one hand for his bowl, still reading, and Sean went toward him to stand there, looking down at that book covered in the softest material with letters running across the page.
    Just then the ship lurched and the tray of tea bowls slid. Sean caught them just in time, leaning into the man, but as he looked down he saw that a drop of tea had splashed on the page.
    The man saw it too. He looked up at Sean, blinking, almost surprised to see him there. Then he rubbed his sleeve across the page, blotting the mark, which had spread into a line covering some of the letters.
    “I’m sorry.” How angry he would have been if it had been his. And could the cook send him into the green water that tilted just beyond a tiny round window in