A Distant Dream Read Free

when it came to negotiating the price of a deal, which he could be when he was in the driving seat and you were the poor sod who was waiting for his money. What if he began to haggle over the price of the horse and cart? Colooney hadn’t been particularly generous when taking the small herd of shorthorns, which had been good milkers and had prolific births. He had given them a trivial amount for the geese and hens and had only offered Bessie a paltry couple of guineas when she had shown him some good pieces of furniture from the contents of the sitting room. Luckily, he had a little tucked away, but the extra money for the horse and cart would have made life a whole lot easier. Still, he was better off than the poor buggers they’d passed along the way, struggling to keep to the muddy track with their possessions on their backs or on a wobbly handcart, their kids crying with tiredness and their thin and starving parents looking as if they were at their wits’ end. Colooney had told him in a lowered voice that the soldiers had been sent from Dublin Barracks in order to clear up the sick and the dying and had made the ditches wider to pitch the poor sods in.
    The cost of emigration wasn’t cheap. It might have been, if Clarence had been under thirty five and had one or two children. Then their voyage would have been completely free, underwritten by the government of Her Majesty, but he was fifty two and childless when he’d applied, though he was able to qualify on two counts – he was married and a skilled agricultural labourer. “Agricultural labourer” was not a term he liked to use, as in his opinion running his own farm, though tenanted, made him a farmer. Though if lying got him to where he wanted to go, he was happy to stretch the truth. He did have the option of borrowing money from Sara’s husband, who was a moneylender. It was something that Bessie had urged him to do, when he had told her that they couldn’t afford to travel in a second class cabin. At £25 per person, they could save that money, travel in steerage and buy more land when they got to their destination. At his age and not being used to taking orders, he didn’t want to have to work for the benefit of another. Why should he now be beholden, like he had been to the absentee English landlord who owned all the land around?
    The child awoke as the horse and cart pulled up outside a row of sturdy, brick-built villas. She lay quietly for a moment, her eyes focusing on the cloudy sky, watching as a flock of seagulls wheeled around in the air above. She felt warm in the little nest that Bessie had created, especially as the cat had joined her and was purring quietly at her side. Though she felt sad that Maggie hadn’t come along with her, perhaps she would enjoy a little holiday.
    The sound of angry voices, the squeal from the cat as it was wrested from its perching place, the shrill tones from the woman and shouts of the man, all brought Molly from contentment to alarm. She was whisked into the air, scratching her shin on the side of the wooden cart and then deposited with someone who was wearing a long, black dress covered with a long, white pinafore and had a frilled, starched hat upon her head.
    â€œTake her somewhere, Bridie, just while we sort this one out,” she heard the woman say. “We’ll be indoors in a minute or so. Perhaps you can give her a drop of milk.”
    Molly sat on the nice girl’s comfortable knee in a place that looked like a kitchen. At least it had a warm fire glowing in front of the chair where they were sitting and the girl called Bridie was dabbing something soothing onto her bleeding shin.
    â€œWheesht, Alanna, would yer ever look at this, what have they done to yer? Where have yer come from and dressed like some sort of a marionette from a puppet show? Sure, all ye’d need is a bit of rouge on that poor little face of yours and yer’d be the spit