Ruby Flynn Read Free Page B

Max now? Ruby’s heart beat faster as she thought of him and her eyes began to fill with tears.
    She wanted to ask the man, would someone take Max when they went for her mammy and daddy? Max needed food. Max would die too. But the words were trapped inside her. The vision of soft eyes came into her mind. The long hair around his mouth, which she used to laugh at and call his beard. The smell of his damp coat when they both came back wet to the house and she lay with him on the floor in front of the fire, stroking his belly with one hand, holding a book with another, listening to her mother busy at the table preparing their supper, feeling warm and content.
    The image, the smells, the memory all fluttered about inside her head. She opened and closed her mouth and tried to form the word Max , but nothing happened, no sound came, she could not speak.
    Ruby looked at the adults talking, oblivious to her silence. The man’s wife, Susan, had told her she would live here and would attend the school.
    ‘You will be sad for a while, but you will get better, sweetheart,’ she had said.
    Sometimes, her mammy had called her sweetheart. When she was having her soft moments. When Ruby sat on her knee and rested her head against her soft pillowy breasts. When her mammy stroked her hair and sang softly into her ear. She tried to remember the song. It was elusive, just there, hovering, waiting to be recalled, but she couldn’t remember. She could only hear the soothing tones of Susan.
    ‘It is a great opportunity, just fantastic. Make the most of it. Learn every day. Study really hard. That school is the best in Ireland and even in Liverpool. You will leave with something most girls in Ireland don’t have, the ability to make your own way in the world. With an education like that, you will be able to do anything, become a nurse, a doctor even, they have more lady doctors now than ever before, since the war. Just you make the most of it, Ruby, turn something bad into something good.’
    Susan looked into Ruby’s face as she spoke, hoping to find some sign that her words had sunk in, made sense. All she saw was fear, staring back at her.
    ‘It’s all too much for her to take in,’ said Con, gently. ‘Don’t upset yourself, it’s because you are so close to your time.’ Susan nodded and Ruby saw tears welling in her eyes.
    She was confused by Susan’s words. Why should she make the most of it? She didn’t want to live here. When the snow melted, she would escape and return to her cottage. Who were these people deciding the rest of her life for her?
    Susan, in her softly spoken way had also said, ‘The nuns will look after you and make you very welcome.’
    If she had got that so profoundly wrong, what of everything else she had said? Ruby now felt more afraid than ever. The looks the reverend mother shot Ruby, when she thought Con wasn’t looking were far from welcoming.
    Con continued to speak. ‘She is about twelve years old, the housekeeper reckons, despite being so small. The only words she has spoken since we found her are her name, Ruby Flynn. They are known not to have family locally. Flynn was an orphan, himself, by all accounts. I will make enquiries, but without knowing which parish the mother was originally from, I don’t hold out much hope… though I do know where she may have once worked.’
    Con had finished his tea. His cup tapped the silver teaspoon and it rattled and rang against the saucer as he placed the cup down. She heard the noise of shuffling, the lightest of footsteps, moving along the corridor outside the door and turned her head slightly, to listen harder.
    She could hear bells softly pealing, doors opening and closing and muffled voices. The convent, which had been silent until now, was slowly awakening. Her fingers were wound around the thin arm of the chair in which Con sat and they clenched tighter, as though she were reluctant to leave his side. A bolt of anxiety shot through her as he rose to