Far From Home Read Online Free

might bring back to infect us all.”
    They turned quickly as the door creaked open. A white-faced, anguished-looking woman in a dark dress under a worn and stained frilled-neck apron, spoke in a flat, thin voice: “I didn’t hear the twiddle of the pin in me door latch. Come in, why don’t yer.” The girls followed her inside the small, single-room house. Clarissa’s breath caught in her throat as she stepped inside and spied a pail of slops under a bench nailed against a wall. A small child sat beside the pail, sucking on a dried, ragged caplin. The fish’s head, with its dull and beady eyes, hung out of the boy’s mouth.
    Clarissa smiled at the child and moved towards the tepid warmth of a square stove with little feet. It was cracked and had a long chain wrapped around it, keeping it together beneath a long funnel that pierced the low roof. She imagined the stove falling apart, and a tongue of fire leaping to grab at the line of clothes above her head, and then devouring the whole family.
    Clarissa noticed a framed portrait of the late Queen Victoria, white-veiled, heavy-eyed and tight-lipped, hanging on the wall of the shack. She thought: The queen wouldn’t have been amused to know her likeness was hanging in a shack. Inside the glass, the painting had swelled from the dampness seeping through the hole it covered. Up close, the distortion almost gave the queen a smile.
    Clarissa looked at a man sitting on a stool with a wool sock on one foot and another wool sock on a stump of leg. His face, the colour of an old penny, was drenched with sweat and grime under a shabby Cape Ann. A TD clay pipe leaned out over his lip, dragging it down to his whiskered chin. The old man dropped the pipe into his hand, leaving his bloodless lips half open as he looked at Clarissa and Cora without greeting them.
    The woman who had invited them inside straightened her dark, heavy clothes and wiped her forehead with a hand that looked scalded and dried; her fingers were scrawny as pickled caplin. “Youse be from der orphanage, I can tell by yer dress,” she said. “The Doctor is highly learned, he is. You’m lucky to be in hese care.”
    â€œAnd glad to be,” Clarissa answered, surprised at her words. She knew that the orphanage, with its bright electric lights and running cold and hot water, was the envy of poor people in the harbour. Missus Frances often reminded the children that the Grenfell Mission had been kind enough to give them a warm and clean refuge. They were better dressed and better nourished than many of the local people.
    A little girl lay curled on a barrel chair under a pile of mouldy-looking rags. She called weakly, “Mammy.” Then she started hiccuping hard enough to shake her thin body.
    â€œHere, Child,” the woman said, lifting a wooden ladle from a bucket to the little girl’s lips. “Nine glutches of water down yer throat ’ll take care of dem hiccups.” The girl slurped nine times.
    The woman turned and pulled a worn flannel barrow down over the child’s head and tucked it around her tiny feet. The girl grabbed the edge of her mother’s stained white apron and sucked on it – mucus dribbling from her nose like a raw egg. Esther, a girl who used to come to school, stood in a corner looking embarrassed. Clarissa could see she was puffed up in her middle. Esther wasn’t smiling, and her thin fingers twirled a lock of dark, greasy hair. She knew what other children in the harbour knew: boys and girls raised in the orphanage would get an education. Esther was smart, even though she came to school for only half days; her soft brown eyes would light up like the polished glass of a lamp whenever she got her sums right. The other half of the day, Jack, her brother, came to school to learn figuring. He told the school ma’am: “I don’t want to be cheated by the merchant whose youngsters always got the smell of