Her Hungry Heart Read Online Free Page A

heard.
    She tried to still her heart. Impossible. Her happiness, its sheer improbability. Memories were flooding back of another wood, barely remembered. But how could she have forgotten? Home, she was coming home. Maybe not her own home, but such a home as the Blocks had never been. She began to cry. She was thinking of Mashinka and Tatayana, her teacher. Poor Tatayana. Of the three of them she had suffered most in their wanderings to find a home for themselves. And she had died of a broken heart, or so Mashinka said. Her tears were for Beechtrees too because it was so beautiful and because it was true, her father would come and find her, and they would be together for the remainder of their lives.
    The pedlar was thinking of his schedule. How quickly he could decently get away from Beechtrees. The summer camps? And the furriers on vacation from New York? Several houses of them, four or five families to a house. His toughest customers. Now that they were inside Beechtrees, Mimi, though not quite forgotten, was relegated to the back of the pedlar’s mind. As far as he was concerned, she wassettled. He had done his bit for poor Mashinka and Mimi. More than his bit. A good deed was a good deed, but charity still began at home.
    Commerce made him oblivious to Mimi’s tears. But not so Cassandra. She placed an arm around Mimi’s shoulder and pressed a clean handkerchief into her hands. The two girls looked at each other. After taking a deep breath, Mimi composed herself and dried her eyes. For a few seconds she covered her eyes with her hands. When she removed them, the crying was over.
    The three, strangers to each other in their various ways, bumped along over the rutted drive. All her life Mimi would remember the pedlar and what he had done for her and for Mashinka. Most especially for taking her fate in his hands. That ride from the gate along the avenue of trees gave her the first real sense of comfort since she had been sent away from home with Tatayana and Mashinka, to become a refugee, a casualty, a mere item amid the flotsam of war. It was the road to new beginnings for Mimi. This displaced child of nine knew it. She could feel something stirring in the very marrow of her bones. The comfort of strangers.

Chapter 2
    Half a mile up the avenue, a pair of winged stone griffins, the more menacing for being pitted by time, wind and rain, stood on ten-foot-high stone plinths. Like sentinels they appeared on either side of the secondary road that led through the stable courtyard to the kitchen gardens, the kitchen itself and the service entrance to the mansion house. At the turning the pedlar slowed for a man to hop on to the running-board. A head poked through the window. ‘Hi, Joe, Cassandra, and you too – can’t keep calling you “you too”. Got a name?’
    ‘Jerry, she’s called Mimi,’ the pedlar told him as he shifted gears and picked up speed again.
    ‘Well, Mimi, look over there.’
    All eyes in the cab looked in the direction pointed out to them. They could just see, parallel to the lorry and a good distance from it, running through the tall grass and its spattering of wild red poppies, three children of various ages and sizes wildly waving at them. They were shouting and jumping up as they ran, to get a better look at the lorry and a glimpse of cook’s new helper.
    Mimi’s heart was racing. She watched them and remembered fun, happiness, what it felt like to run wild and laugh and play. The Blocks and Chicopee, years of imprisonment in those grim, smelly rooms – now it was just a bad dream, a long nightmare through which only Mashinka’s and Tatayana’s love for her had sustained them all. The poverty that had ground their spirits had alienatedthem from the niceties of life. At the beginning there had still been laughter between herself and Mashinka, first her wet-nurse then her nanny, her second mother, and Tatayana, her governess and tutor. But that had been in the early days of their exile,