No Peace for Amelia Read Online Free

she bent to loosen the floorboard, Mary Ann was not planning to read over her mother’s last letters, but rather to add a new letter to the bundle. With a shaking hand she pulled out the crumpled and beloved bundle and undid the old bootlace that held the letters together. As she did so, the letters fell into her lap with a soft sigh. Just then, a mating cat mewled and screamed somewhere beyond Mary Ann’s window, which was open to the spring night, and the sound made the girl jump. The sudden movement caused a tidal wave in the folds of her apron, and the precious letters went skittering and slithering to the floor.
    â€˜Christmas in the workhouse!’ Mary Ann swore her mother’s favourite curse and bent down to pick up the letters. Now she’d be forced to open them all to check the dates, as she liked to keep them in order. There were about a dozen, and as she opened each envelope, stray words and phrases from the body of the letters caught Mary Ann’s eye, try as she would not to read the content: ‘Tell your Da to put Jimmy in the middle of the bed, so the others keep him warm …’ (for Mary Anne’s father was illiterate, and her mother could only keep in touch with him through messages to Mary Ann), ‘the nuns are very good …’, ‘porridge for breakfast …’, ‘Remind the small ones to say a prayer for their poor Ma …’, ‘bad painin my chest …’, ‘Don’t let your Da get into debt …’, ‘You’re a great girl …’, ‘I’m feeling a bit better today, thank God.’
    Mary Ann gulped when she read that bit. It was from the very last letter, written two days before her mother died. She folded the letter quickly and stuffed it back into its envelope, and laid it on top of the bundle. Then she put her latest letter on top of that again, and did the whole lot up with the mangy bootlace.
    On second thoughts, she undid the bundle again, removed the new letter, and re-tied the bootlace. She’d just read it once again and then she’d put it with the others , but not inside the bundle. She’d prefer after all to keep her mother’s letters in their own special bundle. There was something that made her a bit uneasy about Patrick’s letter, and she thought her mother, much as she had loved her eldest boy, mightn’t like her letters to be so closely linked with this one of his.
    The letter was written on a page out of a school jotter – the very cheap kind that had visible pieces of wood pulp in it, which you couldn’t write on in pen and ink, because it would blot all over the place. He’d written with a pencil that needed sharpening, so between the poor quality of the paper, Patrick’s inelegant handwriting and the blunt pencil, it was a bit of a chore to read it at all. But Mary Ann could decipher it well enough, and she could read between the lines too, and every time she read it, she got a sour surge of acid in her stomach,caused by a mixture of panic, excitement, fear, horror and elation.
    As well as being physically poorly written, the letter was confused in its construction and tone, as if Patrick too was in the grip of a mixture of panicky and elated feelings. It was full of sentences repeated from things that Mr Pearse, the leader of the rebels, had said, and bits of a poem by somebody else all about blood and roses, which was half like a prayer and half not. And at the very end there came an awful request for Mary Ann’s help.
    The request was awful, because it required Mary Ann to do something both simple and shocking. Quite what the something was was not entirely clear – it wasn’t the sort of request you could make openly in a letter going through the public postal system. But even though it was stated in shrouded terms, Mary Ann knew perfectly well that she was being asked to do something illegal, and something that might also be morally