The Linnet Bird: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

he didn’t mind if I fell asleep. And I usually did; it was difficult to stay awake after a full day of work, followed by the warm bath and soft bed and the harmless caresses by hands smooth as kid leather. Wednesday was difficult to leave when Ram’s knock was eventually heard.
    But Thursday was my favorite. He loved to feed me and after our time in his room in the beautifully appointed hotel off Lord Street he always took me downstairs to the dining room, shimmering with candelabras and silver salvers and platters polished bright as mirrors. The walls, with their elegant muted wallpaper of blue and silver, were lined with oil paintings. There were tall windows steamed from the warmth of the generous fires and the bodies heated by rich food and plentiful drink and, in many cases, I suspect, thoughts of the upstairs rooms. During our time in the hotel I was instructed to call Thursday Uncle Horace. Did the people at the elaborate front desk, or those carrying clean linens and trays of food through the wide halls, or those serving us in the dining room really believe me to be his niece? Or did they simply turn a blind eye to the truth of the situation, accepting the lie with polite smiles and subservient bows or curtsies, willingly taking the coins Horace pressed into every hand?
    Uncle Horace was huge of girth. Although he was quickly and easily fulfilled upstairs, he seemed unable to satisfy his insatiable appetite at the table. He ordered mounds of food, with special delicacies for me—capons with sizzling golden skin, turbot with lobster sauce, potatoes mashed and swirled into little golden-brown domes. He also bought me sweet port. I didn’t care for its taste but loved its beautiful deep ruby, which reflected off the fire. Uncle Horace always insisted on a table by the fireplace.
    It was there, in the gracious high-ceilinged dining room smelling of roasted meat and caramelized sugar, of hair pomade and delicate eau de toilette, of wealth and confidence, that I watched and learned all I could of how men and women of his class moved about with surety. I studied the ladies at other tables, saw how they dressed, how carefully they dabbed at their lips with their heavy damask napkins, how their laughter chimed like pleasing music. I memorized their language and their articulation, which, I now knew, was far finer than my mother’s had been. It was easy, a game to play as I pretended to listen to Uncle Horace talk about his business and wealth and opulent home in the city of Dublin. I heard about his childhood in rural Ireland, and how he would sneak out with the stable boys on Sunday afternoon for road games of hurling. He told me how he’d learned to eat to take away the emptiness he had while his parents left him with the house staff, sometimes for a year at a time, as they traveled the world. He often brought me a soft spicy cake filled with currants—barmbrack, he called it—his own childhood favorite. It was baked by the ancient cook of his boyhood, still alive and living with him in his house in Dublin. The cake would be wrapped in one of his fine linen handkerchiefs and he’d urge me to take it home.
    “Are you really as hungry as you appear,” he’d asked me once, as I quickly but neatly sucked an oyster from its shell, “or do you eat because you know it pleases me?”
    I’d touched my mouth with my napkin and then put my hands in my lap, choosing my words carefully before I spoke. Had he never known hunger? Did he have any idea that before I was brought to him I’d spent a full day with my folding knife and stack after stack of pages, my hands cramping so badly that by the end of the ten hours it felt as if pebbles had lodged under the skin of my palms, and my shoulders and wrists burned with fatigue? That I had fifteen minutes midday to visit the privy and bolt down the piece of bread and cheese I’d brought with me? “I am as I appear, I assure you, Uncle Horace,” I said, “for how else could I