Free The Good People by Hannah Kent Page B

beside the arbutus shops and cooperages and tanneries, carts wheeling close to jaunting cars, barrels and sacks. While most farmers had come to hire help for the winter term, there were people selling their autumn pigs and small, horned cows that lumbered slowly through the street, stirring it into mud. The unpaved roads were pocked, puddle-shined, and the air was clear. Men hauled creels of turf on their backs, cut from the black bogs beside the mountains in summer, and women sold potatoes, butter and salmon from the rivers. There was a crisp promise of winter in the air and a gravity to the fair’s atmosphere. All must be sold, must be bought, must be piled and stacked and stored and buried, before the earth ground its teeth in frost and wind. Better-off farmers swung their sticks of blackthorn and bought themselves shoes, and young men, drink-taken, trailed their coats behind them, eyes and ashplants eager for fight. Women counted eggs from straw baskets, fingers loose around the creamy shells, and all along the lanes and in the dark corners, those advertising themselves as labourers waited silently.
    They stood apart from the carts and produce, casting their eyes quickly at every man and woman walking past. There were more boys than girls, some as young as seven, shivering next to one another in attitudes of hope or reluctance. Each carried a small item to show that they were seeking work: a parcel of clothes or food, or a bundle of sticks. Nóra knew some of those parcels were empty. Mothers and fathers stood behind the smaller children, their eyes jumping from one farmer to another. They spoke with the hirers on behalf of their sons and daughters, and, although Nóra could not hear what they were saying, she could tell from the fixed smiles that they spoke of honest workers, hardy constitutions. The mothers folded their lips into narrow lines, their fingers tightly gripping their sons’ shoulders. It would be a long time until they saw each other again.
    Nóra noticed one grey-skinned woman standing beside a girl of twelve or thirteen. The girl was hunched over, coughing the sticky wheeze of the ill. Nóra watched as the mother, seeing a man approach, gently covered her daughter’s mouth with her hand to muffle the sound and ease her upright. The sick did not get hired. No one wanted to bring badness into the home. No one wanted to pay for a stranger’s coffin.
    Nóra’s eye was suddenly drawn to a tall, thin-faced girl standing apart from the other children, holding a parcel under one arm. She was leaning against a cart, frowning, watching a farmer inspect the teeth of a young redheaded man for hire. There was something appealing about the girl, in the thickness of the freckles on her face and the slight stoop of her back, as though she was reluctant to grow any taller. She was no beauty. Nóra felt a strange pull towards her.
    ‘Good morning to you.’
    The girl looked up and immediately pulled away from the cart, standing straight.
    ‘What’s your name?’ Nóra asked.
    ‘Mary Clifford.’ The girl’s voice was low, husked.
    ‘Tell me, Mary Clifford, are you looking for work?’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘And where are you from? Where are your people?’
    ‘Not far from Annamore. By the bog.’
    ‘And how old are you?’
    ‘I don’t know, missus.’
    ‘Fourteen by the looks of you.’
    ‘Yes, missus. Fourteen, I’m sure. And fifteen next year, please God.’
    Nóra nodded. She had thought that the girl might have been older, given her height, but fourteen was a better age. She would not be thinking of marriage yet.
    ‘Have you brothers and sisters?’
    ‘I have, missus. Eight of them.’
    ‘You’re the eldest, are you?’
    ‘Eldest girl. That’s my brother there.’ She pointed across the lane to the redheaded boy. The farmer with him was now lifting his cap and inspecting his hair. They watched as the farmer ran rough hands across the boy’s scalp, pushing his head this way and that, looking for lice.