Free Lina at the Games by Sally Rippin Page A

toasting fork. There’d be enough food for a week!
    Grace waded into the shallows, but Joe Bean was close now. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Don’t make me call the boys to look you over.’
    Grace shook her head, too nervous to speak. She held the hammer with one hand behind her back. She had never stood up to Joe Bean before, but then she had never found anything as precious as a hammer.
    Joe moved towards her. ‘Show me!’
    â€˜No.’ Grace’s voice quavered.
    Joe grabbed her arm and tried to pull it from behind her back. Grace fell back into the river, dropping her kettle into the mud. Water splashed up around them as they struggled.
    â€˜No!’ she shouted.
    Joe Bean had his hand on the hammer. It was slipping from her grasp. Grace gritted her teeth and with all her strength, she wrenched it from him. Joe fell back into the water and Grace held the hammer high over him.
    â€˜I said no, Joe Bean! The hammer is mine! You go away and leave me alone!’ Her voice trembled as Joe crawled like a crab through the mud, his eyes wide with surprise. The sharp iron claws on the hammer’s head glinted.
    Grace picked up her kettle and ran, knocking straight into a group of sailors clambering out of a rowboat onto shore.
    â€˜Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ one of them said. ‘A handful of rags like you?’ She could smell whiskey on his breath.
    The other sailors laughed at her.
    Grace picked herself up and pushed her way past. When she turned around, Joe Bean was lost in the crowd somewhere behind them. Grace hurried higher onto the shore where the crowd thickened, pushing past mudlarks and boatmen, coal whippers, and costermongers selling dried fish and oysters. She breathed a sigh of relief, shoving her way through groups of people waiting for workboats and others lining up to buy fresh fish from the colliers to sell at the market.
    Grace gripped the hammer tight and headed home, slowly now and limping. Her foot stung against the cold cobblestones as she dodged the open drains of sewage and the piles of garbage that lined the narrow crowded streets. She stopped to inspect her wound. The cut wasn’t deep – only bloody.
    Grace shivered. It was when she got out of the water that she most felt the cold. The wind cut straight through her. It doesn’t matter this time, though, she thought. I’m safe from Joe Bean and I still have my hammer.
    In Chatham Square a line of fishmongers stood at a long scaling table. They ran their knives down the backs of freshly caught fish, cutting out the guts and tossing them to the ground, staining the cobblestones a purplish red. The smell of fish filled the air. The women sang as they worked, their arms moving in time to the rhythm of their song.
    Grace stopped to listen. She liked singing, never mind who was doing it; sailors or fishmongers or butchers selling ham hocks, even her drunken uncle and his sailor friends. The only thing Uncle Ord had ever told her about her mother was that she liked to sing. I wish I could remember the songs, Grace often thought. I wish I could remember her voice.
    Grace kept walking, humming the fish-mongers’ tune. She had never known her father, and her mother had died when she was very small. When Grace tried to remember her mother, she could recall the feeling of warm arms around her; but the memory wasn’t enough to keep her alive without a roof over her head in the long cold winters. Uncle Ord always reminded her of that. ‘You’re lucky to have me, Grace! You’d be on the street without your uncle to take care of things. You are an orphan after all!’ He said the word as though it were a curse word – the very worst thing you could be.
    Uncle Ord had lost his wife and his only son to an illness called consumption, and he missed them a lot. He’d lost his sister too – Grace’s mother – and that was how he got stuck with Grace. She knew