Free By The Sea, Book One: Tess by Antoinette Stockenberg Page A

inward.
    "Father? Will?"
    From within a pleasant baritone said, "Tess,
is it? Come in, girl. And about time too."
    Tess opened her eyes wide, trying to adjust
to the dimly lit room—for it was no more than that. A cot and a
straw mat placed end to end along one wall, and a table and two
rickety chairs along the other, justified the landlord's claim that
the house came furnished. A small filthy window let in just enough
light to let Tess see, after a while, that her father was finishing
his midday meal in a chipped and battered bowl. The dogs at Beau
Rêve ate from better crockery.
    Tess kissed her father shyly on his cheek
and asked, "Where's young Will, Father?"
    "Ah-ha! Wouldn't you just like to know," he
said with the childlike good humor that she associated with him.
"There's news at this end, girl. Will has got employ as a ball-boy
at the Casino. What do you say to that now, hey?"
    "I say that's good news indeed," said Tess,
drawing up the other wobbly chair and sitting down gingerly on it.
"Because I don't think Maggie will be kept on much longer as
laundry maid."
    "Well, if you get down to it, I never
should've left you two up there, any more than I'd leave young Will
to fend for hisself in the streets. A man's obliged to his family,
and no mistake." He rubbed the back of his neck with a huge,
calloused palm the way he had of doing whenever the world outside
did not conform to the one inside his head. "Ah, well, no matter,
really. Things'll work their way through. So you think Mag will be
coming home, then?"
    "Home?" The word sat like a stone on her
tongue as she looked around her.
    "It's true, the place needs a woman's
touch," her father agreed sheepishly. "Knicky-knacks and such. But
girl, I've been damned busy at the smithy's. It's uphill
work, all the way. Still, the place has a future for me, Tess." He
folded one massive arm over the other on the table, which
immediately disappeared. "I see me own business down the road a
piece. Maybe a partnership; then, someday, all mine. See if I'm
wrong."
    She stared at him. Here we go again, she thought. "Oh? How will you manage it, Father?" she asked him
aloud. Always before, Tess had humored her father's sanguine moods,
falling in with his endless happy forecasts of prosperity and good
times for the Morans. For the first half of her life he'd convinced
her that they would one day own a dairy farm; for the last half,
he'd had his heart and high hopes set on being master of a river
barge. He knew nothing of animal husbandry and less of navigation,
but who cared? There was time enough to learn, time enough to save,
and meanwhile—plenty of time to dream.
    But the sands were running low; somehow Tess
had to make her father see the peril they were all in. "How will
you manage it?" she repeated, nearly shouting. "Has Mr. Needham
given you a raise? Or promised you a share? Has he given you a man
to work under you, or started teaching you to keep the books? Has
he adopted you or made you his heir?"
    William Moran, taken aback by his daughter's
vehemence, said, "What's this now? Am I in the dock for some crime
I didn't commit?"
    "But you are guilty, Father—of
putting stars in my eyes, and Will's. Now we must flush them out as
best we may, and get on with the ... the everyday of our lives.
Maybe Maggie was right; we should never have left Ireland. There's
nothing for us here."
    Tess listened to her own voice and heard
something in her heart snap, like a twig underfoot in a dark,
needle-lined forest: it was her dreams of Edward Hillyard.
    "Don't you understand, Father?" she
went on, determined to get through to him this time. "You can't
slice a dream the way you would a loaf of bread; you can't cover
yourself with a dream on a cold night, the way you would with a
blanket. Not another word of partnerships or ownerships or anything
else! You and Will and I are the able ones; we must among us feed
and care for Maggie. Three to care for one. We can do that. We
must!"
    "Maggie's no