Free The Pirate Fairy by A.J. Llewellyn Page A

lots of people kept coming to the workhouse and food was scarce. His father admitted to Denny one night that some of the starving men fought over the bones so they could suck out the marrow before crushing them.
    Denny wasn’t as disgusted as he should have been. He wouldn’t have minded a bit of bone marrow. He didn’t mind the food and, being the children of neglectful parents, he and Polly were fed better in the spike than they had been at home. They got bread and porridge for breakfast. Though porridge was a staple British breakfast item, it had never been something Denny and Polly had eaten before, and it became his lifelong obsession. Polly preferred dinner, and he liked it too, especially when they got the rare treats of cheese, butter and potatoes with their bread and pickled meats.
    Their father, however, was never the same after their time in the workhouse and soon vanished once they were released. What had once been their home, a basement flat in East London, was now overrun by numerous displaced families. Denny, at the ripe old age of eleven, wound up on the streets finding ways to make money to pay for Polly’s keep in the apartment. She worked occasionally as a chimney sweep with Denny some days, hiding her long locks under a cap so she could pass for a boy. Denny tried to look out for her, but was soon working in a cotton factory where he spent long days waterproofing the fiber with rubber gum, which was then used to produce Mackintosh coats.
    Polly was too young by law to work in factories because she was not yet nine. She had learned to steal and managed to snatch a loaf of bread or a potato here and there, but Denny’s long hours in the factory kept him away from her. By the time he went to the apartment to find her one Christmas Eve, he learned that the people he’d been giving money to, to care for her, had sold her off as a junior housemaid. He tried so hard to find her but learned right after New Year that she had been arrested for stealing a loaf of bread.
    Now eleven, she was legally old enough to work, but it took Denny almost a whole other year to discover that she had been taken in by a British officer and his wife. Denny traveled to their home in Somerset, only to learn that they’d set sail for Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia. The officer had just been appointed in a position of authority at the penal colony. Denny became frantic. His mother had been banished there for stealing an onion. He’d learned of her circumstances and feared Polly winding up the same way. He decided there and then at the age of thirteen that he would become a seaman and make his way to Australia to rescue his sister, if not his mother.
    It would take another four years for Denny to make good on his promise to himself.
    “Wake up,” a gravelly voice snapped him out of his reverie as somebody viciously shook him, making Denny’s tender wing throb with pain.
    “What is it?” Denny almost fell off the bed. “What’s wrong?” He looked up to see Frogmorten, the bumblebee man, standing over Denny, a large pewter mug in his hand.
    “Barthelmass said to bring this to you. He said you needed it.”
    “Is that nectar?”
    Frogmorten nodded. When Denny reached for it, he snatched it back. “How am I to be paid for this elixir of life?”
    Denny worked hard not to act on the kind of violent thoughts that had gotten him into so much trouble in the past.
    “If you let me have the nectar now, I can show you how I intend to repay you.”
    “I—” Frogmorten blinked as Denny held his gaze. They exchanged the kind of silent contract only men can sign between them. He gulped. “Okay.” He let Denny take the goblet.
    Denny drank every drop, ecstatic at the taste of the nectar. Oh, it was the most delicious thing that had ever touched his tongue. Wait a minute . The perpetual ache from his wings went away. His muddled thoughts vanished. Nothing hurt. He felt fantastic.
    “Can you get me more?” he asked, excited that