The Grace Stories Read online

  Contents

  Meet Grace Book 1

  1 Mudlark

  2 Horses

  3 Orphan

  4 Hunger

  5 Pegasus

  6 Charged

  7 Newgate

  8 The Trial

  9 Indispensable

  10 Hannah

  A Friend for Grace Book 2

  1 Setting Sail

  2 The Horizon

  3 Life at Sea

  4 Dysentery

  5 Liza

  6 Rio de Janeiro

  7 Land

  8 Sydney Cove

  9 The Factory Above the Gaol

  10 Assignment

  Grace and Glory Book 3

  1 Wattle Park

  2 Discoveries

  3 Cornfield

  4 Glory

  5 Master Tom

  6 Work

  7 Mulgo

  8 Pain

  9 Grace and Glory

  10 Neighbours

  11 Alice

  A Home for Grace Book 4

  1 Homecoming

  2 Infection

  3 Forest

  4 Muggadung

  5 Cooroowal

  6 Night Trips

  7 Truth

  8 Foal

  What happened next?

  Two Years Later . . .

  IT must be the longest day this winter, Grace thought, and all I’ve found are a few bits of coal and a piece of rope.

  Grace waded towards the riverbank, wiggling her toes into the mud, feeling for anything that had washed in with the tide or fallen from a boat or barge to put in her kettle. That was her job as a mudlark – to search the bottom of the Thames for things to sell. She shivered.

  A dirty fog hung over the water, draping everything in grey. The other mudlarks looked like shadows as they waded through the river. Grace felt the water cold against her legs – the tide was on its way in and her dress floated around her like a tent. She knew that soon she would have to get out of the river, but her kettle was only half full.

  ‘Please let there be something more,’ she said to herself, her teeth chattering, ‘some copper nails or a piece of driftwood.’

  Grace looked across the river at a forest of masts. It was the same view she saw every day. Sails of every size billowed beneath the winter clouds. Barges filled with coal and iron held anchor, ready to be unloaded on the shore. Longboats cut slowly through the water carrying fruit and meat to distant parts of London, and busy workboats ferried people up and down the river.

  Ouch! Grace gasped when she felt a sharp pain in the bottom of her foot. She bent down and searched around in the mud until she touched something that felt like metal – cold and smooth. She pulled it up. Grace wiped it clean with a corner of her dress and turned it over in her hand, unable to believe it was real. It was an iron hammer, with no rust on its head, and no chips in its sturdy wooden handle. It was the most valuable thing she had ever found – worth as much on the street as a silver watch, she was sure.

  ‘A hammer – a fine hammer,’ she whispered. ‘Uncle Ord will be so pleased.’

  ‘Oi! What you find?’ Someone shouted at Grace and she quickly dropped her hands beneath the water.

  A figure waded towards her through the fog. It was Joe Bean. He was no older than Grace, but he was the leader of a gang of mudlarks that lived under Blackfriar’s Bridge. Grace had always been good at staying out of their way; she kept her head down so she wouldn’t be noticed, or she worked in the parts of the river where Joe and his boys didn’t often go. They were thieves, and they didn’t think twice about stealing from the barges and from the other mudlarks who worked on their own. If any of the mudlarks ever had money from things they’d sold, Joe Bean would try to take it from them. And Grace knew that if he saw the hammer, he would snatch it from her and take it straight to the marine shop to sell for himself.

  ‘I got nothing!’ Grace shouted back.

  ‘I saw something in your hand just then – something shiny. Give me a look what you got!’

  Grace’s heart pounded; she couldn’t let Joe see her prize. With a hammer like this to sell, maybe Uncle Ord would be happy with her, instead of angry. He would be proud that she was clever enough to find something so valuable. They could keep the coal Grace had found and light a fire in the hearth – she imagined warming her numb toes and heating up a cinnamon bun on the end of 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!’

  ‘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.

  ‘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.

  ‘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.

  ‘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 fish­mongers’ 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 that every day, just by being alive, she reminded him that his son was not.

  Grace climbed the steps that ran up by Blackfriar’s Bridge and crossed into Water Lane, hobbling to keep weight off her foot. Her wet skirt slapped against her legs, stinging her skin. The fog was in the streets too, hanging like low-slung spider webs. Crowds of people pushing carts ready for the night markets were coming down in the opposite direction.

  Two of the girls who lived next door came running up behind Grace, giggling together. Grace pressed back against the stone wall as they shoved their noisy way past her. She wished she had a sister, or a friend to share things with. It never mattered how hungry they were, or how cold, the girls were always playing and laughing with each other.

  Ma Honeywell, their mother, stopped when she saw Grace and gave her cheek a playful pinch. She had eleven children, most of them girls, though she could never find half of them.

  ‘Hello, luv,’ she said, smiling. ‘How was business today?’

  Ma Honeywell always asked the same question, only today Grace could give her a different answer. ‘Good,’ she said, smiling back. ‘Very good! My uncle will be happy!’

  ‘That’d be a sight for sore eyes. You better get home, luv, and give him what you got!’ Ma Honeywell patted Grace’s arm, then turned and walked on. She was on her way to the alehouse, where she would drink so much gin that later she wouldn’t remember who Grace was at all.

  Grace continued up the steps, imagining what it would be like when Uncle Ord saw the hammer. ‘Well done, Grace,’ he would say. She could almost feel the heat from the fire and taste the toasted cinnamon bun.

  ‘Uncle Ord!’ she called, as she pushed in the door of their lodgings.

  Her uncle was sitting in his chair in front of the empty hearth with his sore leg up on the table.

  Uncle Ord used to be a sailor until his leg was caught in a loop of rope that lifted him into the air and snapped his knee-bone. ‘I was hanging upside down like a side of ham in a butcher’s shop!’ he told Johnny Dugs, the rag shop man. Uncle Ord and Johnny Dugs laughed as if it were a joke, but Grace knew that it was not. Uncle Ord couldn’t be a sailor after that. He wasn’t good for anything, he said, but ‘selling the rubbish from the bottom of that stinking river.’

  Grace tipped out the contents of her kettle. Wet coal tumbled across the table beside Uncle Ord’s leg. Without turning around to look at her, he growled, ‘Is that all?’

  Grace carefully placed the hammer on the table beside the coal. Uncle Ord picked it up and swung around to her, his eyes hard.

  ‘Where’d you find this?’ he snarled. ‘You little thief!’

  Grace jumped back. ‘I never stole it. I stood on it,’ she stammered.

  She lifted her foot to show him the cut. But Uncle Ord didn’t look, he smacked his hand down onto the table, making Grace jump.

  ‘You bring the runners to this house and they put me in chains, I’ll kill you!’

  ‘I never stole it, Uncle!’ Grace protested, but she could tell he wasn’t listening. ‘I never stole nothing! It was Joe Bean tried to steal from me. There won’t be no runners coming for you.’

  Uncle Ord stroked the sharp claws of the hammer with his tobacco-stained fingers.

  ‘They hanged a boy smaller than you down at the Newgate gallows yesterday. He stole a pair of boots worth a lot less than this here hammer. He was so small they had to weigh him down with stones so he’d drop right when he stepped off the platform.’

  Grace shuddered. She had never wanted to see a hanging, but most people didn’t feel that way – they flocked to see an execution as if it were a circus show. Even her uncle’s stories frightened her.

  ‘Please, Uncle, I found the hammer in the river, I swear.’ Grace could feel her eyes welling with tears. She wiped them away; if Uncle Ord saw her cry he would curse her and say she was a useless girl.

  ‘A thief and a liar,’ he said. ‘Get out of my sight and give me some peace.’

  Grace went back out the front door and sat on the step.

  Uncle Ord isn’t proud of me for finding the hammer, she thought. He’s angry at me for bringing something so valuable home.

  For the first time, Grace realised that it didn’t matter what she brought her uncle – she could carry half a barge into the house – it wouldn’t make him happy. Nothing Grace found in the river could bring back his son, or fix his sore leg and make him a sailor again.

  Grace picked at the mud drying on her knees and ankles. She should have let Joe Bean take the hammer – what difference did it make? When it was time for her to get back in the mud tomorrow she knew she would have to face Joe Bean and he would be very angry. She wouldn’t have the hammer and she wouldn’t have any money for him either. And the other boys from the gang were sure to be with him this time.

  Grace sighed. She tore off a strip from the hem of her dress and, using it as a rag, she cleaned the dirt from her wound. She tied the rag tightly around her foot to make a bandage.

  ‘There now,’ she said. ‘Let’s go to Fleet Street and see the horses.’ Just thinking about horses helped Grace forget her troubles.

  GRACE left Uncle Ord sitting alone and hurried towards Ludgate Hill – pushing her way through the crowds that poured out of the alehouses and onto the street.

  ‘Where’s the pie seller when you need him?’ a man shouted, slurring his words.

  ‘More ale’s what we need!’ a woman called.

  They both broke into raucous laughter.

  A chestnut mare pulling a cart loaded with flowers rumbled past. The scent of Christmas roses and winter jasmine filled the evening air. How I would love to sell flowers from my very own horse and cart, Grace thought longingly.

  On the corner of New Bridge Street, she only just missed a chamber pot of slops being emptied from a window up above. Chimneys from all the houses belched the thick dark cinder smoke that hung over the city throughout winter. It mixed with the smell of sewage and garbage. Sometimes Grace had to hold her hand over her mouth just to breathe.

  Fleet Street was one of the busiest roads in all of London. It was where the rich folk came to do business and look at each other’s fine dresses and carriages and stop for cakes and tea. Gentlemen, wearing high hats and shiny boots and coats with brass buttons, rode shining horses up and down, and there were carriages with six horses pulling at once, all of them the same colour. Ladies in bonnets leaned out of gilt-edged windows and waved and smiled to each other as they passed.

  Even if I were rich enough for a carriage with gilt-edged windows pulled by six horses all the same colour, I still wouldn’t ride in the back, Grace thought. I would ride in front on the horses instead. I would tie white ribbons down their reins and carry brown sugar in my pockets to give my horses for a treat.

  Grace could see other mudlarks from her part of the river standing along the sides of the road. They came up to Fleet Street when the tide was too high to work, to hold the horses while the gentlemen stopped to talk to a lady or buy a peppermint water from the pepperminter. They were paid in whatever spare change the gentlemen had in their pockets. Grace had never had much luck, but it didn’t stop her trying.

  The light was fading – night came early in the wintertime. She leaned against a railing on the corner where a man was selling hot tea and biscuits. A gentleman rode up on a fine black mare, her hooves clattering on the cobblestones. He pulled her up close to the tea-cart. The mare was one of the biggest horses Grace had ever seen. Her body glistened with sweat from the ride and steam came from her nostrils. Grace imagined being able to touch such a horse, to stand close and breathe in her scent. What
would it be like to feel the mare’s soft nose against her cheek? Grace wondered. She stepped forward.

  ‘I’ll hold your horse for you,’ she called to the gentleman about to dismount.

  The gentleman looked down at Grace in disgust. She knew what he saw: her bare feet and filthy pinafore, stiff with dried mud – more like a rag than a dress – her dirty face and her knotted hair. She knew that the gentleman would not see a girl who would take good care of his mare – he would see how small and thin and dirty she was, and rich people didn’t like to get too close to someone as poor as Grace.

  The man shook his head and waved her away, as if being poor was a sickness he might catch.

  ‘Get away there. Be off with you and give the horse room.’

  Grace was used to being told she wasn’t needed. Only the mudlarks who had cleaner clothes and faces, and those who were bigger and stronger than she was, got to hold the horses.

  She stepped back and watched the horses lifting their long legs high to trot, sometimes cantering and stopping all of a sudden. A music man on the corner of the street struck up a tune on his horn and Grace saw a chestnut gelding rear up in fright, pawing at the sky with his front legs, a wild look in his eyes. Grace felt a rush of excitement – she knew that if the horse wanted he could throw the man from his back and gallop away.

  The horses Grace could get the closest to belonged to the cab drivers. They pulled up at the ranks and waited for passengers to drive around London.

  Grace quietly slipped alongside the line of cabs. The mud on her skin and clothes had turned her the same colour as the winter-grey skies. She walked to the front of the first carriage where a horse stood resting, tied up in his traces, while the cab driver chatted to his mate and smoked his pipe and waited for another passenger. The men didn’t notice her.

  Grace saw an old gypsy woman approach the men. She had a dirty pink scarf knotted under her chin and black coal around her eyes.

  ‘Fortunes read for a penny. See what’s in your future and be prepared,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll pay you with a puff of tobacco, because that’s all you’re worth,’ the cabbie replied, laughing.