Read Christmas Wish for Free Online Page B

trailing along behind her or the stink of dirt and smoke. It would keepher warm. It would hide who she was and the shame she felt at being so dirty, so shabbily dressed.
    Pressing her face against the gap at the side of the door, she felt the chill scything through, frosting her face like a thousand needles. She was aching to get out, but she wasn’t going to let her Aunt Bridget know that. She’d been kept a virtual prisoner for a whole year.
    The snow came up to her knees, soaking her skirt, her worn stockings and her canvas boots. The boots were suitable for summer or a clement climate, not for an English winter. Her winter boots had gone the same way as her coat in reality, paying for a second-hand fox fur for her aunt that stunk like a skunk and had rabid glass eyes.
    Warily, like a rabbit emerging from a burrow, Magda scrutinised her surroundings. Being locked up for so long had made her nervous of going out.
    Thanks to the snowfall, the alley was deserted. There were no gentlemen callers across the way and there would be none until the snow had melted and the roads were passable.
    The sound of trams running on their twisted rails came from some way off on the main road into East London. Except for a few horse-drawn delivery carts, the trams had the road to themselves without the hindrance of the buses, which were gradually taking their place.
    Hurrying was difficult, each step taking a great deal of effort, raising one leg out of the snow, down into it again, repeating the process with aching legs and chilled bones. Her breath came in hot steaming gasps. Her chest tightened with each cold breath and the snow fell heavier like a curtain of thick lace before her eyes.
    Winnie One Leg hated cold weather. It made her bad leg ache even if she wasn’t moving around or out in it.
    Pursing her upper lip she removed a heated penny from the window pane and looked out. What she saw caused her to hold her breath. The snow was embellishing the mean buildings with an elegance they did not usually possess. Crumbling buildings with jutting first floors suddenly looked magical.
    ‘Like an old woman in a fine white cloak,’ she murmured to herself.
    It wasn’t as though she hadn’t seen such a scene before and she’d expected the whiteness, the grey sky, and the sudden beautification of lop-sided houses and grim narrow streets. She had not expected to see a monstrous cloak, moving seemingly of its own accord.
    What she’d perceived to be a cloak was, on reflection, a blanket. The figure struggling to get itself and the blanket through the snow was far from adult.
    The pretty little girl living with Bridget Brodie.
    So the Connemara mare, the name they all knew Bridget Brodie by, had let the girl out. Somebody pointed out that the breed was one of the prettiest ponies in the British Isles and it was an insult to compare the two. Somebody else had remarked that the child’s name was Magda.
    Bridget Brodie was a hard woman. Winnie had seen her screaming and beating her husband James Brodie with a broken chair leg. It wouldn’t come as any surprise that the child was receiving the same treatment. For one solitary moment she shared the child’s pain, rubbing at her twisted leg, rueing the day she’d ever got involved with the likes of Reuben Fitts.
    She blinked away the memory. What was done was done, though she bitterly regretted what had happened. If only she’d had the courage to stand up to him and demanded he called a doctor when she was screaming in labour, unable to bring thechild forth. But there. Water under Waterloo Bridge. All in the past.
    Her thoughts and her eyes went back to the Brodie child. What kind of future could she look forward to? Not one she deserved if Bridget Brodie had anything to do with it.
    None of your business, Winnie One Leg.
    Hugging the warmth of the loaf close to her ribs beneath the scruffy blanket, Magda pressed on. The snow was deep on the ground, each step painfully slow. Her calves ached