On a Making Tide by David Donachie Page A

that same dress now, even if it was a mite small for her. The sight of it might cheer her ma, who looked very fine and fancy in what she was wearing, even to the quality of the buckles on her shoes.
    The water was near black by the time she finished, so dirty that she chucked the contents out into the lane at the back of the house and refilled the bowl with what was left. Even that was discoloured when she had finished, testimony to how much of the coal stuck to her on a windy, August day. Yet for all the filth it was a job she enjoyed. There were her regular customers, who used the purchase as much to pass the time of day as to buy fuel for their fire. Naturally, given her age and the way she was growing there were boys around, gawky, spotty fellows in the main, who would guy her as a group and blush to the roots if faced with her on their own.
    Work wasn’t all plain sailing, of course. Some of the women were shrews,and it wasn’t confined to the old crones either. And there were the goats: men who couldn’t look at young girls without thinking themselves beauty enough to be considered swains. Age was little barrier to their fooling themselves. There were those who were old, at least thirty years, all the way up to men who could give years to her grandpa. What they had in common was a sweet tongue and a look in the eye that she now knew too well.
    At first, Emma had taken as friendship their dallying by her handcart. The first untoward hand on her backside had soon disabused her of that notion, and she had to thank her stars for her grandma’s pitch being on such a busy spot, so that even a muted squeal was usually enough to deter the lecher. Failing that a cry of ‘There’s my grandma’ drove them far enough away to restore her safety.
    Sometimes it was true. Grandma Kidd, on the box of her cart with the old nag puffing along, would come in from the coastal marshes with a fresh supply of sea coal heaped in the back. Beach scouring always produced something, and when the wind was right, strong and north-westerly, an abundance of washed up coal.
    By the time she got to brushing her hair, a dampened cloth placed around her shoulders so that the dust dislodged didn’t spread, the heat had gone out of her elder’s argument. She counted the strokes in her head and fell into daydreams of herself on the arm of a handsome fellow, well dressed and about to enter his carriage and four. By a hundred strokes she was in a grand house, with a dark panelled entrance and a stairwell lit by a huge window. And there was always a bed at the end of a long corridor, soft, full of feathers, and because she was so young, it was a bed she occupied alone.
    ‘Two hundred,’ she said aloud, and stood to slip off the dirty dress she was still wearing. Even filthy it was neatly folded, as it was required for the morrow. No point in wearing something clean that would get just as dirty. With no smalls or petticoats on underneath, she stood naked for a second, looking down at the spreading nipples and hint of breasts she had sprouted these last weeks, and below them the first signs of silky hair between her legs. None of the other girls her age were, as yet, anything more than children, still squealing like infants when they played. Emma knew she had left them behind, and the thought was pleasing.
    The scraping noise alerted her to two things: that she should have pulled the shutters before disrobing and that she wasn’t the only one looking at her body. Fighting back the temptation to glance round at the window, she went to the chest by the far wall that contained her dress and bent to open it. Part of her mind told her she should be outraged, that she should scream blue murder and have these peepers taken up. Yet another part of her took a delicious thrill in being watched.
    Emma reckoned she knew who it was. Tom Meehan and Bart Higgins: two of the most tenacious of her workplace admirers, neither much more than two years older than herself.