Murphy's Law (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #1)

It didn't affect me, but little Bridie took one look at the green faces around her and decided she didn't feel well, either. I was happy enough to tuck her in the bunk and stay with her. It gave me a good excuse to be away from the smell and the noise and the stale air of that room. If only I'd had a book to read and enough light to read by, the time would have sped by. But as it was, each day seemed like an eternity. That deep, dull thud, thud of the engine went through my whole body and pounded in my head until I wanted to scream.

I sat there in the dim light and made myself think about America. All my life I'd had big dreams--too big, according to my mother. Only lead to trouble in the end. It all came from educating me above my station. She'd been against it from the very beginning. She'd not even been grateful that I'd saved the family from being thrown out of our cottage. Because that was how it had all started. The landowner's agent had been around, trying to raise the rent again, bullying and threatening the way he always did. I was ten years old at the time. I'd stood there in the shadows, watching my parents bowing and cringing and pleading. Then I'd stepped out of the shadows and told that fat bully just what I thought of him.

It had almost got us thrown out, there and then. But somehow word of it got to the landowner's house-- Broxwood Court, it was called--and my choice of descriptive words had made the Hartleys

chuckle at their dinner party. The landowner's wife, Lady Hartley, was visiting from London, where she spent most of her winters. She expressed a wish to meet me and I was scrubbed up and brought up to the big house. I can remember my first sight of all that grandeur. I was too interested in taking it all in to be humble and mind my manners. Lady Hartley found me bright and refreshing, so she said. She thought it was a shame that a quick wit and a silver tongue like mine should go to waste, so next thing I knew, I was having lessons up at Broxwood with Miss Henrietta and Miss Vanessa.

I loved those lessons. There never could be enough books in the world for me. I devoured them all, geography and history and even Shakespeare and Latin. The governess said I was a joy to teach. Miss Henrietta and Miss Vanessa decided

I was a teacher's pet and there was something really wrong with a girl who liked studying. Men don't like clever women, they told me. I suppose they must have been right. They were both married by twenty and I was still an old maid at twenty-three.

Reading all those books had started to put big ideas in my head. I'd move to London or go to Trinity College in Dublin and be an educated lady and move in the highest circles. Unfortunately it had all come to an abrupt end when my ma died and I had to stay home to care for my brothers. That had pretty much snuffed out my big ideas. There was only one thing to do in Ballykillin--get married and raise a lot of babies of my own. I'd hoped maybe to take over from the schoolteacher one day, but she didn't look like she would be dying or retiring for a while.

And now suddenly I discovered that my dreams hadn't died at all. They had merely been sleeping in a far recess of my mind, ready to wake when opportunity knocked. And now it was knocking loud and clear. America--land of opportunity. I had heard the other women gossiping about it in the common room, how so and so's brother had gone there ten years before and now he had a fine house and carriage, or land of his own, or a business employing hundreds. Maybe I'd find my own way to prosperity in such a land! I lay on the bunk beside Bridle and let my fantasy roam--I'd start small, maybe working in a shop. And with the money I saved, I'd open my own shop--a bookshop maybe, and all

the educated folk would gather there and we'd sit around talking, with me at the center of it all ... if I could just get safely ashore and deliver these little ones to their father, then it would all be possible.

Then, on the third day out, I met O'Malley. I'd noticed him right away, of course, sitting with the card players at the table in the center of the room. He had the loudest laugh and I heard one of the men say, "You're a card yourself, O'Malley. I'll say that for you. A proper card."

There was something about him that made him different--the swagger, the way he showed all those big white teeth when he laughed and looked around to see if everyone had noticed how witty he was being. He was a big-boned man, almost handsome in a way, but he used too much brilliantine on his hair and he wore a bright red silk cravat around his neck. He talked too loudly. He laughed too loudly at his own jokes.

As I watched him, a young lad walked past the cardplayers' table.

"Well, look who we have here," he bellowed in that booming voice. "'Tis the pretty boy himself, off to sing soprano in the church choir. Of course, he'll be singing soprano all his life, that one. If you handed him a naked girl, he wouldn't know how to rise to the occasion!"

The boy blushed, which made the men at the table laugh even harder. I took an instant dislike to that man O'Malley, even more than the teasing should have warranted.