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Ceely, Jonatha Mina ISBN 13: 9780385336901

Mina - Hardcover

 
9780385336901: Mina
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In the musty attic of an upstate New York house, a woman finds a clasped box, hidden away for over a century. Inside, wrapped in cambric and tied with a green ribbon, is an old manuscript written by a girl dreaming of a better life, fighting for survival, and coming of age in a time of chaos and danger. This wondrously told tale is a stirring adventure set in nineteenth-century England, a novel of rich history and vibrant imagination.

Amid the lush fields and gardens of an English estate, in a kitchen where every meal is a sumptuous feast, a young servant called Paddy anxiously hides her true identity. Using coal soot and grease, she conceals her flaming head of red hair and covers her body, desperate to keep the job she needs to survive. But the girl, whose real name is Mina, cannot conceal from herself the pain of her past or the beauty of an Ireland she remembers with love and grief—until she meets a man who convinces her to trust him, a man hiding sorrows of his own.

To the mysterious Mr. Serle—the estate’s skilled and quiet chef—Mina dares to confess her true identity and reveal a shattered past: her flight from the blighted fields of her homeland to the teeming streets of Liverpool...her memories of the family she lost and dreams for the future. And as Mina and Mr. Serle begin to know each other, an extraordinary journey begins—a journey of faith and identity, adventure and awakening, that will alter the course of both their lives.

The sights and sounds of nineteenth-century England come vividly to life in Jonatha Ceely’s magnificent novel, a tale that explores the intricate relationship forged by two people in hiding. Moving and unforgettable, Mina is historical fiction at its finest—a novel that makes you think, feel, and marvel...until the last satisfying page is turned.

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About the Author:
Jonatha Ceely grew up in Canada and has lived in Turkey and Italy. She is a former teacher and administrator who lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband, who is a composer and teacher. She is currently at work on her second novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
CHAPTER I
Someone asks: What country, friends, is this? No answer. I open my eyes with a start. In the dim early-morning light, the world returns around me. I lie nestled in straw in the stable loft of a country estate. I look out a dormer window toward the soft hills that rise in a low ridge between the estate and the nearby village.

Below me the horses shift in their stalls. Their safe smell and their heat rises to me. It is dawn, and the sounds of the yards and the house awakening will begin in a few moments. This is the moment of stillness before the lark rises toward the rosy light raying up from the eastern horizon, toward the zenith of the clear spring sky.

My work begins as the lark flies up, singing from its meadow nest to greet the sun. I too rise. I begin not with a hymn to nature but with a visit to the outhouse, ablutions under the pump, a quick ordering of my garments.
Then I attend to the horses. They need water, clean straw, and grooming. But first I have something else to do.

I have a dream that recurs. It came to me again last night. I walk from the door of our croft into the field that slopes to the south. The land is green, green, green, like a velvet gown laid over a curving body. In my dream I tread lightly on the soft surface. I feel the spring of grass beneath my bare feet. As I pace down the slope of the field, I feel the warmth of the sun on my face and arms. All is pale blue above, green below, and a fresh wind blowing. I notice something growing in the field. Loaves of bread, golden-crusted. It is as if the corn had grown, been harvested, thrashed, ground, kneaded, baked all in a night—as if the bread grew ready to my hand and mouth directly from the earth. In my dream I smell the yeasty bloom and fall to my knees, mouth watering, guts cramped with hunger. I am eager to pluck and eat these magic mushrooms, brown-gold buttons on the green velvet field. I lay my hands reverently on a loaf and find that I hold stone. Frantic, I rise and run about the field from seeming loaf to seeming loaf. All stone and heavy beyond bearing.

I stumble, weeping, down the slope, and in that sudden translation of dreams find myself in a dug field. A man in ragged clothing stoops over his spade; his face is averted from me and his lowered head is covered with a shapeless blob of felted hat. He looks familiar and yet I cannot put a name to him. He turns the earth, stoops his back into the weight, lifts brown clumps from the soil—potatoes. Here is food, I think; not crusty, fragrant bread but gray flesh formed under dark loam. This man will share with me a potato or two, and I will find green herbs in the field and feed my brother. I hurry toward the man and stand beside him. My heart fails me, for here again are stones. His face turned from me, he delves stone after stone from the ground, brushes away dirt and sets the stone on a rising heap. A cairn is growing in my dream, a monument, a funeral pile. I stoop to see the face of the man who digs. His blue eyes burn with fever. His eyebrows are thick and red. His cheeks are gaunt with hunger, yet glazed with the red-gold stubble of his rough beard. This is my father. He does not speak. My tongue is thick in my mouth, my throat burns. I cannot make a sound. It would not matter if I could; I know he would not hear me.

I turn to look back to the house at the top of the rise. It is tiny in the distance. I have come much farther than I thought. I turn my steps along a path. The green grass lies to my right, the spaded soil to my left. My father will not, cannot, speak to me, for he is dead. I think that I will go back to the house and find my brother. The house is a white toy in the distance, the sky is blue and far above. I am filled with a sense of urgency.

Then, as always, I awaken in a strange country. Above the place where I nest at night in the barn loft, I have rigged a bag that swings away from the beam on a thin string. The string is enough to hold the bag, yet not thick or strong enough to give passage to the mice that might forage here. I let the bag down and check its contents. The mug and the spoon are there and my brother’s jacket, folded carefully. The bag would be limp with just those three things, but hard bread packs the cloth too. Fresh bread would mold, flour would sift away. The cook sets out this dry bread for the field hands; for three mornings now, I have managed to filch some. Why I do so, I do not know. There is food enough here at the kitchen door for all the outdoor workers. Even so, I keep this private store. I count the brown-gray squares. Six now, put away against the day of need. I will not eat of this, not even nibble on a corner to taste it. It will not matter if a little mold grows on this bread; that is easily scraped away, the biscuit boiled in water to a sticky dough. This will suffice as food. And my store is secret; I will not be called to share it until I find my brother. When the day of need comes, as come it will, I will be ready. I hoist my cache again to safety and begin the day.

It comforts me to groom the horses. I lead the black, Sultan, out of his stable into the sunshine of the back courtyard, fasten his lead to the iron ring in the wall, and wield the comb until his flanks shine and my arms ache.

As I finish with Sultan, the kitchen maid who peels the vegetables, cleans the pots, and helps the cook as he requires comes out the kitchen door. I have spoken to her just once in the three mornings I have risen here.
Yesterday, she handed me a chunk of brown bread and a wedge of cheese and said, “Here, Paddy, I don’t suppose you saw such food as this at home.”

“No,” I said, “not since two years ago. They are starving at home.” She did not answer that.

Today, she has her hair tied up in a fancy green ribbon, her skirts down at her ankles, not kilted up as she wears them when she is working. She carries a bundle under her arm.

“Good morning, Mary,” I say respectfully, keeping my voice low. “Are you off to the village so early?”

“Indeed, I am,” she says, tossing her head in her saucy way. Her face is pudding-plain and marked by smallpox besides, yet her blue eyes are clear lake-blue and fringed with long lashes. “Indeed I am, Paddy. Off to the village and beyond.” She winks at me, fluttering her black lashes down to her pox-scarred cheek.

“Beyond?” I ask, puzzled by her way of speaking and her new manner. She seems impertinent and yet fearful of her own boldness. It frightens me that she might be doing something that will involve me in a wrong.

“Beyond, indeed,” she asserts. “I’m off across the hill to the village and the stagecoach for London town.”

“London?” I feel quite stupid.

“London?” she mimics my Irish speech and my bewilderment. “Yes, London. I had a letter yesterday. My sister has a place for me in a great house, a maid’s place, sweeping and dusting the fine things. Mr. Serle will have to find someone else to shell his peas and scrub his pots. Or do it himself, the black foreigner.”

“Oh.” I can think of nothing to say to this Mary I have never seen before, this bold girl who was hiding all the time inside the lazy kitchen scullion with her straggling hair and dirty skirts.

“Oh?” says Mary. “All you have to say is ‘Oh’? You Irish are as stupid as they say.”

I want to say that I am not stupid, just surprised by the change in her. She looks almost clean in her traveling-to-London clothes. But I know it is wiser to hold my tongue. “Well, good-bye, Mary,” I say. “Godspeed your journey.”

“I’m away,” she says and hurries out the gate.

And Godspeed to me too, I say to myself under my breath. There will be a place in the kitchen to fill today. I wonder whether Mr. Serle, the black foreigner, will be angry when he learns she is gone. I have glimpsed him walking in the kitchen gardens in the morning and heard him speaking to the gardeners. I do not catch his words when I listen, only a murmur of sound. He is not a man who raises his voice. Where does he come from? I wonder. He is not so black, I think. I have seen darker in Ireland even, and in Liverpool for certain.

I lead Sultan out to the paddock behind the stable. The master will ride this morning as he does every morning. I lead out the gray mare, Gytrash. If the master’s lady does not ride her, I will exercise her, following the master in a lazy loop down to the path along the river, across the meadow by the road up to the ridge of hills, and then down along the river again to the copse of great oaks, and, finally, back across the meadows to the stable yard. I hope the lady will be busy with the house today. I love to ride. The master does not speak to me, and I am free to move with the horse and to think of my father and my brother who loved horses and raced them and wagered on them and laughed when they won and drank up the prize money to my mother’s despair. But she laughed too and said that it was all gravy money anyway and who could not love the beauty of a clean race. And when they lost, they had a pint for consolation and groomed the horses for longer even and whispered to them to run better next time.

As I run the currycomb down the dappled flank of Gytrash, I dream of the past. Gytrash means ghost; Mr. Coates, the stable master, told me. As I curry her, I think of the past. I think of the dark bay horse I groomed for my father, the dreams of horses my brother told me as we did the work on the farm. Gytrash brings my ghosts to me each morning, and for that I am grateful. I have nothing now except my ghosts, and the gold ring my mother gave me sewn into my shirttail, my brother’s riding boots, and the bag of bread I have saved in the loft.

The clothes I stand in and my brother’s boots. The boots he was taking to ...

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  • PublisherDelacorte Press
  • Publication date2004
  • ISBN 10 038533690X
  • ISBN 13 9780385336901
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages336
  • Rating

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