I stood beside my window, looking through the grimy glass at the street below. The rain pelted down in torrents, mercilessly soaking to the bone anyone who dared emerge into it. Men, women, and children alike darted to and fro, across the street and down the sidewalks, attempting to shield themselves from the giant raindrops. A few barefoot boys splashed in the murky puddles that lined the sidewalk.

"Stupid gits will catch their deaths out there," I mumbled, shivering. The rain in autumn always seemed to carry with it a chill that foreshadowed the coming winter.

Barefoot, my toes blue and freezing, I made my way the few feet across the cold attic room, from the window to my bed. Sitting down, I picked my worn stockings up from the floor and pulled them over my ice-cold feet. I wrapped the blanket from my small bed around my shoulders and went back across the room to the window. If Mother were still alive, I thought, I wouldn't be here. I had never let go of thoughts like that; not even after five years. I was not an orphan, but in most respects I might have been better off that way.

My mother, Elisabeth, was British, distantly kin - through marriage, in fact - to the royals. She herself was raised in a middle-class home in London, and met my father, Cavan McCartney, while on a family outing in Ireland. Father was - typically - a heavy drinker, and had been in trouble with the law, but he had a magnetic personality that drew my mother to him. They fell in love, and Father stopped drinking and took up a gentleman's lifestyle in order to gain my grandfather's consent to marry my mother.

Grandfather gave my parents his blessing, and they married and settled in Ireland. Shortly thereafter, I was born. We lived in a warm little apartment in County Antrim, and I remember living happily for the short time that we were there.

When I was eight years old, my father made the decision to emigrate to America. Mother didn't take to the idea of moving overseas, but I thought that it was grand. My mother reluctantly agreed to Father's whim, and we set sail for the "free land where the streets are paved with gold," as my father put it.

The journey to America aboard the Battlement was a blur to me, for I was seasick the entire trip. All I remember is hearing my mother's gentle voice waking me on the day that we arrived in Manhattan, and my father's strong arms carrying me to the deck to look upon Lady Liberty.

For the next two years, everything in my life went smoothly. Then, my mother contracted scarlet fever and passed away. Father was so grief-stricken that he began drinking again. Our lives quickly spiraled downward, and soon he was out of work and we were starving. Slowly, my father lost his mind.

On my eleventh birthday, my father was taken away from me and put in a mental institution in upstate New York. When the doctors came to get him, I hid under the bed. Father loudly protested that he had a little girl, and the doctors found me and coerced me into joining them. I rode in the front seat of black carriage between the two of them, and they talked of me as if I didn't exist right there beside them. They spoke of a "Miss Hemingway," and I felt myself weaken; I assumed they meant to take me to an orphanage. I was lucky, however; the carriage pulled to a halt in front of an old stone building with a sign reading, "Hemingway School For Gifted Girls." The doctors didn't let me say goodbye to Father, and he cried and I cried. I sobbed all the way up the steps and into the lobby of the building.

It was the headmistress of that school, Miss Hemingway, who took me in - only in a sense. Of course, I didn't get an education as I'd hoped to. You had to have money for that, and money was something I definitely didn't have. Anyway, I had gone to school until then, so I could at least read and write. She agreed to let me work as a maid in exchange for food and a bed to sleep in. After the doctors left me at the school, I was given the small, damp attic room to stay in, and I was allowed to have three meals a day in the kitchen with the cook and the butler. I was now sixteen, and I was tiring of my routine.

The window was beginning to fog. I reached up and traced circles in it with my finger, contemplating what I would do when Miss Hemingway decided that I was too old to remain at the school.

Suddenly, the creaking of my door jerked me out of my thoughts. Miss Hemingway bustled in purposefully, holding a basket and a piece of paper.

"Here," she said, shoving the basket and paper into my hands. "Go across the street to the market and get the things on this list. After that, I need you to find these books." She wagged her finger at the list she'd written up.

I looked up at her in disbelief. "In this weather?"

"No, girl, next July!" she snapped. Quickly, she softened a bit. "Get your shoes on and hurry, please."

She stood over me while I sat and pulled my shoes on over my stockings. Black, black, black, I thought. You'd think I was in mourning.

She pulled the blanket from around my shoulders and draped it over the bedpost. "Hurry, Margaret. Don't dilly-dally around like you usually do," Miss Hemingway ordered, pushing me out the door.

I hurried down the long hallway, passing the students. A few offered me sympathetic smiles, but most of them smirked, jeered, and snickered as I walked toward the door. I was used to the teasing by now; after all, I wasn't rich, and could never hope to be. And so I tolerated them, for to return their actions would mean a home on the streets for me.

I stepped out the front door with the basket over my left arm. Clutching the list in my right hand, I ran out from under the awning and into the rain, my feet splashing through the puddles. When I made it across, I caught my breath under the book store's awning and squeezed the water out of my drenched hair. I went inside and found the titles Miss Hemingway wanted. After paying, I went next door to the grocery and milled about, looking for the items on the list and dreading going back out into the rain.

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