“This gentleman had the last bid at seven hundred and eighty,” the official tells the slaver. “Since Jeb can’t pay, that’s the price you get.”

Mister Maddox nods, throwing evil looks at Jeb.

The woman lowers her eyebrows, making her forehead even higher and her eyes even smaller. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says.

Jeb’s red face turns redder. He hunches his shoulders and strikes off for the tavern.

The woman’s husband counts out seven hundred and eighty dollars, and I am his.

Chapter 3

Henry

My first look at America stabs me with homesickness. There’re no craggy cliffs, no green hills. New York is a gray, dirty city, crowded and noisy. But it’s full of busy industry. Of loading and unloading ships. Of flush-faced and well-fed people.

The captain of the ship is the first down the gangplank. His shoes make a hollow echo as he walks, like knocking on a door. We’re a sorry-looking lot, filthy and flea-bitten, spilling into the city like rats out of a hole.

When I step onto the street, the ground feels wrong after six weeks at sea. My legs want to fold up under me like a new foal’s. I don’t trust them to move, so I stand there on the dock with the crowd jostling around me, blinking in the light. I fill my lungs with air that reeks of dead fish, but it’s a damn sight better than the stale rot I’ve been breathing for over a month down in the hold.

New York is the busiest place I’ve ever seen, but, even with all these people around me, I feel alone for the first time in my life. When the harvest failed, Ma lay down and never got up again, which took the fight right out of Da. They were both gone within days of each other. Maggie, Beth and me were left to keep starving or get out while we were still breathing. We took our chance on a coffin ship, which lived up to its name in the weeks we spent cramped and miserable in the airless hold. The typhus took Maggie a week after we set sail from County Cork, and Beth passed only days ago from God knows what. Take your pick. The shitting sickness, the coughing sickness, or the killing fever. A good third of the passengers wasted away during the crossing. Maggie and Beth were tossed overboard like the rest, with not even a priest to bless them.

I thrust my hand in my pocket and wrap my fingers around a small rock I keep there. The piece of home I took with me the day we set sail. I rub the rock, flicking it between my fingers as I follow the heaving mass of immigrants up South Street.

The herd is headed to the Five Points, the Irish quarters, as they called it on the ship. We pass grand homes and squat shops and horse-drawn carriages near about as big as our hut back home, but what I notice most as we walk are the signs. Irish Need Not Apply. They hang next to every posting for a job.