“Three free dinners,” Margaret said contemptuously.

“We could have run up an enormous bill, and those four wouldn’t have batted an eye,” Mary Louise said. “Champagne, a couple of bottles of good burgundy. And I could have had the woodcock. I’ve never had the woodcock here, for it is hideously expensive.”

“Mary Louise! You are surely not suggesting I should have accepted that man’s offer?”

“No, no, of course not. Goodness, Margaret, that man has got right under your skin.”

“He most certainly has not!” Margaret picked up her menu. “I probably wouldn’t even recognise him again if I passed him in the street.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Eight

New York, May 1869

WHEN MARGARET WAS FIRST ACCEPTED as a volunteer at the mission, her offer to help out “in any capacity” was treated with some scepticism. Despite her previous experience in Lambeth and Enniskerry, the board found it difficult to believe that the daughter of a duke would be happy to assist in the most menial of tasks and willing to mingle with the dirtiest and most bedraggled of the children. Realising that she had to prove herself, she determined to do so. By the second month of working there, she was no longer greeted with mild surprise when she turned up on time every morning, nor did she suffer an embarrassed silence when she entered the staff room.

She had grown to relish the variety of the tasks and the excitement of not knowing what each day would bring. Today, she had been helping out with new admissions, which tended to be both harrowing and heartwarming. There could be as many as four hundred and fifty children of all ages attending the school on any given day; and at times they were forced to turn children away because they had reached capacity, though they did everything to avoid doing so. The first day could be daunting for the mothers as well as the children, for they were essentially handing their little ones into the care of strangers, sometimes against the wishes of their family. The Irish and Italian communities in particular had to overcome the resistance of their church to having the children educated by Methodists. Some mothers, deeply ashamed of the ragged and filthy condition of their children, would nudge them over the threshold and hurry off, while others were defiant, aggressive, and demanding.

Not even Lambeth had prepared Margaret for the condition of some of the poor souls she helped to treat: their clothes and hair alive with lice and fleas, their feet caked in mud, all of them under-nourished. Once the children were cleaned up, fed, and clothed, Margaret was on very familiar ground with them—the naughty ones and the shy ones and the clever ones and the sullen ones alike, each a challenge and a reward. Kindness, she had been told, was the watchword of the mission, and it was that which brought the children back each day.