One of Us Buried

by Johanna Craven

  His words hung in the stillness for a second. I held his gaze.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “I know him. He wouldn’t do such a thing.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Lottie hissed, getting to her feet.

  “Is he? And how do you know that? Were you there?” I turned back to Owen and Brady. “Were any of you there?”

  “I was there,” Owen spat. “I went out after the fight to check on my cousins. Bullets in their chests. Point-blank range.” He leaned close to me. “My cousin’s wife was hiding in the woods. She saw it all. I went out into the bush after I found the bodies. Saw Blackwell riding off. Too far away for me to shoot.”

  I started charging away. Lottie called my name. Her footsteps crunched behind me and she snatched my arm. I yanked away.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Listen to them, Nell.” Her voice was pleading.

  “Listen to them?” I repeated. “Listen to these lies they’re spouting? Do you actually believe this?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  I shook my head in frustration. “You’ve been blinded by Owen. All of you, you think he’s your way to freedom, but you’re wrong. Following a man like him is going to destroy you.”

  “You’ve no idea what you’re on about,” Lottie hissed. “You’re the one who’s been blinded. You’re so desperate to believe you got someone who cares about you that you’re refusing to accept the things he’s done.”

  I kept striding back to the hut.

  “Nell,” called Lottie. “I told Owen to come for you because you need to know this. I’m scared for you. Blackwell; he’s dangerous.”

  I whirled around to face her. “All the while you’re spending your time with the man who killed Maggie?”

  Lottie didn’t answer.

  “Stay away from me,” I hissed. “And tell those bastards to stay away from Blackwell.”

  I paced back and forth across the empty hut, anger bubbling inside me. With too much energy and no thought of what to do with it, I went back to the river to fill a bucket for cleaning. Water sloshing over the sides, I took it back to the hut and unloaded everything from the shelves, dumping it onto the table. There was the locket containing Sophia’s portrait, tucked in between the books. I wondered when Blackwell had taken it from the chest.

  I scrubbed violently at the dusty shelves, rage at Owen shooting through me. There was rage at Lottie too. For the first time since I’d sat beside her at the spinning wheels, we were not sisters. We were Irish rebel and sasanaigh. The reality of it stung.

  I was still scrubbing when Blackwell shoved open the door. His hair was windblown and I could smell tobacco on him. He eyed me, and then the contents of the shelves I had upended across the table. Books and candles and soap and razors were piled high.

  “You’re still awake,” he said sharply. “Why are you still awake?”

  I raised my eyebrows, hand planted on my hip. “I’m cleaning the shelves.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do that.” He slid off his jacket and hung it on the nail beside the door. “I hoped you’d be asleep.”

  I tossed the cloth back in the bucket of muddy water. I didn’t deserve this sharpness. I had not dragged him to the Christmas party. I had not poured the liquor down his throat, or forced him to fall asleep on the floor with his body pressed to mine.

  “I’m here as your housekeeper,” I snapped. “And you are to reprimand me for cleaning your house?” My words came out drenched with my best high society inflections. Blackwell looked taken aback.

  For a moment I thought to tell him of the way I had been dragged from the hut by Owen and the other men. Something to shift his anger from me to the rebels. But no. I did not want him to know what tales were being told of him.

  He took the rum bottle from the table and poured himself a cup. Sank heavily into a chair and brought his drink to his lips.

  I hovered beside the bucket of water, twisting the cloth between my hands.

  Blackwell filled a second cannikin and set it on the edge of the table. The chair creaked noisily as I sat beside him. In the centre of the table, the candle hissed and spluttered. I wrapped my hand around the cup, but didn’t drink.

  He lifted Sophia’s portrait from the top of the pile. With one hand, he clicked it open, then closed it again quickly.

  “Do you miss her?” I asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  I ran my finger around the rim of the cup. “Just sometimes?”

  He didn’t speak at once. “It’s as though she belongs to another life,” he said finally. “Another world.”

  His eyes were down as he spoke. Was he ashamed of the distance he felt from his wife? Or was he feeling the inappropriateness of sharing all this with a mere convict woman? He sat the portrait back on the table and took a mouthful of rum.

  “Forgive my coldness,” he said after a moment. “It was not about you.”

  I nodded, though I did not believe him. I knew this had plenty to do with me.

  “How were the celebrations?” I asked.

  He scooped back the dark liquid of his hair, his shoulders relaxing visibly. “Captain Daley’s wife singed her eyelashes playing Snapdragon.”

  I smiled. “I almost did the same as a child once. My father was horrified. He told me it was most inappropriate for a young lady to set herself on fire.”

  And so there it was; my admission that I was not a pitiable story of stolen eggs and squalid slums. I was a long-ago lady who’d fallen from a world of twelfth night balls. It felt right to tell him, after his brief moment of openness.

  He peered at me, turning his cannikin around in his hands. I could tell there was much he wanted to ask. Could tell he desperately wanted to break that unwritten rule and ask me what had led me to my prison ship. Instead, he said:

  “And how did you spend your Christmas once the Snapdragon was forbidden?”

  I smiled. “Father had me play carols on the fortepiano.”

  It seemed impossible that such things had happened on the same earth as this. Blackwell was right; it was as though our old lives belonged to another world.

  “You play the piano?” he asked.

  I nodded faintly. “At least, I used to.” I was quite certain I would never do such a thing again.

  “Captain Macarthur’s wife owns a fortepiano,” he said. “Downriver.”

  “Really?” I heard the light in my voice. While I knew, of course, that a lag like me would never get her hands to it, it filled me with inexplicable joy that the instrument had made it to this outpost of the world. It made me feel less like I were living on the wildest edge of the planet.

  “I had a lesson or two when I was a boy,” said Blackwell. “My mother used to play. But I rather think I gave my tutor nightmares.”

  A laugh escaped me. It hung in the stillness of the hut. Brought a crooked smile to Blackwell’s face. I found it oddly easy to imagine him as a boy, bashing at the keys of his mother’s piano.

  A smile moved across his face. A smile of reminiscence? Or was he simply enjoying the present moment? I wished I could see inside his head, if just for a second.

  He emptied his glass, chuckling to himself. “I must say, Eleanor, of all the strange things I’ve seen in this place, you are by far the most surprising.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I’m not sure how I ought to take that.”

  “You ought to take it as it was intended. As a compliment. A sign I value your company.”

  Stillness hung between us, half pleasant, half terrifying. I wanted to scream to break the silence, wanted to hold it forever. Wanted to step towards him, wanted to run away.

  Lottie had warned me away from him. But my trust in Lottie had splintered. She had been standing there at Patrick Owen’s side, spouting tales so vicious they could only be lies.

  I was no fool. Blackwell was a soldier. I knew there was blood on his hands. And I knew much of that blood had likely come from the rebel uprising at Castle Hill.
But how could I believe the word of Patrick Owen, who had wrung Maggie’s throat and left her lifeless in the undergrowth? How could I let Owen stain my image of this man who had been so good to me? Perhaps Lottie was right; I had been blinded. But I didn’t want my sight returned.

  I pushed Patrick Owen from my mind. I didn’t want him in the hut with us.

  Blackwell reached for my hand and held it in both of his. He turned it over in the lamplight as though it were the most fragile of specimens. The contact made my heart thunder. He looked at my hand closely, the faintest of frowns on his forehead, as though he had never seen a woman’s fingers up so close before.

  Had he ever seen his wife’s body, I found myself wondering? Had he ever cast his eyes over the female form in its entirety? In my head, Sophia Blackwell was the kind of meek and submissive lover who hid beneath the covers and slid her shift to her hips. Sophia Blackwell, if she were here, would be labelled wife.

  I wanted to challenge him. Wanted to break through that cursed shield he hid behind. I wanted to see how far I could push him, how much power I had. Here, in this lamplight, with lust in a man’s eyes, was the only place a woman had the upper hand. Playing on his desires was the only way to make a man weak. I had to take control any way I could.

  I rose to my feet, bringing Blackwell with me. Slowly, I unbuttoned my dress and stepped out of it, letting it fall to the floor with a sigh. I stood before him in my underskirts, my shoulders ghostly white in the candlelight. I could feel his eyes moving over every inch of me.

  He took a step closer. Pressed his palm to the top of my arm. I heard myself inhale, sharp and loud. His hand felt rough against my skin. The hut rustled and creaked around us.

  I tilted my head, offering him the bare white slope of my neck. Up his fingers went, over the protrusion of my collarbone, over my throat, pushing aside the flaming snarls of hair, tracing the constellation of freckles on my cheeks. His other hand went to my hip, feeling the shape of me.

  Fingers slid along my collarbone, pausing at the top of my stays. I heard his breath. Fast. Shallow. Or perhaps it was my own.

  At the feel of him against me, it went past my need for power. Now it was about my need for him. I was burning beneath his touch.

  His hand was motionless, his thumb resting on the laces of my stays, and two fingers held against the place my heart was beating. He breathed heavily, caught in hesitation.

  “No one would ever know,” I said, trying to wrestle this back to a thing of power. But my skin was hot and my heart was beating between my legs. Blackwell had the control now, and I cursed myself for it.

  But even as I spoke, I knew it was not a matter of who in the colony would see. God would know; would see him break his marriage vows; would see him lie with a woman who was not his wife. He would become an adulterer. And I would become a concubine.

  I stepped away, leaving Blackwell’s hand hovering in the dark space between us. I felt cold and hollow. But I could not be what Reverend Marsden had accused us of being. I picked up my dress and held it tight against me. I felt ashamed of my boldness, of all I had tried to do.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. I wondered why he was the one apologising.

  Blackwell moved quietly across the hut. He blew out the candle, leaving me standing alone in the blackness.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Nell Marling,” the superintendent barked. I looked up from the spinning wheel. “You’re to go with Corporal Anderson.” He nodded towards the sunburned young soldier dithering at the top of the stairs. “You’re being assigned. Housekeeper to Mr Robert Leaver. You’ll be escorted to his property shortly. He has a room ready for you.”

  I swallowed. “A room?”

  The superintendent chuckled. “I trust that’s to your liking.”

  I traipsed down the stairs behind the soldier, feeling stupidly unsteady.

  Had Blackwell had a hand in this? I couldn’t tell.

  I looked back over my shoulder as I climbed down the staircase from the factory. A place that, for all its horrors, had become strangely comfortable in its familiarity. The life I had scratched together here – days at the spinning wheels, nights on Blackwell’s floor – was something I knew I could cope with. But here I was facing the unknown again.

  It was almost a relief to be leaving the stool beside Lottie. In the three days since Owen had manhandled me to the river, we had barely exchanged a word. Each night as I’d left the factory and walked back towards Blackwell’s hut, I could feel her eyes on me. Once, I’d thought to call out to her, make some attempt at resurrecting our friendship. But it felt like the time for that had passed. It had disappeared the night Owen had dragged me from the hut and told me lies about Castle Hill.

  Or perhaps it had disappeared on Christmas night when I had shown the colony the way my heart sped for Adam Blackwell.

  My new overseer, Robert Leaver, was waiting outside the factory. The soldier escorting me squinted as he read from the crumpled paper in his hand.

  “Eleanor Marling, sir. Twenty-eight, childless, healthy.”

  Leaver was a short man with a wide, sun-streaked forehead and pale tufts of hair that reminded me of tussock grass. Forty perhaps. Maybe younger. I knew this place had a way of ageing you. He looked me up and down.

  “She’ll do.”

  Leaver was building himself a farmhouse on the eastern end of the settlement, downriver from the military barracks. As he led me wordlessly down the front path, I saw a number of what I assumed were government men, constructing the walls of the house from large sandstone bricks. Beyond the skeletal outlines of the new rooms, two wide paddocks had been hacked out of the forest. Sheep and cows dotted the patchy brown grass.

  Leaver deposited me in the main house with little more than a nod, abandoning me to his tiny, blonde-haired wife. Mrs Leaver was much younger than her husband, with a soft, doll-like face and dimpled cheeks. I guessed her little more than twenty. She glided around the house with a curly-haired child pinned to her hip.

  “It’s good to have you, Eleanor,” she said in a girlish voice. “We’ve just had our last government woman finish her sentence.” She set off down the hallway, gesturing for me to follow. “Quite a shame, I have to say. She were a good worker and all. But never mind. I’m sure you’ll fill her shoes just nicely.” She launched into a rapid tour, waving a hand at each room as we passed. The parlour, the dining room, and this will be my husband’s smoking room… “The place is only half finished, I’m afraid. But we’ve room enough for you to have a little space of your own.” She led me down a small set of stairs off the kitchen, the child squirming out of her arms and barrelling down the hallway like a wild rabbit. Mrs Leaver pushed open a door and nodded at the tiny room. A narrow bed sat against one wall, with a wash basin and chair beside it. “This will be your lodgings. I trust it has everything you need.”

  I murmured my thanks. The last time I’d slept in a proper bed, I’d been lying beside Jonathan in Clerkenwell.

  “You’ve belongings?” she asked.

  I thought of my old stockings and spare dress, tucked into my cloth bag beside my sleeping pallet. I would go for them later that night, when Blackwell was on duty. “Yes,” I managed. “I can fetch them this evening.” It would be far easier, I knew, if I was just to grab my belongings and disappear from his life. Pretend not a thing had passed between us. After all, nothing could come of it. If I hadn’t known that before, I certainly did now.

  “Very well.” Mrs Leaver lurched for the child as he made a grab for the candlestick on the nightstand. She swung him back onto her hip. “The windows are due to be cleaned today,” she said. “I trust you can see to that now, please? The polishing rags are in the kitchen. The cook will help you find them.”

  Her request was polite and achingly reasonable, but I bristled as I went to the kitchen for the rags. Once I had been the young wife, directing the staff to clean the windows. And now here I w
as with the polishing cloth in my hand.

  My own bitterness infuriated me. How had I managed to dig up a scrap of my old spoiled self when I’d just been hauled from the spinning wheels? I knew women considered themselves lucky when they were chosen to leave the factory. As housemaids and cooks, the hours were better, the food better, the lodgings better. But I’d not had the experience of the other women, had I? I’d not had to sell my body to eat. I’d not taken men behind the factory to pay for a roof over my head.

  In the back of my mind, I knew what this grief was really about. That tonight when I slept, I would not hear Blackwell breathing beside me. I hated that I could not control my attraction to him – that in his own quiet, underhand way, he had exerted his power over me.

  It was better this way, I told myself, as I wiped acres of dust from the Leavers’ windowsills. Best that I tried to forget.

  But that night, when I crawled into my bed, feeling the softness of a mattress beneath me for the first time in two years, I felt nothing but sadness pressing down upon my shoulders.

  *

  My days became filled with laundry and bed-making, dusting and polishing, and the constant thud of hammers as the Leavers’ house grew up around us.

  While Leaver employed a small army of convict farmhands, there were just three of us inside the house; a pink-faced cook who had come over as a free settler and young housemaid, Amy, who broke glasses with disturbing regularity.

  One morning, Amy and I made our way into town with an endless list of errands. A thick heat haze drifted up from the land, and the track into town crunched beneath our feet. The tuneless hum of insects rose from the grass.

  Amy walked with her eyes down, twisting the corner of her apron around her finger. In the month I’d been at the Leavers’, I’d barely heard a word from her.

  “You come over on the Norfolk, didn’t you,” she said as we walked. “You was friends with Hannah.” Her voice was tiny and bell-like.

  I felt a tug of guilt then; I’d not had any thought that we’d travelled to this place together, lost in my own thoughts as I’d been for much of the voyage. But yes, with the reminder, I remembered shy, soft-spoken Amy. She’d been one of the youngest convicts on our ship. I guessed her little more than thirteen.