Girl of Shadows

by Deborah Challinor

  ‘Who says? You?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Molly hoicked and spat into an empty tumbler on her night table.

  Folding her arms over her ample bosom and raising her chin, Elizabeth said, ‘I think you’ll find I can.’

  Molly’s own chin came up. ‘You think so? You just try it. Because if you do, I’ll tell the authorities you’re paying assigned convict girls to work in your whorehouse.’

  Elizabeth stared at her in icy silence for a moment, then crossed to the door. But before she opened it she turned and said, ‘You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?’

  Outside in the yard Friday washed her hands and rinsed the bucket using water from the rainwater overflow barrel, then went back inside. Mrs H was closing the door to Molly’s room, rather forcefully.

  ‘She’s no more fit than you are,’ she said angrily. ‘What did the pair of you get up to last night? And why are you covered in bruises?’

  ‘I’m not,’ Friday said, pulling her robe closed.

  ‘You are. There’s one on your chest, and your wrist, and is that one on your cheek? You know what I think about my girls fighting! What if one of your customers saw? I run a superior establishment — I can’t be seen to employ girls who roll around in the gutter belting the living daylights out of folk!’

  ‘They weren’t folk.’ Friday trudged into her room and slumped onto the bed. ‘They were sixpenny jack-whores. And they started it. Reckoned we were trespassing.’

  Elizabeth knew damned well where such women worked. ‘You were in the Black Rat again, weren’t you?’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs H,’ Friday mumbled. She didn’t like it when Elizabeth told her off. It made her feel like she was five years old.

  ‘I should think so! For God’s sake, Friday, have some respect for yourself.’ Elizabeth passed her the opium. ‘I think it’s high time you did something about your drinking, don’t you?’

  Forgetting she’d told herself something very similar less than half an hour earlier, Friday said, ‘Why? What’s wrong with it?’ She sat up, removed the glass stopper from the opium bottle and took two sips.

  ‘What’s wrong with it? Look at yourself!’ Elizabeth laid her hand on the back of Friday’s head and made her look towards the looking glass on her dressing table. ‘Go on!’

  Friday did, and got quite a fright. Her hair was knotted and wild and something had stuck big clumps of it together, her face was deathly pale and her lips dry and cracked, her eyes were bloodshot, she had a blossoming bruise on her right cheek, and the black kohl she’d applied the previous afternoon was smudged halfway down her face. No wonder Jimmy Johnson had looked frightened.

  ‘And you smell like an unwashed bar rag!’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve come home like this. It worries me, Friday, it really does.’

  Friday said nothing.

  ‘Apart from the fact you’re ruining your looks and your health, not to mention bringing the name of my house into disrepute, have you not thought about what might happen if the police pick you up?’ Elizabeth caught sight of the clothes strewn all over the floor. ‘Did you wear that out last night? Where are your nice dresses? Why are you wearing that flash tat again?’

  Friday still said nothing. The opium had begun to ease into her blood, washing through her like a velvet wave, smoothing away her headache, comforting her bruised flesh, wrapping her in soft cotton gauze.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Never forget you’re a bonded convict, my girl. If you’re picked up you’ll be back in the Factory so fast your feet won’t touch the ground. And not in first class, either.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes. ‘Well, why carry on like this, then?’

  The door opened and Molly stuck her head in. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘Bit rough,’ Friday replied. ‘You?’

  ‘Same. I swear, never again,’ Molly said, darting a sly glance at Elizabeth. ‘I’m going back to sleep for a few hours.’

  ‘Well, open your window before you do,’ Elizabeth ordered sharply. ‘Your room smells like a sailor’s socks marinated in rum.’

  A moment later Molly’s bedroom door clicked shut.

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘What question?’ Friday caught sight of her boss’s reflection in the looking glass and prepared to duck; Mrs H looked like she could happily slap her across the head.

  Elizabeth let out a long, loud breath. ‘You know very well what it was. Why do you keep doing it?’

  Several plausible excuses flashed through Friday’s mind but she couldn’t share them with Mrs H, and she knew they weren’t the real reason anyway, and she didn’t want to lie. She owed Elizabeth Hislop more than that.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. She lay back on her bed and rested her arm across her eyes. For a second she almost fell asleep. ‘I go out to get as mashed as I can. It’s the only time I get any peace and quiet. From this.’ She tapped gently on her skull. ‘And I just can’t stop. And I don’t want to. I like it. Except for the horrors.’

  ‘Well, it’s ruining you. You do know that, don’t you?’

  Friday shrugged. ‘I don’t know if I care.’

  ‘You should care.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because people depend on you. Your friends Sarah and Harrie certainly do. And what about whoever it is you’re supporting in the Factory? And you’ve a lot of friends here. That’s enough “shoulds”, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m fed up with “shoulds”,’ Friday muttered. ‘I’m always doing what folk tell me I should do.’

  Elizabeth gave an incredulous snort. ‘What a lot of bloody rubbish! I’ve never known you to do anything anyone has said you should do!’

  Friday had the grace to giggle. ‘No, I don’t suppose I do, do I?’ Sitting on the end of the bed, Elizabeth said, ‘You’re just like my man. He was a drinker.’

  Friday recalled that Mrs H’s husband was at sea, captain of a trading ship, though to her knowledge he hadn’t been back to Sydney for some time.

  ‘Did he give it up?’ she asked.

  ‘Give what up?’

  ‘The drink. You said he was a drinker.’

  ‘Oh. No, not as far as I know,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He pushed me to the absolute limit. Coming home blind drunk whenever he was in port, swearing and shouting, hitting me, breaking the furniture, upsetting my girls. When he actually did come home, that was. Sometimes I wouldn’t see him for days, and then his ship would be gone and I wouldn’t know until I read it in the paper. Then I’d have to go to the bank to see how much of my money he’d taken to pay for the damage he’d caused around the town and settle his debts.’

  Friday lifted her arm and peeked at Elizabeth through one bleary eye. ‘Why didn’t you throw him out?’

  ‘Oh, because I love him and I’m stupid,’ she said crossly.

  ‘So why haven’t we met him?’

  ‘One day he broke my jaw and it was the last straw. I’d had enough. I told him I didn’t want to see his face again until he’d decided he’d rather have me than the booze. When he did that, then he could come home.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Five years ago. I’m still waiting.’

  Shocked, Friday stared at her.

  Elizabeth moved to the door. ‘I’m going to have to say the same thing to you, Friday. And I will say it, if you don’t start taking better care of yourself. I’m not happy about those new tattoos of yours, either. They look cheap and I’m worried they’ll deter your customers. I’d rather you didn’t get any more. Now, I’m going to send Jack up with some hot water. You badly need a wash.’

  She went out, shutting the door behind her.

  Friday closed her eyes and heaved out a big, rancid sigh. She’d forgotten to ask Mrs H if she’d put the bucket in her room. She was right, though: she did have to stop drinking like this. But she’d tol
d the truth — she did like it, and she truly couldn’t imagine how she could ever get through her nights, or her mornings for that matter, without her gin.

  Just the thought of it alarmed her and she staggered off her bed to the dressing table and dug around in a drawer for the bottle stashed there. There was another on top of her clothes press, out of sight at the back, but that required too much effort to reach today. She took several eye-watering gulps and got back into bed, slipping the bottle beneath the pillow.

  Chapter Thirteen

  January 1831, Sydney Town

  Friday helped herself to one of the shortbread biscuits Sarah had arranged on a plate and set on the table. She was getting quite domesticated these days. Also, recently — very recently, in fact — something about Sarah had changed, and Friday had a pretty good idea about what might have happened. Yes, there’d certainly been some big changes in the Green household since Esther had buggered off. For a start, it was nice to sit inside at the table like normal folk, something they’d only once been permitted to do when Esther had been in residence. Friday didn’t know about the others but she’d been getting fed up with balancing her arse on a bucket in the backyard, with lizards and the like skittering across her boots. Truth be told, she didn’t mind the little slinky ones — they were quite sweet. It was the bigger ones with the blue tongues that gave her the shits.

  Peering down her cleavage for errant shortbread crumbs, she said, ‘Well, we know there’ll be another demand, don’t we? We just don’t know when.’ Spotting a crumb, she dug it out and flicked it on the floor, then looked at Sarah and Harrie and added truthfully, ‘I’ve thought about this until my head hurts, I truly have. But I just can’t see how we can get the upper hand.’

  What was really vexing Friday was how to begin the conversation. She eyed Sarah and raised her brows, hoping Sarah would take the lead. She’d lured Harrie to Adam’s house on the pretext of discussing their next move regarding Bella, but what she and Sarah most wanted to talk to Harrie about was her state of mind. They were extremely concerned about her, and the time had come to get to the bottom of whatever was so distressing her. Adam was out visiting Bernard Cole, and they knew they’d have at least an hour to themselves.

  ‘Is that what’s been upsetting you so?’ Sarah asked Harrie. ‘All this worry about Bella?’

  Nodding thoughtfully, Harrie turned her teacup round and round in its saucer. ‘It feels like a huge weight, crushing me into the ground. Like rocks on my chest. Sometimes I feel as though I can’t breathe.’

  She certainly looked like she’d been having trouble breathing lately, Friday thought. Her face — normally quite rosy across the cheeks — was the colour of fine flour, encouraging the freckles on her nose to stand out, and even her lips were barely tinged with pink, making her appear like a portrait that had so far only been sketched and not yet coloured. Making her look like a … ghost.

  Friday said, ‘I feel that way, too, love, now and then. I really do. You know, deep in my heart I don’t regret what we did, but sometimes I do wish we hadn’t done it.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Sarah said. ‘He deserved it.’

  There was a silence, then Harrie said, ‘No, we were right to kill Keegan. An eye for an eye. That’s what Rachel says.’

  In the parlour, Esther’s mantel clock struck the hour, the muted, mellow gong ringing hollowly through the house.

  ‘Rachel says?’ Sarah repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  Sarah and Friday exchanged uneasy glances.

  ‘When you dream about her, you mean?’ Friday asked.

  Harrie shook her head. ‘Not in my dreams. When I talk to her.’ She raised her eyes and stared directly at Friday. ‘She’s back, you see. Rachel’s come back.’

  The hairs on Friday’s arms rippled. She risked a glance at Sarah, who stared back at her, her dismay evident.

  ‘What do you mean, she’s come back?’ Now the tiny hairs on the back of Friday’s neck were standing up.

  ‘She’s here,’ Harrie said crossly, as though Friday were being stupid. ‘She’s returned from … wherever she’s been.’

  ‘Oh, Harrie, love, there’s no such thing as ghosts,’ Sarah said. ‘That was just a game, with Esther. To scare her.’

  Harrie’s face flushed a dull, angry red. ‘There is! Ghosts are real! Aren’t they, Friday? Everyone knows that! And Rachel has come back. She talks to me, at night, in my room. And I talk to her. Tell her, Friday! You saw the Flying Dutchman on the Isla!’

  But Friday couldn’t, because she wasn’t completely sure herself. She reckoned, though, if anyone was likely to come back from the dead it would be angry little Rachel, who had so abruptly been ripped away from all those things she’d wanted in her life. And from her baby daughter. Friday shivered.

  ‘Don’t you dare, Friday,’ Sarah warned. ‘Harrie, we know you’ve been very worried lately. Might you have imagined Rachel?’

  Harrie banged her open palm on the table, making Sarah and Friday jump. ‘No, I haven’t! I knew you wouldn’t believe me. She’s real! I can see her and hear her. She talks to me! She told me we were right to kill Keegan, and she tells me all the time that I’m not …’ Harrie paused to swallow, and added in a voice not much louder than a whisper, ‘I’m not unhinged.’

  ‘Nobody said you were,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You haven’t said it, but you think it, don’t you?’ Harrie stood and collected her shawl and bonnet. ‘You don’t have to believe me, but perhaps that’s what you need to do, to see her. Just believe. Have you ever thought of that?’ At the door she said accusingly, ‘I would have thought you’d want to see Rachel again.’

  And she left.

  Sarah and Friday sat in rueful silence. At last, Friday said, ‘That didn’t go very well.’

  ‘Christ, what if she is going mad?’

  Friday said, ‘But sensible folk like Harrie don’t go mad.’

  ‘They don’t talk to dead people, either.’

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you really, truly, honestly not think there’s any such things as ghosts?’

  ‘No I bloody don’t!’

  ‘Lots of folk do, you know.’

  ‘Well, I’m not one of them.’

  ‘But what if there are?’

  Sarah sighed and sloshed the teapot to see if there was any tea left. There was and she poured it into her cup. ‘Then I’ll be wrong, won’t I? But I doubt it. Have you ever seen one?’

  ‘I saw the Flying Dutchman.’

  ‘You saw some strange waves and a lot of low cloud and spume, the same as I did.’

  ‘Everyone else on the Isla saw a ghost ship.’

  ‘No, not everyone. The captain didn’t.’

  ‘Christ, you’re stubborn.’ Friday shook her head despairingly. ‘Well, I suppose what matters now is either Rachel has come back, which you reckon is impossible, or Harrie’s gone barmy.’

  They both knew that a female convict too sick to work would be returned to the Factory, and that one suffering from hysteria or mania could find herself confined to the hospital there or, even worse, the lunatic asylum at Liverpool — an awful prospect. But Harrie still seemed capable of carrying out her duties at the Barretts’. For now.

  ‘Should we go and have a talk to Nora?’ Friday suggested. ‘If anything’s amiss she’ll have noticed. Can you get away tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Good idea. I’ll check with Adam when he gets in.’

  ‘Speaking of Adam, have you got some news?’

  ‘News? No.’ Sarah blushed to the roots of her hair.

  Friday laughed. ‘You liar. Come on, out with it.’

  Sarah saw she wasn’t going to be able to hide much from Friday, and suddenly felt very self-conscious. ‘Oh, all right. We … well, we slept together.’

  ‘About bloody time! How was it? Good? He looks like you’d get your money’s worth.’

  Sarah smiled to herself. ‘Yes, it was good.’

  ‘Best yo
u’ve had?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to compare it with.’

  ‘What?’ Friday was aghast. ‘Really? Harrie I can understand, she’s such a saint, but I just assumed with you. I thought you and that flash man of yours — what was his name? Ratface?’

  ‘Ratcliffe. No. He tried often enough, but I couldn’t stand him. So yes, Adam was my first.’ Then Sarah put her hands behind her head, gazed up at the ceiling, and said, ‘Shit.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve just lied to you.’

  Friday asked, ‘Is there any tea left in that pot?’

  ‘It’s nearly cold.’

  ‘Then it’ll have to be gin, won’t it?’ Friday took a flask from her reticule, fetched two glasses, poured a measure of gin into each, and pushed one across the table towards Sarah. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

  Sarah brought down her arms and studied her fingers, picking at one with a thumbnail. ‘Only if you promise me you won’t … well, that you won’t think badly of …’ She trailed off. ‘Christ. That you won’t think less of me.’

  And Friday knew then that Sarah was about to tell her something momentous; until now, she’d never once indicated that she cared what anyone else thought of her — not even Harrie, Rachel or herself.

  ‘Sarah, have a bloody good look at who you’re talking to. Have you ever looked down on me for who I am or what I’ve done? For what the hell I do?’

  Sarah had to think about that. ‘No,’ she answered honestly. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘No. And I won’t do it to you.’

  Seconds ticked by until Friday began to think that Sarah might have changed her mind. Finally, she began.

  ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters and my mother and father were quite old when I was born. They were both high church and fanatically religious. My father was a tyrant and a violent bully, and my mother was too frightened of him to leave him.’ Sarah’s jaw tightened. ‘Well, that’s what I told myself. Better to think that than to believe she condoned what he did. And now she’s dead so I can’t ask her.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘He’s still alive, last I heard. Unfortunately.’