Playing Beatie Bow Popular Penguin

by Ruth Park

  The husky voice now said, almost with kindness, ‘Just out from the Old Country, are you, my pet?’

  Abigail nodded.

  ‘Hannah will see you right,’ went on the voice. ‘Heart of gold, Hannah, though it’s a long way in, eh, Hannah?’

  The fat woman snarled. But it was plain she was afraid of the man with the husky voice. He now said, ‘If I take away my hand, will you be quiet, like the dear child you are?’

  Abigail nodded, and the hand was removed from her mouth. Instantly she yelled, ‘Ju …’ But she got no further. A kerchief was thrust between her teeth and tied behind her head, and she was given a push that sent her sprawling into a corner. She was now able to see that the owner of the husky voice was a handsome man, a gentleman, as Beatie would have said, in well-fitted breeches, a tailored coat of cocoa colour, and a dashing tall beaver to match.

  He held a tiny bouquet of jonquils and fern to his nose, presumably to keep the smells away.

  ‘She’s to be kept close,’ he instructed the bearded woman, jerking his head at the ceiling. He took out a gold watch, sprang open its lid, and shut it again. He said, ‘In the morning, Hannah, and I don’t want the goods damaged.’ Without another look at Abigail he strolled out.

  Now Abigail began to sweat with growing terror. If Judah and Beatie had not seen her duck into the little alley, what chance would she have? The bearded woman came over, a rag still held to her bloody chin, and said venomously, ‘Lucky for you the master took a fancy to yer. But don’t think I ain’t able to hurt you bad where it don’t show.’

  Abigail swallowed with difficulty. Her mouth was dry. The scarf was salty with dirt and sweat. She retched a little. She thought desperately, ‘I can’t lose my head, whatever I do.’

  She made herself breathe quietly. But something soft and squashy moved beneath her. She realised with horror that it was a woman, a kind of woman, for shortly it wriggled feebly out from underneath her and showed itself in the candlelight to be a hobgoblin with tangled hay-like hair, cheeks bonfire red with either rouge or fever, and a body hung with parti-coloured rags.

  She crept over to the table, and began to tear at a mildewed crust of bread. One of the other women, wearing a flounced red petticoat and a black corset and little else, good-naturedly pushed over to the wreck an anonymous hunk of meat that might have been a rooster’s neck.

  ‘Here, Doll,’ she said. ‘Don’t eat that muck you got there. Ruin your gut it will.’

  The wreck stuffed it in her mouth, bone and all, but before she did she said in a voice of extreme refinement, ‘Thank you, Sarah, I’m much obliged.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ thought Abigail, ‘that thing has had an education. It might even have been a lady.’

  Now she was paralysed with terror. She could imagine herself as another Doll in twenty years’ time, all spirit beaten out of her, sodden with booze and disease, not even fit for the life of degradation the gentleman with the husky voice evidently intended for her. No matter how fiercely she blinked, tears filled her eyes and fell down on the gag.

  One of the other girls strolled over to her. She was fancily dressed, with much flouncing and many ribbons, and a large hat with a purple ostrich feather. Below this hat was a young plump face, pretty and good-natured. Abigail noticed that she, like Dovey, uncannily resembled a Victorian doll.

  ‘It must be their idea of good looks,’ thought Abigail hazily. ‘No wonder everyone’s always telling me how homely I am.’

  The girl smiled, showing chalky teeth. ‘Don’t pipe your eye, duck; ’tisn’t such a bad old life. Better than starving on slop work in the factories, any old how. I’m the dress-lodger, and me name’s Em’ly, but I call meself Maude ’cos it’s more posh. Come on, Doll, the lamps is lit, time we was getting on the road.’

  All of this, spoken in a thick south London accent, was scarcely comprehensible to Abigail. But she was to find out that the handsomest girl in the house was called the dress-lodger, sent out in garments belonging to the proprietor, always with an attendant to see that she didn’t run off with them.

  But Doll began to cough and splutter. Her eyes rolled up; she looked as if she were going to die.

  ‘Gawd, I’m not going off with that death’s head trailing behind me,’ protested Maude. ‘It’d scare off Robinson Crusoe.’

  So another famine-wasted object was dragged out of a corner, arrayed respectably, and pushed forward to follow Maude. Maude protested, but finally laughed and set off.

  Doll cringed timidly as Hannah stood over her.

  ‘You good-for-nothing, you scarecrow! You’re fit for the bone-yard, that’s all, breathing pestilence over us all.’

  ‘Chuck her out, Hannah,’ advised one of the men who sat smoking a cutty pipe by the fire. They seemed to have nothing to do with the establishment as customers or protectors. Abigail guessed that they were employed by the gentleman proprietor to bully the women’s takings from them and keep an eye on Hannah’s honesty.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Hannah, putting on a ludicrous face of long-suffering virtue, ‘if I ain’t charitable towards me own niece I dunno what the rest of you villains can expect. Here, you, Chow, take the new ’un up to the attic, and you come up and keep an eye on her, Doll.’

  Chow, an emaciated half-Asian, seized Abigail as though she weighed no more than a cat, carried her up stairs built of rough-hewn baulks of timber, and at last dropped her on a sagging pallet. Doll sidled breathlessly about Hannah, beseeching, ‘Just a little gin, Aunt dear. Twopenceworth would be sufficient. Just enough to keep my cough from annoying our guest.’

  ‘Here y’are, then, and don’t say I ain’t a good aunt to you, bit o’ useless rubbish that you are.’

  Hannah dug into a depthless pocket and fished up a small bottle. Doll seized it with tearful gratitude. Hannah cautioned her to keep a keen eye on Abigail.

  ‘Them rats are partial to a nice bit o’ fresh chicken,’ she said. Abigail could hear rats scampering over the ceiling. Hannah saw her look upwards and grinned, satisfied.

  ‘They come out in their fousands.’ She chuckled. Placing the candlestick on a box in the corner, she jerked her head at Chow. The door slammed, and Abigail heard a key turn and a bar clank home.

  She wanted to cry but she knew that if she did she would choke on the gag. To distract herself she looked around at the attic. Doll, lying on a sack beside the pallet, sucked luxuriously at her bottle.

  The attic did not have the proportions or the sloping roof of the usual attic, such as the one Gibbie slept in. The window, too, was almost as large as a door. And then, those stairs … they were not stairs anyone would build in a house. Abby tried to think as sensibly as she could.

  Was it likely that houses, however derelict, would stand beside such a narrow alley? The walls of the attic seemed to be made of blocks of bare stone. That, too, was uncommon. There was no fireplace and, as she had now learnt from Beatie, almost every room in every house in Sydney, no matter how poor, had a fireplace.

  She realised with despair that she was too frightened to make sense of it. Her thoughts began to chase one another round and round.

  ‘Like those rats up there,’ she thought. Sometimes her whole body shuddered spasmodically, as if she were lying on an ice floe. She was aware in the direst way of her great danger. It could be that she would never be seen again in 1873, let alone her own time. She had nothing to hope for except that Judah and Beatie had heard the first great yell she had given.

  She forced herself to lie quiet. There was no one to help her, no one at all. But she could not give up without a battle. Whatever she could do to escape, she had to try to do.

  She had an imaginative flash of her grandmother, addressing her perm in resigned tones: ‘She’s dodgy, Katherine. Not one of your nice frank open-faced girls. You’re too soft and protective. Heaven help her if she ever has to fend for herself.’

  ‘We’ll see about that, you old bat,’ thought Abigail. But her bravado was false. If her grandmother had com
e through the door, smiling her bogus smile, Abigail would have welcomed her like an angel.

  But Grandmother would never come through the door. Grandmother had not yet been born.

  Abigail, with one eye on Doll, began to strain at the fabric that bound her hands. It seemed to be another kerchief. She twisted it patiently, at last got a thumb free and, after half an hour, the fingers of one hand.

  Doll drank, sometimes wept, the tears oozing like oil out of the black-socketed eyes. She mumbled and sang, sometimes seemed to speak to her companion, though perhaps it was to herself.

  ‘My name is Dorothea Victoria Brand. I had God-fearing parents. Mother was ill-educated, like Aunt Hannah, and Father married beneath him. He was a clerk in a counting house. He saw that I went to school, a boarding-school on the moors. It was very cold there, but I was happy. I was a bookish child. Clever and industrious, that’s what the Board said. Father wanted me to have private tutoring in French and singing, but he could not afford it. He wept, I remember. He loved me dearly, did my father.’

  It’s a warehouse or bond store, that’s what it is, thought Abigail suddenly. A disused one. And that window might be the kind that opens on a platform, with a pulley and rope for hauling up bags of flour and stuff.

  She got the other hand out, and with infinite slowness untied the gag at the back of her head. She clamped the gag between her teeth, did not shift her position, and kept her gaze on Doll.

  ‘Father was taken suddenly. His horse rolled on him. And Mother went labouring in a slop-shop, making sailors’ smocks. Twenty girls in a room ten by ten – think of it! – stitch, stitch, fourteen hours a day without a breath of fresh air. So Mother took the lung fever. Thirty-two she was when God took her. So the parish Board sent me out to Mother’s sister. I had my thirteenth birthday on the ship Corona. That was ten long years ago.’

  Abigail froze. Could this tottering ruin of a woman be only twenty-three? Doll pushed herself half upright, fell into a fearful paroxysm of coughing, and subsided once more. Her breath rattled in her chest in a frightening way; she seemed in a stupor.

  ‘Aunt Hannah,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘she put me to work. I didn’t starve, you know.’

  Abigail slipped to her feet. There was an iron bar across the two shutters that formed the window. It took her a long time to work it out of its rusted sockets. As she tried to open the shutter, it squawked alarmingly. Doll opened one glazed eye, but seemed not to have the strength to open the other. A trickle of bloodstained dribble came from her mouth.

  ‘A person will do many things rather than starve,’ she murmured. ‘That’s what the parsons don’t understand. Empty bellies speak louder than the Ten Commandments.’

  She closed her eyes again. In the uncertain light her face was that of a skull.

  Abigail was frightened out of her wits. ‘Mum!’ she thought. ‘I want you, Mum!’ She wanted to pray but couldn’t think of any words, so instead she put forth all her strength and shouted silently, ‘Granny! Help me, help me!’

  But it was to Granny Tallisker and not her own grandmother that her thoughts had turned. The shutter moved, and opened, and a gush of damp, kerosene-laden air came into the room. A glaring yellow light, broken by dancing shadows, fanned up from the little court below.

  She had guessed right. There was a small wooden platform, supported on struts grown rotten and flimsy, in front of the window, and above it projected a rusty pulley and a frayed rope. She closed the shutter behind her, in case the cold air awakened Doll from her drunken slumber, and crouched on the platform. It groaned and dipped under her weight.

  Nervously she gazed over the edge. Dark, shapeless things like bears or trolls gyrated about a brazier; coarse braying music from a tin whistle and a paper-covered comb filtered upwards. She could see above the lower roofs the gaslights of George Street, and she heard the chunk-splosh of the Manly ferry’s paddlewheels as it left the Quay.

  She saw now that the thread-like alleyway into which she had ducked to hide from Beatie and Judah led from Harrington Street to George Street. Half-way down this wretched short-cut was a yard upon which opened the back doors of two taverns. It was plain that they catered for the violent and degraded. A ragged thing flung out of a tavern door, to lie unconscious on the cobbles, had a face that might have belonged to a bulldog. The ruffians gyrating drunkenly around the brazier instantly fell upon this victim, and in a few moments it was naked. Abigail watched, paralysed with horror.

  The platform creaked and shuddered. She could climb neither down nor up, unless the rope and pulley were usable. Some time towards morning, surely, the revellers below would be either asleep or dead drunk, and she could let herself down into the courtyard?

  After a while she thought of testing the dangling rope. Cautiously she rose on tiptoe and seized it. The frayed ends fell almost into dust in her hand. The rope had not been used for years and was completely perished.

  Her eyes filled with tears. There was no hope. As she stood there, looking up at the askew, rusted pulley, and the edge of the roof above it, a small patch of the sky suddenly lost its stars.

  Someone was lying on the warehouse roof looking down at her.

  Chapter 7

  When Abigail realised that she was being spied upon, her first horrified impulse was to get back into the room with Doll and bar the shutters. Her hand was on the pin when a voice said, very hushed, ‘Dunna be feared, lass – it’s me, Judah.’

  She could see nothing but the shape of a head. She stood very still.

  ‘Aye, that’s bonny,’ said the voice. ‘That contraption ye’re standing on might go any moment. Now, d’ye hear me all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed.

  ‘I’ve some of the lads from the ship wi’ me. I’m droppin’ you a line with a loop in it. Put your foot in the loop and hold tight wi’ all your might.’

  A rope tumbled down to her. She seized it, did as she had been told, and whispered, ‘I’m ready.’

  As her chin rose above the roof slates, sturdy arms reached down and caught her under the armpits. In a few moments she was lying, limp and sweating, on the dewy slates.

  There were several boys, two of them as small as Beatie, on the roof. They had bent the line around the stump of a chimney, and were now swiftly untying and coiling the rope. Barefooted and silent, they moved with the monkey-like nimbleness of apprentice seamen.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ she asked.

  ‘It was Granny,’ said Judah, matter-of-factly. ‘Go ahead, lads, and take care, for the roof’s as rotten as them that own it.’

  Keeping low, for fear anyone should see them outlined against the sky, Abigail and the boys crawled to the edge of the warehouse roof, and down the steep slippery gable of the terrace house next to it. If Abigail had not been so numbed with her recent experiences she would have been nervous of falling. But she had lost her shoes, and her stockinged toes, though not as deft as those of the boys, gripped fast in the mossy irregularities of the slates.

  The boys pushed and pulled her across the roofs of six or seven little houses, sometimes disturbing rats playing in the guttering, or birds nesting in disused chimney-pots. She began to feel more and more unreal. Sometimes she thought she must have gone to sleep in the attic and was dreaming.

  At last they came to a high rock lavishly curtained with convolvulus. A meagre lane squeezed between house and rock. Abigail cleared this space with ease.

  ‘Why, she’s as good as a lad!’ said one of the boys. ‘My sister Mabel would just ’a stood there squalling like a stood-on cat.’

  Abigail, having slid down into the lane, was about to say that Mabel couldn’t have been blamed when a curious thing happened. A wave of heat rippled up from her feet, leaving her legs boneless behind them.

  She said feebly, ‘I’m awfully sorry … my legs are gone somehow … and I think I might be sick …’

  So she was, shivering and ashamed. But Judah merely said heartily, ‘Chuck it up, Abby. It’s a l
iving wonder you’re not in a dead swoon, what you’ve been through this night.’

  She dimly heard the apprentice with the sister say, ‘My sister Mabel would be flat on her back a’kicking and screeching in a fit of the flim-flams.’

  ‘Poor old Mabel,’ she tried to say, but nothing came out. Judah gathered her up, and she remembered no more until she realised she was being carried through the door of Mr Bow’s shop. The other apprentices had vanished. She did not open her eyes again; it was too safe and comfortable against Judah’s chest. If only, she felt drowsily, she could rest there for ever. But she had caught a glimpse of Dovey and Beatie, hovering about anxiously, and Gibbie in his long trailing night-shirt, flickering around like a small grey ghost, mad with curiosity.

  Judah took her upstairs and laid her on her own bed. He said to Dovey, ‘Granny?’

  Dovey shook her head. ‘Low.’

  Abigail tried to speak, tried to ask, ‘Is Granny Tallisker ill?’ But although her mouth opened, her tongue moved, not a word came out. Terror filled her. What was the matter now? She caught Dovey’s eye, pointed to her mouth, struggled to speak.

  Dovey said soothingly, ‘It’s the shock, without doubt. Come the morning your voice will be back, as good as gold. Now then, so I can tell Granny when she’s herself again: Did those villains do anything bad to you?’

  Abigail longed to say, they kidnapped me and slapped me and a foul little beast with no legs bit me, and then they locked me up with a drunken consumptive who might be dead, as far as I know; but, no, they didn’t do what I know you mean. But she could say nothing. She looked helplessly from Dovey to Judah and shook her head.

  Judah said, ‘I’ll go take a keek at my granny, then.’ He came over to the bed, smoothed the tangled hair back from her forehead as if she were a child, and said, ‘All’s over now, Abby. Fret no more. Go to sleep and dream grand dreams, as you deserve.’

  Abigail thought he had the most beautiful smile she had ever seen. The ruddy wholesomeness of his face contrasted so vividly with the fearful half-beast countenances of the inhabitants of the thieves’ kitchen that she wanted to say, ‘Thank you, thank you, Judah, for everything, not just for saving me. Thank you for being here.’ But she could do nothing but press his hand.