Bridget Crack

by Rachel Leary

  ‘She tried to kill me, sir.’

  ‘There you are, as I told you,’ Mrs Marshall said.

  ‘I didn’t try to kill no one.’

  ‘Take her away, please,’ Mrs Marshall said. ‘Take her away now.’

  ...

  The constable took her down through the town and to the gaol. She was charged with ‘insolence and disorderly conduct’, sentenced to time in the stocks, then to be reassigned. For two swollen hours she stood in the middle of the town locked into a timber frame, her jaw tightening against pain, ladies moving slightly closer together as they passed, lengthening their step. She was a few weeks in the gaol then, taken every day to the hospital to wash blood from sheets and bandages. She had just grown used to the haemorrhage of women that was the women’s wing of the gaol—or the Female Factory, as it was known—when the matron told her one morning she would not be going to the hospital that day. Instead, she was sent down the hill to Johnson’s—to the pale slug and his stolid, watchful wife.

  ...

  Johnson was fat and oily-looking, his house when she arrived there sparse and tidy, cold with no fires burning in any of the hearths. The walls were thick and the curtains heavy and it smelled of stone. The kitchen at the back was as scrubbed and dustless as the rest of the house. His wife, with one child clinging to her hip, another looking up at Bridget from next to her, thumb in its mouth, was young and nervous.

  When Bridget came up from the dairy on the first afternoon and into the yard he was there. He watched her, big eyes in a fat head, the skin under the eyes pulling away from the eyeballs and hanging in puffy sacks, exposing wet red skin below the whites of the eyes. The woman was at the kitchen door. When Johnson turned and walked towards the stable the woman stood there in the doorway watching him with crossed arms. She watched until he had gone then turned around and went in.

  In the night Bridget snuck out of the small room adjoining the kitchen and went down into the town, back to the Bird in Hand, where Eliza pushed her way through the crowd, swore as someone bumped her and her drink sloshed down her front. She settled next to Bridget. ‘Johnson, master at that new place you’re at—girl who were there a while back got took back to the gaol, his bastard in her belly,’ she said.

  ...

  The little girl Hannah had just finished breakfast when she vomited all over the floor. Bridget cleaned it up. ‘What’ve you fed her?’ Johnson wanted to know. He was at her about everything then.

  ‘You don’t want to stay there,’ Eliza said, and Bridget burned the potatoes nearly black, put them on the table in front of the missus, who looked at them, then only turned and walked out of the room. The next day she burned the lamb, was surprised to see a film of moisture over the woman’s eyes.

  ...

  On the day she had arrived at the gaol from Marshall’s place she had been out in the yard when the door had flown open and a woman had run out, thrown herself on the gravel, wrapped her arms around her head and lay there on her side, knees pulled up toward her belly, wailing. Three others had come behind her and one of them grabbed her arms, tried to pull her up. ‘Come on, Lottie, get up. Come on. It’s alright now, get up.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  The woman let go of Lottie’s arms and squatted down next to her, whispered something, but Lottie only continued to cry. Bridget found out later that she’d had her hair cut off, a punishment for insulting her mistress.

  The day the constable came to Johnson’s and took Bridget back to the gaol and they did it to her she sat stone-still staring at the wall in front of her.

  Later, in the dark, she sat up and ran her hand over the rough stubble.

  ...

  Bridget walked to the far side of the gaol’s yard, sat down on the gravel and scraped at it with a rock. The sounds of the town came over the wall, the cries of gulls carried up from the cove. A few of them circled over the yard. She looked up at their white bellies, the stretch of their wings.

  She was sitting against the wall staring at her boots when a shadow appeared over her. A woman with wide hips and thin shoulders stood in front of her. ‘Matron’s watching you. They’ll lock you up for a lunatic and you’ll never get out.’ She looked over towards the door on the other side of the yard that led into the gaol. Bridget followed her gaze, saw the matron standing there with folded arms.

  ‘I’m Anne,’ the shadow said.

  There was a scar that ran from the side of her eye in an arc down to her mouth. The sun was behind her, creating a glow around her head.

  Bridget looked down at the pattern she’d scraped into the gravel. ‘Bridget,’ she said.

  ...

  Ellen Cotton was loud. Her voice rose above everything, nasal and cracking. ‘You, Mary-Ann Salter’d take the Devil’s hot prong in ya mouth if you thought you’d get anything by it.’ A chorus cackle rang through Bridget’s head. She stood up from the table, took the bowl of soup. Poured it over black hair, Ellen Cotton’s head. Ellen stood up fast. ‘Crazy bitch! You crazy bitch!’ She grabbed and clawed at Bridget, soup dripping onto her shoulders.

  ...

  The walls and the low ceiling were made of stone blocks, the floor dirt, the only light coming in from a small window up high in the thick timber door, three bars through it. There was a bucket in the corner, the smell of shit and piss wafting through the suffocating dark filling up the whole cell. Twice a day keys rattled, the door opened and light flooded in. The matron brought bread and water, swapped the bucket for an empty one. Other than the bucket there was a blanket, coarse wool, a small hole in one corner. Between the cold stone blocks moss grew, the wall wet to touch on one side. Sometimes the sound of a laugh a long way off, a scream, someone yelling.

  Long days of darkness. She crawled to rays of light that fell over her like gold dust then were gone. Punishing dark again. Dark and more dark. She sat holding her knees, sometimes rocking without knowing she was.

  ...

  The light was like nothing she could ever have imagined. It jabbed into her eyeballs like sticks. It hit her eyes and exploded there and all she saw was white. She put her arms up to shield herself from its violence. A whimper came from her throat. She couldn’t see a thing.

  ...

  The police magistrate sat in a room with high, decorated ceilings and furniture of polished timber. He read out something about her refusing to work at Johnson’s. She hadn’t refused to work, but she didn’t get to say anything. He ordered that she be sent to the Interior. ‘Up-country,’ Anne said. ‘Where they send the hard cases.’ She didn’t care; didn’t give a damn what they did with her. They could go to hell.

  ...

  The matron came into the workroom in the middle of the morning. Bridget got up from the spinning wheel and followed her to a small room near the street. The door was open and there was a man standing in there, black hair receding away from the rounds of his forehead, his eyes as dark as his hair. His jaw was angular and the bottom of the chin almost flat. His nose was large and, like the rest of his face, appeared bony rather than fleshy. It was a face that drew the viewer’s attention to its structure, to the underlying frame. The matron said he was to be her new master, that his name was Mr Charles Pigot. He looked at Bridget and nodded. The matron was polite with him, eager to please.

  He was a tall man with square shoulders and carried himself in an upright way. Outside on the street she kept her distance behind him, as both his posture and his manner demanded.

  When they came to the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets he stopped next to a black carriage, four horses harnessed to it. ‘Wait here.’ He went into a brick building the carriage was parked near.

  On the other side of the road two women in fancy dresses, both holding parasols, walked past. She watched the people, the horses and bullocks and carts coming and going, cart wheels rolling over dried-up shit that was being broken up, pressed more and more into the gravel until eventually there would be nothing left of it but tiny pieces of grey grass that wo
uld be blown away. Bridget leaned against the shiny carriage.

  She was standing there a long time before Pigot came back. He opened the carriage door. ‘Get in.’

  There were two seats facing one another. She sat in the one that faced the front of the carriage and moved into the corner by the window. He came in behind her, sat on the same seat near the other window.

  They sat there in silence and then the door opened and a man with little glasses and an orange beard put his head in. ‘Ah, Mr Pigot! Fancy that.’

  ‘Mr Lloyd,’ the dark-haired man said, his tone flat.

  ‘We’ll be travelling together then.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  The man got in and settled himself in the middle of the other seat, glanced at Bridget, wiped one of his hands along his thigh then sat with both hands on his knees. He cleared his throat, looked out the window.

  Outside, a man came out of the building Pigot had gone into, climbed into the seat on the front of the carriage and a minute later they were moving.

  Mr Lloyd seemed to ready himself, looked at Pigot. ‘Quite nice weather, isn’t it?’ The day was sunny, a cool breeze.

  Pigot didn’t reply.

  ‘I suppose you’ve heard about the trouble up at the Wilkinsons’ place.’

  ‘I heard something.’

  ‘And you know Mr Clarke lost twelve sheep last week. Slaughtered by natives. Terrible waste.’

  ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it?’ Pigot said.

  Lloyd was silent for a moment, glanced at Bridget again. ‘No one in their right mind would set up out our way. No one.’ He laughed awkwardly.

  The carriage was headed up the main road and a moment later they passed the turn-off to Marshall’s place.

  She could feel Lloyd’s eyes on her even though he was trying to be furtive. She wondered how long she was going to be stuck in here with him and with Charles Pigot.

  ‘It’s rather close in here, isn’t it? The air I mean, warm.’ Lloyd spoke the words as though they had been building up, as though he had been contemplating speaking them for some time.

  She nodded and Lloyd, who seemed disappointed with that response, looked down at his laced fingers in his lap.

  Pigot’s eyes were closed, but now a slight grin tugged at his mouth.

  ...

  The carriage travelled through an open area of land, the river visible out the window on her side. They passed a chain gang, the men digging close to the road, the overseer walking back and forth in front of them. Some of the men stopped digging and looked up as the carriage passed.

  The road became bumpier and for the next mile or so she could see nothing but trees on each side of the carriage, some of them close enough that the branches scraped the windows.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Pigot said nothing although his eyes were open now. Lloyd looked from Pigot to Bridget and back again, leaned forward slightly. ‘What, she doesn’t even know where she’s going? Good God. No, no, that’s not right at all; they should at least be told where they are going. At the very least. Goodness gracious me.’

  Pigot sighed.

  Lloyd turned to her and spoke slowly as though addressing a child or an idiot. ‘Mr Pigot, your new master—well, I gather…Yes, well, Mr Pigot has a property near Jericho, don’t you, Charles?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lloyd, I do.’

  ‘And that is where you are going,’ Lloyd added. He glanced at Pigot. ‘It is a…it’s a nice place.’

  ‘There’s worse,’ Pigot said.

  ‘Oh, absolutely. Absolutely there is. There definitely is. I didn’t mean there was anything wrong with it. Not at all. Everyone has to start somewhere and it all takes time, doesn’t it? You know what they say—Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ He laughed, but when Pigot didn’t say anything the smile fell away from his face and he sat back in his seat again.

  After a while the rough road evened out and followed close to the river where the land was flat, the river glassy, shallow for a good part of the way across, reeds growing up close to the track, the air smelling of mud. The smooth surface reflected the blue and white of the sky and the murky green of a hill on the other shore. Black swans carved tracks through the mirage of shiny colour. To her left the mountain, a light dusting of snow.

  Further on they stopped at the river, where they drove onto a ferry, one of the horses snorting, picking its feet up and putting them down again, the carriage driver standing on the ferry’s deck talking to the horse to calm it while the ferryman made small talk with the man.

  On the other side of the river they jostled on, crossed a timber bridge then went up a hill and past a cottage and then the horses were pushed into a canter. They stopped outside a brick building where a fair woman in a peach-coloured dress got in, wearing matching gloves that she constantly adjusted. She seemed to know Lloyd, asked about his wife. Pigot she glanced at with a look of fear and distrust. She had looked at Bridget once when she got in and then adjusted her position as though trying to get further away from her, hadn’t glanced her way again.

  The road went up a hill and they passed a cottage and then a couple of huts off in the distance. For a long time after that there was nothing but trees until they came to a house and then just beyond it a group of buildings that was, as she discovered from another conversation between Lloyd and the woman, a town called Bagdad. They drove on and in the late afternoon stopped in front of a double-storey stone place built close to a creek. Pigot, Lloyd and the woman went into the house, Bridget following. Pigot spoke to a woman who took her upstairs to a small attic room with a set of drawers, a washbowl, a jug of water and a bed. ‘You’ll find a chamber pot under the bed.’ She left and a key turned in the door.

  The bed had an iron frame, a mattress and two blankets on top of it. There was a small window that Bridget could reach by standing on the bed. She tried to open it but it was nailed shut. Through it she could see only a grassy plain, blue hills beyond it.

  ...

  Outside the hills were pink in the hurrah of dawn light. The woman brought her stew that was mostly water with a few small pieces of meat floating in it. She took Bridget downstairs and then out and along the road, pointed down a lane that ran alongside a building, said she was to go down there.

  Pigot stood in a yard next to a bullock cart loaded with crates and barrels. He was talking to another man. A few yards away from the men there was a boy playing in the dirt with some wooden soldiers. The boy looked up at Bridget where she stood waiting and then went back to his game. One of the soldiers knocked the other two over and then one of the fallen ones got up and knocked down the offender, who then got up again and knocked down another one. The boy threw his arms around—‘plah, plah’—spitting as he made the noise of spurting blood. He looked up at her again, left the toy soldiers where they were, came over and stood in front of her. He used his fingers as a gun, aimed it at a tree not far from where they stood, pretended to pull a trigger and made the sound of a gun going off. He turned to her. ‘My brother is too small to hold a gun, but I can do it. I can shoot and everything.’

  She didn’t say anything and he aimed his fingers at the tree again. ‘Boom. Die, you black bastard. Boom. Boom.’

  ‘Joshua.’ The man who had been speaking to Pigot was looking at the boy, who grinned at Bridget and then ran over to the man. The two of them walked to a bullock that was tied to a post. Pigot got up on the cart, told her to get on the back.

  It was a bleak morning, her face and hands smarting from the cold. They travelled a long time through open woodland, past a cottage that sat alone a few yards back from the track. About half a mile after that the track led into dark forest. In the cart’s wake darkness and trees closed off the world behind her.

  The river roared, flowed through a narrow canyon, water curled silkily over rocks and then exploded into angry white below. Bridget lay on her stomach on a flat rock and scooped water into her mouth. From a ridge she had spotted the trail of white running between stee
p forested slopes. She had fought her way into the tangle of bush then slid for yards, the rush of the river audible way below.

  She tried to follow the river downstream now, around her a labyrinth of sticks and logs and leaves. Branches and tree trunks arranged in every which way—vertical, horizontal, diagonal, some hanging from the branches of another tree, caught part way through their fall. The ground wasn’t that at all but a trap of timber and bark, half rotten and freshly fallen about a yard or so deep, and then underneath that out of view were rocks and holes.

  She sat among the mess of plants, wished she had more damper. She’d picked the last crumbs off her dress that morning. If she could, she’d go back to Pigot’s. But she was nowhere. She’d walked and walked and she was nowhere. She put her hand down to feel the shape in the top of her stockings, the letter folded and folded again to make a small rectangle, the paper soft with wear against her thigh. On touching it she saw her sister, saw her niece walking on plump legs, falling backwards onto her bum and then smiling up at Bridget as though she had just done the cleverest thing. Something unreal about the memory, as though it were a far-fetched story someone was telling her, or a picture on a piece of paper disappearing into water.

  A small brown bird hopped up onto a branch in front of her. She watched it. Was it lost? Are you lost? She picked up a rock from next to her boot, chucked it at the bird. You’re not lost. Bugger of a thing.

  Bridget scrambled towards the ridge again. There had been no sun all day, only a bright white sky behind slow grey cloud. The scrub relented, thinned, but she walked slower and hunger worked at her mind, brought thoughts she didn’t know. The Devil followed her, waited behind trees.

  She no longer cared much for direction. Walked carelessly without knowing why she walked.

  Once she sat down and cried like a baby. Got herself up. Up and walking.