Behind the Sun

by Deborah Challinor

  She blinked rapidly.

  ‘Those rats,’ she said to the priest. ‘Their faces, did you see them?’

  ‘Yes, the Seaton girls,’ he said. ‘I know their father well.’

  She stared at him in disbelief. Oh God, she was so frightened she was losing her mind.

  Up ahead the door seemed to loom twelve feet tall. The priest, dwarfed, pulled it open and sunlight poured in, blinding Sarah. She squinted, shocked and confused by the noise until she realised it was the roar of the crowd gathered on Gallows Hill above the gaol, come to watch the day’s hanging.

  Beyond the door stood a column of soldiers, the scarlet and white of their jackets and trews glaringly bright. A drum began a slow, mournful beat as loud almost as her heart, and the troops set off towards the gallows across the yard. The turnkeys followed, gripping her elbows, while the priest trailed behind in his flapping black vestments, a tall, thin bat droning the funeral service under his breath: ‘Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet he shall live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’

  A funeral service for her.

  When her knees gave way the turnkeys simply jerked her upright again and dragged her along between them.

  The good people of the Rocks cheered heartily.

  She was hauled up the gallows’s wooden steps and placed on a trapdoor beneath one of three rope nooses. Why were there three? She knew the number was profoundly important, but not why it was. If she closed her eyes and really concentrated it might come to her, but her terror and the drumming and the shouting and the rush of her own blood in her ears were all too much and she couldn’t. Surrendering, she let her need to know float away.

  From the gallows she could see over the high stone wall and into the Harrington Street crowd, and all the way up the hill to the houses and shops and pubs perched along Gloucester, Cambridge, Cumberland and even Princes streets. In the mob she fancied she recognised familiar faces. There was her master Adam in his sober black coat and hat, hands cupped around his mouth, shouting and shouting and shouting. What was he trying to tell her? She’d never hear him from here. Mrs Dick from the Female Factory had come, too, and James Downey, and, oh God, Bella Jackson, and Mr Skelton from the pawnshop. And there was Rachel, her long pale hair falling free and catching the sun, turning everything around her to silver. No, that couldn’t be right: Rachel was dead.

  She couldn’t see Friday and Harrie, but didn’t blame them at all for not coming to watch.

  The door to the gaol swung open again; more manacled figures emerged and suddenly there they both were, shuffling into the sharp light.

  ‘No!’ Sarah shouted in horror, her cry echoing around the yard. ‘No, not them!’

  Harrie and Friday barely glanced up.

  But no matter how loudly Sarah screamed, Harrie and Friday continued to be escorted across the yard and up the steps to stand beside her. The drum beat on relentlessly, and overhead in the endless white sky crows wheeled and jeered.

  Sarah blurted to Friday, ‘But I confessed! I told them it was me!’ Terror and panic conspired to make her feel dangerously light-headed, and she felt as though she might pass out. This was all horribly, horribly wrong.

  Her copper hair shimmering in the sunlight, Friday shook her head sadly. ‘You dobbed us in, Sarah.’

  Sarah gasped. The shock almost stopped her heart and sent waves of confused dismay through her entire body. She hadn’t, surely. Had she? She couldn’t remember.

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Harrie said in her lovely, kind voice. ‘We’ll be with Rachel soon. We’ll all be together again.’

  Sarah couldn’t believe she could have done such a thing. ‘I didn’t! I know I didn’t!’

  Friday and Harrie would no longer meet her eye.

  Then a great howl rose from the crowd as the hangman arrived. Clomping up the steps in an absurdly large pair of heavy black boots, a top hat, and a coat reaching his ankles, he creaked his way across the gallows platform.

  ‘Tell him!’ Sarah pleaded. ‘Tell him you’re innocent!’

  But Harrie and Friday said nothing, standing as still as statues, their hair lifting slightly in the light breeze, not even blinking. Refusing to help themselves.

  Desperate, Sarah cast her gaze back out over the crowd. Adam had moved closer, his hands still raised, still trying to call out to her.

  She opened her mouth and shouted as loudly as she could, but nothing at all came out now. She tried again, straining until she thought her eyes might pop out of her head, and still nothing emerged, except perhaps for a tiny croak.

  And the drum kept on beating, the crowd clapping in time now; a slow, gleeful, anticipatory cadence.

  Behind her the hangman crouched, opened his leather case and removed three white hoods. He pulled one each over Harrie’s and Friday’s heads, and then Sarah’s. The fabric smelled of lye soap and caught on her ear on the way down. The hangman then lowered the noose over Sarah’s head, tightened it slightly and adjusted the knot so it sat just beneath her right ear.

  She dragged in ragged, terrified breaths, the cloth of the hood drawing close against her mouth. ‘Friday? Harrie?’

  ‘Hush, girl.’ The hangman stood back.

  The drummer stopped drumming.

  The priest intoned, ‘For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

  The hangman yanked the trapdoor lever.

  Sarah dropped like a stone.

  She jerked upright, gasping, her shift plastered to her chest with sweat, her hand on her throat where she could still feel the rough scratch of rope. She sat for a few minutes, head bowed, until her heart slowed.

  Her room was dark, though birds were starting up a racket in the tree in the backyard. She lit the candle on her nightstand and turned the miniature clock Adam had given her so Esther could never reprimand her for being late in the mornings. It was five-twenty — time to rise in a few minutes anyway.

  Sarah threw back the bedclothes and set her feet on the floor. This was the fourth or fifth time she’d had the hanging dream, and every time she awoke feeling utterly hag-ridden, tormented and riddled with cold, greasy fear. They had murdered Gabriel Keegan five months ago and she had imagined the dread of being found out would have subsided a little by now, but it hadn’t.

  Thanks to Bella Jackson.

  Sarah knelt and reached beneath the iron bed for the po and crouched over it, bunching her shift up around her waist and peeing for what felt like ages, then tossed the contents out of the open window. She crossed to the small chest of drawers and poured cold water from a jug into a bowl and scrubbed her face with a washcloth, then brushed most of the knots from her straight black hair and tied it up in a ponytail. Sniffing the armpits of the plain, sage-green dress she wore almost every day and deciding it would do, she shrugged it on over her head and fastened the buttons at the side. She cleaned her teeth with bicarbonate of soda and, after a cursory glance in the tiny looking glass on the wall, took the candle and went downstairs.

  Her mistress Esther Green was, as usual, already in the kitchen; coiffed and corseted and wearing yet another new dress. Sarah knew she wore stays because she’d crept into Esther’s room one day and had a good poke around, discovering a drawer full of good-quality demi-corsets. Being slender, Esther didn’t need to wear one, but all women of class did, therefore Esther Green had to, even though she was hardly a toff, being an emancipated convict. But rather than ask for Sarah’s assistance she’d bought demi-corsets, which she could — just — fasten herself. This suited Sarah: she would rather walk a mile over broken glass in bare feet than consent to lace Esther Green’s stays.

  Sarah deduced from the way she was banging the porridge spoon around that Esther was in a bad mood. As a rule she often was, and usually at her worst at breakfast time. ‘Morning,’ she muttered.

  ‘Sarah,’ Esther replied brusquely, withou
t turning away from the fire.

  Esther Green believed that instead of residing in a series of small rooms above her husband Adam’s jewellery shop on George Street, and daily cooking in a detached kitchen — little more than a shed — just beyond the back door, she should be living in much grander style. That the kitchen was so located to prevent heat and cooking smells permeating the house and shop, particularly in summer, was, to her, irrelevant. Adam made good money as a manufacturing jeweller; if only he could be persuaded to work harder and sell more, then surely there must soon be the money to acquire a bigger and better appointed house, perhaps on Woolloomooloo Hill on the other side of Hyde Park where the smarter set were building. If not there, up on Princes Street would possibly do, though it was rather too close to the Rocks. Then she could have her modern indoor kitchen, with a big American cooking stove and room for enough sideboards to store her good crockery and cutlery and serving ware. She loved to cook: Adam knew that. It was the least he could do for her, considering. She could also take on more servants — proper domestics from England, not sluttish convict girls — and get rid of sly, nasty, wanton Sarah Morgan.

  She set the wooden spoon back into the pot and turned around, wiping her hands on her flower-sprigged calico apron. ‘Have you emptied the chamber pots yet?’

  Sarah shook her head: it was a chore she hated. In the mornings Esther always crapped in hers — on purpose, Sarah suspected, so she would have to clean it out. Esther could easily use the privy in the backyard. Adam did. And why couldn’t Esther call it by one of its usual names? What was wrong with pisspot? Or thunder mug? Or even just po? No one called it a chamber pot.

  ‘Well, go and do it then!’ Esther demanded.

  Sarah left the kitchen and went inside, passing through the small dining room where she would claw a sliver of revenge when she sat down to breakfast with Adam and Esther. Adam insisted on it and it drove Esther wild — probably because Adam insisted on it — otherwise she would have to eat in her room, or outside, or standing in the kitchen or parlour.

  She met Adam on the first-floor landing.

  ‘Good morning, Sarah. And how is everything today?’

  ‘Same as usual.’

  By ‘everything’ Sarah knew he meant Esther and her mood. There were two bedrooms on the first floor and Adam and Esther often occupied one each, usually after a difference of opinion, which was a frequent occurrence. The following morning Adam always pretended nothing was amiss, as though Sarah couldn’t possibly have heard Esther’s carping demands and bitter accusations rising up through the floorboards of her tiny second-floor attic room. Sarah couldn’t decide whether the pretence was a product of his embarrassment, or because he didn’t want to admit to himself the bellicose state of his marriage.

  After a year as an assigned servant to Adam and Esther Green, however, Sarah understood that Adam did genuinely care for his beautiful, bad-tempered wife; but she wasn’t sure if he loved her. Yet who was she to say what form love took? She’d never been in love, and didn’t care to be.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Adam said. ‘What is it this morning?’

  Sarah shrugged and thought, You should know; you were the one she was shouting at last night. He’d shaved already; the pale skin on his face was smooth and she could smell the toilet water he always wore, lightly fragranced with a hint of sandalwood and lime. This morning his dark hair, which had grown really rather long and well past his collar, was not tied back.

  ‘Well, I expect I’ll find out in due course,’ he said.

  Sarah nodded and went into Esther’s bedroom. The pisspot sat on the floor near the bed draped with a piece of cloth, which was doing nothing to contain the stink. She picked up the pot by the handle and carried it downstairs, one hand pinching her nose shut, hoping she wouldn’t meet Adam again. He knew Esther did this: it was embarrassing — for him and for Sarah. Obviously not for Esther though, or she wouldn’t do it. Dirty cow.

  Outside Sarah tipped the turd down the privy and rinsed the po in the overflow from the rain barrel, then washed her hands thoroughly with carbolic soap.

  At breakfast she set a covered dish containing sausage and an egg each on the table, ladled the beautifully prepared porridge into three bowls, poured the tea, then sat down.

  Esther glared at her; Sarah glared back. Adam concentrated on his porridge.

  Sarah knew that if Esther had her way, she would be sent back to the Parramatta Female Factory tomorrow. Esther had convinced herself that she, Sarah, was lifting her leg for Adam. She wasn’t; she would never take such a pointless and unrewarding risk. Aside from having to endure Esther, she liked her position. Adam was a kind, intelligent and, at times, quite amusing boss, and she delighted in working with jewellery again. She was crafting her own designs now and they were selling well, and her jewels were bringing new customers into the shop and increasing Adam’s profits. Which was a good thing because she was still pilfering from him every chance she got.

  And there was another reason she wanted to stay. When dear, precious Rachel had died six months ago, Esther had deliberately denied her leave to visit Rachel’s body or attend her funeral. Poor little Rachel, whom Sarah, Friday and Harrie had tried so hard to protect and care for, and whose baby, Charlotte, they were now all working to support. That had really hurt, and had lodged in her like the broken-off barb of an arrow, festering ever since.

  Now Sarah wanted revenge.

  About the Author

  Deborah Challinor has a PhD in history and is the author of nine bestselling novels. Behind the Sun is the first in a series of four books set in 1830s Sydney, inspired by her ancestors — one of whom was a member of the First Fleet and another who was transported on the Floating Brothel. She lives in New South Wales with her husband.

  www.deborahchallinor.com

  Other Books by Deborah Challinor

  FICTION

  Tamar

  White Feathers

  Blue Smoke

  Kitty

  Amber

  Band of Gold

  Union Belle

  Fire

  Isle of Tears

  NON-FICTION

  Grey Ghosts

  Who’ll Stop the Rain?

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in Australia in 2012

  This edition published in 2012

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Deborah Challinor 2012

  The right of Deborah Challinor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Challinor, Deborah.

  Behind the sun / Deborah Challinor.

  ISBN: 978 0 7322 9306 2 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 978 0 7304 9370 9 (epub)

  Female friendship – Fiction.

  Women convicts – Australia – Fiction.

  NZ823.3

  Cover design by Nada Backovic Designs

  Cover images: Woman © Margie Hurwich / Arcangel Images; Rock formations on beach © Simone Byrne / Arcangel Images; ship by tallshipstock.com; all other images by shutterstock.com

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  Deborah Challinor, Behind the Sun