Grace stood close, taken aback by their beauty. She reached out and ran her finger over a dimple in a woman’s cheek. Her tiny, motionless eyes stared over Grace’s shoulder. Beside her sat an old man with deep wrinkles and a crooked smile.
An exquisite talent. How could a man speak in grunts and go about filthy and half-naked, yet whittle such life into chunks of wood? Grace could sense the personalities of the people who lined the shelf. The seductive woman. Grumpy child. Cheeky old man. Such detail carved by those meaty black paws.
And then, at the very back of the shelf: seven wooden men. Each with beards and long, unkempt hair. Wide haunted eyes. Each so real she expected their chests to rise and fall with breath. Their tortured faces stared into her. She saw coldness, desperation. A little of herself.
“Grace,” said Violet, making her start. “I want to go home.”
Grace’s throat tightened. She ran a hand across Violet’s downy hair and kissed the side of her head. Her skin was pale and grimy.
“Papa will be mad when we get home so late,” said Violet.
Harris would be looking for them, of course. Perhaps lost in the forest was the safest place for them to be.
Violet stared at the carvings and gnawed the edge of her finger. “I don’t like the wooden men.”
Grace squeezed her tightly to ward off her own sudden chills.
“I want to go home to the blue house. I want to go and see the sideshow again. I don’t like it here.”
Tears pricked Grace’s eyes and she blinked them away. No, my darling, I don’t like it here neither.
They had stepped onto this foreign soil beneath a blazing, exposed sun. Had sailed out of a wet London summer and watched the sea turn grey, then black, then become green and full of light. As they crossed the equator, seamen dressed as Neptune danced shirtless in the hot evening. And then down they went. Down, down, down to the bottom of the world. Down to the land where her country sent its most unwanted. To the bottom of this prison colony with its roaring oceans and inland sea, neighboured by the great frozen world of the Antarctic. At the end of the earth, Grace was expecting ice and snow.
But when they stepped off the Duckenfield that hazy December afternoon— she and the twins and Harris, gripping hold of each other like they were trying to salvage some sense of family— she breathed the air and thought her lungs would turn to fire.
They were marched off the rocky outcrop of Hunter Island to a lodging house in Market Place, Violet clinging to Grace’s hand, her sister, Nora, to their father’s. All the migrants wore a slightly vacant expression as though they were trying to remember what bizarre twist of fate had led them to this place.
The wharf was lined with warehouses and taverns spilling dishevelled men onto the street. Half-built boats and whaling pots peeked out of workshops. Red-coated marines lined the docks, rifles across their backs. A Union Jack dangled from a flagpole, lolling in the hot wind. But this was no England. Here, the clouds were high and the sky was a vivid, cornflower blue. Men walked the streets in rolled up shirtsleeves and bare feet. Sunburned foreheads, peeling cheeks. Smells of sea and sweat and the minty fragrance of the great grey-green trees.
Grace squeezed Violet’s hand. The motionless earth beneath her feet made her stomach turn. That same awful churning she’d felt as the Duckenfield slid out the mouth of the Thames. The hot wind swirled, blowing dust onto her damp cheeks. She swatted at the flies until she grew weary of it and let them settle in clusters on her back.
They queued for two hours outside the lodging house before being herded into a pen of a room with peeling plaster walls. The beds were sagging and covered in stained sheets. Mice scuttled across the floor. Grace wondered if those sent here on His Majesty’s pleasure were being treated to the same luxuries as the free settlers.
She didn’t sleep that night. Just sat up in bed, hugging her knees. There were no curtains in the lodging house and an orange glow from the street lamps lit the room. Beside her, Harris lay on his back, snoring in a deep, sweaty sleep. Violet and Nora were curled up at his feet in cotton nightgowns; their matching mouths open, matching eyelids fluttering. A fly crawled across Nora’s cheek.
On either side of them were two more beds, each filled with people. The room stank of breath and hot bodies. Grace got up and wove through the maze of beds, stepping over drawers stuffed with sleeping babies. Below them, the street was almost empty. A policeman on horseback paced through the dust and a dog pressed its nose beneath a warehouse door. Through the open window, Grace heard the faint clop of hooves. An owl hooting. The sea slapping the docks. And between these frail sounds of life was a great, overwhelming emptiness.
What she would have given for sooty skies and dung-filled streets. For street vendors and Bow Bells and clunks and hollers and shrieks and the filthy all-night-ness of London.
This will be a great adventure, Harris had said, striding down the hallway of his house in Covent Garden and shaking the tickets in the air.
Grace had been drawn in by his excitement, the way she was drawn in by everything else about him. There was a foolishness in her she hadn’t been able to see until it was illuminated by Hobart Town’s orange light. A need to rise above herself, which had sucked her towards Harris like riptide.
Across the room, a bed creaked.
“What’s the matter, Gracie?” Harris was leaning up on one elbow, his nightshirt sliding off his shoulder. The waves of his pale brown hair hung about his cheeks. He climbed out of bed and stood behind her at the window. Wrapped one arm around her middle and traced his fingers down her arm. She shivered and pressed herself against his body, needing the familiarity of him. He pushed aside her long brown plait and kissed her neck.
“Come to bed. You need to sleep. Everything will seem better in the morning.”
She closed her eyes at the feel of his lips against her skin. “You’re right.” She reached behind her and ran her fingers through his salt-hardened hair. “A great adventure.”
She felt Harris’s lips turn up against her neck. “That’s my girl.”
She looked out at the vast, foreign sky, glittering with unfamiliar stars. A thin peal of laughter rose from the drunkards by the docks. Grace leaned out the window, straining, straining towards that fragile sound of happiness.
IV
As the sun drooped towards the horizon, Grace began to wonder if Alexander had left.
Don’t panic, she told herself. She had the gun, the hut, the fire. Still, she felt a surge of relief when his footsteps crackled up to the clearing. He had hacked off the length of his hair and it lay sleek and jagged against his neck. His skin had been scrubbed free of the film of black filth. A tattered linen shirt clung to his wet shoulders, dark coils of hair escaping out the open neck.
A dead creature dangled from his fist— something rat-like, but larger, with the tiny front paws and pointed snout of a kangaroo. He flopped the furry body onto the chopping block.
“You caught that? Without the gun?”
He slid a knife down the animal’s belly.
“You got traps set up out there?”
He nodded without looking at her.
“I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”
He pulled out a trail of intestines and flung them into the scrub.
Grace chewed her thumbnail. “You’re wondering, no doubt, what in hell I’m doing out here with a six-year-old girl.”
Alexander didn’t take his eyes off the animal. If he truly had been wondering about her, he was damn good at hiding it. Grace watched for some reaction from him. A flicker of the eyes, a movement of his lips beneath that dense black and silver beard. Nothing. His expressions hidden, age hidden. Could have been anywhere between twenty-five and fifty.
He smacked the knife into the tree stump and took the head off the animal. His silence made Grace’s voice seem louder, garish with its east London vowels, cutting through the slop, slop of his slaughtering.
“It was right foolish of me to come out
here, I know it. But I had to run away. It’s Violet’s father, you see, in Hobart Town. He’s treated me awful bad and I was so afraid of what he would do to the girls that I didn’t think this through. I suppose I thought we’d come across the northern settlements if we kept walking. Somewhere I could keep Violet safe, then go back for her sister.”
In her head, the escape had been the only hard part. She’d spent weeks memorising the attendants’ schedules, committing the layout of the compound to her mind’s eye. She’d given little thought to what would happen once she’d made it out that window. Surely it would be no more than a day’s walk to the next settlement. With no money, she’d have relied on charity when they arrived, but she’d felt certain they’d find someone willing to give a bed to lost women and children.
But what was in her head was much different to the reality. She’d avoided the main road, so she wouldn’t be caught. Had no thought it might have been the only road. The lights of the next settlement hadn’t appeared when they were supposed to. The earth had risen. The undergrowth thickened and tangled. And the sun had dipped below the horizon leaving she and Violet lost in the dark with nothing but a pocket of stolen oats and flint. Her first night in Hobart Town, Grace had feared the wildness of this land, but tucked up safe in the settlement, well that was nothing. This unclaimed forest was a place from a dark fairy-tale. A world of ghosts and shadows and nameless creatures beyond the reaches of her imagination. She’d made up names for them to try and keep Violet calm.
“That’s just a curly bear. A golden goose. A wriggly worm.”
One night became two, then three, four, five. Days of crawling through mud and clambering over the monstrous mossy corpses of fallen trees. Days of torn, bloody hands and aching feet. Hysterical tears and desperate prayers. They spent hours traversing what could barely have been a mile. With each day came the slow dawning of the expanse of this place. As the pile of oats grew smaller and their stomachs shrunk with emptiness, Grace saw that they would die out here. Her own foolishness would bring about Violet’s death.
“I don’t understand how there can be nothing out here,” she told Alexander, pacing in front of the chopping block. “Where I come from you can’t walk more than half a day without reaching another village. When I was a girl my sister and me once walked from Stepney to Cheshunt and back to fetch a flour grinder off my aunt. You been to London? Never? What are you, some country dandy? An Irishman? Took us all day to get there, mind. Got chatting with some lad who reckoned he knew our ma, but it turned out he was just trying to get up our skirts.
‘Anyway, I’m damn glad me and Violet came across you when we did, what with your fire and your traps and all. We were nearly out of oats and then Lord knows what we would have done.” She forced a smile, but he didn’t look at her. He just peeled the skin off that creature like he was turning a coat inside out.
Grace pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders. “This land, it ain’t like nothing I ever seen before. So wild, like even God never been here. You’re the first person we’ve seen in four days. When I was a girl there were eight of us living in one room. Couldn’t scratch yourself without getting an elbow in your face. I never imagined there was a place on this earth you could walk for four days and not see another soul.” She glanced at Violet, who was sitting in the doorway making her doll dance on her knees. She swallowed hard. “These girls, they mean more to me than you could ever know. I love them like they’re my own. I loved their mother too, and I promised her on her death bed I’d do all I could to keep her babies safe.” She felt a stabbing in her throat as she thought of Nora back in Hobart with her father and the convict workers. “I couldn’t get her sister out. Their father came home before I could get her out of bed. But I’ll go back for her. I’ll find some place safe for Violet and go back for Nora. I’ll go back for her if it kills me.”
Still nothing from Alexander. Suddenly she despised him; so cold and silent while she wrenched her heart open in front of that stupid slab of dead rat.
“Nothing then? Not even a nod? A cough?” She wanted suddenly to strike him, tear words from his lips. Her fists flew into his arm, pounding, pounding, trying to shake out an answer. He dropped the knife and grabbed her wrists. Grace struggled against his grip, then gave up, stilled. His grey eyes looked past her.
“I’m sorry,” she coughed. “I’m sorry.”
His grip tightened, then he released her suddenly, picking up the knife and turning back to the meat. Grace stumbled backwards, her breath short. She held out her hand to Violet.
“Perhaps we should leave you a while. Have a walk or something. Won’t we, angel.”
And so they walked, she and Violet, hand in hand along the narrow path worn through the scrub. Threads of late afternoon sun shone through the trees. The evening chorus of birds was beginning; a great wall of trills and shrieks and bells. The river roared to their left.
“Not the river,” said Violet, her hand tensing in Grace’s.
They turned and began to walk in the opposite direction.
“We going home now, Nanny Grace?”
She thought of Harris’s vast rolling paddocks in Hobart Town; a place she’d never call home. He had bought the land before they’d left London. For two thousand pounds he’d put his name to fifteen hundred acres of the finest farming land on the edge of the settlement.
“Fifteen hundred acres, Gracie,” he’d announced, the day he’d come home with the deeds in his valise. “All mine. Can you imagine?”
Now how could she imagine such a thing? Fifteen hundred acres? The words meant nothing to her. He opened the papers with a flourish.
Fifteen hundred acres. Covent Garden to Whitechapel.
How was it possible that a man who wasn’t the king could own so much land? Even the richest men in London had houses jostling their neighbours for space on the street.
That was the allure for Harris, of course, all that property to his name. Heard of it from a friend emigrated to Sydney Town. Fortunes to be made in wool, in wheat, in land ownership. He spoke of it like it was a paradise across the water.
But when they came to that precious land, it was just miles and miles of coarse brown grass and tangled, wiry scrub. The forest pushed onto the western edge of their land; a vast bank of ancient, gnarled tress they were too afraid to venture into. On the edge of the property, close to the dirt road, Harris strung a sheet of canvas from a tree and hammered three edges into the earth.
Home.
Grace had grown up drinking from the drains in Stepney and had never had such miserable lodgings.
“Well,” she said, too brightly, one girl attached to each hand. “There sure is plenty of space.” She didn’t know what she had been expecting. But it wasn’t this.
They spent the first three nights bathed in dust while the girls screeched themselves silly at the depth of the darkness. Grace took them outside to the rolling, black expanse of their father’s land. Behind them, the mountain rose solid and lightless. Mosquitoes hummed around their ears.
Grace looked upwards. An eruption of silver light. “Look,” she said. “It ain’t darkness. Did you ever see so many stars?” No clouds for them to hide behind. No lamps to dim their brilliance. They sat with their necks craned, trying to count the things until she felt the girls go heavy in her arms. On the fourth night they found a snake under Nora’s pillow and Grace demanded Harris take them back to the lodging house until his palace had a floor.
She never saw much of that floor, in the end. He had her sent away before the house even had walls.
She’d gotten far too close to him. She saw that with such clarity now.
She was seventeen when she became his wife’s lady’s maid; the most coveted position in the household that Grace, with no experience, had little right to step into. She didn’t know a tiara from a turban, and the only curling tongs she’d ever seen were the ones she’d dug out of the Thames in the mud-larking days of her childhood. For the mop fair, she borrowed a dress f
rom the woman in the room above them who bragged she’d once been on the stage. It was a ridiculous pink powder puff of a thing with rosette sleeves that made Grace look like a wedding cake. It was inches too long and so tight around the shoulders she could barely lift her arms.
Her mother laughed as she sucked on her pipe. “What you playing at? You think anyone’s going to hire you looking like that?” She gave a loud, wet cough. “God made a place for everyone. And I’m sorry to say it, my treasure, but you’re stuck down here with your old ma.”
Grace said nothing. She’d argue with her mother after she’d proved her wrong. She went into the street and peered at her reflection in a shop window. Crammed her hair beneath a ratty straw bonnet and practiced the smile a man had once told her had made him forget where he was going.
She’d settle for washerwoman, be overjoyed with scullery maid. Anything that might get her out of the leaky lodging house and the bed crawling with her sister’s snotty fingers. Anything to prove God had a damn better place in mind for her than this.
She stood among the other job seekers with their pressed aprons and how do you do, my ladys. Watched them thrust glowing references into the hands of wealthy employers. She’d be going home to Stepney tonight for certain. Back to stale bread and the sticky-handed monster God had deemed she share a bed with.
But then, there he was, Mr James Harris, the young customs attorney after a lady’s maid for his new wife. He had a jawline like a Roman statue and eyes that shone like pebbles in the rain. He wore a dark blue frock coat and a tie of silver silk. Grace flashed her most disorienting smile.
Harris took off his top hat and rubbed his freshly shaved cheek. “You have experience?”
“Oh, yes sir. Of course.”
His lips turned up. “Are you lying?”
“Yes sir, I am. Whatever gave it away?”
Harris laughed and looked her up and down. His grin widened as he took in the pink monstrosity of her gown.
Grace’s cheeks flushed. Her eyes hardened. “I got no experience, sir, but you’ll not find anyone who wants to work as much as I do. And you’ll not find anyone who’ll learn half as fast as me.”
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