Forgotten Places

by Johanna Craven

  It had been many years since he’d thought of the world he’d left behind. Grace had brought a little of it with her. Started his thoughts churning again. Forced him to remember that once there had been an alternative to living like an animal. Forced him to remember what he’d done to end up here. His thoughts were forming with increasing complexity. Now there was no longer just cold, tired, hungry, afraid. Now there were stories, histories, guilt and self-loathing. A reminder of his own dark capabilities. He hated her for it.

  He swung the axe. Thunk into that tree trunk. Into that mud bank. Into that burrow.

  Anger at her, at himself. Why hadn’t he been able to pull the trigger? In that second, as her chatter had stopped and she’d stared at the rifle, he had felt himself drowning in the silence. Found himself longing for another word from her. More garbled instructions to the girl. He hated the way she’d crawled beneath his skin.

  His world had begun to feel small and empty, inhabited by dead men’s bones.

  With each swing of the axe, he imagined he was able to silence her. Her endless babble and burnt bread and her little vanishing Violet.

  Animal rage. He welcomed the familiarity of it. Nothing of the past weeks had been familiar. He charged up the escarpment, wild sprays of rock flying from his boots. Beads of animal blood dripped from the axe blade. He scrambled over the top of the cliff and ran towards the hut. One swing of the axe, he thought. All it would take. He thought of her sprawled across her sleeping pallet, passed out with exhaustion and grief. She’d never even see him coming. Never have a chance to be afraid.

  She opened her eyes as the axe arced above his head. She scrambled from the sleeping pallet, her scream sticking in her throat. He swung the blade into the table and felt the vibration charge through his body. He released the handle and kicked the table leg. Grace pressed her back against the wall. She glanced at the rifle leaning beside the door. She would need to pass him to reach it. Dalton yanked the axe from the table and hurled it into the clearing. It left a cavernous slash in the wooden surface. He hated himself for not being able to do it. Hated himself for considering doing it. He was afraid of how much he’d remember if she stayed, shaking his mind out of its decade-long hibernation. He upended the flour pot over the table and traced a finger through the mess, carving letters in the scattered black seeds.

  Leave.

  Grace kept her back pressed to the wall. Dalton smacked the table hard.

  “I can’t leave. What if Violet finds her way back? Why do you want me to leave? Why now? I thought we was all right.” He grabbed a fistful of her shawl and yanked her towards him. He felt heat rising from her body. Her face was inches from his. There were details that hadn’t been there before. Faint pores, freckles. A fleck of wattle clinging to an eyebrow. Tiny white scar on her chin.

  His lips quivered.

  “What?” She leant forward.

  Leave. Go before I hurt you.

  He heard the words in his head. Felt them rising in his throat. He exhaled loudly, hoping the words might escape on his breath. Grace pressed a hand against his fist. His skin tingled beneath hers.

  “Tell me, Alexander. Whatever it is. Just say it.”

  Dalton let go of her shawl and shoved her away. He swept his hand over the table, scattering the flour. The roof creaked and rustled.

  “I can’t leave,” coughed Grace. “Not without Violet. If you want me gone, you’d best kill me too.”

  VIII

  Colonial Times

  Thursday 29th October, 1863

  ‘It is … very generally acknowledged that the New Norfolk Asylum stands pre-eminent throughout the colonies for … the admirable mode of its management.’

  The rain began. Grace went out to search in the grey dawn, the hood of her cloak pulled over her head. She shoved her way through banks of dripping ferns and trunks running with silver water.

  Violet, Violet.

  But each call was answered only by the patter and drizzle of the downpour. She heard hopelessness creep into her voice.

  By the third day, the forest was a great expanse of mud, the land beyond the river near inaccessible. Grace paced the clearing until her boots and cloak were soaked through, calling out into the shimmering mist. Finally, Alexander pushed open the door and took her wrist. Led her back inside the hut and gestured to the fire.

  When, on the fourth day, the rain finally eased, she carried their dirty clothes and cooking pots to the river. The sky had cleared to a fierce blue. The water roared as rapids charged towards the falls.

  She crouched in the mud at the river's edge and beat Alexander’s shirt against the rocks.

  Was she trying to prove herself indispensable, she wondered? Show him he couldn’t survive without her? Prevent him from swinging the axe again?

  She looked up edgily. He was stripping sheets of bark from the blue gums with his whittling knife; a replacement for the curling, wet wood of the door. Snowflakes of gold wattle clung to his chest.

  Grace turned away and scrubbed the grimy sleeves, laying the wet shirt over a log to dry. She stopped suddenly.

  A swirl of blonde hair in the river.

  Her stomach plunged. She leapt into the water, her feet sliding through the pebbles on the floor of the river. She dove towards the swirling mass.

  Not blonde hair, she realised sickly, but a thatch of yellow reeds. She grabbed them anyway. Fell to her knees in the water and lay her cheek against them. She felt their dampness, cold like the skin of the dead. A sob welled up from her stomach.

  Her teeth began to knock together, arms trembling with cold. And suddenly she was back at the asylum in New Norfolk, strapped to a chair beneath streams of freezing water.

  Be a good girl now. You’ll feel much better after this, I promise.

  The river snatched her. She clutched at the reeds, but they snapped in her fists. She was pulled along, down, under. White water, brown water. Leaves and branches and sharp twigs. She tried to stand, but her feet tangled in her skirts. Ahead, a low branch stretched across the water. She clutched at it desperately and managed to lift her head and shoulders out of the rapids.

  She was following Violet’s path. She knew it. Could sense her flying, terrified through the swells. Could sense the water closing in over her little head.

  Grace felt an arm around her waist. Alexander pulled her tight against his body. She could feel his heart thumping.

  “Is this where you brought her? She was here. I can feel it.” Her legs flailed, tangled in her petticoats. “Let go of me. I can walk.”

  He kept his arm tight around her waist and dragged her upstream. And then a dip in the floor of the river. Alexander stumbled, losing his grip on her. Water rushed over Grace’s head. She saw her then, little Violet, blonde hair floating around her face like a halo. Grace opened her mouth in a silent scream and the river rushed down her throat. And suddenly she was dragged through the surface, coughing, gulping air, more air, feeling herself go limp in Alexander’s arms.

  He hauled her onto the bank. Water streamed from her dress.

  “She’s here,” she sobbed. “I saw her. I saw Violet.” Her throat seized with tears. Alexander picked up his greatcoat from the riverbank and slid it over Grace’s shoulders.

  “She’s in the water.” She moved to stand, but he pushed her back to the bank with such force she didn’t dare argue. He stepped into the water. The river hissed around his knees.

  “There.” Grace pointed to the place where the branch hung low. “That’s where I saw her.”

  Alexander dived beneath the surface. Grace held her breath. She could see his hazy shadow moving along the bottom of the river. She felt dizzy with fear, terrified that he both would and wouldn’t find her. He resurfaced, empty-handed, his hair slick. He dived under again, again. Grace held her breath in the same rhythm as he; filling her lungs to bursting as he plunged beneath the surface. Each time he came up with nothing and each time she let herself breathe. Eventually, he waded out of the river and sho
ok his head.

  I’m sorry, said his eyes.

  Grace wondered: sorry for which part?

  He shook the water from his hair like a dog, picked up the clothes and pots and tucked the bark sheets beneath his arm. He began to walk, dripping, back to the hut. Grace followed slowly, his coat around her shoulders. Violet’s watery face flickered through her mind.

  It was all too easy to see things in this forest. Things that weren’t there. She grappled with the image of that little face as the memory threatened to lose its sharpness. By the time she reached the hut she was unsure whether Violet had ever been there at all.

  She sat by the fire with the coat around her, watching steam rise from the wet petticoats that clung to her legs. They’d drunk cups of wattle tea, cooked a possum they’d caught in one of the traps. Grace had sat her share on the floor and stared at it until Alexander picked it up and swallowed it in one mouthful. He sat at the table, knife in hand and a hunk of wood in his lap.

  “She’s gone, isn’t she.”

  Alexander met her eyes.

  “I can’t bear to think how Nora will cope. The two of them were so close. How is she to go from being a sister her whole life to being an only child?” She smiled slightly. “They were so different, you know. Violet’s the shy one. Nora’s always doing the talking for the two of them. She’s a bossy little thing. A real chatterbox. Suppose she picked that up from me, right, Alexander?” She pressed her chin to her knees. “They were so different, but looked so alike. Both even got a freckle in the same place near their nose. It’s awful hard to tell them apart when they got their bonnets on.”

  Alexander ran his palm over the chunk of wood in his lap. A tiny version of Grace watched them from the shelf now, beside a man with weathered cheeks.

  “Will you carve Violet?” she asked.

  Alexander raised his eyebrows. Shook his head.

  “Please.”

  He sat for a moment with the knife motionless in his hand. Then he began to carve.

  Selective absence of speech. An intriguing project for Doctor Barnes at New Norfolk, Grace was sure.

  There were fifteen women on the ward in the asylum. Forty or more men on the other side of the compound. Convicts and free settlers thrown in together, labelled insane. The cell to Grace’s left belonged to Molly Finton, who’d been plucked screaming from the Cascades Female Factory. On the right, a woman transported for life who’d slit her wrists in grief for the husband and son in England lost to her forever.

  New Norfolk Insane Asylum. Twenty miles from Hobart so those on the outside could forget.

  The building was a few years old at most, built by the government when the streets of Hobart Town became a gauntlet of madmen. A government asylum for government men and women. But always willing to take the money of a free settler with a troublesome mistress he wished to dispose of.

  While Harris had watched his convict workers lay the foundation stones of his house, Grace had tried to make a game of it for the girls; tried to make their miserable tent liveable.

  The palace, they called it. And the flap of canvas sheltering their convict workers: the summer house. Tree branches became brooms, their pit fire a marble hearth. They hung great swaths of blue gum across their sleeping pallets so they could pretend they had bed curtains.

  Yes, yes, they were just playing house. All a game.

  “Why not go into town?” said Harris, like the fool hadn’t seen the whores plying the docks or the bloodied backs of the men tied to the triangle. Grace had been at the wharf with the girls one day when a ship arrived full of female convicts; dirty, sorry creatures with bare feet and swollen bellies. Wrists and ankles bleeding from their shackles. Violet and Nora pressed themselves against Grace and peered at the women from behind her skirts. They watched silently as the prisoners were herded into a wagon bound for the Female Factory. Grace imagined she was the one in leg irons. Seven years’ transportation for theft of an egg.

  Slowly, slowly, the house grew up around them. And with it, the tension that had begun to build in London.

  Mrs Harris they’d called her on the voyage. Who was there to argue? They were heading to a colony without parents or pasts. A few well-spoken lies could make a man and woman husband and wife.

  But fifteen thousand miles of sea had not changed James Harris. He was the same starchy man in Hobart Town he had been in London. His promise of marriage withered and vanished. He found the whist tables in Wapping before their first fortnight was through. Came home bragging about his winnings. And when the owner of the neighbouring farm came to introduce himself, Harris was deliberate in keeping him out of the hut. God forbid anyone lay eyes on his rough-spoken, frazzle-haired mistress.

  She’d let herself believe things would be different. That here in Hobart Town she’d no longer be a source of embarrassment. That I love you, Grace might become more than just a drunken mistake.

  Van Diemen’s Land, it turned out, was populated by half of London. Hobart Town was full of familiar faces. There was Harris’s school friend William Bell, who ran the apothecary on Collins Street. The Allens from Islington who’d bought land out in New Town. Bloody Archie Tyler who they’d run into their first week in town. He may have been digging a ditch in leg irons, but it didn’t stop him grabbing his crotch and yelling: “over here, Grace Ashwell, I’d know them tits anywhere.”

  And then there were the Wintermans; clients of Harris’s from London. When they’d crossed paths leaving church one morning, Harris had turned white.

  Mr Winterman clapped him on the back.

  James, my boy, small world, blah blah blah.

  His wife peered over her fan at Grace and the girls who were fidgeting in the heat. Violet had been moaning for weeks. Desperate to go home.

  The blue house.

  The river.

  The sideshow.

  Grace tugged her hand to make her stand up straight. “Stop your bleating this second.” She hurried towards Harris, pulling the girls behind her. Waited to be introduced.

  My wife, Grace…

  “I’m dreadfully sorry, James,” said Mr Winterman. “You’ve had a rough time of things haven’t you. You’ll let us know if you need anything.”

  Harris smiled thinly. “Very kind of you, but we’re managing just fine.”

  Violet erupted into an epic tantrum; arms and bonnet flying. Harris grabbed Nora’s hand, leaving Grace struggling with the screeching Violet. He nodded hurriedly to the Wintermans and marched back to their waiting carriage.

  “He’s dreadfully sorry?” Grace climbed into the seat opposite him and hauled Violet onto her lap. “Sorry about what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Sorry about what, James?”

  Harris looked out the window, avoiding her glance.

  “He’s dreadfully sorry you’re stuck with a woman like me? Dreadfully sorry you couldn’t find no one better to come out here with you?”

  Harris sighed. “Of course not. It doesn’t mean anything. Just an old mess at work, that’s all.”

  “You’re lying.”

  He glanced at Nora, who was making handprints on the window. “Let’s not have this conversation now.”

  When the girls were asleep, Grace stormed up to the table where Harris was reading by candlelight. She slammed the book closed. “You’re ashamed of me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You didn’t even introduce me to those people. Couldn’t wait to get me away from them. How am I supposed to take that? You think I don’t know shame when I see it?”

  “Keep your voice down,” he hissed. “The workers will hear you.” He stood and marched across the single, dirty room of their new home. Reaching the other end of the tent, where the girls were curled up on their sleeping pallet, he turned, striding back and shoving Grace out of the way. He’d never lived in a place so small, she realised.

  “You can’t walk away from me here,” she said with a bitter smile. “Fancy that. You carted us out here for
all the bloody space, but look where we’ve ended up. Crammed together like pigs in a sty.” She picked his top hat up off the table and flung it across the tent. It thudded against the wall and dropped onto their sleeping pallet. What was he trying to prove, dressing up like some cursed dandy in a place like this? His silk waistcoats were dulled with dust, shirts stained with sweat. She glared at him. “Your daughters hate it too.”

  Harris rubbed his eyes. “Grace, please…”

  “It’s true. You heard how much Violet’s been whining. She hates it here. You just ask her.”

  “Grace, stop it.” His voice began to rise. “Now!”

  Violet sat up in bed and began to cry. “Nanny Grace?”

  She forced a smile. “It’s all right, angel. Everything’s all right.”

  Harris sighed noisily. Violet cried harder.

  “Look at her!” Grace gestured wildly. “Look how miserable she is! Tell Papa, Violet. Tell him what you told me. Tell him how you want to go home. Tell him how you want to see the sideshow again.”

  Harris whirled around. A sudden flash of white-hot pain as his palm struck her face. Grace stumbled backwards, blood blooming inside her mouth where her teeth had dug into her cheek. She glared fiercely. She had grown up dodging her father’s fists, and when he’d died, she had sworn she’d never take such a thing again.

  “Good Lord, Grace, I’m sorry. This tent and that damn couple and this blasted mess with Violet… It’s just more than I can take.”

  Violet’s sobs turned to shrieks. Harris swore under his breath and marched towards the girls’ bed. He clenched his fist. Grace’s heart leapt into her throat. She lurched at him suddenly and yanked his arm back.

  “Don’t you dare! You lay a hand on those girls and I’ll break your damn neck!”

  Harris turned, his cheeks flushed. He looked back at the girls, chest rising and falling with rapid breath. Violet’s shrieks became terrified murmurs.

  “I’m not—” he began. “I—” He reached for Grace’s arm.