Forgotten Places

by Johanna Craven

  For a fleeting moment, she was sitting beside him on the piano bench, their knees pressed together as she picked out each chord. She was strutting through the blue house in silk petticoats, falling asleep cocooned in his arms. Then: the creak and thud of her cell door, icy water, straps at her wrists. Yes, she thought, wash the good memories away.

  “Hurry now.” Jack’s voice made her start. “Grab the girl and let’s get out of here.”

  Grace slid a hand beneath Nora’s sleeping body. The bed creaked. Harris opened his eyes and his breath left him.

  “Gracie.”

  XXV

  “Gracie,” Harris said again, his voice stronger. Deciding perhaps, that she was more than a dream. He leapt from the bed. “My God, Gracie, I was so afraid you—”

  Grace stumbled backwards, clattering into the dressing table. Jack stepped between them.

  “Who in hell are you?” Harris’s eyes flashed.

  Jack raised his pistol. “Give her the girl.”

  “What?” Harris sought out her eyes. “Grace?”

  Her heart thudded. She gripped the corner of the table. Knocked over a bottle of scent. Hers, she realised. She had kept it on her nightstand in the corner of her attic room.

  “The girl,” said Jack.

  Harris glared at him. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

  “I’d never hurt her,” said Grace. “You know that. Give her to me.”

  Jack cocked the trigger.

  Harris clenched his jaw. He scooped Nora from the bed and placed her in Grace’s arms, gripping her wrist in desperation. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  Grace turned away. She was shocked at the Nora’s size. She was far heavier than Violet had been. Taller perhaps? Her legs seemed far longer. Was such a thing possible?

  “Your money.” Jack’s voice sounded distant.

  Harris glared, but pulled open the drawer of his nightstand without a word.

  Jack looked over his shoulder at Grace. “Take the girl. Get on the horse and wait for me down the road. I’ll see he doesn’t follow us.”

  “Don’t hurt him. Please.” The words fell out of her mouth on their own accord.

  “I’ll not hurt him if he does as I say.”

  Grace nodded tensely. She held Harris’s glance for a moment, then rushed down the stairs.

  The darkness was thick. Grace felt her way through the entrance hall and out into the night. Annie’s lantern flickered faintly at the edge of the property, surrounded by a pool of black.

  She clutched Nora and set out towards the horses.

  She was grabbed suddenly from behind. A hand was clamped over her mouth to muffle her scream.

  “Don’t say a word.” Alexander’s voice was close to her ear. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  Her fear gave way to hatred. She slid a hand inside her cloak. “I’ve a gun in my hand,” she hissed. “Let go of me or I’ll shoot you in the stomach.”

  He released his grip. Grace pulled the pistol from her skirt and held it out in front of her. She could see little of Alexander’s face. Just shadows and glowing eyes.

  “How did you find me?”

  “A tunnel of trees beside the northwestern farms. One end leads to the forest. The other to Harris’s land.” His glance fell to the sleeping girl slung across Grace’s shoulder.

  “Don’t you even bloody look at her,” she spat.

  Alexander raised his palm. “Don’t shoot. I’ve just come to give you this.” He held the coin pouch out to her. “Use it to get home.”

  “I ain’t taking nothing from you.”

  She heard Jack’s footsteps behind her. “Grace!” he whispered. “Come on. Now.”

  “Get out of my way,” she hissed at Alexander. “I got to go.”

  “No. Wait.” He held the pouch close to the end of the pistol. “Take it.”

  She tried to push past him. Heard faint voices and hooves. The light vanished. Jack and Annie had gone, Grace realised sickly. Taken Harris’s money and left her alone with these men. She stumbled back into the entrance hall, needing the security of the house over the open land.

  “Please,” said Alexander, following her inside. “Let me do this one decent thing.” He tossed the pouch towards her. It clattered noisily on the floorboards.

  “And help you clear your conscience? Never.” She kicked it away. Stray coins shot across the floor. “You ought to be out there with those dead men, spending every minute thinking about the things you’ve done. Thinking about what a monster you are.” She shook her head. “No. Why should you get to live when Violet don’t?” Her voice began to rise. “I wish you’d died when you were supposed to. I wish those men had killed you and torn you to pieces like you did to Bodenham.” Her fist tightened around the gun, her arm aching under Nora’s weight.

  Alexander met her eyes. “Are you going to shoot me to my face?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? Did you look into Violet’s eyes when you killed her? Did you see her face when you tossed her in the river?” Her finger trembled on the trigger. “Tell me, Alexander. Did you?”

  “Gracie, put the gun down.”

  She whirled around. She hadn’t realised Harris was behind her. He set his candle on the side table, his eyes darting between Grace and Alexander. He lifted Nora from Grace’s arms and laid her gently on the chaise. Grace swallowed hard. She had to tell him. In spite of all he’d done, he needed to know what had happened to his daughter.

  “He killed Violet, James.” A tremor in her voice. “She’s gone. I wanted to believe she’d just run into the forest and gotten lost, but he… I… He took Violet in the night and he killed her.” She looked at Harris, not moving her aim from Alexander’s chest. His face was unreadable. “James? Did you hear what I said? Violet is gone.”

  She saw a tremble in his jaw. He stared blackly at Alexander. “Whoever the hell you are,” he said, “get out of my house this instant.”

  “What?” Grace demanded. “You want to let him go? The man who killed your daughter?”

  Harris didn’t look at her. “Go!” He pushed Grace’s arm, shoving the gun aside. Alexander ran. She yanked free of Harris’s grip and snapped the trigger.

  XXVI

  She fired again. This time, the hollow snap of an empty barrel. The front door slammed. Harris snatched the pistol and tossed it across the room. He grabbed her tightly.

  “Let go of me!” Grace thrashed against him. “How could you let him escape?” She turned in Harris’s arms to face him. His cheeks were flushed in the candlelight. Hair hung over one brown eye. She could feel heat rising from his body.

  “Why did you let him escape, James?” Her voice wavered, terrified of the answer.

  On the breeze came the glassy twitter of wind chimes. A sound from the blue house. A sound from the past.

  And suddenly she was breathing the smokey London air. Cold stung the tip of her nose.

  Two girls in matching blue coats, white trims, high collars. Quilted bonnets over their ears. Nora clung to Grace’s left hand, Violet to her right.

  The river was high and hungry. Tents were lined up at the water’s edge; stripes of red, white, gold. Strings of tiny lanterns glittered against the midday gloom. People shoved their way along the riverfront, laughing, talking all at once. Inside the tents were bearded ladies, tattooed men, two girls joined at the hip.

  Violet tugged Grace’s gloved fingers. “My head hurts,” she said. “I want to go home.”

  “We’ve not seen the mermaid lady yet,” said Nora. Violet’s cloudy eyes brightened. And so Grace let Nora lead them into the last tent.

  The mermaid was a young woman with legs fused like a tail. She wore a dress of silver and blue. Grace felt sorry for her, but the woman’s smile reached her eyes. Her hair was long and golden, flowing loose over her bare shoulders. The girls stared, entranced.

  Harris clutched her cheeks in his hot palms. “Grace, you need to listen to me.”

  But she was not listening. She was in
the sideshow booth beside the mermaid. Opposite her sat the bear man; covered in hair from head to toe. Grace stared into the wildness of his brown fur and searched out his eyes. He stared back. Perhaps a smile. Impossible to tell.

  She turned suddenly. The girls were gone. She felt hot with dread. So unlike them to run away. She shoved aside the flap of the tent and raced into the crowd. People were queuing at the ticket booth, others huddled at the river’s edge, waiting for a waterman. Grace glimpsed the two blue coats several yards ahead of her. They were swept up in the sea of people elbowing their way toward the pier.

  “Violet!” she called. “Nora!”

  One of the girls slipped through the crowd towards Grace. Her face was stained with tears.

  “The bear man,” she was sobbing. “I don’t like the bear man.”

  Grace grabbed a fistful of the blue coat before the crowd could swallow her again.

  A shriek. People crammed onto the pier. Grace shoved her way through. Women were screaming, waving at the filthy brown river. The waterman tore off his coat and dived beneath the surface, searching for the second blue coat, the second fur trim.

  The girl left on the riverbank was screaming and crying, pulling on Grace’s skirts, hysterical. Grace realised she didn’t even know which one had fallen. She pushed back the bonnet of the child at her skirts. She had Nora. The river had Violet.

  Grace felt her legs give way beneath her. Harris dropped to the floor beside her and clutched her hands. “Gracie, this man, he didn’t kill Violet. Violet died eighteen months ago at the sideshow at Bankside.”

  She opened her mouth to speak. Couldn’t form the words. “No,” she managed finally. “You’re lying.”

  But then she was home in Covent Garden, she and Harris screaming at each other, breathless with grief.

  What were you doing taking her out? What in hell were you thinking?

  And, God, she was curled up in Harris’s bed, her head pounding when she heard the police come to the door, telling him his daughter’s body had been found at Saint Katharine docks at the low tide.

  Her breath began to race. Cold sweat prickled her skin and she thought for moment she’d be sick. She leapt to her feet and raced upstairs to the girls’ room. Ribbons hung from the ceiling like threads of cloud. The walls were draped in fabric; the breeze making them ripple like sea. Dolls peered out of the darkness with unblinking eyes.

  One bed.

  The room asymmetrical, incomplete. Grace threw open the wardrobe. One coat. One pair of boots. One quilted bonnet. “Where are her things? Where are Violet’s things?” She felt Harris’s hands around the tops of her arms. “She was here,” she managed. “In the forest. And here in Hobart Town. I held her hand as we walked down the gangway. I put both of them to sleep at the end of our bed in the lodging house.” Her voice began to rise. “I was up all night with her those first few weeks because she was afraid of the forest.”

  Harris nodded. “She’s been with you since the voyage, hasn’t she? That’s when you began to see her again.” He pushed her damp curls off her forehead. “Doctor Barnes, he says she came back to you because you feel responsible for her death. He says you let yourself believe she was real because it was the only way you could cope with losing her.”

  “No.” Grace shook her head. “No, no, no. That ain’t what happened. He killed her. He’s a monster. He’s done such terrible things. Inhuman things.”

  Harris squeezed her hands. “We buried her at Saint Mary’s beside her mother. It rained that day. I know you remember it. The day we left London, Nora didn’t want to go without Violet. You told her they were twin sisters and they would always carry a part of each other with them.”

  “No. I never said that.” She remembered that morning with such clarity. Buttoning Nora into her dress, tying her bootlaces. She remembered the clatter of hooves on stone, the rotten smell of the river. Nora on one side of her in the carriage to the docks, her forehead pressed against the glass. “Goodbye blue house,” she was saying. “Goodbye market, goodbye church … ”

  Where was Violet?

  Grace tried to sift through her memories. “Violet was sitting next to you in the coach.” But she could hear the waver in her voice. Felt the solidity of her world dissolve to nothing.

  *

  No Grace, I never saw the girl. I’m sorry. I saw you sitting on my chopping log singing to the empty night and I saw you curl around your cloak as though it were her body, but I never saw your Violet.

  I can imagine the way you’d look at me. Don’t be like that. Perhaps I ought to have told you from the start; that you lost her that day because she was never really there. That your mind let her go because you were finally ready.

  But who am I to bring your madness to the light? Would you have believed a word that had come from me? The man who sees his murdered comrades when he looks behind the shadows? The man who builds an extra stool to convince himself he won’t die alone?

  XXVII

  Hobart Town Gazette

  Friday 25th June 1824

  ‘The circumstances which were understood to have accompanied the … crime had long been considered with extreme horror. Reports had associated the prisoner with cannibals; and … our eyes glanced in fearfulness at the being who stood before a retributive judge, laden with the weight of human blood and believed to have banqueted on human flesh! We heard His Majesty’s Attorney General … entreat the jury to dismiss from their minds all previous impressions against the prisoner; as however justly their hearts must execrate the fell enormities imputed to him, they should duteously judge him, not by rumours, but by indubitable evidence.’

  Grace lay on her back, staring at the dancing ribbons. Left to right, left to right. The coloured walls moved like sea.

  Her thoughts were slow and cloying. She felt Harris’s hands in her hair and at once she was back in the blue house, curled up in his arms and tasting his breath. And from Covent Garden to the wild snarls of the Derwent Valley. She felt the wind in her ears, rain on her skin. Saw curls of smoke twirl upwards, disappearing into a silver black sky.

  The thought yanked her back to reality.

  She had pulled the trigger.

  She leapt to her feet and rushed dizzily down the staircase. She heard Harris behind her, calling her name. She snatched the candle from the hallstand. At her feet sat Howell’s money pouch. The pistol lay in the corner of the room.

  Heart thumping, she held the candle up to the wall, running her hand across the surface, searching for a bullet hole. Nothing.

  A sound of horror came from her throat. At her feet: a splatter of blood. Sickness rising, she followed the ruby trail out the door. Across the porch. And then nothing. She stumbled down the path and stood at the edge of the stone fence. The land opened out before her, orange in the dawn. She walked towards the silhouetted trees. “Alexander?” Her voice sounded out of place among the jagged birdsong. She crouched at the edge of the forest, hiding her eyes against her knees.

  She’d needed to escape her guilt. Pin the blame on another. And who better than a man who had done the unthinkable?

  Her accusation had been all too easy to believe.

  Guilty of murdering a girl he had never even seen.

  She felt Harris’s hand on her shoulder. “Come inside, Gracie, please. You need to rest.”

  She shook her head. “I got to find him.”

  “No. Nora’s gone long enough without you. You’ve got to be there when she wakes.”

  Nora clutched Grace’s hand and launched into a whirlwind tour of the house. A bedroom full of rainbow ribbons. Dining room with an enormous pine table. Two guest bedrooms with canopied beds, Harris’s study, kitchen and laundry, sitting room with textured gold wallpaper that glittered in the morning sun. He’d transplanted the luxury of their life in London. Built walls against the wilderness. Grace peered through the sitting room window. The edge of the forest was visible, but it felt distant. A land on the other side of the glass.

 
“Papa said we can get a piano. So we can sing our songs again.” Nora pulled her from room to room, her bare feet pattering on the floorboards. “It’s much bigger than the blue house. And much prettier too. Don’t you think?” She grinned. She was every inch her sister. Every inch that little white face that had appeared between the reeds of the river. But older, Grace realised. Her baby blonde hair beginning to darken. A front tooth missing. The Violet of her visions had been frozen in time; the fragile four-year-old she’d been when she had died. But here was Nora, almost six and a half, long-legged and tanned. Cheeks flushed with sea air.

  Grace smoothed Nora’s flyaway hair and kissed her forehead. “Yes, mopsy,” she said. “It’s much prettier.”

  That morning, she’d opened the wardrobe and found her neatly pressed dresses hanging beside Harris’s waistcoats and shirts. On the clothes, she could still smell the smoke and rose air of the blue house. Here was everything she’d brought from London, waiting patiently for her return. A belief she’d come home.

  Nora led her through the kitchen where a teenaged girl in an apron and mop cap was slicing ham for breakfast. She bobbed a curtsey and eyed Grace curiously.

  “This is the cellar,” Nora announced, heaving against a heavy door beside the range. “Papa built it to store the wheat. There’s ghosts and monsters in there.”

  Grace steered her away from the door. “Don’t go looking for ghosts and monsters, mopsy.”

  “Nora knows she’s not allowed down there, doesn’t she?” Harris’s voice boomed into the kitchen.

  Nora huffed dramatically. “Yes Papa.”

  He herded her out of the kitchen. “Why don’t we show Nanny Grace the farm instead?”

  They walked past lush green paddocks dotted with sheep, past the wheat growing in neat arrows. Magpies carolled above their heads. The farm smelled of damp earth and animals. And there, behind it all, was the clean eucalyptus scent of the bush.