One of Us Buried by Johanna Craven (year 2 reading books TXT) 📕

the hut. Then I went to the river and refilled the basin, ready for Blackwell’s return.

I stepped back out into the street, the door scraping loudly as I tugged it closed. Broken as my sleep had been, it was better than any I could remember. There was a clarity to my thoughts I’d not had for months.

I crossed the bridge and walked towards the factory, a wry smile on my lips. I tried to imagine the prisoners at Newgate walking obediently back down Giltspur Street to be let back into their cells.

As I reached the jail, I stopped abruptly. A man had a convict woman pinned up against the wall, driving into her with loud, rhythmic grunts. The woman caught my eye and I turned away hurriedly. I couldn’t bear to look. Not at what was happening to her. And not at that haunted expression in her eyes.

On the Norfolk, I, like all the other women, had not been spared male attention.

A young ship’s mate had ever so kindly chaperoned me back down below after we’d been let out to wash. Invited me to lift my skirts.

I shook my head, grabbing my dress from my bunk and holding it against my wet shift to shield myself. “Leave me alone.” He could force me, yes, I knew that well. But why bother? There was nothing about me that warranted a fight. There were plenty of women who were willing. Talk rippled regularly through our quarters of girls who had earned a little extra favour by seeing to the sailors’ needs. An hour of fresh air. A scrap of extra bread. A comfortable bed for the night.

“I can do things for you in return,” the ship’s mate said. “I’ll call on your family in England. Give them news of you.”

Later, I found out this ship’s hand had promised to call on families from Glasgow to London with news of their wayward daughters.

I gave him a wry smile. “No one’s waiting for news of me.”

Foolishly, I’d imagined bartering with our bodies might end once we were back on solid ground. But I was quickly coming to learn the currency of this place. Coming to learn where the women in striped skirts fitted into the puzzle.

I hurried up the stairs, eyes down and my thoughts churning. I was acutely aware that I had not paid for my night on Blackwell’s floor. Not in coin, not with my body. I couldn’t fathom his intentions.

When the bells rang at the factory that night, what would I do? I’d been gifted a night of food and fire, and I knew myself lucky. Going back to that hut felt like I was tempting fate. But what was the alternative? Lottie was right; I could hardly spend my entire sentence sleeping in the street.

It was a decision for the evening, I told myself as I took my seat at the spinning wheel. I was coming to learn that the best way to survive in this place was to look no further than the moment I had in front of me.

Out the window that day I caught my first glimpse of the reverend. I’d heard talk of Samuel Marsden the day before; magistrate of Parramatta, assistant chaplain of the colony and, if the women in the factory were to be believed, father of every illegitimate child this side of Sydney.

 Maggie Abbott, one of the most outspoken women in the factory, stuck up a finger as she filed past the window on her way to the carding machine. “Would you just look at that bastard? Strutting around with his chest puffed out like he were the king himself.”

I glanced out the grime-streaked glass. I guessed Marsden close to forty; broad and flat-faced with pale, thinning hair. He swept past the factory, dark robes billowing, without a glance in our direction.

I took a sack of carded fleece from the corner of the room and carried it to my spinning wheel.

“Off he goes,” Maggie sang as she made her way to the wheel beside me. “Potato on legs. And with all the mind of one too.”

On the other side of her, Hannah gave a snort of laughter.

“Quiet, all of you,” barked the superintendent. I hid a smile and tucked myself onto my stool.

Soft sobbing was coming from the woman behind me. I tried not to look at her. I wondered if Maggie’s jabbering had been intended to block out the sound of the woman’s grief.

I had become adept at ignoring another woman’s tears. I’d been surrounded by crying women for the past year; tears in the cells at Newgate, in the convicts’ quarters of the Norfolk, and now here at the factory.

Once, I had been empathetic by nature. Another’s tears had tugged inside me. But here there was no place for empathy. Every one of us who’d been shipped out here was grieving; grieving for husbands, for children, for lovers left behind. Grieving for England, for Ireland, for the lives we’d had before. My own grief was striking enough, without taking on others’ as well.

But this woman’s tears were impossible to ignore. They turned into racking sobs I could feel deep inside my chest. When she got up to relieve herself, I turned to Maggie. “What happened to her?” I asked.

Maggie kept her eyes on her spinning. “Her little one got taken away today. Sent to the Orphan School in Sydney Town.”

“A school? Is that so bad?”

Maggie looked at me as though I were half-witted. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, set deep in tanned, leathery cheeks. Dark corkscrew curls sprung out from beneath her cap. “Once a little one gets sent away, they got next to no chance of their mamas ever seeing them again.” Her brassy voice dropped a little. I wondered if she were speaking from experience.

“Oh,” I mumbled, not wanting to