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

and their bristly faces edging closer with each mouthful. Told us rum-scented stories about their farms and their houses and their hard-earned tickets of leave.

Just now need me a wife, they’d say.

It wasn’t a difficult thing to find in this colony. Just that day, a settler had turned up at the factory with his marriage permit from Reverend Marsden. We’d lined up to be inspected, been given the chance to offer ourselves as wives.

The settler had left twenty minutes later betrothed to Sally Quinn.

Being chosen as a convict wife, I’d learnt that day, was a thing to be celebrated. Once you’d signed yourself over to your husband-to-be, it marked the end of your time at the factory. Sally Quinn’s settler was a loud-mouthed drunkard from what I could tell, but he’d saved her five more years of weaving Parramatta cloth. Tomorrow he’d be whisking her off to be mistress of a grand house in Sydney Town. Filthy and ragged though these men on the riverbank were, I was beginning to see they were the way to freedom.

The evening was warm, with parrots shrieking in the trees above us and bugs swarming the surface of the river. The sloping roof of Government House peeked out between the trees.

One of the wife-hunters climbed onto a log and squinted up at the row of dark windows.

“The governor in, Ned?” called Dan Brady, the man who had followed me on my first night in Parramatta.

Ned chuckled. “I think I see him there through the window. Eating his mutton with a finger raised to the poor croppies.”

Brady leapt onto the log and bared his pasty white backside in the direction of the house. An unenthused chuckle rippled through the group.

I looked away, wishing for a mouthful of rum to dull my senses.

“Did you hear?” Maggie Abbott began brassily. “Tom Evans got caught stealing from the granary last night.”

Lottie snorted. “Tom Evans is a bloody fool. How many times we seen him strung up for a flogging? He’ll be off the coal mines now, just you watch.” She grabbed the rum bottle from the man sitting beside her. “He’s a woman from the factory staying with him,” she told me. “Only thing is he’s got no way of paying her keep. Half the thieving in this place is lags stealing to pay their whores.”

I hugged my knees, looking out across the darkening river. How precious us factory lasses were. Precious enough to steal for. Strange how something so precious could be treated with such disdain.

Lottie held the bottle out to me. I gulped down a mouthful, coughing as it seared my throat. The rum was terrible. Tasted like the sea had gotten through the barrel.

“Careful there,” said the man beside Lottie. He was sharp-eyed and too handsome, with ragged, sand-coloured hair and a smile that wasn’t entirely warm. Spoke with a liquored-up Irish lilt I had trouble understanding. “I’m yet to meet a sasanaigh that can hold their liquor.” He reached over and took the bottle from my hands, to a chorus of laughter from the men around him. I felt my cheeks flush.

Maggie had introduced the man earlier as Patrick Owen, an emancipist who was seeking to sell his land for a plot in Sydney Town. He was loud spoken and sure of himself, with a constant flotilla of Irishmen around him, laughing at his questionable jokes.

Lottie’s eyes followed him as he got up and strode towards the riverbank. He flung a stone into the river and sent water fountaining upwards. He looked over his shoulder and gave her a broad smile. She grinned.

“Patrick Owen?” I said witheringly. “Really?”

She shrugged.

“Sally’s new husband is a free settler,” I said. “You can do better than an emancipist.”

“That’s the thing, Nell,” she said, watching Owen as he grabbed another stone and flung it into the water. “I’m not entirely sure I can.” She gave me a wry smile. “Don’t you know Irishwomen are as low as the blacks? So the good reverend says anyhow.”

“Sally Quinn is Irish.”

Lottie snorted. “Sally Quinn is all arse and tits. These things help.” She traced a stick through the dirt. “Besides, it’s not really about doing better now, is it. It’s about getting out of the factory. I’d rather be an emancipist’s wife than spend another four years weaving shirts for the lobsters.” She looked back at Owen.

“It don’t matter anyhow,” she said. “Owen’s got Maggie in his bed and she’s got her claws in tight.”

Dan Brady took his pipe out from between his teeth and blew a line of smoke down at me. “What did Blackwell want with you then?” he asked.

I stiffened. Felt Lottie’s eyes pull towards me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Saw you with him in the street yesterday,” said Brady. “He after a bit of company was he? You tell him you’re too good for him too?”

My cheeks flushed.

“If one of his kind were after my company, I’d give it to him,” Maggie announced, planting a hand on her hip. “Earn myself a little sway over a powerful man. The Rum Corps controls everything in this place. Even the liquor.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

Lottie tapped her fingernails against the side of the rum bottle. “The redcoats are the ones making all this. They got stills out behind the barracks. Their liquor’s as good as coin in this place. Can buy yourself anything with it.”

Maggie waved a finger at me. “That’s what you want, girl. Believe me. An officer’s attention. Ain’t an easy thing to get. Most of them wouldn’t dare let themselves be seen with our kind.”

“Shut your mouth, Maggie,” Lottie snapped. “She knows better than to go near that bastard Blackwell. Don’t you, Nell?”

“Of course.” I couldn’t look at her.

Two soldiers marched past the river, heading towards the barracks.

“Fine