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

“And then what?” I asked, still staring into the trunk. The unfamiliarity of what was next was tying my stomach in knots. Somehow, having to face it without my gown made it worse.

Hannah had no answer for me. Not that I’d expected one.

I took the striped flannel dress and petticoats from the trunk and tied my underskirts over my wet shift, fighting the elbows of the other women. Like all the clothing the Navy Board had issued, the skirts only reached halfway down my shins. I was unsure if it was a deliberate attempt to shame us, or ignorance on the part of the Navy Board. I buttoned my dress with unsteady fingers.

In the pale, hatched light of the convicts’ quarters, we were identical creatures; long, loose hair and striped skirts; skin so thick with dirt the seawater had done little to clean us.

“Would you look at us?” I said to Hannah. “No man could ever tell us apart. What does it matter which one of us they choose?”

A faint smile curved in Hannah’s round cheeks. “They’ll be able to tell you apart, Nell. Ain’t no worry about that.”

I smiled wryly. She was right, of course. My fiery hair had never allowed me to hide, nor had the inches of height I had on most women. Perhaps blending into a crowd was a little wishful thinking.

I shoved on my cloth bonnet. Seawater trickled down my neck, but my skin was still velvety with grime, hair stiff as tarred rope.

I could feel the ship slowing, turning, groaning. Heard the roar as the anchor slid from its hawser and rattled down to the sea floor.

Movement in the men’s quarters on the other side of the bulkheads. Shouted orders from the sailors. And a barrage of footsteps as the male prisoners were corralled onto deck.

I stood bedside Hannah at the foot of the ladder, staring up at the thin streams of sunlight outlining the hatch. My gaze darted around for anyone wearing my gown. In spite of everything, I couldn’t let the damn thing go.

And then I was on deck, my new home folded out before me, and all thoughts of the gown gone. New South Wales was vast and bright; cracked mud flats straining for the water beneath high clouds and a sky almost violently blue. The sea swept in between jagged nuggets of land, tiny islands dotting the bay. The harbour swarmed with movement; bodies darting in and out of harbour taverns, women in coloured gowns who looked like they’d been plucked directly from Mayfair. Men chained at the ankles to one another hauled wood along the mudflats, the scarlet coats of the soldiers stark against the prisoners’ bleakness. Behind it all, untameable forest; brown and green and thick with shadow. Eighteen years of colonisation, it seemed, had made little more than a dent on the place. Warm wind blew my hair across my cheek, bringing with it peals of laughter, shouts of men. A scent of sea, of sweat, of a land that felt raw and rugged, caught halfway between horror and inescapable beauty.

A crowd of men was waiting on the docks; settlers, emancipists, soldiers. At the midshipman’s signal they charged up the gangway onto the deck of the Norfolk; seeking cooks, seeking housemaids, seeking wives.

We stood in line, blue-striped skirts after blue-striped skirts, silently awaiting inspection.

“Officers first,” barked the naval lieutenant who had overseen the fortnightly dunking. And the soldiers were upon us. Click click went their boots. Their eyes raked over us like we were stock in a shop window.

I understood. We were a precious commodity here. Precious and vital. Despite our grimy skin and light fingers, the colony would die out without us.

“Right here, sir,” Hannah belted out, as a pink-cheeked soldier strode past her. “Whatever it is you’re looking for, I got it, you’ll see.”

One of the sailors clipped the back of her head to silence her.

The men took their cooks, their housemaids, their wives.

They did not take me.

Though I did not want to be dragged from the ship and turned into a stranger’s wife, I couldn’t help a pang of bitterness. What was wrong with me? Was it my too-short skirts, or the crude colour of my hair? The freckles on my cheeks my governess had always urged me to cover with powder? Would things have been different if my gown had not been stolen? Perhaps.

Or perhaps somehow these men knew I was not well suited to being a housemaid. Even less suited to being a wife.

Us left-behind women were led from the ship and herded along the wharf that rose from the murky plane of the mudflats. Six months at sea and the ground was lurching beneath me. I felt unsteady on my legs as though I were a child just learning to walk.

We were led to a long log barge that knocked against the dock with each inhalation of the sea. A crooked shelter rose from the middle of the vessel like a misplaced turret.

I watched the waves spill over the edges of the barge. Such a thing was not seaworthy, surely. I had seen, had felt the power of the ocean; had witnessed the way it could toss ships and make men disappear. It would swallow a raft like that in one mouthful.

Hannah stopped at the front of the line, the rest of us dominoing into the back of her. “No,” she said. “I ain’t getting on that. I ain’t. Not a chance.”

The soldier at her side jabbed her in the shoulder with his rifle and she stumbled forward, landing on her knees on the barge. It seesawed on the surface, a swell of water gusting over it. One by one, we stepped on behind her. And before I could reconcile myself with the feel of solid earth beneath me, we were