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

me; dutiful daughter and conscientious student, then I was to become a wife and mother. I’d never imagined I could be taken in any other direction. For all my studies of the skies and foreign phrases, my world was narrow. Though I could point to any city on a map, I had no thought of how life might be in any place but London. When, as a nine-year-old child, I heard of our ships landing in Botany Bay, the place seemed as distant as a dream. Never in the stretches of my imagination could I have perceived ever walking these shores. Especially not as a prisoner.

Jonathan Marling was an accounting client of my father’s; an ambitious young man who shared ownership of a jeweller’s on Theobolds Road. He’d come to our door one day with a valise full of papers, and while I waited for my father to return home, I kept him entertained with mindless small talk and a pot of Indian tea. At the sight of us laughing together in the parlour, my father’s face lit up, and he set about arranging our betrothal with far too much enthusiasm.

A week later, Jonathan was back at the door to ask for my hand, no doubt buoyed by the sizeable dowry Father had dropped at his feet.

 I’d held out no hope of marrying for love, of course, but accepting Jonathan’s proposal left a hollowness inside me. I found reason after reason to delay my wedding; the need to be married in spring, our priest’s runny nose, the unavailability of sky-blue satin for my bridal gown. I had nothing against my husband-to-be. I was just not ready to become a wife.

When Father fell ill with smallpox, I was still finding excuses not to marry.

But Jonathan was there beside me while my father’s body was lowered into the earth. And he was there to accompany me home from the service, to manage Father’s affairs on my behalf, to hold me when the grief broke inside me.

With Father gone, I felt the emptiness stretching out around me. As his only child, he had left me a good inheritance, but the thought of being alone in the world was terrifying. I felt utterly incapable of managing my own life. And so three weeks after I had walked out of St James’s behind my father’s coffin, I was walking back down the aisle as Jonathan’s wife.

I became the lady of a whitewashed townhouse in Clerkenwell, with a fortepiano in the parlour and a small garden in front.

My father would be proud of me, I told myself, as I managed our small staff and walked on Jonathan’s arm to a parade of garden parties and banquets. Would have been proud of the well-respected young lady I had become.

But I knew he would not have pushed so hard for our marriage if he’d known I’d be a widow by the age of twenty-six. And he certainly would not have done so if he’d known that marrying Jonathan Marling would lead me onto a prison ship.

I lay wide awake for what felt like hours, listening as the yelling in the street continued. I could see the flare of the bonfire through the cloth window. Did the rebels plan to break Owen out of prison? Or was this chaos their way of announcing to the Rum Corps that they would not be kept down?

I got out of bed and lit the lamp, knowing there was little point trying to sleep. I went to the shelf and looked over the pile of books. Blackwell’s collection was an eclectic one; a Bible interspersed with the novels of Goldsmith and Fielding, and an enormous brick on construction techniques that looked unbearably dull. I opened the novel at the top of the pile but it did little to hold my attention.

My gaze drifted to Blackwell’s empty sleeping pallet, to the wooden storage chest beside it. I felt a sudden, desperate need to look inside. To learn just a little about this man I lay beside in the night. This man I had chosen to trust.

I picked up the lamp, my bare feet sighing against the dirt floor. I tiptoed towards the chest in which Blackwell kept a small piece of himself.

Guilt tugged inside me, but my curiosity won out.

I opened the lid and held up the lamp. The chest was filled with clothing; neatly folded shirts, trousers, a scarf and gloves. Beneath them, several more books and a large metal crucifix.

Tucked down the side, fallen between the books, was large oval locket. I clicked it open, holding it up to the lamp. A young woman peered back at me, pale hair falling in ringlets around a heart-shaped face. She had a delicate beauty, with large doe eyes and a smile at the edge of her lips. I remembered posing for a similar portrait in the year before my father’s death.

Blackwell’s wife, I wondered? I’d never been bold enough to take the conversation in that direction. I clicked the locket closed, and tucked it back beneath the clothes.

I felt a hollowness inside me, though I couldn’t fathom why. Guilt, perhaps? Or the inexplicable envy that his thoughts might have been on that curly-haired beauty while he was sitting at the supper table with me?

I regretted going through his things. I closed the lid and went back to my sleeping pallet, bringing my arms up over my ears to block out the chaos in the street.

CHAPTER NINE

 

 

“The Enemy hath so completely possessed himself of the minds of all ranks and orders here; that it is a matter of doubt with me, that His power will be ever seen in this place.”

 

Letter from Rev. Samuel Marsden to Mary Stokes

October 1795

On Sunday morning, as I laced my boots for church, I said, “You’re a man of God.” My thoughts