The Secret River (10 page)

Thornhill seemed to have been pulling on an oar all his life. It made little difference whether the water on which he did it was called the Thames or Sydney Cove.

He worked for many masters but in particular for Mr King, who had built one of the stone storehouses that had floated in
Thornhill’s vision that first day. Alexander King was a tidy fellow with tiny ears flat against his head and a dimple in his chin big enough to lose a boot in. He was a cheerful sort of man who took satisfaction in amusing people, and Thornhill always obliged. His laughter was all the more sincere for knowing that the joke was on Mr King.

Mr King had a finger in many pies, but the one of immediate interest to Thornhill concerned certain casks, containing certain fluids precious in the colony, which Mr King had caused to be brought on ships from Madras, from Calcutta, from the Indies. Mr King would come down in the morning, stand on the wharf in the sun and, with a list in his hand, punctiliously count the casks on their way to the Customs men: so many of Jamaican rum, so many of French brandy, so much Ceylonese gin. Paid up without a murmur, smiling as he did it, because he knew that other casks, not appearing on his list, were being looked after by night. That was Thornhill’s job: privily to convey those casks from the ships to a bay around the point from the settlement, where they were safe from the grasping hand of the Master of Customs.

You will get your share
,
Thornhill
, King told him, smiling his calm smile, the smile of a flourishing man.
You will find it better than coin of
the realm
. Thornhill had no concerns about not getting his share.
You may rely on me, Mr King
, he said, and they shook hands on it.

Mr King was a happy man, and did not grieve about the tiny splined holes under the hoops, and the gimlet in Thornhill’s pocket. He did not grieve because he did not know, tucked up safe in his feather-bed while Thornhill was busy in the dark.

~

Morning and evening the Government chain gangs clanked and shuffled to and from the split-timber barracks where their hammocks were packed in so close together the convicts became part of each other’s dreams.

Without Sal, Thornhill would have been assigned to one of those gangs. Failing that, to some settler who, in exchange for victuals and a suit of slops once a year, could do with him pretty much as he pleased. A man could be lucky, and be assigned to some master of kindly stamp who would feed and clothe his convicts properly and at the end of a year let them apply for a ticket of leave. But for plenty of masters the charm of having men obliged to work for nothing was irresistible. Those masters would make sure their servants were accused of some misdemeanour or other before the year was out, so they would never get their ticket.

The ticket of leave was a peculiarity of New South Wales. Here, three-quarters of a year away from the fields of wheat and sheep in England, the working of the land to produce food was urgent. The authorities had realised that if the place was ever to sustain itself, it would be by free labour and not the reluctant time-serving of felons. The ticket was a way of making men free enough to benefit from their own sweat but not free enough to stop being prisoners.

As little as a twelvemonth after arriving, a convict could apply for his ticket, and with that safe in his pocket he could walk about as free as any Legitimate. He could sell his labour to anyone he chose, or take up a piece of land and work for no one but himself. The only limit to his freedom was that he could not leave the colony. For folk who had thought to die an ugly death, that seemed a light enough fetter.

But for the next twelve months, until he could apply for his ticket, Thornhill would have Sal as his master. It made a good joke between them. In the nights, on a pile of the fern the old hands called bungwall that was covered with a piece of canvas, he would turn to her.
I had best call you Mrs Thornhill, madam
, he said, and squeezed her body, that he had felt in his imagination for those months at sea, and never tired of having now under his hands.
Yes, Mrs Thornhill. No, Mrs Thornhill. At your service, Mrs
Thornhill
. Many things in this place were bewildering, but the feel of her body was still the thing he knew best in all the world. Sal moved closer and the fern beneath the canvas shifted too, like a restless creature in the bed with them.
Why Thornhill
, she whispered.
My good man. Let me think now, how can you service me?

~

The place ran on rum the way a horse ran on oats. Rum was the currency of all exchanges, there being little coin. As well, rum promised consolation for the fact that everyone in the colony might as well be on the moon.

A man could hardly take a step in the settlement without coming to one of the open-sided shelters, nothing more than a roof of bark held up with a few lopped saplings driven into the dirt and a counter of wattle-lathes, where rum could be got at any hour. Men sprawled on upturned barrels with their heads on the counter, far gone but still clutching a pannikin so tight their knuckles were white, and behind the counter thin-faced fellows with sunken cheeks stared blankly at their world.

What with the rum Mr King knew about, and the rum he did not, the Thornhill household soon moved into another hut down by the stream. It was made mostly of mud, but bigger than the first, and it had the luxury of a stone fireplace and a sod-lined bark chimney. The rain tended to come in through the roof, also of bark, but they reminded each other of how superior it was to the room in Butler’s Buildings, especially in respect of ventilation.

It was Sal’s idea to make the hut into two rooms with a bit of canvas suspended from the rafters, and to set up a grog-stall in one of them. She proved canny at the inn-keeping game, using the charm of her smile to jolly the customers along while she poured another tot of Mr King’s Jamaica. Willie ran about on the muddy track outside, and the baby Dick lay quietly in his cradle.

At the end of each week Sal would count up the takings, from Thornhill’s work on the water and from her own selling liquor, and hide them away in a box under the bedding. Then they would get the children to sleep in their corner. Thornhill would fill his pipe and pour them a good tot of Mr King’s best French brandy—the very same that the Governor enjoyed in his grand house on the hill—and they would take their ease on the bungwall, their feet resting on the lump made by the box of coins.

One of the pleasures of those murmured times was telling each other about their future. A person who was willing to work, and who did not piss it all up against the wall, could make good in no time: they saw that all around them. Captain Suckling, once commander of the
Alexander
, was one such. In London, Suckling was nothing but one more hard-faced sea captain with the toes sticking out of his boots, but he had got himself land here and swaggered around the place now in a silver-buttoned waistcoat. He had filled out, his face shiny with good living, clean-shaven to a purple gleam.

Even men who had started out as felons could work their way through the system—from assignment to ticket of leave to pardon—within a few years. He saw them standing on the wharfs, looking about them as if they owned the place: men no better than he was, who had got their freedom and made their pile, and now could look anyone in the eye.

By and by, the Thornhills told themselves, they would have enough put aside to go back to London. They would get a little neat house in the Borough, the twin of the one in Swan Lane except that they would be sure they owned the freehold. Out on the river, there would be a wherry sound as a pippin tied at the wharf, and a good strong prentice to row it. They would take their ease by the fire in a warm parlour, a stuffed armchair cushioning their bones and a girl to bring in the coals.
My word, Will
, Sal
would whisper, curling herself in against him,
I can just about smell
the butter on the toasted muffins she’ll have fetched us!

Two wherries, why not, and a couple of prentices.

One of them paisley shawls from India
, Sal whispered.
And never do
my own washing ever again
.

Thornhill could see himself taking his ease in the Anchor with a plate of whitebait and a tankard of best bitter, and the kind of look about him that came from having gold put away safe in the bank. Men in a smaller way would greet him as he strolled down to the river with his pipe after lunch.
Good-day Mr Thornhill!
Fine day Mr Thornhill!
He knew he would make a good rich man, having had so much practice as a poor one.

A little luck, a deal of hard work: with those, nothing could stop them.

~

Out on Sydney Cove pulling an oar, Thornhill could imagine himself back on the Thames, but Sal could never for a moment stop seeing the differences between that place and this. She was astonished every time at the rain, no gentle drizzle that misted everything over soft and grey, but lightning and thunder loud as cannon-fire, and water hurling itself down hard out of the sky, trying to make holes in the ground.
By God, Will
, she would say,
have you ever seen anything like it?
and by the livid shocks of lightning he would see her eyes wide, as if at a circus where some trick was being performed.

Their hut swarmed with creatures they had never seen before: bold lizards that eyed them unblinkingly, sticky black flies, lines of ants that could reduce a lump of sugar to nothing in a night, mosquitoes that could sting through cloth, creatures along the lines of a bedbug that buried their heads in skin and swelled with human blood. Sal learned from their neighbours how to deal with them, setting the legs of the table in dishes of water against the ants,
hanging switches of pungent leaves at the doorway to discourage the flies. Against the blood-suckers and the nits she cut the children’s hair. Having no scissors, she used the knife so Willie’s ears stuck cruelly out of his close-cropped head, the knife-hacked hair standing up in tufts. With his thatch of feathery hair gone, Dick’s neck looked as fragile as a twig.

She was inclined to take it personally about the trees, wondering aloud that they did not know enough to be green, the way a tree should be, but a washed-out silvery grey so they always looked half dead. Nor were they a proper shape, oak shape or elm shape, but were tortured formless things, holding out sprays of leaves on the ends of bare spindly branches that gave no more protection from the sun than shifting veils of shadow. Instead of dropping their leaves they cast off their bark so it dangled among the branches like dirty rags. In every direction that the eye travelled from the settlement all it could see were the immense bulges and distances of that grey-green forest. There was something about its tangle that seemed to make the eye blind, searching for pattern and finding none. It was exhausting to look at: different everywhere and yet everywhere the same.

When the hot weather came—confusingly, at Christmas—it was like no hot weather they had ever known. The sun rose up into a sky wan with heat and hung there pouring brassy light down on everything through the whole endless day, a burden on the shoulders, until it slipped behind the mountains to the west. There were no slow twilit evenings. Darkness came down sudden and absolute.

Everything they had owned in London had been pawned, or sold, or stolen during the voyage. Even his old leather hat, and Sal’s good blue shawl that her father had given her—even those had gone. But there was one thing she had brought from London that became more dear to her than any of those other objects because it was the one that remained to her: a broken piece of
clay roof-tile that she had found in the sand by Pickle Herring Stairs the morning of her last day in London. It was worn and rounded from the tides of years, but the bulge along the edge could still be seen where the clay had been pushed into a straight line, and the hole where it had been tied on to the batten. The hole was not quite round, and its inner edge retained the grooves where a stick had been jabbed through the damp clay.

I’ll take it back to Pickle Herring Stairs by and by
, she said, rubbing her thumb over its smoothness.
Right back where it come from
. The thing was like a promise, that London was still there, on the other side of the world, and she would be there too one day.

To everyone else, the grog-shop was nothing more than Thornhill’s, but she gave it a name: the Sign of the Pickle Herring, just for the pleasure of hearing the words in her mouth.

Thornhill noticed that Sal never ventured beyond the few streets of the township, dusty and muddy by turns. He assured her that even the Governor’s lady took the air down along the point, where the forest was not too thick, and sat on a rock there watching the sun go down, and that if she were to go with him along the track to the lighthouse at South Head, she would find it worth the walk to see the way the ocean flung itself against the great cliffs of blind stone. She went with him once or twice as far as the Governor’s garden, leaning on his arm like a lady with her squire, but he knew that it was only to please him. On the top of that small rise she turned away from the wild forest and looked back down the hill at the settlement.

Where she liked best to be was down at Sydney Cove. He would see her sitting on the public wharf there, her legs hanging over the side, Willie running about on the strip of sand and Dick in her lap, staring at the ships moored out in the bay. He would row out to one of the ships, load up the lighter, and row back to the Customs Wharf, and she would still be there, the hair blowing across her face in the afternoon sea breeze.

The ships anchored in the port were the end of the long string that joined this place with the one they had left behind. What Sal saw as she stared out at the
Osprey
or the
Jupiter
was herself climbing on board and turning her back forever on Sydney Cove, getting the bit of roof-tile out of her pocket ready to put back on the sand at Pickle Herring Stairs.

~