One of Us Buried Read online

  ONE OF US BURIED

  JOHANNA CRAVEN

  Copyright ©2021 Johanna Craven

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in line with copyright law.

  www.johannacraven.com

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  NOVELS

  Bridles Lane (West Country Trilogy #1)

  Hills of Silver (West Country Trilogy #2)

  Wild Light (West Country Trilogy #3)

  Forgotten Places

  The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

  SHORT STORIES

  Moonshine (West Country Trilogy Prequel)

  Goldfields: A Ghost Story

  The Dutchman

  Afterlife

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART ONE

  I imagine I can still see the blood on my hands. Perhaps my fingers are forever stained.

  I hide my hands in the folds of my skirts. Focus on the rhythmic clack of footsteps against stone.

  I am surrounded by men, as I was the day I arrived in this place. And just like that day, there are soldiers in red coats, convicts, settlers. Englishmen, Irishmen and me, the lone woman. We all step into the courtroom together, though we are anything but equals.

  My mind is on the distant sigh of the sea, on the pearly afternoon light, on the wall of birdsong that comes before evening. These things have been part of my world for the past two years, but only now, with my end approaching, am I coming to see their beauty.

  They sent me to this place; this sun-bleached colony at the end of the world, to pay for my crimes; to weave cloth, to populate this land with my descendants.

  But there will be no descendants. No more cloth, no more birdsong, no more light.

  For there can be only one verdict. My bloodstained hands will see me to the gallows. How can I pretend to be surprised? I knew from the start I would never leave this place alive.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Penal Colony of New South Wales

  1806

  The land was a shadow breaking the horizon. An illusion, surely. I’d begun to believe the sea was without end.

  Creaks and groans and rattles of the ship. I felt the shoulders of the other convict women bump up against mine.

  The water came at me before I’d readied myself. Seamen upended buckets over our heads, to a grizzled chorus of cursing. I wrapped my arms around my chest as the water turned my thin shift transparent.

  “That’s it,” laughed one of the sailors, as we tried to clean our grime-caked bodies with grime-caked hands. “Make yourselves presentable.” And then more laughter, as though he, like the rest of us, knew any chance we had of making ourselves presentable was long gone.

  I shivered. Here, on the outskirts of our new life, the wind was cold, though the air held a lingering warmth. The scratches Hannah Clapton had made on the bulkheads told us it was mid-April; autumn, apparently, here at the bottom of the earth.

  I looked out across the sun-streaked water, watching the edges of that land sharpen. My lips parted and I tasted salt on my tongue.

  Dire as conditions were on the Norfolk, they had become familiar. The fortnightly wash was not unexpected, nor was the speed with which we’d be shunted back into the convicts’ quarters, or the beads of hot, black pitch that seeped through the deck and dotted our bunks like remnants of plague. But the land awaiting us was utterly unknown.

  Back down below, the stench swung at me; a soupy haze of bodies, and filth, and inescapable damp. The few minutes on deck had given me a chance to breathe. The iron grille slammed behind us, padlock closed tight. We elbowed and shoved our way to the pile of trunks against the bulkheads, hunting for our belongings amidst the dark roll of the sea. This was our chance, we knew, to escape the mythical factory for women and serve our time as housemaids, or cooks. Perhaps a settler’s wife.

  We’d been permitted to bring one small trunk on the voyage. And while many of the women had brought nothing but the clothes on their backs, I’d carted along my best worsted gown, along with woollen stockings and a pair of gloves I’d lost just days out of England.

  On the ship we’d been given clothing for our new life: two sets of shifts and petticoats, a linen cap and apron each, matching gowns – one blue striped, the other the colour of milky tea.

  I pulled my trunk out from the bottom of the pile. There was my apron, my striped dress, a shift that had become sweat-stained and worn.

  My worsted gown was gone. I stared blankly into the trunk, as though I might will it to reappear.

  “All right, Nell?” Hannah Clapton asked from behind me.

  I nodded stiffly, though I felt anything but all right. The ship was lurching violently, and the world was lurching with it. The unknown land was approaching and I couldn’t find my gown. I’d convinced myself it would be my ticket out of the factory. My way of making myself presentable. I felt a wave of deep panic.

  Hannah gave me a wry smile. “We’ll be off this cursed ship soon at least.” She tucked lank, grey-streaked hair beneath her cap and tried to bash the creases from her skirts.

  “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 back on the water.

  The barge, thankfully, did not take us to sea. Instead, the waterman guided it down a wide, dark river, where the water became coppery and trees hung above us like ghosts. Bronze light shafted through the branches, banks of thick wilderness swallowing the specks of civilisation scarring Sydney Cove.

  I hugged my knees, watching coloured birds swoop down and ripple the river. The sound from the forest was unending; musical trills and discordant birdcalls, within the constant sighing of trees and water. My senses felt overloaded.

  There were fifteen women crammed onto the raft, watched over by two marines and the burly, bearded waterman. But our humanity seemed insignificant. I felt as though we were the only people left on earth.

  We were to be taken to the factory for women in Parramatta, I knew, but what was that but a name? It seemed impossible there could be any civilisation among this endless wild.

  For the first time, I began to truly appreciate the abrupt turn my life had taken. Somehow, tucked away within the confines of the ship, I had managed to block out the reality of it. Perhaps a part of me had believed that when I finally set foot on solid ground again, I would be back at the docks in Woolwich. I’d never known any home but London, so how could my mind fathom this boundless forest and this quicksilver river and the impossible stretch of the sky?

  When the last of the light was sliding away, the waterman tied the barge to a chalky tree trunk at the river’s edge. He disappeared into the shelter in the middle of the vessel and returned carrying a flask of water and a loaf of bread. He passed them among us.

  Surely we weren’t to stay here the night. Not with trees all around us and nothing overhead by sky. The meagre shelter was barely big enough for a single person to stand.

  In the corner of the barge, two women sat bundled in the thin grey blankets we had slept under on the Norfolk.

  “Would you look at that?” Hannah said, jabbing a finger in their direction. “Don’t I wish I were smart enough to have done the same.”

  I hugged my knees. The thought of bringing my blankets with me had never even crossed my mind. What kind of savage place was this, where we were not even to be given bedclothes? I forced down a mouthful of bread, the anxiety in my stomach leaving me with little appetite.

  The waterman leaned back against the shelter, blowing a line of pipe smoke up into the darkening sky. The soldiers sat side by side on the riverbank, chuckling between themselves. One crunched on an apple and flung the core into the trees. The baby born on the voyage mewled in his mother’s arms.

  I wondered distantly at the time. The sun was slipping below the horizon, but in this strange place, I had no thought of whether that made it ten in the evening or three in the afternoon. Time seemed insignificant. A construct of men trying to tame an untameable world.

  As the darkness thickened, a chaos of shrieking pressed against us. Birdsong, I told myself, but in this violent wall of sound, there was not the barest hint of musicality. The river lapped up against trees that seemed to grow within the water; their gnarled, bare branches eerie in the twilight.

  And then there were stars; an endless brilliance lighting up a deep black and purple sky. I lay on my back with my spare clothing in a cloth bag beneath my head, staring up at the crescent moon that hung above the treetops. Lying there in the cradle of the river, I could give no form to the shape my life was to take. It hardly seemed to matter. Against the vastness of this place, what was I but an insignificant scrap? And with each minute I spent here, I was coming to see that, as a discarded woman bound for the factory, the shape my life would take mattered less than anything.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘It will readily be admitted by every impartial observer … that there is no class of the community [that] calls more earnestly for the attention of the state than these unhappy objects, who have from various causes and temptations, departed from the p
aths of virtue and forfeited their civil liberty.”

  Rev. Samuel Marsden

  A Few Observations on the Situation of the Female Convict in New South Wales

  1808-1817

  By dawn, the barge was carrying us back down the river. My back was aching from a night on the uneven logs, my skin a mosaic of insect bites. I’d managed a few hours of broken sleep, punctuated by images of creatures in the dark. I couldn’t tell if they had come from my dreams or reality.

  Bend after bend, the river swept onwards, the waterman’s oar rising and falling, rising and falling. Just as I was beginning to believe it would go on forever, the wilderness broke.

  A riverside tavern. A sailboat tied to a narrow jetty. And then a cluster of mud huts and farmland.

  Parramatta.

  A row of redcoats was waiting on the riverbank to meet us, rifles held across their chests. How many? Six? Eight? Ten soldiers with their weapons out, ready to greet a barge full of women. Their message was clear; we were prisoners. Step into line or come to regret it. But there was something oddly defensive about the soldiers’ gesture. I couldn’t help but feel as though those rifles offered them a little protection against everything that raft of women represented. Protection against allure, desire, temptation.

  The redcoats peered at us as the raft bumped against the wharf, sizing us up like the men had when they’d climbed aboard the Norfolk. The look in their eyes told us we were both nothing and everything. A commodity to be coveted, bartered, perhaps even feared.

  The tallest of the soldiers stepped up to the waterman, exchanging words I couldn’t hear. He looked out across the barge at the new arrivals. I lowered my head, cowed by his presence, shame tugging my shoulders forward. I held my breath as I stepped past him onto the narrow wooden jetty.

  I had not been expecting London, of course. But this place; what was this? Rusty plains of farmland pushed up against a tangled, grey-green forest, intercepted by a wide, dusty road that cut through the middle of the settlement. Huts dotted the farmland, presided over by the twin spires of the church. The morning sun was searing the tops of the trees, and I squinted in the brassy light.