Forgotten Places Read online

  She shoved him away. Her cheek throbbed and she tasted blood. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you even bloody look at me, you bastard!”

  “How dare you speak to me this way?"

  “I’ll speak to you however the hell I like! I ain’t your wife, as I know you’re so damn happy about!”

  His eyes flashed and Grace wondered if he was about to strike her again. She planted her hands on her hips, daring him. Harris glowered for a moment, then gave up and sank back into his chair. “To hell with you, Grace. Can’t you see all I’ve done has been for your own good?”

  “My own good? You lay a hand on me and tell me it’s for my own good?” She’d not spend her life with a violent man. Wouldn’t let the twins be raised by one. Wouldn’t let them grow up as she had.

  She crammed into the girls’ bed and stroked Violet’s hair until her tears stopped. Flies pattered against the inside wall of the tent. She could smell the salty remains of the pork she’d cooked for supper. Cicadas shrieked in the paddocks.

  What a mistake she’d made by coming here. Believing Harris would give her the life of security she craved. She vowed then and there she’d see London again.

  Harris’s sleeping mat rustled. “Come on, Gracie. Come back over here. Please.”

  The thought of lying next to his hot body made her stomach turn.

  “Come on. I’ve told you again and again how sorry I am. It won’t happen again, I swear.”

  Grace snorted. She’d heard the same line from her father more times than she could remember. She’d stood for it then because it was all she had known how to do. But she was a woman now. She had the girls to protect. She would give her life to make sure they never knew the pain of their father’s fists.

  “I know things have been hard for you,” said Harris. “Believe me, they’ve not been easy for me either. But we need to do this together.”

  “Together?” Grace spat. “You couldn’t wait to hide me away from those toffs.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting to see them.”

  “I thought we’d left our old life behind. But you’ll always be ashamed of me, won’t you.” She rolled over and curled around Violet’s body. “You needn’t worry no more. I’ll make sure everyone in this colony knows you’re just a beard splitter who docked with his children’s nurse. And who uses his fists when things don’t go his way.”

  Harris sat up suddenly. “Grace. Please—”

  She laughed coldly. “Don’t worry. I’m sure such a scandal will make you well popular around the gambling tables.”

  Two days later, Harris rode into town and returned with a carriage. The girls ran out excitedly to meet him.

  “We’re going for a trip.” His smile was forced.

  Grace folded her arms. “We’ll stay here if it’s all the same to you.”

  “No!” whined Nora, grabbing Harris’s hand. “I don’t want to stay! I want to go in the carriage!”

  Grace gritted her teeth. She was thankful Nora had slept through the whole ordeal, but her adoration of her father felt like a betrayal.

  “You must come,” said Harris. “I insist. It will do us all good to get out for the day.”

  Violet gripped Grace’s arm and peered warily at Harris.

  “Come on!” sighed Nora. “We have to go! Tell her, Papa!”

  Harris smiled stiffly. “You heard the girl.”

  Grace sighed and climbed into the carriage. She sat with Violet on her lap while Nora scrambled across the bench and knelt with her head pressed against the glass. The carriage snaked through a chain of brown potato-sack hills.

  “Where are we going?” Grace asked finally.

  “New Norfolk,” said Harris. “The next town to the north.”

  They rolled into a sleepy settlement, cottages dotting patchwork fields. Purple mountains rose in the haze behind the town. Men reclined shirtless on the riverbank.

  The coach turned off the main road. It rolled towards a long sandstone building that rose from the sun-bleached plains.

  Grace stiffened. “James.” Her voice was throaty. “Where are we going?”

  He avoided her eyes. “I’m sorry, Grace. This is for the best.”

  The carriage pulled into the gates and came to a stop beside the long verandah.

  “Stay here,” Harris told the girls sharply. He took Grace’s arm and pulled her from the bench.

  “James? What in hell is this?” She gripped the door of the carriage, but he took her by the waist and pulled her down the carriage steps. “A hospital?” The realisation squeezed her chest. “A madhouse?” She felt suddenly hot and breathless. Harris tightened his grip and led her up the gravel path towards the entrance.

  “Please don’t make a scene,” he whispered.

  “Don’t make a scene?” Anger flared inside her. She glared at their convict worker, Samuel, who was driving the carriage. “Are you just going to sit by and watch while he does this? Help me!”

  Harris jabbed a finger at his convict. “Stay where you are. This is none of your business.”

  Grace thrashed against his arms. “Why are you doing this? Because I won’t whore myself to you any longer?”

  “You know things can’t go on the way they have. It’s not fair on any of us.”

  “Then let me go! Give me my earnings and let me go back to England.”

  A man in glasses and a shiny brown frockcoat came out the front door, trailed by a woman in a nurse’s apron.

  “Good afternoon Mr Harris.” The man smoothed his moustache. He nodded at Grace. “Mrs Harris.”

  “It’s Miss Ashwell,” she spat. “He don’t have no power to put me in here!”

  “Her things are in the carriage,” said Harris. Grace whirled around to see Samuel hauling her trunk from the back of the coach. When in hell had they packed her things?

  Harris stepped close. “You’re to stay here with Doctor Barnes a while.” His voice was thin and controlled. “It’s important you remember the way of things.”

  “The way of things? You think you can bring me here and turn me into a woman who’ll just sit by and let you treat her as you please? Don’t know what in hell I were thinking coming to this place with you!”

  The doctor rubbed his chin. “You were right to bring her here, Mr Harris. She is quite hysterical.”

  Grace stared at Harris with glacial eyes. “You’re trying to turn me into Charlotte.”

  His eyes hardened. He stepped back and pursed his lips. “Take her,” he told the doctor, his voice stiff and empty of emotion. “Goodbye, Grace.”

  A cell the size of a cupboard. Force-fed castor oil to purge the madness from her body. Tied in a freezing bath to ease her sadness.

  Your husband has your best interests at heart.

  Once a week, Doctor Barnes would take her to his office, sit her in the leather armchair opposite his desk and speak in a honeyed voice Grace assumed was supposed to be calming.

  “Tell me about London,” he would say, puffing on his pipe.

  Tell me about London, Miss Ashwell. Or: let’s start at the beginning. In her four months of incarceration, they never seemed to get past the beginning.

  “You were a nurse to Mr Harris’s twin daughters.”

  “I was more than their nurse. I was the only mother those girls ever known. Was I just to stand there and watch when he became violent? You think I’d let the bastard put a finger on them?”

  Barnes made a noise from deep in his throat. In a fleeting moment of optimism, Grace imagined him unlocking the door to her cell.

  Forgive me, Miss Ashwell, we’ve made a terrible mistake.

  “All right.” She sighed. “I ain’t stupid. What is it that Harris wants? Does he want me out of the way so he can hunt down another hedge whore at the gambling halls? Or does he want me in his fancy new house as a well-behaved little wife? Come on Barnes! You’re taking his money! He must have told you what he’s after. Why don’t you just tell me and then I at least know what I need to do to g
et out of here. Then we can put an end to this stupid game.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can’t. Because then he’d stop paying you. You know as good as I do that Harris and I ain’t married. He’s got no right to put me in here.” Her voice began to rise. “But you don’t care, do you. Sixty pounds per year in your pocket. That’s the sum, ain’t it? It’s nothing to Harris. Spare coin!”

  Barnes took off his grimy glasses and wiped them with an enormous handkerchief. “Calm down, Miss Ashwell, or there’ll be consequences.”

  “Shove your consequences! You expect me to be calm when Harris has me locked up like a criminal?” She sat back in her chair defeatedly. “The men with the money always have the power, don’t they. The rest of us can just bloody well curl up and die.”

  That afternoon, an attendant led Grace into a room covered in murky white tiles. In the centre, a chair sat beneath a series of narrow pipes. Doctor Barnes stood with his back pressed against the wall. He smiled warmly.

  “You’ll feel much better after this, I promise you. Much calmer.”

  Grace stood shivering in her shift. Her heart sped. Nausea tightened her stomach. She tried to imagine which part of this might possibly make her feel calmer.

  The attendant sat her on the chair and buckled straps around her waist and chest. Fastened her wrists to the arms of the chair. Fear shot through her.

  “Let me up. I’ll be calm, I swear it.”

  Doctor Barnes said nothing. Grace squeezed her eyes closed and tried to will herself away. The whir and groan of the pipes began from somewhere deep within the building. The sound moved through the walls and up above Grace’s head.

  And then the water. A thin, icy stream. Her hands clenched around the arms of the chair, shocked at the coldness and the intensity of the pressure.

  Just water, she told herself. How could such a thing hurt her? But down it poured, stealing her breath, freezing and relentless, like chiselled shards of ice. Against her head, the water felt like needles, then nails, knives. She tried to move, but the straps kept her pinned to the chair.

  She gritted her teeth. She wouldn’t cry. Wouldn’t scream. Wouldn’t give them any reason to think her hysterical, or weak.

  Behind her eyes she saw a great expanse of stars. The room was washed away into blackness.

  Molly Finton was playing the game the other way around. Weighed up life as a convict at the Female Factory and a life at New Norfolk asylum. Decided she could play the part of a lunatic.

  “Sometimes you got to choose the lesser of two evils, you know.” She looked at Grace across the sewing table. Spoke in a hushed tone so the attendants couldn’t hear. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, girl. You got more wits about you than the rest of the rabble in here put together. You don’t belong in this place any more than I do.”

  “You think this were my own doing?” Grace snorted, pushing a needle through the chemise she was hemming. “No sir. Just got mixed up with a man who thought he could put a hand to me and his girls. When I didn’t sit down and take it he threw me in here.”

  “Fucking men,” said Molly. She leant across the table. Molly was twenty-five like Grace, but her skin was as leathery and wrinkled as an old woman’s. “The bastards at the factory put me in solitary for a whole week. Left me in the dark and fed me nought but bread and water. When I come out, I pretended I was seeing ghosts. Started screaming in the night and keeping all the girls awake. When I waked up all the babies in the nursery one night they had enough and threw me in here.”

  “You got out of the factory,” Grace said. “Do you have to keep up the act so good?” She’d been yanked from sleep many a night by Molly’s howling. Hated being dragged from the bliss of unconsciousness.

  “Got to keep it up, don’t I? Or they’ll think I come good and send me back to the factory.”

  Grace heard London in Molly’s words and was hit with a bolt of homesickness. She’d kept away from Molly at first, the way she’d kept away from all the others. She wanted Doctor Barnes to see her apart from all the dribblers and shriekers and think, well that Grace don’t belong in here, do she? But then Molly asked her for the cotton across the sewing table one day and Grace’s loneliness got the better of her.

  It turned out Molly Finton had grown up in the slums of Whitechapel, a mile from the room where Grace’s family had lived. At seventeen, Grace had gone west to the mop fair and Harris’s grand blue palace. Molly, east, into a world of pickpocketing in Rotherhithe where she found an undercover policeman and seven years’ transportation. Grace knew Molly’s fate could easily have been hers. A step to the left instead of the right and she’d have been hauled out to this place on a convict ship. But what did it matter now? She and Molly; free settler and convict, and here they were side by side at the sewing table. Here they were with matching grey dresses and matching shorn hair, a matching wild anger that simmered beneath their skin.

  “Sometimes I think you truly are mad,” Grace told Molly. “Choosing the hell of this place.”

  “See this.” Molly leant forward so Grace could see the thick brown scar on her neck. “At the factory they had me six weeks in an iron collar. Trussed up like a dog.” She tossed her head indignantly.

  “What’d you do? How come they put you in the collar?” But Molly wasn’t answering. She just ran a hand through her unevenly cropped hair.

  How fitting it was they’d hacked at Grace’s hair here, her pride and joy. Curls she’d been growing to her waist since she was a girl. Harris had loved to wrap them around his fists and pull her into him. She’d never plaited her hair when she was in bed with him; just let it loose all over his pillow. Once, his hands in her hair was the best feeling in the world.

  When she sat in that chair at New Norfolk there was a cold satisfaction to watching those curls pile up at her feet.

  “This will cool your mind,” the attendant told her as the scissors squeaked around her ears. But her short hair made Grace hot with anger.

  Look what you’ve lost, James Harris. Look what you’ll never have again.

  Grace lay on her side and pulled Alexander’s greatcoat around her. Sometimes she wondered if this hut was real at all. What if she’d passed out beneath the water pipes with shackles at her wrists and this strange silent man was nothing but a dream? She shuffled closer to the flames. No, the heat was too real for this to be a water-induced fantasy.

  She watched the silver blade dart across the wood, tiny in Alexander’s hand. A frown of concentration creased his forehead. Wood shavings clung to his bare feet.

  He placed the figure of Violet by Grace’s head. Its wooden eyes were level with hers. She squinted. The cheeks were too round. The hair too short. Eyes too close together. It had none of the personality of the other carvings. This was cold, empty.

  “That ain’t Violet. It don’t look nothing like her.”

  Alexander’s lips twitched. He flung it into the fire. They sat watching as the flames closed in around the carefully whittled face.

  IX

  Mist hung over the bush. Dalton could smell rain in the air. He sat on the tree stump and opened the chamber of the rifle. Electricity gathered in the sky.

  He tied a piece of cloth to a bootlace and fed it into the gun for cleaning. He pulled slowly, carefully. When he was a young man he loved the feel of a weapon in his hands. It gave him a feeling of power. That ability to control life and death. His captain could holler at him all he wanted, but if he pulled the trigger the bastard would die.

  Dalton had trained at Gibraltar among men who’d fought in Spain, across America. Men who’d been at Waterloo. They’d speak of their adventures while they puffed on pipes and watched the sun sink into the water. Great men, great soldiers. Dalton, he had a great anger in him. The great anger of the poor and oppressed. The great anger of the Irish.

  The sky tore open. Globes of water pelted into the mud of the clearing. Dalton lifted his face and felt rain explode against his s
kin. He was dimly aware the soaked rifle would be useless for days, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t leave the energy of the storm. He shrugged off his coat and shirt. Tiny rivers ran down his chest. He opened his mouth and tasted the water. So clean and cold. Christ, he felt alive. The bush smelled fresh and clean, as though the storm was washing away the terrors that had taken place among these trees.

  Grace ran out of the hut and laid the pot and cups on the chopping block to catch the water. She was barefoot in her shift and cloak, her dress hanging from a tree branch after being washed that morning. There was a routine to her cleaning, Dalton had noticed. One session she would wash her dress, the next her petticoats, then her shift and stockings. She’d come to him with nothing but the clothes on her back, but did her best to stay clean. There were always clothes hanging up at the hut now, flapping in the trees in fine weather, or thrown over the chairs where they cast shadows that made him jump in the night.

  Her decency made him behave less like the rabid dog he’d become out here on his own. With Grace about, he kept himself washed, dug a hole to shit in, drank from a cannikin instead of burning his lips on the boiler. With Grace, he ate at the table like a human being, instead of gnawing at bones while he paced through the bush.

  She pulled her dress from the tree branch. Dalton grabbed her wrist.

  Stay.

  She had to experience this storm. Had to see the thickness of this sky, the great forks of gold lightening. She glanced down in surprise at the hand he had clamped over her wrist. Unlaced her cloak and tossed it and her dress inside. She lifted her head and smiled, but her eyes didn’t reach him. A private smile. What was she thinking? It was the first time he had seen her smile since the girl had disappeared. Her first acceptance there could be life after Violet.

  Thunder rolled across the sky and a flock of blood red birds shot screeching from the trees.

  Dalton watched the water run over Grace’s eyelids and cheeks, through her hair. The skin on her upper arms was the colour of milk, a contrast to the tan on her wrists and hands. A contrast to his own leathery brown skin.