The Silk Thief (52 page)
Authors: Deborah Challinor
Put like that, the answer was obviously no, and the realisation hit Harrie like an extremely sharp slap in the face. She glanced down at Charlotte, whose cries were settling to whimpers now, and hugged her until she squirmed.
‘I thought … I thought if I gave her back, I’d stop feeling so guilty,’ she said into the top of Charlotte’s wet head.
‘Why do you have to feel so bloody guilty about everything?’ Sarah demanded. ‘Christ. Who made you responsible for the entire bloody world?’
Am
I responsible for the entire world? Harrie wondered. Really? ‘No one did,’ she mumbled.
‘
You
did, that’s who. So stop it. It’s the guilt that’s making you sick. The only people you’re responsible for are you and Charlotte, because she’s your daughter now. And that’s it.’
Hitching in a deep breath, Harrie said, ‘But it isn’t just Charlotte. It’s easy for you to say all that about responsibility and guilt, Sarah, you’re as hard as nails, and I’ve tried so hard, I really have, but truly, I
can’t
live with what we did to Gabriel Keegan.’ She spat out more seawater. ‘I just can’t.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Sarah stood, flapped out her dripping skirts, took Charlotte from Harrie, squelched away to the picnic rug and handed the baby to Daisy.
Returning, she said, ‘I told her it was a silly accident. We don’t want her telling all of bloody Sydney Dr Downey’s wife tried to commit suicide and drown her daughter, do we?’
Harrie went on as though Sarah hadn’t even moved. ‘We killed Keegan for nothing. I can’t forgive myself for it and I’m tired of pretending I can.’
‘But he deserved it,’ Sarah said.
‘But he didn’t
kill
her, and that’s what we did to him.’
Friday said, ‘He did kill another girl.’
There was a short, ringing silence.
Sarah stared at her. ‘What?’
Friday suddenly realised the magnitude of the words she’d just spoken. But it was too late now. It had been too late for a whole week. ‘He killed someone else. Another girl.’
Sarah was giving her a
really
evil look. ‘How do you know that?’
This was it, Friday thought, as a great, painful lump swelled in her throat. This was the point at which their friendship ended.
‘Mrs H told me. Mrs McShera, another brothel owner, told her. Keegan beat the life out of one of Mrs M’s girls. They covered it up.’
Both Harrie and Sarah were staring at her now.
‘When?’ Sarah demanded.
‘Not long after we got here. A few months before Rachel died, it would have been.’
Sarah’s face had gone incredibly hard and mean. ‘When did you find this out?’
‘A week ago.’ Friday felt sick.
‘Then why didn’t you
tell
us?’
‘I don’t know! I didn’t want … I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t keep my mouth shut,’ Friday said. ‘I was going to tell you. I was! When the time was right. I didn’t know Harrie was going to do this today!’ She shot a panicked glance at Harrie, and saw that her eyes were filled with the most awful hurt. And something else. Relief? Oh, please God, let it be relief.
Harrie staggered to her feet. ‘So even though he didn’t kill Rachel, he’d murdered another girl?’ Her eyes were huge and she was trembling. ‘He really
was
a killer?’
‘You useless, selfish, drunken bloody bitch!’ Sarah shouted. ‘You could have saved Harrie from today. She nearly bloody
drowned
, Friday!
Charlotte
nearly drowned!’
Then Sarah hit her, a full punch in the face with a closed fist. Friday fell back on the grass, shocked wordless.
‘Fuck off,’ Sarah said, looming over her. ‘Go on. Go and drink yourself stupid somewhere else. We don’t want to see you any more.’
Friday tried to get up, stood on her hem and fell over again. Finding her feet, she trudged across to the picnic rug, one hand over her bleary, throbbing eye, collected her boots and walked away.
James had spent the afternoon with Matthew, then had supper with him at the Australian. Matthew had been out of sorts since Sally Minto had spurned him, and Harrie supposed James might be feeling the smallest bit guilty because he was married now. Anyway, she knew he was going to be late, so there had been more than enough time for her, Daisy and Charlotte to get home that afternoon, clean themselves up, rinse their clothes in the copper and hang them on the line. Entire dresses weren’t usually washed, they were normally just sponged, but James wouldn’t know that and was unlikely to remark on gowns flapping in the backyard if he looked out the window tomorrow morning. She could never, ever tell him what she’d done.
Charlotte and Daisy had been asleep for hours — poor Charlotte had been exhausted and Daisy not much better. She was bone-tired herself, but had remained up after they’d retired so she could sit quietly for an hour in the armchair, waiting for Rachel. But Rachel hadn’t come. Had Sarah been right? Harrie wondered. Had she only ever been a figment conjured by her sick and chaotic mind?
Harrie didn’t think so.
By the time James finally did arrive home, she was in bed herself.
Sliding under the sheet beside her, he said, ‘I thought you’d be asleep by now, after your day in the sun.’
Harrie shook her head. ‘How was your supper?’
‘Same as usual. The gravy was too salty.’
‘And Matthew?’
‘He’ll survive. He’s lonely, though. We really must find him a nice girl. How was your picnic?’
‘It was nice. The Domain’s very pretty. Sarah and Friday had a fight.’
James’s eyebrows went up. ‘Anything in particular?’
‘Friday told us something she should have told us a little while ago.’
‘Anything that matters? Do I need to know?’
‘It did matter, but no, you don’t.’
‘Did it upset you?’
Harrie examined the end of her plait. After a moment she said, ‘It did at first, yes. A lot. But now, I’m pleased she told us.’
‘Have you forgiven her?’
‘I didn’t feel like it, but I have. Of course I have. How could I not forgive Friday?’
‘Good girl.’ James patted her leg. ‘You don’t want to fall out, the three of you. Not after everything you’ve been through together.’
‘No. And James?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I really think I’m getting better. I really do.’
James took her hand and kissed it.
‘I really do. And I think everything’s going to be all right,’ Harrie said, and when she looked at her husband she saw the beginnings of tears in his eyes.
Sarah and Adam were halfway up the stairs on their way to bed when someone hammered on their back door.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Adam said. ‘At this hour?’
Sarah took the lamp off him. ‘I’ll get it.’
She made her way downstairs and through the dining room. Leaving the chain on, she opened the door, raised the lamp and peered out. A dishevelled figure sat on the porch steps, reeking of tobacco smoke and alcohol.
Friday peered up at her through one eye, the other swollen shut.
‘Please don’t hate me, Sarah. I can’t do this by myself.’
Sarah stared at her for a long moment, sighed, then slipped off the chain, opened the door and held out her hand.
The snippets of poem I’ve quoted at the beginning of parts one, two and three of this story are from John Keats’s ‘Ode to Melancholy’, written in 1819.
The Female Orphan School at Parramatta was a real place, but Matron Duff and her husband are fictional. Reverend Charles Wilton and his wife Elizabeth were the actual superintendent and matron at the time, though they resigned in December 1831 and were replaced by Lieutenant Alexander Martin of the Royal Navy and his wife Sarah.
In August 1801, Governor Philip King, concerned about Sydney’s numerous neglected, abandoned or orphaned children, opened the town’s first female orphan school in a two-storey waterfront house on George Street, purchased from Captain William Kent for 1,539 pounds, seventeen shillings and thruppence, and initially accommodating thirty-one girls aged between seven and fourteen. King blamed the girls’ destitution squarely on their convict parents, and while not all convict women were as compassionate as Harrie, Sarah, Rachel and Friday, many, of course, were, but found themselves trapped in a cycle of poverty and servitude that rendered them incapable of caring for their children.
The girls were taught to sew and spin, and some to read and write, though in 1812 Governor Bligh gave evidence to the British Select Committee on Transportation implying that education was not a priority at the orphanage, and that it had become little more than a training school for domestic servants and a clothing factory.
The orphanage was initially run by a committee of worthies appointed by the governor, including Reverend Samuel Marsden and other clergy, surgeons, and government officials and their wives. In March 1826, the management, care and superintendence of the Female Orphan School, and the Male Orphan School that opened later, became the responsibility of the Clergy and School Lands Corporation, and from 1833 they continued under the control of the Colonial Secretary.
Almost from the outset it was clear that the George Street premise was too small, and plans were made to build a much bigger and more grand institution at Arthur’s Hill, Parramatta. This opened in 1818 when a hundred girls (ages five to eight only) moved in on 30 June, leaving the George Street property to become Sydney’s first Male Orphan School. When girls turned thirteen, they were found positions as apprenticed servants in ‘good homes’. A bit like kittens and puppies. If a girl married and had behaved extremely well during her apprenticeship, she received a cow as a dowry.
Religious instruction was essential to the girls’ training, they were seldom allowed out of the orphanage, and parents who did want contact with their daughters were forbidden access.
By 1829, the orphanage was home to one hundred and fifty-two girls (fifty-two over the limit), including Indigenous children from the Blacktown Aboriginal Settlement, and the admission age had been lowered to two. In 1823 the Male Orphan School relocated to Liverpool, then again in 1850 to the Parramatta Female Orphan School facility, where the boys’ school amalgamated with the girls’ school to form the Protestant Orphan School. The school closed in 1886 and reopened two years later as Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital under the control of the Department of Lunacy. The original Female Orphan School building had fallen into disrepair by the 1960s but was restored and is now part of the Parramatta campus of the University of Western Sydney.
Speaking of lunacy, Harrie was lucky to go mad during an era of enlightenment as far as treatment of the mentally ill was concerned. Until the latter decades of the eighteenth century, management of the insane was, on the whole, barbaric. The mentally ill were scorned and ridiculed, and hidden away in filthy, dark asylums, where they were isolated and constrained with manacles and chains, whipped, let of their blood, shocked and starved, as portrayed in many depictions of the London lunatic asylum Bethlem (Bedlam).
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a movement emerged in Europe that focused on a more ‘moral’ and holistic approach to the treatment of the mentally ill. This included the banning of chains (though not straitjackets), and the concepts that the mentally ill would respond better if they had access to fresh air, sunlight and meaningful activities. Most importantly, moral treatment embraced the idea that many people suffering mental illness could actually recover.
While in theory this movement was a vast improvement on what had come before, in practice being a patient in a mental asylum in the nineteenth century still would have been rather dire, whether the asylum was state-run or private. The Liverpool Lunatic Asylum, where Harrie is dumped by George Barrett, was managed by the state, and staffed mainly by convicts, who had little or no training regarding how to manage mental patients, which is why I only left her there for a day or two.
A note on distances: it was pretty well impossible to find out how long it would take to drive a cart or ride on horseback from Sydney to Liverpool in 1831, so I had to make a bit of an educated guess.
Another note, this one on Christmas: the one the characters celebrate is a little more modern than it should be in the 1830s. Then, people were probably still giving gifts on the traditional New Year’s Eve — and only small ones, like sweets and trinkets — and not sitting down to a lavish Christmas dinner. That didn’t really come into fashion until Victorian times, i.e. after 1837. But that didn’t work for the story, so I tweaked it a little.
The more I write in this series, the fewer books I need to buy. Which is a shame, really, because I like hunting down and purchasing books. I bought a few, though.
Bedlam: London and its mad
(Simon and Schuster, 2008), by Catherine Arnold, was particularly useful when it came to the description, diagnosis and treatment of Harrie’s mental health issues. I also found a beautiful copy of Terence Lane and Jessie Serle’s
Australians at Home: a documentary history of Australian domestic interiors from 1788 to 1914
(OUP, 1990) in a Newcastle second-hand bookshop for
much
less than the $912 for which I saw it advertised on Amazon. Entries in this inspired Biddy Doyle’s house, and it will come in very handy for
A Tattooed Heart
, in which there is more house-breaking to be done. Thanks, Indigo Books!
Victorian Pharmacy: rediscovering forgotten remedies and recipes
(Pavilion, 2010), by Jane Eastoe, was useful, as were
Millers Point: the urban village
(Halstead Press, 2007), by Shirley Fitzgerald and Christopher Keating (Sally Minto, of course, lives at Millers Point), and
True Blue: 150 years of service and sacrifice of the NSW Police Force
(HarperCollins, 2012), by Patrick Lindsay. This is the first history of the NSW Police I’ve come across, it weighs a ton and I had to cart it all the way home from Sydney on the train. But I can’t complain because I got it for free.
