The day Abigail ran away to go home started like any other day. As usual she was wearing clothes borrowed from Dovey, flannel underwear and a brown gingham dress covered by a long white pinafore. She felt draggy and looked it.
She had noted that the ladies in the carriages dashing through to Kent and Cumberland streets – some of them being real ladies and others, according to the cynical Beatie, only ‘high-steppers’, or women unacceptable to polite society – wore lace jabots, handsome buttons and silk braids, and tight jackets that narrowed to fish tails at the rear.
Working women wore drab, ankle-length dresses with long sleeves and aprons. And whereas the rich ladies and the dashing high-steppers both peacocked in saucer-shaped hats tipped forward to make room for elaborate chignons of plaits and curls, the working women flung shawls over their centre-parted, smoothly brushed, or, more often, disorderly and dusty, hair.
It was hard to tell a high-stepper from a real lady, thought Abigail; but you would never mistake one or the other for a working-class woman. She understood now why Kathy never got any lower-class Victorian clothing at Magpies. It had all been worn out by unceasing labour a hundred years before.
‘Mum knows a lot about Victorian and Edwardian days,’ ruminated Abigail, ‘but she has no idea how hard the women worked!’
‘Are the high-steppers prostitutes?’ Abigail innocently asked Dovey.
Dovey flushed ‘Oh, Abby, never let Granny hear you use such language! It’d fair make her swoon awa’.’
Abby added prostitutes to the list of things she was not to mention: the Deity, legs (in front of menfolk), any natural function (except in whispers), the privy at the end of the yard, which consisted of a can and a scrubbed wooden seat (this was ‘the wee hoosie’).
‘Lot of blanky rubbish,’ said the outspoken Beatie when she was alone with Abigail, ‘with The Rocks the way it is, full of seamen and soldiers and language to curl your hair. Not to mind some of the worst grog shops and crimp houses in Sydney.’
‘What’s a crimp house?’ asked Abigail.
‘A grog shop where they put opium in the seamen’s drink, and then shanghai them away to ships that need crews and can’t get them, leaky old tubs bound for China and maybe intended to sink so that the owners will get the insurance. So Judah says.’
‘But that’s cold-blooded murder,’ cried Abigail. ‘Things like that can’t go on in these days!’
‘Do they no’ go on in yours?’ asked Beatie hopefully.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Abigail.
She could not bring herself to tell the eager Beatie about nuclear bombs, chemical warfare, napalm bombing of peasants’ villages and fields. The little girl thought of the late twentieth century as a sort of paradise, a place of marvels. In some ways it was a paradise compared with Beatie’s own time. Let her go on believing there was no dark side, thought Abigail. She would not live to see it, anyway.
On the day Abigail tried to run away to her own time she was not wearing Mrs Tallisker’s best buttoned boots, though now her ankle was its normal size again. Granny had bought her second-hand shoes from the boot barrow. They were heel-less slippers of kid, very uncomfortable, and the barrow man had passed cheeky remarks about the size of her feet. That was another thing she hadn’t known: that even Victorian working women had tiny feet.
Beatie went off to the Ragged School. She was excited because Judah’s ship was in port; he would be home that night.
‘And I’ve learnt how to decline six Latin verbs,’ she told Abigail joyfully. ‘Judah teaches me.’
‘Has Judah studied Latin, then?’
‘Oh, aye, has he not!’ said Beatie proudly. ‘And wasn’t he top of the class when he was only thirteen. Mr Taylor gave him a grand book, Travels in Africa, with “First Prize for Scholarship” and his name written in copperplate, and he sorely wanted him to go to Fort Street School for Boys; but Judah, he was that set on the sea and he wunna!’
‘Who’s Mr Taylor?’ asked Abigail.
‘Oh, he’s the headmaster of Trinity Parish School, y’ken, and he took Judah into his special class for promising boys. Aye, promising, that’s what he said about our Judah. Smart as a whip he is, and will be master of his own vessel some day.’
Mr Bow had been very morose and silent since his last escapade; he was a wretched man, and Abigail was sorry for him. It must have been a terrible thing to lose his wife and little son all in a day. This child was not the only one he and Amelia Bow had lost. Three daughters had died of the smallpox. They had come between Judah and Beatie. Judah had taken the disease too, but lightly. The pock on his cheek, that looked like a dimple, was the only sign of it.
Abigail had not looked closely at Judah’s face: she had been too frightened and confused that night. But she remembered the quaint way he had got her name out of her, and the ease with which he had lifted her to look out the window – to find that her own world had vanished as if by enchantment. She tried to get Mr Bow to talk about his children, but he only gave her a piteous look from those preposterously crossed eyes, and she desisted.
She was making bonbons for Granny. They were small squares of orange and lemon peel threaded on a fine steel knitting-needle. Abigail dipped the needle into a pot of boiling sugar flavoured with grated lemon and a drop of purest whale-oil.
‘To keep the syrup from brittling,’ explained Granny. These bonbons were then laid carefully on a buttered slab of marble and allowed to get cold and crisp before they were packed in paper cones for sale.
It was interesting, thought Abigail, how she had been so absorbed into The Rocks area without further question. The fiction that she was an immigrant girl of good education and no kin, bound for a situation on the High Rocks, knocked down and injured by Mr Bow in one of his spells, and now without memory or worldly resources, had been accepted by those customers made curious by her occasional presence in the shop. She had now been two weeks with the Bows, and there had been no further reference to that curious conversation between Granny and Dovey about her lost green dress. Nor would Beatie answer any questions about ‘the Stranger’. She shut her mouth like a rat-trap and admitted frankly: ‘I’m that scared of Granny. She’d murder me if she knew what I’ve told ye already. She’s got the power, I’ve told ye over and over again!’
‘You’re dotty!’ said Abigail. ‘Granny would never hurt you, or anyone else. She’s the best soul in the world.’
‘’Tisn’t that she’d hurt me,’ explained Beatie reluctantly. ‘But she’d look at me. And I dinna want Granny to look at me.’
And that was all she would say.
Yet Beatie was relentless in her questioning of Abigail about the years to come. Abigail told her about jet aircraft, about men landing on the moon and their voices and pictures coming all the way to earth, clear and bright. She told her about new countries that did not exist in Beatie’s day.
‘But where is the Empire?’ Beatie asked, baffled.
Abigail did not know. ‘It just seemed to break up and dribble away,’ she admitted lamely.
‘But who’s looking after the black men?’
‘They’re looking after themselves,’ said Abigail. But Beatie could not understand. ‘Black men canna look after themselves. Don’t be daft!’
Abigail was constantly surprised at what Beatie would believe and what she could not accept for a second. That men could land on the moon, yes. That people bathed naked from public beaches, no. She scoffed at the idea that there were only three or four kings and queens left in the world, but believed without question that many married folk divorced and married others.
‘For rich folk do the same right now,’ she said in her matter-of-fact way. ‘But for a housewifie now, should her man starve or beat her and the bairns, there’s naught but running away or rat poison.’
Most of all she wanted to know about people, whether girls could become doctors, teachers, do good and useful things. Abigail was glad to be able to say ‘yes’.
Always these conversations ended the same way.
‘But how did those bairnies know my name? Dinna ye ha’ some more ideas, Abby? I tell ye, I’m ettlin’ to find out, come what may!’
The older children at the Ragged School had their lessons after dinner-time whistle, a midday orchestra of hideous noises from steam cranes, factories, and loading ships. It was taken for granted by the Ragged School board that the children worked for a living. Some were boot blacks or newspaper boys in the city; others ran errands for offices, or delivered for merchants; many were ‘sparrow-starvers’ or sweepers of manure. Each youngster did something, anything, to earn a few pennies, and many of their parents resented their wasting afternoons at the Ragged School.
On this fateful afternoon, Beatie had long gone off, grizzling and fiery-eyed over the ‘lassies’ rubbish’ she would be taught. Granny and Dovey were upstairs with Gibbie; Mr Bow, hoop-backed, speechless and glum, stirred a cauldron, his back to Abigail.
Abigail delicately placed the last skewer of bonbons to dry on the marble slab, and walked without haste out of the shop.
It was late in the afternoon. The ships’ masts, bare as trees after a bushfire, stood up in the Harbour, very straight, like a thousand spillikins, criss-crossed and twigged with spars and lesser gear. The westering sun seized upon bright specks of metal on these masts and made them burn like stars. Abigail walked straight down Argyle Street.
Not for a moment did it occur to her that she was not going home, to her mother, her father, the bear chair, Magpies, school. All she had to do was turn up Harrington Street, find the stairway and the lane up which she and Beatie had run, and she would descend towards George Street and Circular Quay, and see Mitchell standing there in its steel and glassy grandeur.
‘My father designed it,’ she had told Beatie, who looked at her as if she were lying.
There were trees in Argyle Street, oaks, she thought, covered with curdy green. Many alleys spindled away, turning into flights of steps as steep as ships’ companionways as they went up and over looming sandstone knobs and reefs. Sometimes houses perched on these outcrops like beached Arks; sometimes they were built into them so that the back wall of the house was living sandstone. The lanes were runnels of wet and filth between mouldering shops, factories and cottages. The whole place was cankered with poverty and neglect. The people also – all had something the matter with them: rotting teeth, clubfeet, a cheek puckered by a burn. A little girl, dressed fantastically in a woman’s trailing dress and squashed hat, snarled, ‘Ooya starin’ at?’ and raised a dirty fist as if to strike. Abigail saw that the little one’s face was despoiled by a hare-lip.
But who could fix these infirmities in Victorian days? wondered Abigail. If you were born crooked, you stayed crooked and made the best of it, as Granny Tallisker made the best of the violent deprivation of her son Robert, her daughter Amelia, the four grandchildren dead before they grew up. It was all God’s will.
The gutters, made of two tipped stones, were full of garbage. Abigail saw scaly tails twitching amongst the rotting debris and sprang away.
‘Steady on, Missie!’ It was an elderly soldier with a roast-beef face. He held his musket horizontally so that she could not pass, and she saw a gang of convicts clanking across the street. Some had yellow jackets with large letters and figures daubed in black and red. Others wore coarse canvas cover-alls, part grey, part brown, like grotesque harlequins. Those who were chained had hitched up their chains to their belts with fragments of rope or rag, so that they could walk. But their walk was a slow, bandy-legged shuffle.
She said, ‘I thought transportation stopped years and years ago!’
‘These canaries are long-termers, Miss. They bin loading coal down yonder.’
‘It’s terrible, terrible,’ she whispered.
The soldier said with harsh kindness, ‘You just out from the Old Country, Miss? Well, New South Wales ain’t no place of harps and angels, that’s sartin.’
He stiffened to attention. Abigail saw a young officer, very dandified and bored, ride out from under one of the flattened arches that marked the many courts or wynds. He cut carelessly with his crop at the mob of skeleton, matted-hair urchins that milled about his horse, yelping, ‘Chuck us down a copper, Guv!’ and rode after the convicts.
Now she was outside the Ragged School. She passed it cautiously, for she did not want to meet Beatie unexpectedly. She heard from within the drone of many voices reciting the Lord’s Prayer, the sudden whip-like whistle of a willow cane. But even as she sighed for the pauper children within, she heard behind her the hoarse voice of Beatie Bow.
‘Eh, it’s Abigail! Abby, come back! Where are ye off to?’
Abigail plunged across the street. A stunted child, face black with a lifetime’s dirt, ceased sweeping horse manure and whacked at her legs with his broom so that she almost fell. Her first thought was that Beatie had called from one of the school windows, but now she saw her, accompanied by the sturdy figure of Judah, running along from the direction of the wharves.
It had not occurred to her that Beatie would play truant from school to go to meet her brother. But there they were, dodging amongst the crowd, gaining on her every minute.
She could not see the lamp-post that marked the stairs she had ascended on that first night; it was too late to look for the right alley. So she dived into the first opening she noticed. It was so narrow she could have spanned it with her arms. Its uneven cobbles ran sluggishly with thick green slime. Pressed against the wall, she saw Beatie and Judah run past.
Suddenly a hand fastened round her ankle. She looked down and saw a frightful thing grinning gap-toothed at her. It was a legless man, on a little low trolley like a child’s push-cart. He had a big bulging forehead and fingers as sinuous as steel.
‘Let me go!’ panted Abigail. With her free foot she kicked at the man’s face, but he dodged her with the nimbleness of a monkey. Laughing, he dragged her closer, and bit her leg just above the ankle. The pain was bad enough, but the horror that seized the girl was unbearable.
She let out a ringing shriek. ‘Beatie, Judah, help, help!’
That was all she could utter, for a bag smelling of rotten fish descended over her head and was pulled tight. She was half carried, half dragged she knew not where. Abigail was a strong girl, and her hands were free. She hammered and punched, scratched and tore. Once her fingers fastened in a beard: she could tell by the bristly texture of it. She gave a great yank and a handful came out. The owner slapped her repeatedly over the ears, cursing in an accent and tones such as she had never heard.
‘You’ve caught yourself no tame puss-cat there, Hannah!’ a husky voice said with a chuckle. Abigail’s hands were deftly snared and tied behind her back, and the sack was whisked off her head. She was in a dark, evil-smelling room, and before her stood a mountainous woman holding a blood-spattered fist to her hairy chin. She must have weighed nearly a hundred kilos; there seemed no end to her in her full skirts and vast blouse of gaudy striped silk. Out of the sleeves poked sausagey hands covered in rings. Ferret eyes gleamed at Abigail; the sausage hands filled themselves with her hair and jerked brutally.
‘I’ll have yer bald!’ she yelled. Abigail shrieked at the full power of her lungs, and kicked violently at everything she could see or reach.
A hand went over her mouth. It was accustomed to holding captives thus, for it pushed her upper lip down over her teeth so that she could not bite.
‘Hold on now, Hannah,’ said the husky voice. ‘We’ve a pretty little canary bird here; she’ll go for a sweet sum, fifteen quid or more. But not if you take off all her hair at the roots.’
Abigail glared over the hand at the bearded woman. She had never seen anything so grotesque in her life. Whether the creature had come from a circus or not, she was terrifying.
Yet, now that the first shock was over, Abigail felt mad fury rather than panic. The panic ran underneath the anger, like a fast-rising tide. She realised clearly that she was in the kind of peril of which she had never dreamed. For the room contained many people, and there was no way, even if she could get her hands free, that she could fight her way out.
The room was, she thought, an underground kitchen. It was like a lair or cavern, pitch black except for a few candle stubs stuck in bottles or their own grease, and the murky gleam of a vast open fireplace. The smell was terrible, even for The Rocks – not only of unwashed and crowded humanity, but decayed meat and rotting wood.
A girl in a draggletail pink wrapper wandered over and looked at her curiously. She seemed half imbecile, with no front teeth and a nose with a flattened bridge. Picking this nose industriously, she lisped, ‘She ain’t much to look at, Master. Be she right age, you think? Mebbe with her ‘air frizzed out and some paint on she’d pass in twilight.’
Abigail felt her skin creep.
‘Shut your trap, Effie,’ said the husky voice. ‘She’s fresh as a new-laid egg. What else matters?’
Abigail felt a hand stealing around the hem of her skirt. Twisting sideways, she saw the terrible little cripple sniffing about her ankles like a dog.
‘She taste sweet as a newborn mouse, Hannah,’ he cajoled. ‘Let poor Barker have a nibble.’
‘Sho, you cannibal,’ shouted the woman. ‘Mark her and I’ll do fer yer, I swear I will.’
The husky voice now said, almost with kindness, ‘Just out from the Old Country, are you, my pet?’
Abigail nodded.
‘Hannah will see you right,’ went on the voice. ‘Heart of gold, Hannah, though it’s a long way in, eh, Hannah?’
The fat woman snarled. But it was plain she was afraid of the man with the husky voice. He now said, ‘If I take away my hand, will you be quiet, like the dear child you are?’
Abigail nodded, and the hand was removed from her mouth. Instantly she yelled, ‘Ju …’ But she got no further. A kerchief was thrust between her teeth and tied behind her head, and she was given a push that sent her sprawling into a corner. She was now able to see that the owner of the husky voice was a handsome man, a gentleman, as Beatie would have said, in well-fitted breeches, a tailored coat of cocoa colour, and a dashing tall beaver to match.
He held a tiny bouquet of jonquils and fern to his nose, presumably to keep the smells away.
‘She’s to be kept close,’ he instructed the bearded woman, jerking his head at the ceiling. He took out a gold watch, sprang open its lid, and shut it again. He said, ‘In the morning, Hannah, and I don’t want the goods damaged.’ Without another look at Abigail he strolled out.
Now Abigail began to sweat with growing terror. If Judah and Beatie had not seen her duck into the little alley, what chance would she have? The bearded woman came over, a rag still held to her bloody chin, and said venomously, ‘Lucky for you the master took a fancy to yer. But don’t think I ain’t able to hurt you bad where it don’t show.’
Abigail swallowed with difficulty. Her mouth was dry. The scarf was salty with dirt and sweat. She retched a little. She thought desperately, ‘I can’t lose my head, whatever I do.’
She made herself breathe quietly. But something soft and squashy moved beneath her. She realised with horror that it was a woman, a kind of woman, for shortly it wriggled feebly out from underneath her and showed itself in the candlelight to be a hobgoblin with tangled hay-like hair, cheeks bonfire red with either rouge or fever, and a body hung with parti-coloured rags.
She crept over to the table, and began to tear at a mildewed crust of bread. One of the other women, wearing a flounced red petticoat and a black corset and little else, good-naturedly pushed over to the wreck an anonymous hunk of meat that might have been a rooster’s neck.
‘Here, Doll,’ she said. ‘Don’t eat that muck you got there. Ruin your gut it will.’
The wreck stuffed it in her mouth, bone and all, but before she did she said in a voice of extreme refinement, ‘Thank you, Sarah, I’m much obliged.’
‘Oh, God,’ thought Abigail, ‘that thing has had an education. It might even have been a lady.’
Now she was paralysed with terror. She could imagine herself as another Doll in twenty years’ time, all spirit beaten out of her, sodden with booze and disease, not even fit for the life of degradation the gentleman with the husky voice evidently intended for her. No matter how fiercely she blinked, tears filled her eyes and fell down on the gag.
One of the other girls strolled over to her. She was fancily dressed, with much flouncing and many ribbons, and a large hat with a purple ostrich feather. Below this hat was a young plump face, pretty and good-natured. Abigail noticed that she, like Dovey, uncannily resembled a Victorian doll.
‘It must be their idea of good looks,’ thought Abigail hazily. ‘No wonder everyone’s always telling me how homely I am.’
The girl smiled, showing chalky teeth. ‘Don’t pipe your eye, duck; ’tisn’t such a bad old life. Better than starving on slop work in the factories, any old how. I’m the dress-lodger, and me name’s Em’ly, but I call meself Maude ’cos it’s more posh. Come on, Doll, the lamps is lit, time we was getting on the road.’
All of this, spoken in a thick south London accent, was scarcely comprehensible to Abigail. But she was to find out that the handsomest girl in the house was called the dress-lodger, sent out in garments belonging to the proprietor, always with an attendant to see that she didn’t run off with them.
But Doll began to cough and splutter. Her eyes rolled up; she looked as if she were going to die.
‘Gawd, I’m not going off with that death’s head trailing behind me,’ protested Maude. ‘It’d scare off Robinson Crusoe.’
So another famine-wasted object was dragged out of a corner, arrayed respectably, and pushed forward to follow Maude. Maude protested, but finally laughed and set off.
Doll cringed timidly as Hannah stood over her.
‘You good-for-nothing, you scarecrow! You’re fit for the bone-yard, that’s all, breathing pestilence over us all.’
‘Chuck her out, Hannah,’ advised one of the men who sat smoking a cutty pipe by the fire. They seemed to have nothing to do with the establishment as customers or protectors. Abigail guessed that they were employed by the gentleman proprietor to bully the women’s takings from them and keep an eye on Hannah’s honesty.
‘Ah, well,’ said Hannah, putting on a ludicrous face of long-suffering virtue, ‘if I ain’t charitable towards me own niece I dunno what the rest of you villains can expect. Here, you, Chow, take the new ’un up to the attic, and you come up and keep an eye on her, Doll.’
Chow, an emaciated half-Asian, seized Abigail as though she weighed no more than a cat, carried her up stairs built of rough-hewn baulks of timber, and at last dropped her on a sagging pallet. Doll sidled breathlessly about Hannah, beseeching, ‘Just a little gin, Aunt dear. Twopenceworth would be sufficient. Just enough to keep my cough from annoying our guest.’
‘Here y’are, then, and don’t say I ain’t a good aunt to you, bit o’ useless rubbish that you are.’
Hannah dug into a depthless pocket and fished up a small bottle. Doll seized it with tearful gratitude. Hannah cautioned her to keep a keen eye on Abigail.
‘Them rats are partial to a nice bit o’ fresh chicken,’ she said. Abigail could hear rats scampering over the ceiling. Hannah saw her look upwards and grinned, satisfied.
‘They come out in their fousands.’ She chuckled. Placing the candlestick on a box in the corner, she jerked her head at Chow. The door slammed, and Abigail heard a key turn and a bar clank home.
She wanted to cry but she knew that if she did she would choke on the gag. To distract herself she looked around at the attic. Doll, lying on a sack beside the pallet, sucked luxuriously at her bottle.
The attic did not have the proportions or the sloping roof of the usual attic, such as the one Gibbie slept in. The window, too, was almost as large as a door. And then, those stairs … they were not stairs anyone would build in a house. Abby tried to think as sensibly as she could.
Was it likely that houses, however derelict, would stand beside such a narrow alley? The walls of the attic seemed to be made of blocks of bare stone. That, too, was uncommon. There was no fireplace and, as she had now learnt from Beatie, almost every room in every house in Sydney, no matter how poor, had a fireplace.
She realised with despair that she was too frightened to make sense of it. Her thoughts began to chase one another round and round.
‘Like those rats up there,’ she thought. Sometimes her whole body shuddered spasmodically, as if she were lying on an ice floe. She was aware in the direst way of her great danger. It could be that she would never be seen again in 1873, let alone her own time. She had nothing to hope for except that Judah and Beatie had heard the first great yell she had given.
She forced herself to lie quiet. There was no one to help her, no one at all. But she could not give up without a battle. Whatever she could do to escape, she had to try to do.
She had an imaginative flash of her grandmother, addressing her perm in resigned tones: ‘She’s dodgy, Katherine. Not one of your nice frank open-faced girls. You’re too soft and protective. Heaven help her if she ever has to fend for herself.’
‘We’ll see about that, you old bat,’ thought Abigail. But her bravado was false. If her grandmother had come through the door, smiling her bogus smile, Abigail would have welcomed her like an angel.
But Grandmother would never come through the door. Grandmother had not yet been born.
Abigail, with one eye on Doll, began to strain at the fabric that bound her hands. It seemed to be another kerchief. She twisted it patiently, at last got a thumb free and, after half an hour, the fingers of one hand.
Doll drank, sometimes wept, the tears oozing like oil out of the black-socketed eyes. She mumbled and sang, sometimes seemed to speak to her companion, though perhaps it was to herself.
‘My name is Dorothea Victoria Brand. I had God-fearing parents. Mother was ill-educated, like Aunt Hannah, and Father married beneath him. He was a clerk in a counting house. He saw that I went to school, a boarding-school on the moors. It was very cold there, but I was happy. I was a bookish child. Clever and industrious, that’s what the Board said. Father wanted me to have private tutoring in French and singing, but he could not afford it. He wept, I remember. He loved me dearly, did my father.’
It’s a warehouse or bond store, that’s what it is, thought Abigail suddenly. A disused one. And that window might be the kind that opens on a platform, with a pulley and rope for hauling up bags of flour and stuff.
She got the other hand out, and with infinite slowness untied the gag at the back of her head. She clamped the gag between her teeth, did not shift her position, and kept her gaze on Doll.
‘Father was taken suddenly. His horse rolled on him. And Mother went labouring in a slop-shop, making sailors’ smocks. Twenty girls in a room ten by ten – think of it! – stitch, stitch, fourteen hours a day without a breath of fresh air. So Mother took the lung fever. Thirty-two she was when God took her. So the parish Board sent me out to Mother’s sister. I had my thirteenth birthday on the ship Corona. That was ten long years ago.’
Abigail froze. Could this tottering ruin of a woman be only twenty-three? Doll pushed herself half upright, fell into a fearful paroxysm of coughing, and subsided once more. Her breath rattled in her chest in a frightening way; she seemed in a stupor.
‘Aunt Hannah,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘she put me to work. I didn’t starve, you know.’
Abigail slipped to her feet. There was an iron bar across the two shutters that formed the window. It took her a long time to work it out of its rusted sockets. As she tried to open the shutter, it squawked alarmingly. Doll opened one glazed eye, but seemed not to have the strength to open the other. A trickle of bloodstained dribble came from her mouth.
‘A person will do many things rather than starve,’ she murmured. ‘That’s what the parsons don’t understand. Empty bellies speak louder than the Ten Commandments.’
She closed her eyes again. In the uncertain light her face was that of a skull.
Abigail was frightened out of her wits. ‘Mum!’ she thought. ‘I want you, Mum!’ She wanted to pray but couldn’t think of any words, so instead she put forth all her strength and shouted silently, ‘Granny! Help me, help me!’
But it was to Granny Tallisker and not her own grandmother that her thoughts had turned. The shutter moved, and opened, and a gush of damp, kerosene-laden air came into the room. A glaring yellow light, broken by dancing shadows, fanned up from the little court below.
She had guessed right. There was a small wooden platform, supported on struts grown rotten and flimsy, in front of the window, and above it projected a rusty pulley and a frayed rope. She closed the shutter behind her, in case the cold air awakened Doll from her drunken slumber, and crouched on the platform. It groaned and dipped under her weight.
Nervously she gazed over the edge. Dark, shapeless things like bears or trolls gyrated about a brazier; coarse braying music from a tin whistle and a paper-covered comb filtered upwards. She could see above the lower roofs the gaslights of George Street, and she heard the chunk-splosh of the Manly ferry’s paddlewheels as it left the Quay.
She saw now that the thread-like alleyway into which she had ducked to hide from Beatie and Judah led from Harrington Street to George Street. Half-way down this wretched short-cut was a yard upon which opened the back doors of two taverns. It was plain that they catered for the violent and degraded. A ragged thing flung out of a tavern door, to lie unconscious on the cobbles, had a face that might have belonged to a bulldog. The ruffians gyrating drunkenly around the brazier instantly fell upon this victim, and in a few moments it was naked. Abigail watched, paralysed with horror.
The platform creaked and shuddered. She could climb neither down nor up, unless the rope and pulley were usable. Some time towards morning, surely, the revellers below would be either asleep or dead drunk, and she could let herself down into the courtyard?
After a while she thought of testing the dangling rope. Cautiously she rose on tiptoe and seized it. The frayed ends fell almost into dust in her hand. The rope had not been used for years and was completely perished.
Her eyes filled with tears. There was no hope. As she stood there, looking up at the askew, rusted pulley, and the edge of the roof above it, a small patch of the sky suddenly lost its stars.
Someone was lying on the warehouse roof looking down at her.