Bridget Crack by Rachel Leary

Author:Rachel Leary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

It was close to dark when she and Joseph Primrose—Primmy—and the donkey crossed a fern bridge to a hut that was barely visible, dark as it was in the shade of trees. As they arrived a man appeared from inside.

‘Who’s that?’

Primmy threw a sack off the donkey onto the ground at the man’s feet. ‘Who is it? Sheedy’s woman.’

‘Sheedy? What’s she doing here?’

Primmy kicked the sack. ‘Take that in.’

A boy came out then, stood there staring at her.

Inside, they ate soup in silence.

‘You can sleep there.’ Primmy pointed to a hammock strung between two poles. She lay awake, heard Primmy’s rough whisper. ‘Sheedy’ll kill us if he has any reason to suspect anything. The man’s full of his own imaginings and enough rage for two men. He’ll kill you as good as look at you if he thinks you’ve touched anything that’s his.’

...

Matt had taken her to a small cottage beyond Norfolk Plains, where the woman, Janet, tutted over the myriad small scars left from flea bites all over Bridget’s arms, rubbed oil into her hair against the lice. Primmy had turned up one night and the transaction took place between him and Slip, the owner of the cottage and the father of Janet’s three children—Slip gave half of the money Matt had given him to Primmy; he was to deliver Bridget to John Sullivan and tell Sullivan that he would be there to get her soon, that he was to keep her there until he came.

...

Branches etched mad and scattered stories onto a flat grey sky. Grey trees bent forward, cried out like a whipped man pleading. Boulders huddled together, let out a deep old sound that hummed under the wind. Primmy walked ahead, the donkey loaded with sacks again. The wind dropped and the sky lifted. They went up a dry slope and then followed a track along a ridge above a hurtling river. They cut away from a gorge up a dry rocky hill and for a while she couldn’t hear the river, then the rush of it was back and they had come downhill and were travelling above the river again, following it upstream.

...

Sully stood watching them come, the musket hanging from his right hand. He wore a hat low over small squinty eyes that glared out of a face compressed by a frown, a small stick between his teeth.

The dogs ran at Bridget and Primmy barking and growling. Sully bellowed at them and they went back, grouped around him, hackles raised, snarling like the Devil’s own guards.

Sully took the stick out of his mouth. ‘Well. This’s a surprise.’

‘Sheedy’s woman,’ Primmy said.

‘Know who she is,’ Sully said, chucked the stick on the ground.

The hut was as she remembered it from before: faded chair; hammock; barrels and tins piled on top of each other, some with a layer of dust and grime over them, as though they hadn’t been touched for years. It sat within a horseshoe-shaped piece of land that the river ran around, huge trees towering up all around it.

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