Blackwater by Jacqueline Ross

Author:Jacqueline Ross [Ross, Jacqueline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

I bring my frozen fist to my mouth, turn and stumble back the way I came, fast as I dare. I have seen mounds just like this on the Isle of the Dead, the island off Port Arthur where they buried convicts in unmarked graves. So this must be the cemetery for the female factory. Convict women lie under this ground, forgotten forever, and here is Ruth, tending their graves like it is her duty, like they are her family. Honouring the dead. The mounds on the Isle of the Dead had no markers.

It must have been Ruth who placed those bricks, cleared the earth, planted the creepers.

The sadness of this place sits heavy on my shoulders. No wonder Ruth has never left. She must feel bound to Blackwater, that there is a responsibility here – at least in her mind. One of the graves probably belongs to her mother’s relative.

I’m shivering by the time I get back into bed. My teeth knock together. I push myself against King’s back for the warmth that radiates from his body. He is so sound asleep that he does not notice.

My dreams are of a woman scrabbling in the dirt of freshly dug graves, her face caved in with a brick, and a baby born with no limbs. I wake exhausted.

My eyes sting as I make breakfast the next morning. It feels like my nightmares and reality have bled into each other, and I cannot be sure what is real. I want to be sure about the graves before I say anything to King. Ruth does not come down from her room in the morning, but now I know why she sleeps so late.

As soon as King goes back to work, I put on my coat, grab the umbrella by the front door and leave the house. It is drizzling as I make my way around the thicket.

It was not a dream. There they are: grassy mounds where surely bones must lie, and Ruth’s neat lines of memorial bricks sitting at the head of miniature garden beds, jam jars of red flowers nestled in the dirt. Now it is daylight, I can see the full scope of it. There are dozens of bricks, at least a hundred, probably more, stretching back to a distant row of pine trees that stand neat and tall, like prickly, protective guardians. Someone has planted them as defence against the brutal wind, as if the dead could feel the cold.

I bend down and look at the first brick. It is an irregular size with jagged edges – a convict brick. These bricks are distinctive, each one different and handmade by a convict more than a hundred and fifty years ago. They say that some of them have thumbprints embedded in them. A way for convicts to show that they really did exist, despite being known by just a number and not their name. When I visited Port Arthur, I remember picking up at least half a dozen of them, looking for marks but finding nothing.

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