The Secret River Read Free

trying not to breathe in the stink. The worst was when the dogs chose the cobbles at Tyer’s Gate with the wide gaps between, so the stuff dropped into the gaps and he had to gouge at it with the stick, or even with his fingernails while Pa stood coughing and pointing.
    A full sack of pure was worth ninepence at the morocco yard. He had never asked what they used it for, only felt he would rather die than go on scraping the stuff off the cobbles of Southwark.
    Except that the ache in his belly was even worse than the stink of the shit.
    Ma was willing to risk less smelly ways to buy a loaf of bread. They watched her one day from behind a cart, William and Lizzie and James. Thornhill thought she looked obvious, lurking and slinking and tight-faced. Hold your head up, Ma, he wanted to call. And smile!
    They saw her approach the trestle of books. The bookseller was inside her shop and it was hard to see if she was watching. William wanted to run across the road and lift the book himself, she was taking so long and looking so black about it, fingering the books and flipping their pages when she knew no more of her letters than the man in the moon. Then at last she slipped one into a fold of her apron, but looked at it as she did it, and used both hands so she nearly dropped the baby: it was clumsily done.
    Suddenly the shop woman was there beside her, shouting, Now give me that, if you please, Missus , and they heard Ma cry out, too shrill, What! I have nothing of yours! but clutching at the book in the folds of her apron so it gave her away. The shop woman, a stringy old boiler, jerked her arm so Ma fell down on her knees and the book fell and the baby too, rolling onto the cobbles and setting up an almighty roar.
    The shop woman pounced on the book, and, while she was stooping for it, Ma from her knees gave her a clout across the back of the head. Old and all as she was, the woman was up in a triceand hit Ma on the shoulders with the book—they could hear the thwack of it from across the street—all the time hanging onto her and yelling, Thief! Thief! Ma was up now, the baby under her arm, and she began to kick out the legs of the trestle and claw all the books till they lay in the mud.
    This was the signal for the children behind the cart to rush over and grab at the scattered books. William got one in each hand, right under the woman’s feet, so she let go of Ma to grab them back, and when he stepped away, Ma ran and now the woman was spinning from one to the other in a dither. Two gentlemen stepped out of the Anchor to come to her assistance, but by then the Thornhills were gone like a lot of rats up the alley.
    They got a book each. William’s was the best, red leather with gold lettering, good for a shilling at Lyle’s, no questions asked.
    ~
    He grew up a fighter. By the time he was ten years old the other boys knew to leave him alone. The rage warmed him and filled him up. It was a kind of friend.
    There were other friends, of course, a band of boys who roamed the streets and wharves together, snatching cockles off the fishmonger’s stall at Borough Market, scrabbling in the mud at low tide for pennies tossed by laughing gentlemen.
    There was his brother James, a whippy boy who could climb a drainpipe quicker than a roach, and poor simple Rob smiling at everything he saw. There was bony little William Warner, the runt of a litter on Halfpenny Lane, and Dan Oldfield whose father had drowned, being the passenger in a wherry trying to shoot London Bridge at low water, the boatman half-stupefied with liquor at the time. Dan was famous for his ability to steal roast chestnuts from the pedlar in Frying Pan Alley, enough to be able to share them, hot out of his pocket, with the other urchins. One frozen morning at Dan’s suggestion he and William had pissed on their own feet:the moment’s bliss was almost worth the grip of cold that came after. Then there was Collarbone from Ash Court with the red mark across half his