The Secret River Read Free Page A

face. Collarbone liked Lizzie. She has skin like a nun , he told Thornhill, wonderingly, and then, perhaps thinking of his own livid skin, blushed red to the roots of his hair.
    They were all thieves, any time they got the chance. The dainty parson could shrill all he liked about sin, but there could be no sin in thieving if it meant a full belly.
    Rob came to the other boys in their little rat-hole by Dirty Lane one day with a single boot that he had taken from where it hung outside a shop. He would have got the other too, he said, but the bootmaker saw him in a looking-glass. The man ran after him, and caught him, Rob said, but he was old, and the boy was able to get away. William hefted the boot in his hand and said, But what is it worth to you, Rob, just the one? And Rob thought long, his face creased with the effort, then through his loose rubbery lips, on a spray of spittle, cried out, I will sell it to a man with one leg! It is worth ten shillings at least! and it was as if he already had the money in his hand, his face fat with satisfaction at his scheme.
    ~
    When Lizzie played mother to John, and then to baby Luke after that, Lizzie’s friend Sal from Swan Lane became sister to William. Sal was the only fruit of her mother’s womb. Had been a bonny baby, but she had cursed the womb as she left it, for every baby after her sickened and died within the month.
    Her family was a notch up from the Thornhills, for Mr Middleton was a waterman, as his father had been, and his father’s father before that. They had lived in the same street in the Borough for as long as anyone could remember, in a narrow house with a room upstairs, a fire of coals in the winter, glass in the windows, and always a loaf of bread in the cupboard.
    But it was a sad house, filled with the tiny souls of thosedeparted babies. With every promising son who had sickened and died, Mr Middleton became a sterner and more silent man. His trade was his consolation. He was out every morning, the first of the watermen to be waiting at the steps. He rowed all day and came home when darkness fell, never speaking, as if looking inward to his dead sons.
    Sal’s Ma and Da were gentle with their precious child. The mother would hold the girl against herself, putting a hand along the side of her face, calling her poppet and sweet thing . Within the means of the household, Sal was indulged with every delicacy she could desire: oranges and sweetbreads and soft white bread, and for her birthday a blue shawl of wool as fine as a cobweb. It was another way altogether of being a Ma and a Da, and William—whose birthday was not even remarked—looked on wondering.
    Sal flowered under such care. She was no beauty, but had a smile that lit up everything around her. The only shadow in her life was the graveyard where her brothers and sisters were buried. They haunted her, and made her puzzle, the way they had no life while she, deserving it no more than they, had all the love that should have been shared out. That shadow made her soft in a way new to William. He knew no one else like her, who could not bear to watch the head cut off a hen, or a horse beaten in the street. She had run at a man whipping a little dog one day, shrilling at him, Leave off! Leave off! and the man had shrugged her away and might have turned the whip on her, except that William pulled her, gripping her arms tight until the man and the cringing dog had disappeared around the corner, when she turned her face into his chest and cried angry gusts of tears.
    It was easy to wish to belong in this house, number 31, Swan Lane. Even the name of the street was sweet. He could imagine how he would grow into himself in the warmth of such a home. It was not just the generous slab of bread, spread with good tasty dripping: it was the feeling of having a place. Swan Lane and therooms within it were part of Sal’s very being, he could see, in a way no place had ever been part of his.
    If he was haunted by the