Page 29 of An Artful Dodge
Maggie’s eyebrows rose, and her lips twitched in amusement.
“You know how men can be,” I said. “He was rubbing up against me, touching my arm. That watch was begging to be nicked.” I still remembered the sight of it, the chain within inches of my fingers as he leaned in to murmur in my ear how pretty I was. His breath had smelled of onions. “When Amelia and I met on the bridge on the way home, I showed it to her. She scolded me for the risk but couldn’t help laughing. She said it earned me extra, but I should consider myself lucky and not to do it again. The extra from that watch bought Sarah and me new shoes and the first meat we’d had in months.”
“You said Sarah was out in service. What does she do?”
“She works as a scullery maid up this way.” I cast my eyes in the direction we were traveling.
“She won’t thieve?”
“She has a birthmark, here,” I said, touching my forefinger to my temple. “Makes her too noticeable. Besides, I don’t want her to.”
“Ah.” Maggie seemed to put that together with another thought. “A birthmarkwouldmake it difficult.” She raised her right hand, turning it over in midair, as if she were inspecting it as well as inviting me to. It almost gave me the feeling she’d steered the conversation toward Sarah so she could broach this. “I can’t thieve anymore with this. Too noticeable, but also, my fingers don’t work as well.”
She was begging the question, so I gave it to her. “What happened?”
“What do you know of Swan River?”
“Nothing, other than it’s a penal colony in Australia. Seems a strange name for the place. Makes me think of the swans in St. James’s.”
She snorted. “It’s not St. James’s.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t,” she replied, but not as sharply as she could have.
“No, I suppose not,” I acknowledged. “Although when I was a child, I saw the hulks in the Thames once. I watched prisoners being loaded on. Only men, though.”
“They don’t mix us together, thank the lord, or every woman in the ship would have been up the pole by the time we landed,” she said drily, her hand sketching a bump over her belly. “As it was, half a dozen were, thanks to the crew.”
“Was it very dreadful?”
“Hellish, from the first day of the journey,” she replied. “Imagine a hundred of us in a dark hold, drinking fetid water and surviving on stale bread and moldy cheese, pissing in a bucket that turned over when the seas were rough.” She drew a breath as if grateful for this air, fresh by comparison. “When we finally got off the ship, we could barely walk. All of us, filthy and stumbling into each other, trying to find our land legs. We were taken to the market square and displayed. I can’t imagine we were much to look at, but still the men picked and quarreled over us. I was one of the prettier ones, so I was picked early, by a man whose wife had died the previous year. He’d murdered her when he found her trying to run off. I didn’t know that then, of course. That was actually his second wife. His first wife had died in childbirth. His name was Turner, and he was a drunk and cruel, and I worked from sunrise to sundown, washing, cooking, cleaning, and minding his children.” Her voice was curiously flat.
The cab jolted over a rut in the cobbles.
“You survived,” I said.
“Nearly not. Have you ever been buried alive?” she asked, almost idly.
I started. “No.”
“One day, when Turner was in the barn, I had a knife with me, brought from the kitchen. I took it out, thinking to stab him in the neck. The man knew somehow, and he was quick as a snake. He grabbed it from me and flung it away.” Her eyes flicked to me. “That’s all he did at first, it being daytime, but that night, he dragged me out of my bed by the hair and pulled me out of doors. I struggled, which is when he broke my fingers. Then he threw me in a ditch at the edge of one of his fields and covered me with dirt and rocks.”
My throat scratched with sudden dryness.
“The next morning, he dug me up. I’d stayed alive by clawing away enough dirt to breathe, but I couldn’t shift the stones. He said that if I had died, he’d have left me there, in that grave. Then he dragged me to his house and put my hand on the stove. He did it because my broken fingers would mend, and he wanted me to always have a reminder that he held the upper hand.”
Maggie’s voice slowed over the last words, and she turned to look out the window. I wondered if she’d told this same horrifying story to the others, while traveling to their mark for the day. But I had been listening carefully, and I would swear the pain in her voice was genuine. Then again, perhaps she could tell that story a hundred times and the pain would still carve as deep.
I shivered at the thought of being buried alive, of leaving Sarah utterly alone, not knowing what had become of me, or having to identify my body when it was eventually found—
“I wouldn’t trade that night, though,” Maggie said, turning back to me. “Because I touched death, and I learned something important. The dead can truly see what happens here on earth after they’re gone, like a play on a stage.”
I stared. That was an odd fancy, to be sure.
“You don’t have to believe me,” she said, “but some of what I envisioned that night has come true already. It’s as if I’d lived a full life instead of only a third of one, and was given all the wisdom of it, in that instant.”
The cab drew to a halt, and there was no opportunity for me to probe what wisdom she’d been given—not, perhaps, that I wished to, for there was a darkness to her life that made me draw back from any truth she’d discovered. As the driver slowed the horses, I found myself of two minds. My initial wariness hadn’t vanished, certainly; but though Maggie may have taken the ring unfairly from Amelia, if this story was true, she was a victim as well.
