The Secret River by Kate Grenville Read Free Book Online Page A

old eyes. One morning it was no longer river but an expanse of rough grey ice, the boats stuck in it as fast as bones in fat. Then it was a matter of the three of them getting into the bed together to keep warm, stretch out the money they had put by for such a day, and wait for the thaw.
    It was in that month of the freeze, with no money coming into any household by the river, that Thornhill’s world cracked and broke.
    First his sister Lizzie came down with the quinsy she had had as a girl, lying flushed and panting on the bed, crying with the pain in her throat. The physick cost a shilling a bottle, only a small bottle too, but it seemed to do little good, no matter how many shillings were spent on it.
    Then Mrs Middleton slipped on a patch of ice outside the front door and fell hard against the step. Some part of her was broken, it seemed, and did not want to mend. She lay rigid and waxy-faced with the pain, her mouth stiff, her lips bloodless, refusing food. The surgeon was called several times, at three guineas a visit, but he was said to be the best man for that sort of thing.
    Mr Middleton hovered by her bed, sweating in the room, kept as hot as an oven because that brought some relief to the poor woman. The new apprentice, who might have hoped for a rest while the river was frozen, was kept busy lugging coal up the stairs.
    As the weeks passed, Mr Middleton grew gaunt, his eyes set in dark rings. A little nagging cough began to keep him company. When Thornhill and Sal went to visit they would hear the cough on their way up the stairs, and know him to be sitting by his wife’s pillow, stroking her hair or patting her brow with a camphor cloth.
    The only time his face cleared was when he thought of some delicacy that might tempt her to eat. Then he could not be still, setting off straight away and walking for miles to get brandied cherries in a jar, or figs in honey.
    The Thornhills met him at the door one day, a day cold enough to crack the very cobblestones. He was setting off to walk to the apothecary at Spitalfields to get a concoction of oranges and cinnamon that someone had suggested. Sal tried to dissuade him, and Thornhill turned him around to point him back into the house, offering to go in his place. But there was a surprising depth of obstinacy in Mr Middleton, and he pushed his son-in-law’shand away. Sal and Thornhill exchanged a look in which they shared the thought that he probably could not bear to spend another afternoon dabbing at his wife’s waxen face with the camphor cloth in her stifling room. To be striding along the frozen streets would give him a sense of doing something useful, at least until he returned with the oranges and saw his wife barely taste them before refusing more.
    So they let him go. Thornhill watched him swing off down the lane, walking as fast as the hard frost would allow, his breath puffing out ahead of him. Nearly ran after him, he looked such a small figure against the snow heaped on the pavement, but did not.
    It was dark when he came home, silent and white in the face. The mixture was safe in his pocket and he did not even take his coat off before going upstairs to try his wife with a mouthful of it. She smiled her strained smile, lifted her head to take a taste off the spoon, then lay back exhausted and would take no more.
    Sal got him down to the kitchen, got him out of his coat and muffler at last. He sat passively under her hands, staring into the fire. When she knelt to take off his boots she exclaimed—they were wet through, his feet mottled with the chill of them. He had fallen in a drift of snow, he said, and while he had waited for the apothecary, the snow in them had melted, and stayed melted all the way home.
    He started to sneeze after supper and next day woke up flushed and sweating, shivering under four blankets, tossing his head on the pillow. The surgeon came again, for the husband this time. He cupped him and gave him something thick and brown in a