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

small square bottle that made him drift into a kind of sleep from which he called out hoarsely and struggled to escape the bedclothes. In spite of the medicine, the flame of the fever consumed him. His cheeks were scarlet, the skin dry and hot to the touch, his tongue furred and grey, his eyes sunk back into their sockets.
    Within a week he was dead.
    When they told Mrs Middleton she cried out once, a terrible hoarse sound. Then she turned her face to the wall and did not speak again. Sal sat with her all day and slept at the foot of her bed. The surgeon was called again and again, until the table by the bed bristled with bottles of potions and pills. But Mrs Middleton’s slide towards death would not be stopped by anything the surgeon could do. With each day that passed she shrank further into the bedclothes, her eyes closed as if she could not bear to see the world any longer, slipping away behind her skin.
    At last a grey dawn came when she was stiff under the blanket. They laid her in her box at Gilling’s, beside Mr Middleton’s, waiting for the ground to thaw so they could bury them.
    It was only after the ice on the river broke up, the hole dug and the prayers said over the two coffins as they swayed down on the undertaker’s ropes, that the Thornhills realised everything was gone.
    Mr Middleton had done all that any man could do. He had lived thriftily and put cash aside. He had put money into well-made boats and kept them in repair, had made sure his apprentice was honest and worked hard. His business had been good, his life cautiously prosperous.
    But as soon as he was gone it fell into pieces with amazing speed. In that frozen month his savings were devoured. The surgeon had come every day, and hardly a visit passed when he did not prescribe some new cure that cost a pound the bottle. The uneaten jars of brandied cherries and figs in honey sat on the pantry shelf. Even though there was no work for him to do, the apprentice had still to be fed, and with the river frozen, all that coal he had carried up the stairs had cost five pounds the sack.
    Worst of all, the landlord’s man had still come by for the rent every Monday. Whether the river was frozen or not, whether aman could work or not, did not matter to the landlord’s man.
    To Thornhill, the house on Swan Lane had always seemed a fortress against want. Surely no harm could come to a man who owned such a thing as a piece of ground with a dwelling on it. If a man had a roof over his head he could batten down, no matter how hard times were, and wait for them to get better.
    He had taken a long time to understand that the house had not been owned, only leased. When he did, it was as if some vital part of himself had dropped away, leaving a void. The house on Swan Lane, always so warm, so safe, was now as cheerless as any of the tenements of his childhood.
    The rent was in arrears, and the furniture had to be sold to pay it. Sal and Thornhill watched even the bed Mrs Middleton had died in, which seemed scarcely cold, being carted off. When that was not enough, the bailiffs came after the wherries, first the Hope that the apprentice worked, so he had to go and find another master to serve out his time, and then the second-best one too, that Thornhill could not prove was a wedding gift. The river had barely melted, Thornhill had done just a week’s work, when he watched them take his wherry in tow. His livelihood disappeared away under Blackfriars Bridge. From now on he would be a journeyman, rowing other men’s boats and never knowing when he would be told there was no work for him.
    He sat for a long time on the pier at Bull Wharf watching the red sails of the sailor-men bellying out as they tacked from reach to reach. The tide was pushing in from the sea. Across the surface of the river, pocked, pitted, rough, ran another kind of roughness, a buckle in the water crossing from one bank to the other. Behind it pushed water of a different character, barred and