Work Text:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And, for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it;—yet I’ll hammer’t out.
—Shakespeare, Richard II, V. v.
Brighid had first laid eyes on him as guards scuffled at the gate and emerged with the tiniest of children at the cusp between infant and toddler. Too squirmy to swaddle, too young to be as confident on his fat little legs as he was.
He was all warmth. She knew what he was before the redcoat's back turned, holding a grinning baby. The baby projected heat like a bonfire, but he didn't sear her as she neared the soldiers. No danger behind the warmth, only dimples. Little grubby hands reached for her. She hesitated. It was not her own harp that flew over the fort.
But Arthur's eyes were the green of a shallow sea over treacherous rocks or whitewash spread too thin over arsenic-green wallpaper. The ones blinking up at her were grinning lagoon green. This baby was far more than Arthur and far more than her. She could sense more of their sort out there, beyond the palisade
She tapped the soldier's epaulette, and he wordlessly looked at the boy and then at her, and she wondered why. Only twenty-odd years old, but he was stooped with what Brighid fancied was the weight of the redcoat. This corporals mother had been born in Country Clare. And as the soldier handed her the child, she marvelled.
"You should keep a better eye on your weans," The soldier muttered like such a thing was permitted inside the convict factory. As she took the beam of sunshine from him, he shook his head in that way kinder Anglos did, even while looking down their nose at anything Celt. She would always wonder if relief or recognition made the soldier hand over her boy.
Her boy. The concept was bizarre but accurate. His rich brown hair was shot through with auburn in the sun. It sat in curls as spiky as the crests crowning the bright-winged birds that fluttered from strange tree to strange tree in this strange place. She combed it more gently than she carded wool. He squirmed when she tugged too hard on a stubborn knot and sometimes just because she'd taken too much time and too much of his patience. He didn't have much of that, but he was a good boy: wee and barefoot.
She fed him what of her mealy gruel there was, let him climb onto her back, and carried him with far more grace than she did the yoke and water pails. She kissed him on the nose when she could catch him, but she couldn't always. He rolled around in her arms like a runaway bannock, not fighting so much as restless. He was always restless.
But he was all sweetness, too. He echoed Brighid's music like a songbird, chirping back all the words he knew and those he didn't in his baby burbles. He always ate what they had had and never complained, even when it was never enough. He was a good, strong boy. Never ill. He stayed in the confines of the chicken coops and goat pen, just within her sight, playing with baby chicks and goats. He did what he was told only long enough for her to do what she had been brought here to do.
Brighid preferred the rope walk, the endless back-and-forth purgatorial march from the wheel to the post where they hooked the threads. Mindlessly pacing, watching young lines come together as rope, handcrafted by Australia's finest convicts to serve Europe's least fortunate sailors.
She called out her song, and he repeated every word, giggling with a lamb or chicken in his lap. She would never run out of songs, she thought. As he sang them back, she hummed under her breath softly enough for the wind to carry it away home, across the sea. It settled like the dry red dust in this godforsaken continent. Her hymns and shanties settled into the lad like the sunlight did.
And with all her daily work, she set aside stories for her boy. In the evening, she picked him up, and they ate what dinner they had, and she spoke them aloud. Tired and hungry, he sidled up beside her when she spun wool. Half hidden in her skirts, he watched the shuttle and the thread moving endlessly between her hardened fingers with quiet fascination. It made her a little angry. Arthur had done that when he was young and sweet, and she feared for her boy, who was hers but not.
When her wool was spun, he rested his head in her lap, and she sang again. The red dust of the baby in her hands couldn't choke her with homesickness when she sang to him.
"Greener than green," She hummed as he nestled a cheek into her hand and yawned. "That's how the hills are on my Isle. A green land in a rumbling grey and churning sea beneath a rumbling grey and churning sky. Your sky is blinding, love; the flatlands sun-baked dusty brick. Your sea is quiet, soft when all the English ships have gone when all the ships have gone."
He settled in only late at night when this southern sun finally fell into the sea off the coast of Botany Bay. He only stilled when it cooled but never when it was warmest during the day. As day fell to night, he huddled next to her on the floor, where she lay what day clothes she had under his head and held him close. She called him Jack. Sean seemed...to scholarly, and he seemed to like his name—but then he enjoyed so many things when they were sung to him.
She shouldn't have let him call her Mam or hold her heart in his little baby's hands, but how could she not? He was clover-honey sweet and a son of her heart, if only a nephew of her blood. The sweetest wee thing Arthur would ever make. Until he wasn't. Her poor wee boy sank his teeth into a guard's hand when it wandered too close to her skirts. But even as he drew blood, he was wailing, frightened of his own temper. He was sobbing long before that same hand struck him across the face. So hard was he hit that the bones of his face were bruised on the entire left side for a month. For the first time, his father's bone structure was visible.
In the fuss that ensued, Jack was noticed. Rather than just a piece of her lost in how little the humans perceived, they took him from her, and she threatened them all with witchery and damnation until they brought him back. They put him back in her arms because he hadn't stopped howling when soldiers parted from her. They took them both from that the gaols then.
A fine English lady gave her a fine new English cloak and a fine new English uniform and set her to scrubbing the floors of the governor's fine new English house. She had preferred the rope walk and sleeping on the dirt to curtsying, grovelling, and looking at her feet.
But Jack was frightened now, all the time, and she couldn't make her opinion known when he didn't run or didn't roll away like a handful of marbles but clung to her skirt and cried. Men spoke to her, and he buried his face in her chest and wept when it ever turned too loud or too scolding.
The seasons turned. Jack began to play again. His restlessness came from the marrow, and he learned more words and more games. He ran the yard like it was his own dominion, ran with a stick and hoop for hours. Why shouldn't he? She thought. It was his name. New South Wales. Alfred had been named New England for Arthur and Matthew Nova Scotia for Alasdair. But then she thought of all the places of Éire that now bore English names and kissed him, closing her eyes against it. It was time, she thought, that Rhys had his own son of Arthur's to give his name to. But at who's cost. Her body hurt. Her heart hurt. That was easy to say, as he still ran fastest to her arms at the night's end. Two years came and went. He grew and learned more words every day. He was smart but didn't like books. Though, all she had to read to him anyway was the bible on Sundays after chapel. He could rattle off the alphabet like musket fire and repeat every word she spoke.
There was always water and a basin in the yard when she was released from scrubbing the floors to find him in whatever mud puddle he'd discovered and scrub him down too. He always found a mess. But when he was clean, they slept in a hard, narrow bed in the servant's quarters. Upon seeing Brighid, the lady of the house had immediately placed a sturdy lock on the door. The master of the house knocked on it nightly, the stablemen sometimes too, even the cook's boy when he'd been in the grog. They whispered. Pleading, threatening, bribing. She was beautiful and a temptress; they'd give her money if she laid with them, and they'd kill her if she didn't. Jack slept through most of it, curled up in the coverlet, sprawled across her belly, head cradled in her hand.
Then there was a new one, who pinched Brighid when she was on all fours scrubbing. The mistress of the house ordered him away when she saw, but he slept in the servant's quarters, same as Brighid, same as Jack. He pounded on her door at night when the family was gone, waking Jack and sending him hiding under the covers, burying himself in her night dress, his little fists clinging to the rope of her braid. Jack was learning new words all the time. Jack was beginning to understand what the man said when he threatened both of them. For three nights, they didn't sleep. For three nights, he cried softly into her skirts, and she held him almost as tight as the blade in her hand. When the family returned, the housekeeper told the mistress, and the mistress sent him away. She asked for paper, a pen, and ink. The mistress gave it to her.
Jack clung to her for a month. Refused to do as he was told, to play with the chickens when he fed them, to fetch her little things when asked. He would hardly let go of her apron string. When the month turned to several, she took out the pen, paper, and ink and wrote to Alasdair.
Jack, her boy, needed more than her.