Not the Same Sky Read Online Free Page A

knowing other places.’
    Matron stayed silent for a moment. ‘Have you ever seen a ship?’ she then asked.
    ‘No,’ Honora said. ‘What will it be like?’
    Matron hesitated. ‘I don’t know myself.’
    ‘Oh,’ Honora said, and leaned in to another trunk to brush the corners clean of dust.
    ‘But you will meet the others at the ship, I should think.’
    ‘Will we go together from here?’ Honora asked.
    ‘No, that won’t be possible. Some have relatives to go to for a day, and some will be put on the first carriage available and it will depend … I’m not really sure yet,’ Matron said, realising that she was not sure of a lot of things.
    ‘But we will see each other at the ship?’
    ‘Well certainly in Plymouth. That will do for now.’
    Honora went to the edge of the room where some gathered around her. Others were too sick today to move or were uninterested. Betsy Shannon was heard to say, ‘I’m glad it’s not me that’s going.’ No one knew if she meant it or if she was making do with the fact that she was too old to get the chance.
    ‘Australia—mad, mad, bloody mad,’ Julia Cuffe said.
    She was good at English, could already swear in it.
    The night before Honora’s leaving, her sister Florrie whispered to her for many hours. There were other whisperings in the room, but Florrie’s was the clearest in Honora’s ears. ‘It is best you go,’ she said again and again, trying to give her sister the backbone that would be required of her.
    ‘But what will I do without …’
    ‘Shh, shh,’ Florrie said, not allowing some things to be said. ‘Now go to sleep, you will need strength for tomorrow’s journey.’
    Was that a sigh of relief that Florrie heard, rustling before sleep? Could she hear a sigh, I will live ? Could she hear that from above some other straw bed in the corner, or could she hear, I don’t want to go, it’s better to stay —because that was what the leaving had to say to those who were remaining here? ‘Shh,’ she said again, and a kind of sleep did descend.
    Dawn came and the sleep was still around enough to dull the ache of girls getting into carriages. The sound of horses’ hooves moved out to the end of the town. The sound drowned out the noise of weeping. The journey was begun.

CHAPTER 5
    Charles Edward Strutt didn’t think of himself as born for bravery or even excitement. He would have been happy to get lost in a village in Somerset, avoid war and get a desk job. If he had found himself in a place like that he would have been content. True, he might not have been interested in the tittle-tattle of such a place, the minutiae that makes an ‘our’ for the front of ‘town’. He might have grown impatient with the re-telling and embellishment of every single private thing. But he could have absented himself from the gossip, read in the evenings, and repaired his mind each night so that it could freshly, each morning, dwell on topics of more importance than gabble. Minor importance, perhaps, but the sort that keeps things ticking over on a daily basis, gives a rhythm to the hours and thereby provides comfort. He wouldn’t have dwelled on major questions—questions like why some are born to hunger and some to comfort. Presumably he would have found a wife. He looked like someone who would be made happy easily enough. Hopefully they would have healthy children and be kept busy by the minding of that health. He would never have suffered from pompous self-righteous zeal.
    Yet this decent-enough plan eluded him. Perhaps it was his mother, perhaps his father. On the first days after he was born his father had looked at his son, given up the practice of medicine and started to paint. It may have been that the shock of watching the opening of his child’s eyes awakened a sensitive seam in him and he was simply unable to stop the expression of it. His mother, on the other hand, had always regarded her contributions to the world of books as the essential work of