Free Girl of Shadows by Deborah Challinor Page B

specifically enquired — and anyway Esther needed someone to help her with the housework, given that she refused to lift a hand to do anything at all except cook.
    He’d had the affair for purely selfish reasons. Esther was a beautiful woman and he loved her. Or, more truthfully, he loved the memory of the woman she’d been when he’d first met her. Now he cared about how she felt and for her welfare, but that essential spark of passion that drives lovers to be together had died well before his affair, extinguished by Esther’s ever-increasing demands on him to make more money. He’d felt belittled by her, and her apparent inability to stop spending what he did make created a never-ending treadmill about which she constantly chastised him, withholding sex as punishment when he flagged and maintaining stony silences and foul moods for weeks on end.
    So when pretty Cynthia had offered the promise of a few stolen hours of uncomplicated fun and sexual relief, he’d accepted. He hadn’t loved her, and she’d been a little noodle-headed and quite possibly fairly annoying in large doses, but she’d had lovely breasts, smooth white skin and the most deliciously perfumed quim, and he had enjoyed himself. But she’d told a friend, who had told someone else and Esther had found out. Whether or not Cynthia’s husband had ever realised, Adam never knew; he’d seen the man often enough since with no unpleasantness.
    There had been very unpleasant repercussions with Esther, however. While many women might have looked the other way, she hadn’t, and he hadn’t expected her to. There certainly had been no sexual relations whatsoever since, and no let-up in her drive to ruin him; he was beginning to view her spending as an obsession if not an actual form of sickness. The fact that she was also ruining herself seemed not to deter her at all. So he’d done theonly thing he could do and that was to work harder and make more money, which ironically was what Esther had wanted in the first place. And to do that he’d had to take on an appropriately trained assistant, who was Sarah, another constant irritation to Esther. To appease her he’d agreed to go to Hyde Park Barracks whenever a new shipment of convicts arrived, on the off chance one might be a jeweller, but whenever that occurred he would simply wander down to the Rocks and have a cup of tea somewhere for an hour or so, come home and say there wasn’t anyone.
    Because he didn’t want to replace Sarah.
    She was an excellent jeweller but, more than that, he thought he might be in love with her.

Chapter Four
    Wilting in the sun and swatting at flies, Harrie and Friday stood outside the tall wooden gates of Parramatta Female Factory.
    ‘Jesus, hurry up, will you?’ Friday muttered. ‘It’s bloody hot out here.’ She raised a fist and pounded on the wicket. ‘ Visitors! Open up! ’
    Finally, the wicket swung open and the porter peered out. ‘Hold your horses.’
    ‘You hold yours, we’re bloody melting out here,’ Friday replied as she barged her way through.
    ‘Just as hot in here, you know,’ the porter grumbled, mopping his brow with an enormous celery-green handkerchief.
    But Friday and Harrie had already set off towards the second set of gates in the inner wall. The portress, peeping through the slot in the wicket from the other side, opened it and let them in.
    ‘Ta, Glad,’ Friday said.
    ‘Thank you, Gladys,’ Harrie echoed.
    Gladys asked, ‘How are yis?’
    ‘Good,’ Harrie replied. ‘Yourself?’
    ‘Can’t complain. Janie and the kids’ve been waiting for yis. Wait here an’ I’ll get ’em.’
    ‘Hold on.’ Friday surreptitiously passed Gladys a decent-sized block of tobacco. ‘Don’t smoke it all at once.’
    ‘Oooh, very nice.’ Gladys sniffed it appreciatively. ‘Ta.’
    She hurried away across the yard and disappeared into the entrance of the three-storey dormitory building dominating the Factory compound; a few pale faces could