Read The Secret River for Free Online Page A

foul wind, straining to keep a boat’s length ahead of Lewis Blackwood the whole way. He had not let his mind go anywhere but into his arms and his hands. Pulling across the line ten yards ahead of Blackwood, he had felt that any feat of strength or endurance would be within his grasp.
    Just not this squibby business squeezed in tight against a table.
    Seeing his face, Sal seemed to understand that this was not a laughing business. She dried the ink off the table, the paper, the nib, his fingers, and dotted out a T on the page. Just go over them dots, Will , she said. We will leave the W for now . He approached the nib gingerly to the line of dots, controlling the runaway tip with all his power. The first time he overshot: a wavering horizontal line cut through the dots and beyond. He tried the second line, watching the trail of ink. A wobble in the middle, but there it was: two lines, a letter T.
    He became aware that his tongue was far out of his mouth, helping the tip of the quill along. He pulled it back, licked his lips,laid down the pen, heard his voice rough as he said, Enough for tonight . Sal looked at the page with the marks. Look, Will , she said. How good you are doing it now, against them you did at the start!
    He rubbed at his hand where it was cramped. To his eye the marks he had made were shameful, nothing more than foolish scratches. He wished to crush the page to pulp. But she was nudging him with that elbow of hers, that arm that liked to alight along his, and saying, I promise you —but lightly, it was a promise hardly necessary to make— I promise you that by next Sunday you will write that W, fair as ever was .
    Winter wore away, and there it was at last, his whole name: William Thornhill , slow and steady. As long as no one was watching, no one would know how long it took, and how many times the tongue had to be drawn back in.
    William Thornhill .
    He was still only sixteen, and no one in his family had ever gone so far.
    ~
    Love came upon him so gradually that it was not even given the name. As the years of his apprenticeship wore away he knew only that, out on the river where the wind cut keen through his old coat, he was warmed by the thought of her, sitting with her mother, threading the needle for her and stitching away at shirts or handkerchiefs. He marvelled at her efficient fingers, doing the edges of the white squares with tiny deft movements too quick to be seen. One moment there was the ravelling edge, the next it was rolled under, turned in, magicked into a tidy scroll of fabric in the time it took her mother to squint at a needle.
    He did not know what it was that melted something in him, so he felt his face grow smooth with thinking of her, could even drift away into a dream of her that stayed with him all day, until he trudged up the steps at night hearing the water squelch in hisshoes. Lying on his straw in the kitchen, waiting for sleep, the knowledge that she was above him in her room under the roof made something thicken in his throat. Sometimes, coming across her by surprise, he found he could not quite breathe for a moment, or find the words to answer her greeting. Why Will! she would always exclaim, quite as if it were a surprise to her that her father’s big-shouldered apprentice was filling the doorway, stooping to save his head from the low beam. She was a one for touching, would take hold of him when she spoke, and he would feel it there long afterwards: her little hand on his arm, speaking to him through the stiff fabric of his coat.
    Rotherhithe was being grown over now with tanneries and knackeries and rows of tenements where there had once been those marshy spots where two children could find a place of their own. Even the gypsies had been chased away. But they found that the yard of Christ Church at the Borough, where it backed onto the river, was a hospitable place in fine weather. Among the tombs two people could find a little privacy.
    Dawdling in the pleasure of