The Secret River by Kate Grenville

furrowed: the sea. He watched the tide, and thought of how the river would go on doing this dance of advance and fall back, long after William Thornhill and the griefs he carried in his heart were dead and forgotten.
    What point could there be to hoping, when everything could be broken so easily?
    ~
    Sal pushed back against it all. She sat with her father during his illness, rubbing at his feet which in spite of the fever were as cold as a corpse. When he died her mouth went grim, as if there was someone she wanted to punish. When her mother went, she walked to Spitalfields and back—as her father had done—for some fine red velvet her mother had always admired, and stood over the man from Gilling’s until the coffin was lined with it just the right way. Her mother’s face was chalky against the velvet, but it gave Sal some satisfaction, and until her parents were in the ground she kept going, bustling from room to room moving objects into cupboards and out again, taking every cup down in the kitchen and washing it, every saucer and every spoon, getting down on her knees with a pail to scrub the floors. It was as if she thought she could work her parents back to life.
    When the first coffin—her father’s—hit the bottom of the hole with a hollow knocking sound, like a knuckle on a door, she broke down, as Thornhill had known she must. Her cries were not so much grief as a kind of indignation at this thing that was happening. She pushed the side of her hand into her mouth, as she had in the throes of childbirth, and Thornhill was once more afraid she would split the skin.
    But the tears finished something and she accepted the coming of the bailiff ’s men better than he did. As her father’s armchair was hoisted onto the cart, Thornhill had to look away, but she did not. She watched until it turned the corner and was gone. Well , she said, and looked at Thornhill. Thank the Lord he ain’t here to see , Will, he paid seven pound for that chair off a man in Cheapside , I remember the day he brung it home .
    It was Sal who saw, before Thornhill, that they would have togive up the attic as extravagant. She went out in the lanes and alleys, the baby on her hip, inquiring for a cheaper place. When that, too, became too dear for them, she went out again until she found another, even cheaper. When they were on the bottom rung of the ladder of accommodation, with only the street itself below them, she still kept looking for something cheaper but better, moving their few things while Thornhill was out on the river.
    There was the basement room in Sparrick’s Row, where the water came in from the yard and had to be kept out with a dam of rags; and a similar one around the corner in Cash’s Grounds; from there across the river hard by St Mary Somerset, where the bells drove them mad; back across the river to Snows Fields, but they were robbed there so they went to Brunswick Lane near the maltings, in Butler’s Buildings, where they came to rest. Third floor back, one broken window and a cupboard missing its door. Every Monday Sal counted out four shillings for him to take downstairs to Mr Butler, standing at the front door drumming on the floor with his stick to tell his tenants it was time to pay. It was robbery at that price, and the stench from the maltings nearly choked them. But it was dry, and the cesspit in the yard freshly emptied, and the chimney smoked only a little. We will get used to the stink, Will , she said.
    He saw that he had married a terrier, and could only admire her, being himself in a trance of despair in which he blindly worked but could not find the will to care about a leaking roof or a stopped chimney.
    We got each other , she reminded him on the pile of rags that was their bed in Butler’s Buildings. He felt her shaking against him and thought she was crying, as she did sometimes, stormily, passionately, out of nowhere. But she was laughing. Each other and all them fleas, that is , she said. We