Ember Island Read Online Free PDF

time and money when I get the roofer for you. Can I move the furniture out of the way?”
    “Yes, thanks.”
    He took his mug of tea and left me in the kitchen, watching his well-shaped back. Then I told myself that he wasn’t for me, and I shut down the machinery in my imagination that was gearing up to make fantasies about him and me together. He wasn’t for me; I wasn’t for him.
    •
     
    Back home in Sydney, I always loved it when evening came. It meant the workday could expect nothing more of me, and I could stop procrastinating or worrying about writing and sit in front of the television for a few hours and forget I had problems. But there was no television here, and after my dinner of instant noodles I sat at the dining table for a while staring into space. What now? I had brought nothing to read except my own painfully wrought manuscript, I had no way to access the Internet and spend a few hours looking up reader reviews of my books and being outraged if they didn’t like them, and I’d taken all the games off my phone when I found I spent more hours playing them than I did working on my novel. I felt empty and restless.
    Outside, a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. I went out onto the verandah to lean on the railing and watch the sky. Great gray thunderheads rolled in, bringing the smell of ozone and fat cold rain, breaking the humid grip of the day’s heat. But I had a hole in my roof, so even with the tarpaulin, it was probably going to rain in my house as well.
    There was nothing I could do. Water had already been in the lounge room and left behind its sour shadow, so I told myself to let go of the worry and get down to the end of the house furthest from it so I wasn’t tempted to check on it all night. I had a cool shower and went to bed early to listen to the storm. It was as I was folding my jeans over the brass rail at the end of the bed that I felt something stiff in the back pocket. Eleanor’s childhood diary. I pulled out the thin sheaf of papers and climbed between the soft cotton sheets, puffed up a pile of pillows behind me, and started to read.

FOUR
     

Stories in the Walls
     
September 28, 1891
     
    Papa intends to hire me a governess. Strictly against my wishes, I might add. I do not need a governess. I was hopeful when Warder Randolph’s wife took sick with diphtheria—and had to be moved off the island lest she infect us all—that she might decide not to come back and I could teach myself. I wouldn’t have wished her dead, you understand. I simply wished her to realise that she was happier over at Victoria Point with her mother, but Papa said she was recovering well and he expected her back soon.
    Then today there was an uproar. The six Randolph children, as you know, diary, have ever been my loathed classmates. Without their very sensible, but quite uninteresting, mother to frown upon them sternly, the eldest two—Anna and Bertie—have been misbehaving most infamously.
    There is one rule on this island that I have been told many times I must obey above all things: children are not allowed near the stockade. Certainly I have been curious in the years I have lived here, especially in the early days when the prisoners were punished with the cat-o’-nine-tails and would make a horrific shouting fuss. But Papa banned that punishment and no man cries out for his Maker when on shot drill: that is a boring and difficult punishment, not one that requires the surgeon to attend.
    So staying away from the stockade has been easy for me. Not so Anna and Bertie Randolph. Rather than practise forming their cursive letters as I had chosen to do—because it was two o’clock and that time of day is always reserved for handwriting—they heard the arrival of new prisoners on the Oracle, and hid behind the blacksmith’s to watch through the window as the new prisoners were riveted into leg irons.
    Perhaps they might have been safe and fine. Perhaps their only crime might have been that