I had become adept at ignoring another woman’s tears. I’d been surrounded by crying women for the past year; tears in the cells at Newgate, in the convicts’ quarters of the Norfolk, and now here at the factory.
Once, I had been empathetic by nature. Another’s tears had tugged inside me. But here there was no place for empathy. Every one of us who’d been shipped out here was grieving; grieving for husbands, for children, for lovers left behind. Grieving for England, for Ireland, for the lives we’d had before. My own grief was striking enough, without taking on others’ as well.
But this woman’s tears were impossible to ignore. They turned into racking sobs I could feel deep inside my chest. When she got up to relieve herself, I turned to Maggie. “What happened to her?” I asked.
Maggie kept her eyes on her spinning. “Her little one got taken away today. Sent to the Orphan School in Sydney Town.”
“A school? Is that so bad?”
Maggie looked at me as though I were half-witted. Her eyes were a brilliant blue, set deep in tanned, leathery cheeks. Dark corkscrew curls sprung out from beneath her cap. “Once a little one gets sent away, they got next to no chance of their mamas ever seeing them again.” Her brassy voice dropped a little. I wondered if she were speaking from experience.
“Oh,” I mumbled, not wanting to dig further. I felt an ache in my chest for the crying woman. Her plight reminded me why I had taught myself not to take on other people’s pain. “How dreadful.”
“Would you listen to you,” Maggie crowed, “talking like a princess.”
I said nothing. I could hear it, of course, the smoothed edges of my own speech up against the ragged phrases of the other women. I’d spent the six months of the voyage trying to roughen my words, but Maggie’s comments reminded me I hadn’t succeeded.
But I didn’t want to stand out. Nor did I want to face the questions I knew would follow.
The woman’s tears had dried by the time dark fell over the factory and we were sent back down the stairs. The air was thick and humid, and smelled of fragrant, passing rain.
I stiffened at the sight of Blackwell in the street outside the jail. Had he been waiting for me?
“You didn’t eat this morning,” he said, his voice low. “There was food for you on the table.”
“I’ve no way of paying for food,” I told him stiffly.
“You must be hungry.”
I began to walk. My stomach was groaning with hunger, yes, but that was no business of his. I didn’t want Lottie to see me talking to him. I couldn’t bear for her to find out I had slept on his floor. I was surprised she’d not asked questions after I’d appeared at the factory with my skin scrubbed clean.
I could hear his footsteps behind me, sighing through the mud. “There’s a bed for you, Eleanor.”
I bristled at the sound of my name on his lips. Back in London, no man beside my husband would have dared called me by my Christian name. It was a cold reminder that I had sunk to the bottom of the pile. Eleanor, like some ash-streaked scullery maid.
I stopped walking. “What do you want for it?” I kept my head down, bracing myself for his answer.
“Housekeeping,” he said after a moment.
A laugh escaped me. “Housekeeping?”
“Is that not to your liking?”
I swallowed, my gaze drifting over his shoulder to the crooked silhouette of his hut. Perhaps it was foolish to trust him. But how desperately I needed to believe I might earn myself a bed and fire just by sweeping a man’s floor.
I hesitated. Blackwell stood beside me, silent and patient. I managed a faint nod.
“Good,” he said shortly.
Inside the hut, the broom was resting beside the front door. I didn’t remember it being there the previous night. Had he put it there in anticipation of my arrival? Had he known he could convince me to crawl back through his door? The thought made me inexplicably angry. But he had been right. Here I was.
Blackwell nodded towards the broom. “The floor needs sweeping. And then please empty the grate.”
I swept with my eyes down, losing myself in the rhythm of it. Sweeping an earth floor felt like a losing battle, but I was glad for something to put my mind to. Rainwater had seeped beneath the door, turning the floor at the front of the cottage to mud.
Blackwell hovered awkwardly in the corner for a few moments, his eyes following the rhythmic strokes of the broom. Then he stepped out into the night, giving me the space I craved.
Housekeeping, Nell? I imagined Lottie saying as I swept. You believe he wants you for housekeeping?
I was aware of my naivety, so perhaps that erased it. It was not blind optimism that had brought me to Blackwell’s door, but desperation.
I swept that dirt floor, then scooped every last speck of ash from the grate. There was a part of me that believed if I worked hard enough, it might convince him that my shelter and fire had been duly paid for. Might prevent him from demanding more.
The dark was thick when the lieutenant returned. I wondered distantly where he had been. He looked at the swept floor, then at the empty grate.
“That’s enough,” he said. “You’ve been working all day.” He nodded to the loaf of bread on the shelf. A monstrous ant was traversing the crust. “Take a little. Rest.”
I broke off a small chunk of bread and hovered in front of the unlit fire, unsure what else to do. The hut felt too small for strangers. I chewed slowly, the bread coarse on my tongue. The crust was crisp and warm where I had sat it too close to the lamp.
I dared a glance at Blackwell. He was opening the jar of potted meat, his back to me. Would he come to my bed tonight, I wondered? There had to be more for him in this than a swept earthen floor that would become thick with dirt again before morning. The lid of the jar popped noisily.
I looked up at the sound of voices coming towards the hut. And then a sudden screech of fabric as a rock came flying through the cloth window. It thudded loudly against the bookshelf.
Blackwell snatched his rifle. “Get down.”
I scrambled beneath the table.
“Did they hit you?” he asked.
“No.” My voice came out breathless. “Who is it? The savages?”
“It’s not the savages.”
I heard yelling; mostly men, some women. Incoherent voices. English words? I couldn’t tell.
Blackwell charged from the hut with the rifle poised. “Get the hell away from here,” he hissed. His voice was taut and controlled, as though his anger, along with all his other emotions, was kept behind bars. I realised he’d not loaded the rifle.
“What’ll you do, you sasanaigh murderer?” spat a gravelly Irish voice. “Shoot us in the street?”
A cold laugh. Terse, unintelligible words from Blackwell. He marched back inside and bolted the door.
I stepped out from beneath the table. “Who was that?” I asked shakily.
He leant the rifle up against the wall. Used his wrist to push a swathe of dark hair from his eyes. There was a moment of silence, as though he was debating whether to speak to me. “The rebels,” he said finally.
“Who?”
He sighed heavily. “The Irish rebels. They rose up at Castle Hill in the north a few years ago. Tried to take Parramatta and Sydney Town. Overthrow the government and bring in Irish rule.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly cold. “What was that they called you?”
Blackwell didn’t look at me. “Sasanaigh,” he repeated. “Englishman.”
I nodded stiffly. But it was the other word that rang more heavily in my ears.
Murderer.
I looked down at the rock that lay beneath the shelf. “Why did they do this?”
Blackwell stared at it for several moments. “They’re angry,” he said. “They feel oppressed and abused. And I represent everything they hate.” He picked up the rock and flung it out the torn window.
The muscles in my shoulders felt taut. It wasn’t just Lottie who despise
d the lieutenant, I realised. Perhaps in my desperation I had been too dismissive of her warning. Perhaps I ought to have stayed beneath the awnings of the church.
“You can’t leave,” Blackwell said as I edged towards the door. “Not now. It’s dangerous out there. The rebels are agitated. They’ll likely go after you.”
“Because of my English blood, or the fact I’m lodging with you?”
“Both.”
I looked up at him, taking in his face up close for the first time. He was younger than I had first guessed. Little more than thirty, perhaps. I imagined that in England, his hair had been cut to his collar, trimmed within an inch of its life. But in this place, a raggedness had begun to creep over him, the way it had done to all of us. His hair tickled the top of his eyebrows, reached past his collar. His pale blue eyes were sharp and clear, but I couldn’t see behind them. It made trusting him a difficult thing.
Outside, I heard loud laughter. I took a step away from the door. “And I’ll be safer here with you?”
Blackwell held my gaze. “Do you think you won’t be?”
I said nothing. Truly, I had no idea.
CHAPTER FIVE
“It would be a wise and prudent measure to bring up the rising generation in the Protestant religion, in order to remove that extreme ignorance and barbarism which constitute the natural character of all the lowest class of Irish Catholic convicts.”
Rev. Samuel Marsden
A Few Observations on the Toleration of the Catholic Religion in New South Wales
1808-1817
I knew little of the atrocities taking place in Ireland, like I knew little of so many other things. My father had done his best to provide me with a sheltered upbringing; one in which I would be married to a gentleman and keep my eyes and ears closed to anything that might upturn my polished existence. Politics, my father liked to say, was no domain for a lady.
Nonetheless, I had caught word of the rebellion in Ireland some years back. I knew the Irish had allied with the French to overthrow the Englishmen who ruled their land. As an impressionable nineteen-year-old, I had panicked, sure the United Irishmen would gallivant across the seas and turn London upside down.
Father had laughed off my concerns. “This is why young ladies should not involve themselves in politics,” he said, reaching across the supper table and topping up his glass with an enormous glug of wine. “Those witless fools have no mind to take London. I daresay their minds couldn’t even fathom such a notion.”
In London, I’d not known any Irish men or women. But sitting beside Lottie at the spinning wheels, I did not see a witless fool.
“I heard the rebels in the street last night,” I said, careful to sidestep any mention of Blackwell.
Lottie made a noise in her throat, but she didn’t look at me. I could tell she didn’t want to discuss the matter.
“Do you know them?” I asked.
She shrugged, not taking her eyes off the spinning wheel. “Some of them.”
“They want freedom,” I said. “Is that it?”
Lottie looked at me then, her hazel eyes shining. “Aye,” she said, with more sharpness than I had been expecting. “That’s it. Freedom and respect.”
“We all want those things,” I said.
She snorted. “Your people have it.”
I’d had no thought there might be an ‘us’ and ‘them’ between two lags sitting side by side at the factory. “Does I look like I have freedom?” I asked bitterly.
Lottie gave me a dismissive look that stung more than her sharpness. A look that said I wouldn’t understand. A look that said I had no right to argue, or to have an opinion on the matter.
“They’ve taken everything from us,” she said. “Even our God. You think we like spending our Sundays listening to your Protestant poison?”
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, unsure of what else to say.
A part of me ached to ask her about the lieutenant. Ask her if she knew why the rebels had stormed his hut last night. Ask her what had happened at Castle Hill. The settlement was crawling with soldiers. Why was Blackwell the target of the rebels’ rage? But then I would have to admit that I had crept through his door as his housekeeper. And that, I was becoming increasingly certain of, was something Lottie would not take well.
When dark fell and the spinning wheels stilled, we strolled out of our prison and wandered to the river. By now, I had come to understand that our punishment was transportation. Not incarceration.
There were plenty of men who came to join us at the river. Convicts, emancipists, free settlers, with liquor bottles in one hand and pipes in the other. They talked a lot, their shoulders pressed to ours and their bristly faces edging closer with each mouthful. Told us rum-scented stories about their farms and their houses and their hard-earned tickets of leave.
Just now need me a wife, they’d say.
It wasn’t a difficult thing to find in this colony. Just that day, a settler had turned up at the factory with his marriage permit from Reverend Marsden. We’d lined up to be inspected, been given the chance to offer ourselves as wives.
The settler had left twenty minutes later betrothed to Sally Quinn.
Being chosen as a convict wife, I’d learnt that day, was a thing to be celebrated. Once you’d signed yourself over to your husband-to-be, it marked the end of your time at the factory. Sally Quinn’s settler was a loud-mouthed drunkard from what I could tell, but he’d saved her five more years of weaving Parramatta cloth. Tomorrow he’d be whisking her off to be mistress of a grand house in Sydney Town. Filthy and ragged though these men on the riverbank were, I was beginning to see they were the way to freedom.
The evening was warm, with parrots shrieking in the trees above us and bugs swarming the surface of the river. The sloping roof of Government House peeked out between the trees.
One of the wife-hunters climbed onto a log and squinted up at the row of dark windows.
“The governor in, Ned?” called Dan Brady, the man who had followed me on my first night in Parramatta.
Ned chuckled. “I think I see him there through the window. Eating his mutton with a finger raised to the poor croppies.”
Brady leapt onto the log and bared his pasty white backside in the direction of the house. An unenthused chuckle rippled through the group.
I looked away, wishing for a mouthful of rum to dull my senses.
“Did you hear?” Maggie Abbott began brassily. “Tom Evans got caught stealing from the granary last night.”
Lottie snorted. “Tom Evans is a bloody fool. How many times we seen him strung up for a flogging? He’ll be off the coal mines now, just you watch.” She grabbed the rum bottle from the man sitting beside her. “He’s a woman from the factory staying with him,” she told me. “Only thing is he’s got no way of paying her keep. Half the thieving in this place is lags stealing to pay their whores.”
I hugged my knees, looking out across the darkening river. How precious us factory lasses were. Precious enough to steal for. Strange how something so precious could be treated with such disdain.
Lottie held the bottle out to me. I gulped down a mouthful, coughing as it seared my throat. The rum was terrible. Tasted like the sea had gotten through the barrel.
“Careful there,” said the man beside Lottie. He was sharp-eyed and too handsome, with ragged, sand-coloured hair and a smile that wasn’t entirely warm. Spoke with a liquored-up Irish lilt I had trouble understanding. “I’m yet to meet a sasanaigh that can hold their liquor.” He reached over and took the bottle from my hands, to a chorus of laughter from the men around him. I felt my cheeks flush.
Maggie had introduced the man earlier as Patrick Owen, an emancipist who was seeking to sell his land for a plot in Sydney Town. He was loud spoken and sure of himself, with a constant flotilla of Irishmen around him, laughing at his questionable jokes.
Lottie’s eyes followed him as he got up and strode towards the riverbank. He flung a stone into the river and sent water
fountaining upwards. He looked over his shoulder and gave her a broad smile. She grinned.
“Patrick Owen?” I said witheringly. “Really?”
She shrugged.
“Sally’s new husband is a free settler,” I said. “You can do better than an emancipist.”
“That’s the thing, Nell,” she said, watching Owen as he grabbed another stone and flung it into the water. “I’m not entirely sure I can.” She gave me a wry smile. “Don’t you know Irishwomen are as low as the blacks? So the good reverend says anyhow.”
“Sally Quinn is Irish.”
Lottie snorted. “Sally Quinn is all arse and tits. These things help.” She traced a stick through the dirt. “Besides, it’s not really about doing better now, is it. It’s about getting out of the factory. I’d rather be an emancipist’s wife than spend another four years weaving shirts for the lobsters.” She looked back at Owen.
“It don’t matter anyhow,” she said. “Owen’s got Maggie in his bed and she’s got her claws in tight.”
Dan Brady took his pipe out from between his teeth and blew a line of smoke down at me. “What did Blackwell want with you then?” he asked.
I stiffened. Felt Lottie’s eyes pull towards me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Saw you with him in the street yesterday,” said Brady. “He after a bit of company was he? You tell him you’re too good for him too?”
My cheeks flushed.
“If one of his kind were after my company, I’d give it to him,” Maggie announced, planting a hand on her hip. “Earn myself a little sway over a powerful man. The Rum Corps controls everything in this place. Even the liquor.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
Lottie tapped her fingernails against the side of the rum bottle. “The redcoats are the ones making all this. They got stills out behind the barracks. Their liquor’s as good as coin in this place. Can buy yourself anything with it.”
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