He hated the crowding, and the struggle for survival which went on among them; he had seen it all before in the crumbling houses in the alleyways of London and Edinburgh. His father had been a Scot with a lucrative practice at the English bar, who had lived only long enough to give his son a distaste for law as a profession, and the kind of reckless, purposeless courage which could let him stake his life on the turn of a card, or the throw of a dice. Andrew remembered his gambling father only dimly; he had been brought up by his mother’s brother, who owned a small estate near Edinburgh. The only discipline he had known in his life was in the Navy, and after that the milder rule of the East India Company. He grew up with a horror of the crowded swarm of the great cities, and for anything which threatened to put a shackle upon his liberty. A kind of sickness crept over him sometimes at the thought of the packed gloom of the Georgette’s prison quarters, of the irons which still remained on some ankles.
Down here the gun ports were closed, and it was dim and airless. In the near-darkness it was always the stench which came first; the overpowering smell of unwashed bodies, the smell of rancid food, and of water, green and half-stiff with living things. The stench of the prisons had come aboard with the convicts, and Andrew imagined it would be a long time before the ship was rid of it.
The prison quarters had been made by running a bulkhead across the width of the ship, with square openings for the guards’ muskets. He made his way reluctantly through the gloom; the guards were both bent with their faces to the holes. When they heard him they came to attention quickly, and one of them produced keys.
Andrew stood before the heavy door; through the grille at the top a confusion of shrill cries and the sounds of scuffling and falling bodies reached him.
He gestured towards it irritably. ‘For God’s sake, hurry yourself, man! What the devil’s happening here?’
The guard fumbled with the locks. ‘Couldn’t say, sir. It’s just started ‒ some sort of fight. They’re always at it.’
‘Well, it’s your duty to see that they’re not always at it. Why haven’t you made some attempt to stop it?’
‘Stop it, sir?’ The man straightened and threw Andrew an astonished glance. ‘Why, it does no good, sir. And besides ‒ I shouldn’t like to go in there. They’d tear me to pieces!’
Andrew pushed him aside impatiently, rattling the key in the lock until it yielded. ‘I shall take care that the captain hears how you attend to your duties.’
He swung the door open, and stepped inside. With noticeable reluctance the sergeant followed.
Inside, when his eyes became accustomed to the half-light, he could make out the mass of lying, sitting and standing women. The noise was terrible, and in the centre of the space four or five women rolled together in a frenzied struggle. All the others had drawn back from them, watching the contest with vicious interest, lending their own threats and encouragement to the general noise. The combat was desperately unequal; even from the mass of kicking heels and waving arms Andrew was able to tell that one of them, lying so completely beneath the bodies of the others that he could hardly see her, was fighting alone. Judging from the size of the women who opposed her, he imagined that the struggle would have been brief, even if he had not come along.
‘Silence!’ he roared.
The women in the centre of the floor took not the least bit of notice. Around them, the others became gradually aware of his presence, and their cries faded away. In the growing quiet he could distinctly hear the grunts and sighs of the struggling women.
Suddenly one of them, kneeling on the legs of the woman beneath that incredible pile, was warned by the inexplicable stillness about her, and glanced round. She stared at him for only a second, with a trace of fear on her face; then she tugged at the shoulder of the woman nearest her.
‘’Ere, Peg! Look!’
The woman she addressed looked up. Her expression altered immediately. She grinned toothlessly at Andrew and made a sort of flourish with her hands. Her harsh Cockney accent rang out over the fading sounds of the others’ voices.
‘’Ere’s the ’andsome young officer come to visit us, dearies! Get out the tea-cups!’
Wild shrieks of laughter greeted the remark.
Andrew felt his face grow hot, and he cursed inwardly.
‘Silence!’ he rapped again. ‘What’s the meaning of all this?’
The last murmurs died away completely. He knew that no one would answer him. They stared at him solidly, appearing to draw strength from their numbers, while he faced them alone. He watched the stirring of rags as they moved, the cracked, filthy hands plucking at garments which were no more than barely decent. The faces, under their coating of grease and dirt, were indistinguishable. And all the eyes were alike ‒ watchful, shrewd. He looked them over, noting that even the ones who lay ill had raised their heads to see him better. The strongest among them had fought their way to the sides, and had at least the support of the bulkhead; their few possessions were grouped about them like the riches of a kingdom. While he watched them, the three in the centre gradually released their hold on their prisoner. Kneeling where they were, they watched him eagerly, while their victim sat up slowly, holding her head in her hand.
‘You all know what the punishment is for fighting!’ he said, fixing his gaze on the four culprits. He gestured towards the one he imagined was the ring-leader. ‘I seem to remember you’ve been punished before. Isn’t it time you learned to obey orders?’
She answered him with another grin. ‘Yes, sweetheart, but I’m an old dog to be learning new tricks!’
He flushed, and in the laughter that followed her sally, he turned towards the sergeant.
‘See that Mr. Harding has these women’s names.’
‘Aye, aye, sir!’
They quietened again at his words. A change at once ran through the crowd. They had been hilarious and cheeky, now they seemed hostile and resentful. There was nothing they could do about it, he thought; they were defenceless against authority. If they once guessed his sympathy for their position they would fasten on it like vultures, and his life on the Georgette would be hell. From that minute every appearance he made among them would be the signal for outbursts of wit and insubordination.
He cleared his throat and said firmly, ‘Is there a woman here called Sara Dane?’
There was no response.
‘Sara Dane,’ he repeated. ‘Is there anyone here by that name?’
‘I’m Sara Dane.’
She struggled to her knees, and then stood up. She began to push her way through the tightly packed bodies towards Andrew. As they moved and shoved to let her through, the suffocating odours reached him more strongly. She reached him at last, stumbling over a prostrate body as she came. This called forth a stream of angry blasphemy such as he had never heard bettered, even in the Navy. But the woman moving towards him seemed completely indifferent to the abuse. She was tall; she had to stoop to avoid the low beams of the deckhead.
‘Are you Sara Dane?’
‘Yes ‒ I am.’
In the dimness he could make nothing of her ‒ what sort of woman she was. But the voice he knew instantly. It was the same one that he had heard raised in protest over the treatment of the child, when the convicts had been sent below after the burial service ‒ the voice which had troubled and puzzled him. He looked at her sharply.
‘And what have you got to do with this disturbance? You should be flogged for being disorderly.’
‘Disorderly!’ She swept the loose hair away from her face to look at him fully. For some reason he felt suddenly intimidated. ‘Do you call it disorderly to fight for what belongs to me? Why should I let this scum get their filthy hands on my things?’
‘What were they trying to take from you?’
‘This!’ She raised her hand and swung before his face a dirty handkerchief knotted at the corners and weighted. ‘My rations.’
Andrew looked around at the sullen faces and fervently wished that he were
out of this place. He was faced squarely here with the thought that was for ever at the back of his mind ‒ the hunger of the convicts. They lived mostly on salt pork and weevily ship’s biscuit. Brooks, who worked among them daily, had told him that the rations were far less than was needed to keep them in health ‒ there was always the fear of scurvy breaking out. There seemed nothing that he, or the captain, or even the East India Company itself could do about it ‒ they were paid a fixed rate to transport the convicts, and it did not stretch to luxuries. In spite of what Brooks tried to do for them, there were frequent deaths. Andrew had heard tales from other transports of the convicts hiding the dead for days, in order to draw the extra rations. As always, where there was hunger, the bullies rose from the mass to take what they could get by force.
‘Is this true?’ he asked her.
‘Of course it’s true!’ She gave her head a slight toss ‒ an action that was oddly youthful, and didn’t seem to fit her appearance. ‘Why do you think they …?’
He cut her short. ‘You’ve got too much to say! I’ll deal with this.’
He turned to the circle of faces about them. ‘One more instance of this ‒ just one more ‒ and I’ll see that you’re all punished. All of you ‒ do you hear?’ Then he addressed Sara Dane again. ‘And I don’t want to hear any more from you.’
‘Well, would you stand by and let them …?’
‘That will do!’
He wheeled, motioning her to follow. ‘Come with me!’ As the guard swung the door wide for them to pass, the raucous Cockney shout rang out again.
‘Have a nice time, sweetheart! Be sure and tell the officers there are plenty more of us where you came from!’
Andrew stopped abruptly and faced them.
‘Another word out of you,’ he said, ‘and you’ll be stopped deck exercise for ten days!’
The guard pulled the door closed with a crash, but the stifled laughter followed him along the passage to the companion-ladder. He motioned the woman behind him to hurry.
When he reached the upper deck he turned to watch her as she emerged into the clear light. She staggered a little, as if the sudden sweet air and the sunlight were a shock to her senses. He half-reached out a hand to support her, and then, glancing at the sergeant, he let it drop lamely again. She regained her balance, looking about her with an air of ease and composure that mixed sadly with her rags. His lips parted faintly in a smile of amusement to see there was even a touch of superiority about her. For a second or two she surveyed the deck with all the manner of a great lady invited aboard. Then, aware of his eyes upon her, she dropped her pose, and turned fully towards him.
He discovered that she was much younger than he had supposed. She was slim and straight, and the skin of the throat and face was unlined. But she carried the dirt of the prisons like a barrier to whatever beauty she might have possessed. Her face and neck had the greyish tinge of long-embedded dirt; her hair, fallen from its rough knot, hung lankly upon her shoulders. She had on a tattered gown many sizes too large; it had been hacked off at the front of the hem, and at the back it trailed on the deck behind her. She wore it with an air of impoverished grandeur.
Then she raised her eyes to him. A greenish-blue they were, almost the colour of the sea, he thought. They had a calculating, questioning expression.
‘It blows fresh up here, Lieutenant,’ she said quietly.
He glanced at her quickly, and then, remembering the guard, looked away. ‘That will be all, Sergeant.’
‘Very good, sir.’
He watched the man across the deck before he turned to her again. ‘Fresh …?’
For all his trying he couldn’t keep the curiosity out of his voice, and was instantly furious with himself for having answered her. It was a piece of rank impertinence that she had addressed him at all, and he should have rebuked her immediately. But with those queer green eyes fixed on him he had, for an instant, lost his head.
‘Perhaps you don’t notice it,’ she was saying. ‘But when one spends one’s time down where I do …’
‘Haven’t I told you to be quiet!’ he threw back at her. ‘Does nothing have any effect on you?’
He turned aside, motioning her to follow him to the passenger accommodation.
She made a little running step to catch up with him, twisting sideways to peer into his face.
‘But why shouldn’t I talk to you, Lieutenant? It can’t harm discipline ‒ there isn’t anyone to hear us. Besides, it’s a long time since I spoke to anyone like you. Down there’ ‒ she pointed to the deck ‒ ‘they don’t know the King’s English.’
He stopped short and faced her angrily.
‘If you’re down there with types you don’t like ‒ then it’s your own fault! People aren’t sent to Botany Bay without good reason!’
‘Oh, but …’
He jerked his head impatiently. ‘Can’t you understand? I’m not on this ship to listen to you talking. Now, for the last time ‒ be quiet!’
‘Yes, sir.’
She made a sketchy kind of curtsy towards him, and as she bowed her head he had an instant suspicion that she smiled. But she followed meekly enough. He could hear the limp swish of her skirt as it swept the deck.
II
Sara Dane had been born in London eighteen years ago, in a top room of a lodging-house in Villiers Street, off the Strand. At least that was where her father said she was born; but he had left so many lodging-houses in a hurry, owing money to his landladies, that she often wondered how he could remember which particular one it was.
She had loved her father, Sebastian Dane, passionately and blindly. He was a tall man, shoulders stooped beneath his height, and straight, black hair falling over his forehead. She always considered that his thin, dark face, with its fatal lines of dissipation and weakness, was far handsomer than any other she had ever seen. The times when he was sober, or only slightly drunk, he had an infectious gaiety, a good humour that made people love him, and landladies forget that he hadn’t paid his rent. There was a strong companionship between them. The only time Sara feared him was during the periods of real drunkenness, when he sat over his rum for days at a stretch, barely able to make the effort of rising from his chair. But this didn’t happen often ‒ for the most part he was a merry drunkard. His insidious, habitual drinking gradually drained his strength, and wore the edge off his brilliance.
He was the son of a West Country parson ‒ though his references to the life of the rectory in that pleasantly wooded Somerset valley meant little to his daughter, for she had never seen it. Sebastian, cynically, did not hesitate in the slightest to make capital from the fact that his father was a baronet’s son ‒ although a fourth son. He sometimes found that his name was good enough as security for the money he borrowed, knowing, in actual fact, that the name meant literally nothing. There wasn’t even a remote hope that either his father or his grandfather might settle any of the debts he incurred. He had seen his father only once since the end of his Oxford days, when he had come down possessed of a brilliant scholastic record, and no money whatever. Since he was obviously not a candidate for Holy Orders, influence was used to find him a position as secretary to a prominent Tory politician. But he was indolent, and already drinking too much, drifting always on the fringe of gamblers and money-lenders. His employer kept him for a year, and then, weighing his touch of brilliance against his multiple failings, finally asked him to leave ‒ not without some regret, Sebastian afterwards told Sara. He then attached himself as secretary to an ageing nobleman, who took him on a leisurely tour of the Continent for three years. The old man was charmed by him, his air of bonhomie and culture, and forgave his frequent lapses from grace. But Sebastian gambled once too often and too heavily with his lordship’s money, and one day he found himself travelling back to London with nothing more than a month’s wages and an excellent knowledge of French and Italian.
A few months later he wrote to his father that he had married a woman whom he described as an a
ctress ‒ another proof to his family of the state of utter hopelessness into which he had drifted, for she was a type of woman they believed he would never have become involved with if he had been in his right senses. His father journeyed grimly to London, and found them in their lodgings. His ecclesiastical tongue raked Sebastian over, leaving nothing unsaid which might describe more minutely his horror and dismay over what he called ‘this tragic and disastrous step.’ The new bride did not escape his scathing comment.
‘This is a scandalous affair, Sebastian!’ he snapped, enraged at the prospect of having to claim such a daughter-in-law. ‘She is sluttish! She is a woman of … of … no refinement!’
The painful interview went on for an hour or more, and at the end of it he offered to take Sebastian back to Somerset ‒ but the bride would have to remain where she was.
Sebastian’s reply was prompt. He pointed out that his wife was already pregnant and would soon have to leave the stage. He added that to desert her in such a condition was something not even his father should ask him to do.
‘In any case, sir,’ he finished mildly, ‘I find now that I have little taste for the country air.’
It was the last contact he ever had with his family.
Sara remembered her mother vaguely ‒ a tall, deep-bosomed woman, with a great deal of golden hair, and a bold, undeniable beauty. The image was not clear, and she had never quite believed Sebastian’s story that his wife had died of a fever. It seemed much more likely that her mother had gone off with one or other of her acquaintances of the ale-houses or the theatres, whose back-stages she frequented, even after her marriage.
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