by Meg Keneally
He seemed far too young to be weighed down by the grand title of surgeon. He did not look any older than Sam, but he must have been to have trained in doctoring and then found his way out here. Tall and as thin as a weaver, he moved through the dead house and the infirmary with an unwitting authority, the gait of a man who knew he would not have to run at a moment’s notice. She recognised that walk from the idle sons of the houses for which she had done laundry. Truman, though, lacked their hauteur.
‘There is to be an inquest,’ he said. ‘When you are strong enough.’
‘An inquest will not help them,’ she said, inclining her head towards Maisie.
‘It may help others, Miss Marin. Ships do not routinely run into the rocks here. The captain may have been at fault, and if he was we need to understand its nature. If there was another cause, we may take steps to ensure the next ship reaches our harbour safely.’
‘So a trial for a dead man, then,’ she said.
Watkins had retained enough of his clothes for decency in death. She looked at the still legs and remembered them carrying him from one end of the deck to the other, darting, shouting. Throwing a command over each shoulder, not pausing to check if the words had been snatched by the wind. Racing towards her, intent on her destruction. And straight at the wheel, steering as though the ship could be steered, yelling instructions to the dead.
He must have been at least partly responsible for bringing his ship’s passengers and crew together in the dead house. She knew he’d been a venal man who had abjured his belief in equity; she knew he had made changes to the ship in exchange for money. But the yeoman who had gutted her father, the rider of the horse that had trampled her mother, neither of them had been brought before an inquest, and there had been no attempt to cast blame over a field of bodies. If those who had put them there did not answer for it in life, why should Watkins answer in death?
But as she well knew, there were those who wanted answers and refused to accept that the Serpent’s only survivor didn’t have them. Most of the colony had read the article that Nurse Haddon had shared with her, and most had an opinion on her survival, ranging from the assistance of God to that of the devil, to fate, and to some concealed unnatural strength. Whatever their view – whether she was a miracle or an abomination – they were all determined to see her.
The article had mentioned the infirmary, and it seemed everyone in town knew the building with a rickety veranda around the second floor, where Sarah slept. On her first afternoon there, she had asked Nurse Haddon if she could take some air on it, and been rebuffed. ‘Quite unseemly to appear in your nightdress for anyone to see,’ the nurse had said. ‘And I would not be taking any chances on that balcony’s ability to support you.’
When Nurse Haddon had opened the veranda doors to allow in the day’s ration of fresh air, Sarah had heard the uninvited visitors. At first there were just a few muffled conversations, then as the days went on a generalised murmuring, and the occasional raucous shout that made her think some of the gawkers had brought their own refreshments, of which Nurse Haddon would certainly disapprove.
They had crowded around as she’d stepped outside the infirmary that morning, some of them pressing forward, hands grasping at her. A few evidently still clung to hope of their loved ones’ survival. One yelled, ‘Tom? Have you seen my Tom?’ Another, ‘Did you know Emma? She wore a yellow dress most of the time.’ Sarah stared straight ahead, trying to breathe steadily, to ignore the tugs on her skirt and sleeves, while knowing these people would not be satisfied by any answer she could give them. She jammed her hands into new pockets provided by charity, which did not contain lost loved ones or little leaden sailors.
She wished she could help them by giving them hope. She remembered the temptation to descend into madness after her parents were killed, to pretend they still lived. And she had ample proof of the reality of their deaths – a year ago now, she realised with a shock. Most of these people would never have anything to bury.
On the outskirts of the throng stood a man plainly dressed in a brown coat and white cravat, all clean enough. He had not been as particular with his hair that sprang in crinkled greyish licks from under his hat. As Sarah and Truman were approaching the coach, he stepped closer to them.
Truman pursed his lips and said, ‘Not now, Mobbs.’
‘When, then? She’s not your property,’ he said in an accent that told Sarah he had not been born far from her. He took another step forward. ‘Hello, lovely,’ he said to Sarah. He thrust a thin booklet at her, and she took it without thinking. ‘That is what happened while you were sleeping,’ he said, nodding to the document. ‘I have tried to contact you through several avenues, but your guard dogs are too vicious.’
‘She’s not talking to the Colonial Flyer or any other paper,’ Truman said, bundling Sarah into the carriage and climbing in after her. ‘I am sorry, Miss Marin,’ he said when they sat down. ‘Mobbs has been quite persistent, but you are under no obligation to speak to him.’
Sarah looked at the document the journalist had given her. It was a pamphlet, she realised. She had not been inclined to speak to Mobbs and now felt even less so; after all, the last man to thrust a pamphlet at her had been the barker at her brother’s execution. Unlike that pamphlet, though, this one did not have a drawing that had been reused for printing after printing. Beneath large letters – which told her she was holding The Melancholy Wreck of the ‘Serpent’, available for purchase for one shilling – was a pen-and-ink drawing of a figure being pulled up a cliff face on the end of a rope, above the curled waves of an angry ocean. The person looked like a shrouded corpse or a bat wrapped in its own wings, but the small caption left her in no doubt about what was being represented: The Survivor Rescued.
Had the ropes under her arms bruised her flesh? She had occasionally peeked down the neck of her nightgown when Nurse Haddon wasn’t watching – the woman would never approve of such immodesty – and had seen a collection of colours from grey to purple to yellow on her skin. Her arms, when she rolled up her sleeves, were similarly festooned. But if any of those marks had been left by ropes, they were so subsumed in a wash of other bruises that it was impossible to tell.
She scrunched the pamphlet and considered throwing it out the window of the coach, but instead found her hand reaching for her pocket. She could feel its weight in there for some time afterwards. Two pamphlets, she thought. Two McCaffreys. And each of us at the end of a rope.
CHAPTER 19
‘How many limbs? How many heads?’
Nell’s questions were not ones Sarah felt like answering. When she had returned from the dead house, she must have looked pale, as she had been put straight to bed by Nurse Haddon. Sarah had secreted the pamphlet under her mattress. She felt insubstantial, as though the flesh in the dead house had absorbed a part of her soul. When she had been in that room she had seen only what was there, her eyes too full of actual horror for her mind to invent any. Now, though, she could only see Sam in her imagination, his head separated from his body, which was laid out before being tipped into the earth.
Nell was sitting as far forward in her bed as her stomach would allow, eyes wide.
This is what you have now, Sarah thought. This is all you have. The remembrance sickened her; she was impossibly far from a home where no one was left for her anyway.
‘I did not count the limbs or the men,’ she told Nell sharply. ‘And I saw nothing that would make me blush.’
‘Well, if it wouldn’t make you blush, it would have no effect on me.’
Nell had decided that Sarah was a prissy woman of constrained morality, although she did not seem to resent Sarah for her imagined prudishness any more than she would resent rain for being wet. ‘But you must have seen something,’ she said. ‘I’ll not force you to yell it across the ward.’ She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and braced herself with her hands, about to get up.
Sarah stood herself, and was nearly forced back onto her cot by dizz
iness. Nurse Haddon insisted young women who were ill enough for the infirmary needed to prove it by lying down as much as possible. But Sarah imagined Nell tripping and falling, the moving knot just under the skin of her belly suddenly still. The only way to dissuade Nell from coming to her was to go to Nell, so she crossed the short distance to Nell’s bed and perched on the edge.
‘I’m not half as sick as she’d have you think, you know,’ said Nell. ‘Nor you, I suspect. She’s a collector of lost birds, is Nurse Haddon. So’s Mrs Thistle, who owns half of Sydney. Warehouses. Ships. Houses. Inherited her husband’s business, and now she can buy and sell most people here. She won’t send us back out to the cats if she thinks we can’t fly fast enough.’
*
Sarah had flown without knowing it. She had skidded up along the cliff face, nothing between her and the rocks and waves except air, and perhaps the phantoms of those who had perished.
In sleep she dipped, as she did so often now, in and out of fragmented dreams in which screams gave way to the sound of water. So she was the only one in the infirmary awake the next morning to see the dawn seeping in through the windows. Enough light to read by.
She cursed the rattle and squeak of her cot as she got up. She gently reached under the mattress to extract the pamphlet, rolling onto her side and pulling up her sheet so she could pretend to be asleep if someone woke or came in. Then she straightened out and opened the pamphlet. Another drawing greeted her, this one of rescuers crowded at the base of the cliff, watching jagged timbers and masts being lashed by waves. Below it was dense text, with the heading The Melancholy Wreck of the ‘Serpent’.
Grief lies heavily upon this town. A cataclysm has occurred of such proportions that it has reached into every home and every heart. And with the cataclysm, a mystery, for very little is known of the woman who was pulled from a sea that claimed her fellow travellers.
For most of us, the first intimation of the horrors to come arrived in the form of sundry articles floating in from the sea. Those who braved the rain that morning reported seeing cabin doors, their thick timbers shredded like paper, the bolts that had secured them twisted and deformed, along with casks of tripe and beer. There were also personal effects such as a lady’s nightdress and a child’s toy. A mailbag, its contents no doubt sodden to illegibility, was marked ‘No. 2, per Serpent, Plymouth, May 1820’.
If any doubted that these artefacts presaged a calamity, they had only to wait by the waters. One report we received was of a man, his face wounded but white, washed of blood. Many others followed. Some were convicts who had been transported in the hold, but most of them were surely dragged below by their leg irons. Other witnesses spoke of limbs, of a torso in a midshipman’s jacket, and of a boy, perhaps three or four years old.
The brig ‘Vixen’ followed these horrors into the harbour, making all haste to the shore, its captain running to the harbourmaster with tales of a sea full of the deceased. The harbourmaster, we are told, already knew about the wreck, as the lighthouse keeper had come to him at dawn. The keeper said he had been unable to see or hear anything through the gale, but had been alerted by his dog, running to the cliff and back, barking until hoarse.
A lad was sent, running against the easterly rain, to the place called The Gap. The ocean has paid special attention to that part of the cliff over the centuries, wearing it away to the point that those without intimate knowledge of Sydney’s edge might mistake it for the entrance to the harbour. When the boy returned, he would not speak.
By the time the harbourmaster set out for The Gap, hundreds were doing the same. Those who arrived with the dawn said there was little left of the vessel, although the winds it had sailed through were still present, hurling gouts of spray so high that the water speckled the faces of those watching. The passengers and crew were there too: thrown against the shore, reclaimed by the waves, then thrown again. Some had lost their clothes to the sea, while others were in nightshirts or uniforms. There were some solitary limbs being churned together with fragments of sail, cases, clothes, and crates of pickles and pork.
Those present on the cliff declare themselves to have been transfixed by horror, retching and wailing, unable to look away.
Every vessel with a master willing to take to the seas was sent up and down the coast. They did not expect to find survivors, and they returned only with corpses to the dead house at the quay.
When the seas began to shrink, the harbourmaster ordered that men were to be lowered on ropes over the cliff. He was perhaps moved by the impulse to ensure a Christian burial for as many as could be retrieved. Those that did come up were beyond any help but the Almighty’s, and it seemed that the sea would yield only the dead.
The harbourmaster had counted over one hundred when a woman near him called in disbelief that she had seen a body twitching. The rescuers moved as fast as they could over the flat, smooth rocks, scrambling towards a small white figure that lay on a high rock, out of reach of the worst of the waves.
Many colonists have been nursing the hope that the survivor could be a loved one, but no one has claimed her as such. If the cause of the ‘Serpent’s misfortune is the most pressing question in Sydney at present, surely the identity of this woman cannot be far behind it in importance.
There was more – breathless accounts of the state of the bodies and the suffering of bereaved families – but Sarah had no desire to read it. She crumpled the pamphlet again and pushed it back under her mattress. She had wanted to sink into the river of the newly arrived, her true identity obliterated by the wreck of the Serpent, and set about finding those who held the beliefs her brother had died for, shaded by the anonymity of a brown dress and a white cloth cap. Instead, she was now one of the most famous women in Sydney.
*
Truman was among those presiding over the inquest. He sat at a long table beside Nicholas Greenwich, the superintendent of police, who seemed to enjoy slapping his open palm onto the tabletop. Sarah sat in front of them, alone on a rickety chair, in the shadow of the empty magistrate’s bench under the courtroom’s vaulted ceiling.
Greenwich’s face had been deeply engraved by the sun and wind, etched with channels that no doubt captured raindrops when the weather was bad.
Sarah did not tell them about the rudder, although she felt a corrosive anger at the knowledge that Watkins had put Maisie beneath that rough canvas cloth in the dead house. If he had lived she would have done anything to force him to pay for it, but he was beyond payment now, and she could not indict him without questions about why he had cannibalised the ship. She might set in train events leading to the arrest of those she did not yet know; those whose beliefs were closer to her own than Greenwich’s would ever be. So she said that the captain had been imbibing, and that his men had seemed unable to steer the ship.
‘Watkins was a rogue, in my experience,’ Greenwich said. ‘He has caused us to exert ourselves at various taverns over the years. I presume you found him somewhat irregular as well.’ He peered at Sarah from beneath scraggly grey eyebrows, clearly expecting her agreement.
She shut her eyes; there was Watkins, hauling on a wheel that would not respond.
‘Odd, maybe,’ she said. ‘Not mad.’
‘Not the act of a sane man, though, is it?’ said Greenwich, looking at Truman. ‘Procedure dictated he should stand off until morning.’
‘We should not be bringing snippets of rumour into these proceedings,’ said Truman.
‘Ah, but rumour can be quite illuminating,’ Greenwich retorted. ‘And it is, of course, one of the chief currencies of the sea.’
‘So the man drank,’ said Truman. ‘He’s hardly the first sea captain to do so.’
‘Perhaps. But that is not the rumour that chiefly concerns me. It is said the captain had certain radical sympathies.’ The superintendent looked at Sarah, one eyebrow raised in a question.
‘It is also said that many shipwrecks are caused by sea monsters,’ she said.
‘I find that a r
ather interesting response,’ said Greenwich. ‘Perhaps you share his views?’
Sarah focused on keeping her body still, her face immobile, even as she wanted to leap from the chair and run from the room, then hide in the crowd outside the infirmary or in the wilderness that fringed the settlement.
‘What the captain’s beliefs were,’ she said, ‘I’m not to say.’
‘There are rumours, too, of treasure,’ Greenwich said as he dipped a pen into a wooden ink pot and began scratching at a piece of paper, his eyes cast down – perhaps wanting her to believe that the question was of little consequence.
Truman sighed. ‘Superintendent, I have heard similar rumours about just about every wreck for the past five years.’
‘Yes, well, I never claimed they were true. And they don’t have to be, to cause trouble. Perhaps the men got wind of it. Perhaps there was an assault on the captain’s cabin, a mutiny.’ Greenwich stopped writing and met Sarah’s gaze.
‘I saw no treasure, nor heard any talk of it. Captain Watkins, he certainly didn’t dress like a man with a chest of gold in his cabin.’
‘Well, if it exists,’ said Truman, ‘it is at the bottom of the ocean now.’
‘Yes, better prepare yourself, Mr Truman,’ said Greenwich. ‘There is always someone who hears of treasure and decides to go looking for it, even if it’s in a dozen feet of water.’
*
Sarah’s bed was occupied when she returned to the infirmary.
Truman had escorted her back in the coach, which shielded her again from the shouted questions, the touches, the invocations and exhortations and curses. He had intended to check on Nell but was met with resistance from Nurse Haddon, waiting at the entrance. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘I should not have to tell you that these young ladies need their rest. We look forward to seeing you for rounds tomorrow. I’m sure Miss Marin has had a very trying day, and I intend to ensure she gets undisturbed peace to make up for it.’ Truman offered no resistance, tugging the brim of his hat in Sarah’s direction and heading for the stairs.