The Wreck

by Meg Keneally

  Mrs Vale looked to Sarah.

  ‘No, madam, I arrived free,’ she said. ‘Although I don’t remember my arrival. I was plucked off the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. The fortunate survivor of the Serpent.’ She bowed her head, a gesture she would normally make when it suited her to seem compliant and demure. This time, though, she was ashamed; the bald description she had just given of the wreck was so inadequate, she feared it bordered on the disrespectful. She did not really believe in ghosts – still, she had no wish to be visited by an angry one.

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Vale. ‘We have a girl with some notoriety among us, it seems.’

  ‘If I have any fame, it is unsought,’ said Sarah. ‘And too dearly bought as well.’

  ‘Nevertheless, some of my guests might be diverted by your story when you serve them at table. Now, some rules.’

  Amelia, who had been full like a tick from milk, was now gurgling and stirring in her mother’s arms.

  ‘Don’t think Amelia understands rules,’ said Nell quietly.

  Sarah shot the young woman a glance. Mrs Vale was insufferable, but for now she was the only thing that prevented them from having to seek shelter in the local wooden shacks.

  ‘You will share a room. On rising at five, you will make your way here and begin preparations for breakfast. I assume one of you, at least, knows how to make bread – get a start on that for the day. You will find chickens to the left of the house, so one of you will need to collect the eggs. Put them in that bowl of sand over there.’ She nodded towards the sideboard. ‘In this blasted climate, eggs go off quite quickly.’ She stood up. ‘I should not need to say this, but I will. Neither of you, for any reason, shall leave these premises without my consent. Now, follow me.’ She led them to what was to be their bedroom, then left and closed the door behind her. Sarah half expected to hear a key in the lock.

  The space was small, only the size of a storeroom – which it might once have been, given its location just off the kitchen. One tiny window let in a miserly ration of late afternoon light, helped by a candle in a holder on the sill. The door required jiggling to ease it past one of the cots, while the other prevented it from opening all the way.

  Nell chose a cot and sat down, unbuttoning her dress and dragging it across to expose a nipple for a few seconds before Amelia began to suckle. Sarah sat on her own cot, but then, feeling restless, she stood up and made for the door, arching her body in order to squeeze between it and the bed.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Nell. ‘Herself said not to go out!’

  ‘I can’t even pace in here! Herself can say what she likes. We are not prisoners, not of hers.’

  ‘We might not be her prisoners, but she’s the gaoler,’ said Nell.

  Sarah snorted but did not try to leave. She unknotted the cloth bundle Nurse Haddon had given her to find a plain nightdress meticulously folded on top of her old clothes. ‘Gaoler or not,’ she said, ‘I can’t be trapped here. I need to get out at some point.’

  ‘Oh, so do I. Why do you need to leave, though? She seems to have warmed to you, that Mrs Vale.’

  The woman didn’t seem the type to warm to anyone, but Sarah didn’t need her to. She needed to find the people Watkins had been dealing with, in the hope they were less venal than him. Her only connection to Sam was among those who believed in the ideals he had died for. But what could she say to Nell?

  ‘I – I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘Who? I didn’t think you knew anyone here.’

  Sarah opened her mouth. Nell would understand, surely; she wouldn’t trust those in power. And telling the truth would allow Sarah to feel free in this small room, without having to guard her words. She had thought, though, that every man in the loft in London could be trusted. Her stomach clenched, and she closed her mouth again.

  Nell frowned. ‘Am I not your friend?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course, but I . . . I doubt you’d understand.’

  ‘I see. Because when a woman uses what’s between her legs, her brains fall out.’

  ‘No! No, I—’

  ‘Keep your secret,’ said Nell. ‘Keep your secret and shut your eyes and sleep. You may need to be up well before dawn.’

  *

  It took Sarah a moment to remember where she was. The last time she had been shaken awake, it was by Sam’s hand, the morning of the uprising.

  ‘You take a frightful long time to wake up,’ Nell was saying as she drew back from Sarah’s cot.

  By the light of a candle, assisted by a weak sliver of moonlight, Sarah could see a lumpen form on Nell’s bed. She sat up, alarmed, only to realise that Nell had arranged the bedclothes into a nest for Amelia.

  ‘You’ll watch her?’ Nell was saying. ‘I’ll be back before dawn, all washed and ready for that cow in the kitchen.’

  ‘What . . . wait, where are you going? You said yourself we’re not to go out.’

  ‘And you said we’re not prisoners.’ Nell bent over and kissed her daughter. ‘We can’t rely on the charity of Mrs Vale – or even Mrs Thistle. You’d think a ticket of leave would be the best thing that could happen here, but at least the King feeds you when you’re a prisoner. There are no workhouses, no poorhouses. If you can’t get work, you will starve.’

  ‘But you surely can’t be thinking of—’

  ‘Why not?’ said Nell.

  ‘You have a child, Nell!’

  ‘And how long will she live, do you think, when Mrs Vale gets rid of us? Oh, and she will, don’t think otherwise. She doesn’t want us here. She’ll catch me looking at the tea chest the wrong way, or she’ll say I stole something. I’ve seen them, Sarah. Women with babies in their arms, sitting against walls in town. Sometimes you can’t tell if they’re alive. I need something put by.’ She tucked Amelia’s makeshift nest around her.

  Sarah closed her eyes and remembered stepping over the lifeless and insensible bodies in Manchester, trying to make herself believe they were broken barrels or pieces of lumber.

  Nell said, ‘She might be hungry if she wakes, but I hope I’ll be back by then.’

  ‘There must be another way,’ Sarah said. ‘You can’t want to . . . Can you?’

  A scowl twisted Nell’s mouth. ‘Want to? What a stupid question! Want the fumbling and the pain and the breath in my face? Oh, they think I want to, if they think about it at all. Because we’re all whores, aren’t we?’ Nell walked over and looked down into Sarah’s face, spittle flying out with her words. ‘You’re better, yes? More intelligent. More moral. You’ll talk to me but not take me as a friend. You would never stoop, would never lift your skirts. But you know, really. You must do. The only difference between us is luck.’

  Amelia started to stir and whimper, so Nell went to rub her back until she quieted.

  ‘You can, at least, do this for me,’ Nell said softly to Sarah. ‘You can help me make sure she is never without a blanket.’

  She opened the door carefully so it wouldn’t creak, stepped around it, and was gone.

  *

  Amelia had been mewling for about half an hour when Nell got back in. Her dress – grey, austere, baggy around her shoulders – had a slight rip in its collar. There seemed, in the watery dawn creeping over the bare stone floor, to be a fresh scarlet mark on her cheek.

  Sarah was relieved to see her. She wanted to ask who had given Nell that mark, wanted to give the guilty party some marks of his own. But Nell looked exhausted. She gave Sarah a quick smile of thanks as she reached into her pocket and extracted some coins. She wrapped them in a handkerchief that she stowed under her mattress, then reached out to Amelia, whose face was beginning to scrunch and redden. She held the baby close for a moment, breathing in her scent, then sat on the cot and undid the buttons at the front of her dress with quick, thin fingers, letting the baby latch on. ‘Hope she didn’t make too much noise,’ Nell said. She sounded close to tears. ‘It was hard, harder than I thought. To leave her.’

  Sarah shook
her head. ‘She only started complaining a little while before you got in.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get her sorted now. Mrs Vale does not strike me as the kind to be patient with a baby’s complaints.’

  ‘You’re wrong, you know,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Am I? Is there a spark of charity in the woman that I didn’t notice?’

  ‘Not about Mrs Vale, you’re most probably right about her. I meant about me thinking I’m better than you. I know where circumstances can take people. There are things, though, that can be done to help. Steps that, if we took them, would stop you needing to find rough men with money in their pockets.’

  ‘Those are fairy stories,’ Nell protested. ‘Oh, I’ve heard the talk – everyone has. Every so often, somebody will decide to stand in the street and call for revolution against the governor, the King, whoever. Sometimes they get arrested, but for the most part they’re ignored – by the constables, and by all and sundry.’

  Sarah walked over to sit beside Nell. ‘It’s not a fantasy, or it needn’t be . . . We tried, in London. And we nearly succeeded.’

  ‘We? Nearly – nearly did what?’

  ‘Nearly started a revolution. But we were betrayed. My brother, the others, they were arrested. He was hanged.’

  ‘Why would you do something so dangerous, though?’

  ‘Because my parents died doing something that should not have been dangerous. They were killed for listening to a talk.’

  ‘And when your brother was arrested, you . . . you were set free?’

  ‘I escaped on the Serpent, which nearly sentenced me to death in place of a judge.’

  Nell was gaping at Sarah now, shaking her head. ‘You’re a criminal, then. The constables might arrest me if they felt like it, if they were bored. But you – if they knew, they’d hang you.’

  ‘They don’t know, though. Nor does anyone else, at least not here in Sydney. Except you, now.’

  Nell was silent for a minute, thinking. ‘I feel no need to say anything to anyone,’ she said eventually, a resolute ring to her voice. ‘Are you going to . . . ? You’re not continuing with it, not here?’

  ‘There is a man,’ said Sarah.

  Nell snorted. ‘Isn’t there always.’

  ‘Not like that. I don’t even know his name, just that he was supposed to be waiting at a tavern near the docks for an important delivery from the Serpent. He might know others who think as I do.’

  ‘Not much to go on, a man in a tavern.’

  ‘I know one other thing – he has a marking of some kind, maybe a tattoo.’

  Nell was nodding slowly. ‘I tend to see a few of those. Best draw it for me, in case it happens to pass before my eyes. Now, what would it look like?’

  CHAPTER 22

  Nell had fashioned a sling out of a bedsheet and tied it at a slant around her body, suspending little Amelia in its folds. Nell did not seem at all concerned about Mrs Vale’s view of the household linens being used in such a manner.

  The young woman had managed perhaps an hour’s sleep before it was time to get to the kitchen. ‘Can I collect the eggs?’ she asked Sarah. ‘If I have to stand still kneading dough I’ll fall asleep.’

  Sarah nodded, happy to mix the bread; she enjoyed the sensation of sinking her fingers into the dough.

  When she had finished with the bread she was using the sugar nips, broad-leafed scissors, on the white dome of a sugar loaf when Mrs Vale entered the kitchen.

  ‘Good morning, madam,’ Sarah said with a polite smile.

  Mrs Vale did not return the greeting, just walked over to her, squinting at the chunk of sugar loaf she had cut off to be broken up and used for tea. ‘Do not give the guests sugar unless they ask for it,’ the landlady said. ‘If I see further evidence of wastefulness, Mrs Thistle will hear of it.’

  Nell walked back in with the eggs, Amelia grizzling and squirming in her sling.

  ‘Please keep your child under control,’ Mrs Vale snapped.

  ‘She’s a baby, madam,’ said Sarah. ‘If Nell could control her, she would be the first in the world to do so.’

  ‘Then I shall make doing so the responsibility of both of you.’

  Nell feigned wide-eyed alertness whenever Mrs Vale’s eyes passed over her, but more than once Sarah had to set a small spill to rights. At one point she caught a fork Nell had been cleaning, just before it clattered to the floor, which would no doubt have brought Mrs Vale bustling in with accusations of vandalism.

  Sarah carried the food into the dining room, keeping her eyes down. She did not know if Mrs Vale had told the guests that the Serpent’s survivor would be serving them.

  They sat around a large polished table. Some – she guessed Mrs Thistle’s mariners – were having a lively conversation about the wind that was beginning to disturb the trees outside. Others sat awkwardly, trying to find space to read the newspaper. None of them paid Sarah any mind.

  She and Nell must have done a decent job with breakfast, for Mrs Vale nodded to them and spoke no word of complaint. ‘You had best be off, the two of you,’ she said.

  ‘Off to?’

  The landlady shook her head and sighed. ‘Did we serve beef last night? Yes. And do you see any cows here? Do you see any carrots or cauliflower? The only thing I can grow in this blasted soil is potatoes. So where, might I ask, do you think all the food comes from?’

  ‘The market,’ said Nell, adjusting Amelia in her sling and rubbing the baby’s back.

  ‘At least you have a few wits,’ said Mrs Vale.

  ‘And what might we use for money?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘You don’t honestly think I would give you two money to trot off with. Be back at noon – you won’t do a proper job in less time. Tell them to put their goods on the account of the English Rose, and mind you tell them to send the account to me, not to Mrs Thistle. And of course, ask for the best they have. Mrs Thistle expects certain standards to be met.’

  *

  Nurse Haddon would have been appalled at the dust being kicked up by the girls’ footsteps on their long walk to the market, staining their hems and threatening to reach the baskets Mrs Vale had given them. Their skirts, though, were purity itself compared with the clothes of those they passed on the road.

  The men wore yellow canvas decorated with blotches left by ancient mud and perhaps blood. They shuffled along; they had no choice, chained at the ankles as they were.

  One of them looked up, and Sarah braced herself for a leer that didn’t come. There was no answering spark when she looked into his eyes. His was a far emptier face than those of the convicts aboard the Serpent.

  Her parents had often worn desperation and anger on their faces, but they had never stopped being themselves. This man was lost to everyone.

  ‘Chain gang,’ Nell said. ‘They’ll be off to build a road or cut timber.’

  Nell walked on. If Sarah had followed her, had not paused for a moment longer as the chain gang passed, she would never have seen him, and he might not have recognised her.

  At first glance he was just another convict, although clearly new to the life. He was looking around rather than at his feet, perhaps still fascinated by the tall pale trees or searching for the sight of a kangaroo peering out of the forest. Then he looked towards Sarah. His eyes skimmed over her, wide and drinking in the strange light of this place. He began to turn away, then stopped. Perhaps he recognised a pattern of features. She certainly had.

  He gaped at her before he began to smile. She felt almost dizzy from shocked joy, restrained only by her doubts about what she was really seeing. She started towards him, for some reason worried he would be annoyed she had lost the little leaden sailor.

  Before she could reach him, an overseer appeared from the trees, cuffed him on the back of the head and pushed him on. Henry Landers shambled along behind the others, looking at her over his shoulder and nearly tripping on the unfamiliar ground.

  *

  As a child, Sarah had loved market da
y. It was a more cheerful gathering than each Sunday at church. Instead of sitting up and being told how she was irredeemably flawed and sinful and destined for hell, she could wander through the stalls, looking – but not too closely, in case she earned a glare from a stallholder – at the vegetables, pastries and meat. Eavesdropping on the adults as she wove around their legs, she had heard about what Mrs Figgis was up to with the butcher, and how Mr Cleary had come home drunk the second time that week, while his children were in a disgraceful state with no shoes.

  But even if this market had been like the ones of her childhood, she would not have taken any of it in. Her joy at seeing Henry had been joined by less pleasant stablemates. She felt ashamed for having imagined a sneer on his face and coins in his pocket; for picturing him tossing the little leaden soldier aside, as it was no longer needed for the ruse. She was ashamed, too, for being happy he was here. This Henry, bruised and chained up, with dried blood on his face, was a grotesque echo of the handsome lad in the Marylebone loft. Although if he was here, maybe Tourville was too; maybe they had not been informers. Her breathing eased at the thought – perhaps it was still possible to trust.

  She had to find a way to help Henry. Perhaps she could appeal to Mrs Thistle to intercede. What if the old woman could request Henry as an assigned convict? If only Sarah could think of a way to explain how she knew him without any mention of rebellion.

  For now, though, she and Nell had been given a list of items to buy. They were outside the market house, a plain building with an incongruous dome topped by a weather vane, like a servant wearing an ornate feathered hat. Carts churned up the dirt as they came and went, or stood by the outer wall as men in shirtsleeves carried goods in and out, while horses gave the occasional whicker from within their feedbags. Crates and barrels were piled up along the outer wall, seemingly unwatched, although Sarah heard a gruff man shooing away some children who had been showing an interest in his apples.

  Inside the stallholders stood cross-armed behind their wares, staring unblinkingly at anyone who approached. Sarah presumed this was the price of setting out one’s wares in a town full of criminals.