by Meg Keneally
‘It was not my plan!’
‘It brings me no joy to see you here,’ he said. ‘I tried to warn you.’
‘Warn me, or get information from me?’
‘Truly the former, if you can believe it. At the time I wasn’t sure who you were, although the thought had occurred to me. I recently received a very interesting letter.’ He waved the papers he was holding. ‘You remember Albert Tourville, I presume.’
She nodded.
‘He wrote to the governor, who passed the letter on to me. Tourville has described you in detail – long dark hair, Northern accent, et cetera, et cetera. He thought you might have found your way onto a ship, and I dare say my counterparts in South Africa and Bombay have received similar letters. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first, even though I am not in the habit of receiving correspondence from the aristocracy.’
‘Tourville is not an aristocrat!’
‘Well, he would have been, if history had taken a different course. He fled France as a child, you see.’
‘Yes, with a cousin, he said.’
‘No, with his nanny. His parents had been imprisoned, you see, and ultimately beheaded. Tell me, was it his suggestion to behead the Cabinet? In any case, he writes that, let’s see . . .’ Greenwich unfolded the letter, shaking the pages a few times. ‘Ah, yes – he writes that he will, until his last breath, cut down those willing to shed blood in the name of their misguided ideals.’ He refolded the letter. ‘I am greatly disappointed. Mrs Thistle was kind to you, in her way. I know she can be vexing, but she did not have to take you in as she did. She did not even have to glance in your direction.’
He sounded like a schoolmaster mildly rebuking a child, and like a man who would forget her as soon as he left the cell.
‘I was just trying to warn her!’ Even as Sarah said the words, she knew she came across like any other lag claiming innocence – but she found it unbearable to be asked to atone for a crime she had tried to prevent.
Greenwich shook his head. ‘After we spoke at the garden party, I convinced myself that you had been caught up against your better judgement in ridiculous, treasonous plans with no chance of success. That you were just a young, foolish woman with nowhere else to go, so I should let you be. I even felt sympathetic towards you. But you kept meeting with those people, and you involved yourself with no coercion in a plan to assassinate Mrs Thistle. And then, of course, I opened the letter from Tourville.’
‘I only discovered their plan the night before. I was trying to save her!’
‘Was this plan not discussed at a meeting sometime prior? And would that not have been an opportune time to warn Mrs Thistle?’
‘It was mentioned, but I didn’t believe they were serious. And I did tell her, that there were those who wished her harm. She didn’t seem concerned in the slightest.’ Sarah paused to think. ‘You were having me followed?’
‘Tourville is not the only police informant to infiltrate a rebel group,’ Greenwich said.
‘If you had someone at that meeting, you must know I argued for peace.’
‘Yes, I would have, too, if I had already been betrayed by one person and feared a similar betrayal by another. It would be a convenient story to tell, should a time like this arrive. Mr Baxendale has an exceptional memory. His wife was killed, you see, in a convict uprising some time ago. So he, like Tourville, takes this sort of thing quite seriously.’
‘But he was the one who drew Keenan into this. And you were willing to let him, at the risk of Mrs Thistle’s life.’
‘Do not think Mr Keenan is an innocent who was unduly influenced. He has been a concern to us for quite some time. And he is still at large, as he managed to slip away while the constables were arresting you. But I assure you, he will be captured, tried and hanged.’
‘As will I,’ said Sarah.
‘That is yet to be determined. We will send you to the Female Factory for the present, and I shall be writing to Tourville and awaiting further instructions – he intimated that Her Majesty’s Government would prefer such a crime, and such a criminal, to be dealt with on their own shores, as visibly as possible.’
She might, then, be hanged on the same gallows as her brother had been. Oddly, she found herself wishing they would hurry up and do it.
CHAPTER 35
What if she survived a violent shipwreck, only to drown in calm waters?
Unlike the other women in the sloop pushing its way upriver, Sarah had her hands manacled. Some of the others aboard were laughing as they boisterously shoved each other, and Sarah was terrified of being tipped into the water.
Most of these women were being sent to the Female Factory for minor infractions. Perhaps they had not displayed the required decorum while in service, or been caught weaving drunkenly down a street. Some were new arrivals to the colony being sent west until they could be farmed out as assigned servants or indifferent brides to unknown men. Most here, though, had been given a trial.
No charge had been laid against Sarah. Her presence on the boat had been a surprise to its master; the constable had simply appeared as the boatman was readying to cast off, asked if the man in charge could fit another, and left Sarah there without awaiting a response.
She could tell that no one quite knew what to make of her. She did not sleep when they stopped for the night, and she spent her time silently staring at the water, wincing whenever the boat rocked. If she looked long enough into the blank face of the river, perhaps she could dissolve herself, leaving behind an animated corpse with no memory of names like Sam, Henry and Nell.
After the sloop arrived at their destination, the women were led in a gaggle from the river to an expansive scrappy lawn encircled by a high wall, over which loomed a two-storey sandstone building. An overseer came out of a smaller building to the side of the yard and started separating them into groups, reeling off their names. When he reached the bottom of his list, he looked up at the only woman wearing irons. ‘Heard from the superintendent about you.’ He beckoned over a man with wiry grey hair and bushy eyebrows, whispered in his ear and nodded to Sarah.
The man, who had to be a turnkey, gripped her painfully by the elbow, propelling her under a low archway and towards a building that seemed hewn all of a piece from one of the cliffs. Appended to its side was a patch of yard where women broke rocks beneath a canvas awning, and some of them looked up as Sarah passed.
‘Back to work, you lot!’ the turnkey yelled as he led Sarah through a door into the stone building.
Once she had been forced up the set of rickety stairs, the rooms she passed had bare floors, broken windows, and the smell of excrement. Some contained several cots, but the room the turnkey unlocked had just one. The only light came from a tiny window set high in the wall, and apart from the cot, the only furnishing was a bucket in the corner. The cell was small enough for Sarah to cross in one pace; she suspected that if she did not have her wrists constrained, she could stretch out her arms to touch both walls at once.
She was gripped by an irrational conviction that once the door closed, it would never open again. ‘How long am I to stay here?’
‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘Until you hang, I suppose.’
‘Am I not even to get a trial?’
‘Ah yes, but the magistrates, they don’t look kindly on high treason.’ He scratched his pock-marked cheek. ‘Makes an interesting change, having you in here. Most of the crimes them out there have committed are far less imaginative.’
Sarah’s mind began clouding with panic, and she feared she might get to a point where thought was impossible, where wailing and gibbering was all that was left. She took a few breaths and steadied herself. ‘Can I have some paper? I want to write a letter, you see.’
‘To some of your treacherous friends?’
She allowed herself only a moment’s thought. Any significant pause might make him suspicious. ‘No,’ she said, ‘to my aunt.’
Although the light in the doorway was dim, she could se
e that this man had recently been chained himself. He had a bent back, and around his wrists, closed but not healed, were livid marks, the kind made by manacles that had stayed on for a long time.
‘I don’t want to cause any trouble,’ she said, ‘but my aunt doesn’t know where I am. Or what I am. Likely I’ll never see her again, and I want to tell her myself. I want to explain, to say goodbye.’
The man was frowning, confused now as he stared at her.
‘I think I can be at peace with my fate,’ she said, ‘if I’ve made my peace with her. It would be unbearable, thinking of her not knowing.’
He paused, rubbing at his eyebrows. ‘We read it, you know. Whatever goes out of here.’
‘I wouldn’t write anything to give you concern. I just wish to soothe the fretting of an old lady who’s been kind to me.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Paper costs money. Don’t suppose you have anything to pay with?’
Sarah found herself backing against the wall. It occurred to her how vulnerable she was. How she could scream and fight and kick and it would make no difference. How she was more isolated now than she had been in the middle of the ocean on the Serpent.
He was shaking his head. ‘Not that,’ he said gruffly. ‘Look, I can’t promise you anything. I’ll see, though, and that’s the best I can say.’
Before she finished thanking him, he had shut and locked the door.
*
Sarah soon lost track of time, as she only saw another person when the hatch to her cell opened and food was pushed in.
One day, the door opened fully. She could tell it was daytime because she could see the turnkey’s extravagant eyebrows and permanent purple bracelets. He handed her a piece of paper, along with a small stick of charcoal, and said, ‘You have an hour.’
Sarah stared at the paper and charcoal. It seemed almost impossible to believe there was a world in which such things still existed.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘I am so—’
‘You can show your thanks by being finished by the time I come back. And I’ll be checking it, don’t think I won’t be.’ He started towards the door, then paused. ‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘In London. I had no letters, you see, when I first was freed, and couldn’t get anyone to write for me. She didn’t know what had become of me, so I learned my letters. I wrote to say I’d been sorry to leave her, and I hoped to make my way back to her.’
‘Perhaps you will,’ said Sarah.
The turnkey shook his head. ‘A man wrote back, said they’d been married and a fever took her.’ She thought he might say something more, but he just sighed and left.
For a moment she held the charcoal above the paper. She had no way of knowing what had happened after Keenan had fired his rifle; she might be seeking aid from a corpse.
Eventually, she touched the charcoal to the paper.
My dearest aunt Georgina,
I am very sad to tell you that I have been imprisoned in the Female Factory for a crime for which I do not hold out much hope for acquittal. I regret the disappointment and grief this news must cause you. Please rest in the knowledge that you have my highest regard, and my gratitude for your many past kindnesses.
This may well be the last you hear of me in this life, so I wish to ask a very small favour. I still owe a debt to your sailing companion Mrs Rose, who visited me in the infirmary. She lives, as you know, to the north-west of the town. Would you be kind enough to call on her and tell her I regret I may be unable to repay her kindness, but that I will think of her in whatever time remains to me with great affection, as indeed I think of you.
Sarah recalled Mrs Thistle’s reaction to Nell’s murder.
Mrs Rose is an upright woman. I ask her forgiveness for the wrongs I have done her, but will not own the sins to which I have not earned a right. I ask her for absolution, which I have known her to give more easily than a priest.
Your loving niece
Sarah
She folded the letter. The address she wrote on the outside was that of the building in which she had first opened her eyes after the wreck.
Mrs Georgina Haddon, Sydney Infirmary
CHAPTER 36
Sometimes on waking, Sarah could not tell where she ended and the stones of the cell began. The part of her body that had been lying on the floor was cold, felt foreign when she touched it, and had as little feeling as a rock.
She had tried asking the men who brought her meals what was to happen to her, or if they knew anything of Mrs Thistle’s fate. They never answered. Perhaps those in power had decided to dispense with the trial altogether, and had already condemned her to a slow, voiceless death in this cell.
Although she had no clear grasp of time, she suspected she had been there at least a month, because the stifling heat had started to dissipate, and she caught the occasional tang of wood smoke on the rare breeze.
She wondered if Henry knew what had happened to her. She imagined him hopefully looking up from his labour, waiting for a visit that wouldn’t come.
Either Nurse Haddon had not passed on her message, or it had been ignored. Or Mrs Thistle had not survived.
Sarah had been arrested in the brown woollen gown that Nurse Haddon had given her. She had kept it pristine when such things had seemed important, but now it was frayed and stained. Her fingernails were chipped and ragged because she passed time scratching pictures in the muck on the floor whenever a small amount of light penetrated the cell. When she was in darkness, she sang half-remembered hymns to a God she no longer believed in. She had long since stopped caring about the deterioration in her voice, which had come to resemble the call of the crows that would sit in the trees outside the English Rose. She wished that she had spent more time appreciating their glossy black feathers and thanking them for producing what song they could.
For a while she had felt a flare of hope whenever the door opened, but now the key seemed to mock her each time it entered the lock. She did not look up anymore.
‘Hardly the greeting I would have expected,’ said a familiar voice when the door opened one morning. ‘I would have thought that gratitude was in order.’
Sarah, who had been on her knees staring at the far wall, got up as quickly as she could – a process far slower than it had once been, driven by muscles that had rarely moved since the cell door had closed for the first time.
Molly Thistle seemed a little thinner. She had a black cane, and when she stepped into the cell there was a catch to her gait. Her eyes fell on Sarah’s privy bucket, and she winced; the guard had not yet emptied it that day. ‘I had visions of a tearful embrace, but just now I’ll thank you to keep your distance.’
Sarah began to smile, the skin on her lips cracking. Then she stopped. Her dreams had brought her back to London, to the yard at Newgate where Sam was hanged, to the field where her parents had died. Had they now brought the phantom of Mrs Thistle, a smoky wisp of hope that would be snatched away by the next breeze?
‘Well?’ said the old woman sharply. ‘Are you coming?’
‘Am I . . . where?’
‘To see the superintendent. Now, do not hope too much just yet. You may be coming back here. It all depends.’
‘On what?’ said Sarah, still bewildered.
‘On how I acquit myself, and whether Superintendent Greenwich slept well last night or fought with his wife, and on how much he cares about his reputation. He’s removed himself to a house near here, having grown tired of living in the bustle of Sydney. If we call on him now, we may gain an audience before he leaves. That meeting may end with your freedom – or it may end with me in a cell next to yours.’
*
Sarah was certain that she stank, though she could not smell it after being surrounded by her stench for so long. Molly Thistle did not mention it, and had probably smelled as bad herself when she was a convict, but she left the carriage window open. A more delicate woman would not have allowed Sarah to make any contact whatsoever with the fine upholstery, but Mrs Th
istle did not seem to mind, smiling warmly at her from the opposite seat.
The carriage’s upholstery was the first soft surface on which Sarah had sat since her arrest, and its windows admitted more light than she had seen since her cell door had closed.
She had thought so often of Mrs Thistle that she wondered if she had finally descended into madness. Was she actually grinning at the wall of her cell? If she were living in a fantasy, though, she would surely not have imagined the occasional jolt the carriage gave her, or the slightly too-cool breeze flowing in through the partially open window. And surely she would have made herself less fragrant.
As her sense of reality began to return, she warned herself not to hold it too tightly – there was no guarantee this trip would not end with her back in her cell.
‘I . . . I am glad you’re alive,’ she said. ‘I was not part of the plot, no matter what the superintendent says.’
‘I am alive, very possibly, because you shouted and I looked up. The shot went into my shoulder. Bit feverish for a while, and it knocked me down so hard that my ankle still hasn’t forgiven me.’ Mrs Thistle put a gentle hand on Sarah’s. ‘I received your letters. And while I am still angry, still hurt, I did miss you. It certainly is not easy to find someone who is congenial company, who understands business, whom one can trust – despite certain information being withheld.’ She smiled again, then shook her head as if to clear it. ‘Anyway, it takes a while to train somebody to do things just so, and then you disappeared.’
‘Hardly by choice,’ said Sarah.
‘Well, now you have another choice in front of you – or a necessity, if you prefer. And what you decide, by the time this coach stops moving, will determine what I say to the superintendent.’
‘I wasn’t aware I had the ability to decide anything right now.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Thistle, ‘one of the most important of your life. Are you, or are you not, planning to consort with your revolutionary friends if you regain your freedom?’
‘But it’s not freedom, not really. Nell wasn’t free. Even after her sentence, she was not free to choose.’