The Wreck

by Meg Keneally

  ‘Cloth, tea. Some skins, as well – the hide had been scraped to the point where I could see light through it.’

  Mrs Thistle nodded. ‘Good. You must send something back each time. Even if you can’t find a problem with any of it.’

  ‘Always flaws to be found, if you look hard enough,’ said Sarah. ‘I was walking past Greenwich’s old house yesterday, and it might make a good location for the home.’

  Mrs Thistle put her teacup down. ‘That, dear girl, is a very lucrative property,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we can find something more suitable for your destitutes.’

  ‘My destitutes, as you call them, are in circumstances that you and I could easily have found ourselves in, had our fates taken even the smallest step to one side or another. And you often tell me that honesty and consistency are crucial to maintaining this business.’

  ‘And you’re about to point out that I did promise,’ said Mrs Thistle.

  Sarah smiled, practised copying the old woman’s usual expression of alert serenity as she sipped her tea.

  ‘Oh, very well. I will make it over to you, and you may open its doors to the most unfortunate women in the colony. And you will, I hope, remember that thanks to me, you are not among their number.’

  Sarah put a hand on Mrs Thistle’s knee. ‘Always,’ she said, hearing a catch in her voice. Mrs Thistle smiled, and Sarah fancied she caught a shine in her eyes beyond her spectacles. She realised she had never seen the woman shed tears.

  ‘Well, I am about to give you something else to be grateful for,’ Mrs Thistle said. As she was not a woman given to tender moments, whenever one arose she deployed her most businesslike voice and her briskest manner.

  She took a wooden box from the side table. Sarah had not noticed it, but now she could not stop looking at its intricate inlay: amid flower petals of light wood, an S was twined around an H.

  Mrs Thistle moved the box so that its little brass catch was facing Sarah, and opened it. Inside was a fine gold chain, from which hung a circular charm in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail. The work was very fine, with the scales of the snake picked out along the circumference of the circle, its eyes set with tiny chips of ruby, its fangs sharp and precise.

  Sarah looked up to Mrs Thistle and beamed. ‘I never thought that you would be presenting me with such a thing. Surely it would be provocative if Superintendent Greenwich saw me wearing it.’

  Molly Thistle shrugged. ‘Then don’t wear it in front of him,’ she said. ‘It’s just a symbol. But one way or another, that snake got you here.’

  She handed the box to Sarah, who traced her index finger around the little snake before she looked up at her friend and smiled, taking the necklace out of the box and fastening it around her neck. ‘You’re right, it is just a symbol. And symbols only have the power we give them.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are a great many people without whom I couldn’t have written this book.

  Stirling Smith, senior maritime archaeology officer at Heritage NSW in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, was extraordinarily helpful and patient with my questions.

  While doing an Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology course, I was lucky enough to meet Renee Malliaros and Paul Hundley from the Silentworld Foundation, and Kieran Hosty from the National Maritime Museum, all of whom were very generous with their time and information. Particular thanks to Renee for taking me through the Institute’s collection.

  Thanks also to Tony Curtis, one of the few people in the world who has sailed a tall ship, for reviewing the manuscript.

  I don’t believe editors get the credit they deserve. They can have a profoundly positive impact on a book, and in this case I owe so much to Angela Meyer, the publisher who believed in this story, Tegan Morrison, who took it on, and editor Kate Goldsworthy. They all left this book far better than they found it. I’m also hugely indebted to my agent, Fiona Inglis.

  Finally and as always to my parents, Tom and Judy, my husband, Craig, and my wonderful and supportive children, Rory and Alex – I love you all, and thanks for putting up with this process.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Meg Keneally worked as a public affairs officer, sub-editor, freelance feature writer, reporter and talkback radio producer, before co-founding a financial service public relations company, which she then sold after having her first child. For more than ten years, Meg has worked in corporate affairs for listed financial services companies, and doubles as a part-time SCUBA diving instructor.

  She is co-author with Tom Keneally of The Soldier’s Curse and The Unmourned, the first two books in The Monsarrat series. Her first solo novel was Fled, and The Wreck is her second. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two children.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  With the exception of the Peterloo Massacre depicted in the first chapter, nothing in this book is closely based on real people or events. But some characters were loosely inspired by historical figures, and some parts of the plot share contours with historical events.

  The Peterloo Massacre

  The incident in which Emily and Jack McCaffrey die is closely based on a massacre that occurred during a peaceful protest in Manchester. In August 1819, sixty to a hundred thousand people gathered in St Peter’s Field to hear Henry Hunt talk about parliamentary reform. His speeches were so well known that he was widely referred to as Orator Hunt.

  Many of those attending would have been hungry. The Corn Laws that protected British merchants from competition with foreign grain also brought about a chronic shortage of affordable food. One of Hunt’s platforms was a call for the Prince Regent to select ministers who would repeal the Corn Laws.

  In the months before the St Peter’s Field meeting, authorities were growing increasingly nervous about the public mood. The French Revolution of 1789 to 1799 was still within living memory, serving as a warning to some and an incitement to others. A month earlier, local magistrates had written to the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, saying they feared an uprising. The notice Sarah sees, declaring the meeting illegal, has the same wording as one that appeared in the lead-up to the event.

  As magistrates watched the gathering from the window, they became alarmed at its size. They read the Riot Act, a law that gave them the right to call on large crowds to disperse or face punishment. It’s unlikely many heard them, and those who did perhaps chose to ignore the direction. So the Yeomanry, mounted and armed with swords and clubs, were ordered in to arrest the speakers. This force was made up of local worthies, business owners and the like, known to many of those attending. When members of the crowd linked arms to prevent the arrests, the Yeomanry began slashing indiscriminately and were soon joined by the Hussars.

  By the end of the day, up to twenty people had been killed and hundreds injured. The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre to contrast the behaviour of the armed men with that of the British soldiers of the famous Battle of Waterloo, who were considered heroes.

  The role of the Female Reform Societies in this event has not, perhaps, received the attention it deserves. Delia Burns is an amalgam of Alice Kitchen of the Blackburn Female Reform Society, and Mary Fildes of its Manchester counterpart. Fildes was on stage with Hunt, as Delia is with Hartford, and carried the banner that Delia carries. Female reformers of the period were parodied in cartoons, often portrayed as whores.

  The excoriating poem The Mask of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley, quoted at the beginning of the novel, was written in 1819 after word of the Peterloo Massacre reached Shelley in Italy. It expressed what he called ‘the torrent of my indignation’. It was not published during his lifetime, eventually appearing in 1832.

  The Cato Street Conspiracy

  The failed rebellion in which Sarah takes part is broadly based on the Cato Street Conspiracy. The conspirators, led by Arthur Thistlewood, were Spencean Philanthropists: followers of the radical writer Thomas Spence. They met in the loft of a disused stable in Cato Street, near Edgware Road, overlooked by a p
ublic house called the Horse & Groom.

  When news reached them of a Cabinet dinner to be held at the Grosvenor Square home of Lord Harrowby, the group hatched a plan to storm this event, behead the Cabinet members, and form a provisional government.

  The dinner, though, was a fiction fed to the conspirators by one of their number, George Edwards, a police spy. From the vantage point of the public house, the Bow Street Runners watched the conspirators assemble before moving in to arrest them. Briardown’s statement just before the group is arrested uses the words of Thistlewood.

  Five of the conspirators, including Thistlewood, were hanged then decapitated, and a further five were transported for life. The hangings described in this book are drawn from reports of the executions.

  The radicals with whom Sarah makes contact in Sydney are completely fictional, and I’m not aware of the historical use of the ouroboros (serpent) symbol in any of the contexts described in this book.

  Mary Reibey

  Molly Thistle isn’t a fictional stand-in for Mary Reibey, but she does owe something to the woman depicted on the Australian twenty-dollar note.

  In 1791, fourteen-year-old Mary Haydock was convicted of stealing a horse in Lancashire and sentenced to transportation. She was dressed as a boy and went under the name James Burrow. A few years after arriving in Sydney, at age seventeen she married Thomas Reibey, a former East India Company man who owned farms and other property, and traded in corn, wheat and cedar.

  Thomas’s business interests frequently took him away from Sydney, and Mary ran the business in his absence. Among other roles, she was a hotel keeper. When Thomas died in 1811, leaving her with seven children, she took over the business and expanded it dramatically, amassing property, buying ships and trading. At one point she held 405 hectares of land and was one of the richest people in the colony.

  Mary Reibey has always fascinated me. In particular, I can’t help wondering what it must have taken to run such a successful business as a woman and former convict in the society in which she lived, so I suppose it was inevitable that she would provide inspiration for one of my characters.

  The Wreck of the Dunbar

  The wreck of the Serpent is fictional, but it does share some characteristics with an actual wreck that occurred some decades later.

  On the night of 20 August 1857, in heavy seas and thick rain, the Dunbar was driven into the cliff face a little south of the entrance to Sydney Harbour. The impact would have been tremendous – at the National Maritime Museum I held thick bolts, which once kept the hull together, that had been bent into ‘s’ shapes by its force. One hundred and twenty-one people lost their lives that night; only one, a sailor named James Johnson, survived. He was thrown far enough up the cliff to grab hold of a ledge, and two days later was winched to safety. The wreck of the Dunbar remains New South Wales’ deadliest maritime disaster.

  We’ll never know exactly why the Dunbar collided with the cliff during that storm. It’s possible that Captain James Green mistook The Gap for the entrance to the harbour, or that he believed he had overshot it and made a sharp turn. Perhaps one factor was the positioning of Macquarie Lighthouse, some distance from the tip of South Head. Today, if you stand on North Head, you can look across the harbour mouth to the red-and-white striped Hornby Light on South Head’s northernmost extremity, built as a direct result of the wreck of the Dunbar and that of the Catherine Adamson nine weeks later.

  The description of the wreck of the Serpent draws on contemporary accounts of the aftermath of the Dunbar wreck, especially A Narrative of the Melancholy Wreck of the ‘Dunbar’, a pamphlet published soon afterwards.

  The idea for this story grew out of my interest in the Dunbar. I hope you enjoyed it.

  Meg Keneally

  Sydney, May 2020

  FURTHER READING

  Some of books and documents I relied on in writing this story include:

  ‘Manchester Political Meeting’, The Manchester Observer, 21 August 1819

  ‘Female Reformers’, The Black Dwarf, 24 November 1819

  The Women at Peterloo: The Impact of Female Reform on the Manchester Meeting of 16 August 1819, M.L. Bush, History, vol. 89, no. 2 (294), 2004, pp. 209–232

  The Peterloo Massacre, Robert Reid, Windmill Books, 2017

  Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre, Jacqueline Riding, Apollo Books, 2018

  Peterloo: The English Uprising, Robert Poole, Oxford University Press, 2019

  Writings of the Luddites, edited by Kevin Binfield, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004

  The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, Anna Clark, University of California Press, 1995

  Enemies of the State: The Cato Street Conspiracy, M. J. Trow, Wharncliffe Books, 2011

  The Cato Street Conspiracy, John Stanhope, Jonathan Cape, 1962

  The Political Works of Thomas Spence, edited by H.T. Dickinson, Avero (Eighteenth-Century) Publications, 1982

  Narrative of the Cato-Street Conspiracy, Anonymous, Published by John Fairburn, 1820

  The Cato Street Conspirators in New South Wales, George Parsons, Labour History, no. 8 (May 1965), pp. 3–5, Liverpool University Press

  A Narrative of the Melancholy Wreck of the ‘Dunbar,’ Merchant Ship, on the South Head of Port Jackson, August 20th, 1857, Anonymous, Published for the Proprietors by James Fryer, 1857

  Mary Reibey – Molly Incognita: A Biography of Mary Reibey 1777 to 1855, and Her World, Nance Irvine, Library of Australian History, 1982

  Dear Cousin – The Reibey Letters: Twenty-two Letters of Mary Reibey, Her Children and Their Descendants, 1792–1901, edited and with a commentary by Nance Irvine, Hale and Iremonger, 1992

  Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney, Catherine Bishop, NewSouth, 2015

  Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788, Richard Broome, Allen & Unwin, 2010

  The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney, Grace Karskens, Melbourne University Publishing, 1997

  So Much Hard Work: Women and Prostitution in Australian History, edited by Kay Daniels, Fontana, 1984

  Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, Joy Damousi, Cambridge University Press, 1997

  Macquarie, Grantlee Kieza, ABC Books, 2019

  Archaeology in The Rocks, Sydney, 1979–1993: from Old Sydney Gaol to Mrs Lewis’ Boarding-house, Jane Lydon, Australian Historical Archaeology, 1993

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

   1. Why do you think Sarah chooses to be a revolutionary at the start?

   2. Why do you think Sarah changes her opinion about the best way to change the world?

   3. What did you think of the depiction of the colony in New South Wales at the start of the 19th century? What do you imagine life was like at that time?

   4. How does the novel explore gender and the position of women in the early 19th century?

   5. In what ways do Briardown and Molly Thistle represent different ways of changing society?

   6. Who was your favourite minor character?

   7. How do you think Sarah’s life would have been different if she had remained in Britain?

   8. How does the novel explore secrecy and betrayal?

   9. In what ways are the themes of The Wreck relevant to the modern day?

  10. What do you see as the significance of the book’s title? To what extent can wrecks be both physical and metaphorical?

  If you loved The Wreck, you’ll love Meg Keneally’s debut novel . . .

  Order now

  First published in the UK in 2020 by Zaffre

  This ebook edition published in 2020 by

  ZAFFRE

  An imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  80–81 Wimpole St, London W1G 9RE

  Owned by Bonnier Books

  Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden

  Copyright © Meg Keneally, 2020

  Cover design by Alexandra Allden.

  Cover images © Ton
y Watson / Megan Engeseth / Mary Wethey / Arcangel Images (shipwreck, woman, sky), Shutterstock.com (cliffs)

  The moral right of Meg Keneally to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978–1–78576–882–8

  Paperback ISBN: 978–1–78576–881–1

  This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd

  Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  www.bonnierbooks.co.uk