by Meg Keneally
She had almost fallen asleep, despite her promise to herself. She was brought back to full consciousness by the cell door opening and a guard walking in with a candle.
Night had fallen and the cell was lit by dim moonlight. Their dinner had been brought, and the assizes were over, so Jenny had expected there to be no more company for them. Perhaps the guard wanted to see if any of the condemned women were keen for a last taste of the carnal – or perhaps he just fancied picking a woman and trying her regardless of what she wanted.
That fear, though, lasted as long as it took for a second man to walk through the door behind the guard. He was plainly but neatly dressed, standing as erect as she’d ever seen anyone stand.
He unrolled a piece of paper, held it up, and then glared at the guard, who held up his candle.
The stiff-backed man looked around the cell and cleared his throat. ‘At the assizes and general delivery of the gaol of our Lord the King, Holden at the Castle of Exeter before Sir James Eyre, Knight, Baron of the Court of Exchequer, Sir Beaumont Hotham, and others, their fellow justices. Whereas certain prisoners were, at this assizes, convicted of felony for which they were excluded benefit of Clergy, his Majesty hath been graciously pleased to extend the Royal Mercy to them, on condition of their being transported beyond the seas for and during the term of seven years, each, and such intention of mercy hath been signified by the Right Honourable Thomas, Lord Sydney – one of His Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State. It is therefore ordered and adjudged by the court that those named here be transported beyond the seas accordingly, as soon as conveniently may be, for and during the term of seven years respectively.’
He then read a list of names. Bea Ormond was one of them. So was Elenor Watkins.
The last was Jane Trelawney.
CHAPTER 7
The women hadn’t been told exactly where the cart was taking them. They were cargo, now. Toxic, requiring careful handling, but also important enough not to be broken.
A light rain fell, unworthy of the name, almost mist. Enough moisture, though, to get underneath the irons at Jenny’s wrists and ankles, to soften up the skin and make it more vulnerable to the brutality of the metal. She hoped the constant presence of pain would make it easier, after a time, to ignore.
She had hoped to see fishing boats on Devonport Harbour, but her view was obscured by the ships which travelled across the seas as a matter of course, not as the endpoint of a life of criminal ingenuity.
Even these, though, looked tiny in comparison to a ship moored close in, which appeared to be serviced by its own dock. It might not, actually, be a ship, she thought. It had no mast, for a start. Therefore no sails. She couldn’t see spindly oars poking out of its sides, and in any case all of the hatches were closed. Its only ship-like attributes were its shape – broad and bloated but still with the delicate curve which ran downwards until one side of the hull met the other – and the fact that it was floating.
The cart pulled up at the docks and the prisoners were unloaded, still shackled together. Jenny had a moment of divine relief when the irons were removed, trying not to look at the deep, wet furrows they had excavated in her skin. She was hurriedly bundled into a small boat with Bea and Elenor and some others, and rowed the short distance to the monstrosity.
Rampant across the ship’s flank was a green blight, which – judging by the smell – was either decaying or forcing itself into the grains of the timbers to rot them.
Up on the deck was a man not nearly as well turned out as the one from the court. Either he lacked the means or the interest to dress himself neatly. He did, though, have a piece of paper from which he glanced up from time to time as he spoke to the convicts. Jenny had become used to being harangued and words from past tirades clogged her ears, forcing her to concentrate on what her latest captor said. Knowledge was all she had.
She did, vaguely, hear him inform them they were aboard the hulk Dunkirk, and she most certainly heard him when he said escapees would be shot, but his words began to bleed into each other when he started talking about the men being taken ashore to work each day. His clothes seemed to have been selected to match the splotched brown of the deck. Apart from the crimson wounds at the wrists and ankles of the convicts, the brightest colours that mankind had contributed to the scene belonged to the red coats of the marines. Several of them stood in a line off to the side – although some had a liberal interpretation of what it meant to stand, leaning against the walls of the huts that had been jumbled onto the deck, looking up from under their eyebrows at the convicts.
Two marines were having a loud and unashamedly carnal conversation, assessing the attributes of the new women. One of them was staring at Bea, who was looking at the deck. Jenny stared at them: boys, really, not much older than her. Without their rank and the weaponry that went with it, she would be equal to them on the highway, and far more than equal in a small boat on a lumpen sea. She did not look away until she was certain they had seen her looking, certain that they knew she had heard them. It didn’t take long – clearly, they too felt the uncomfortable tightening, the slight ripple she always felt when being stared at. They looked up, almost in unison, and went silent. Until one leaned into the other, whispering something with his eyes still on Jenny, and the two laughed with a snorting abrasiveness.
But another pair of eyes was on them now, belonging to a slightly older man who shared with them the red coat and little else. He stood straight but not self-consciously so. He didn’t seem to be following orders; it was as though he simply didn’t know any other way to stand. He could glare, though, and the two younger marines’ sniggers trailed off and fell silent.
The older marine turned to Jenny, then, who gave him a small smile that she had calculated to hide her rotting teeth. He nodded briefly: a perfunctory courtesy, but courtesy nonetheless in a place not overburdened with such gestures.
‘You’ll be given canvas slops, and I don’t care what you do with the clothes you’re wearing now,’ the dull-clothed man was saying to the convicts, in a voice so dreary that even Bea seemed to be struggling to pay attention, while Elenor was openly looking around. ‘When you’re not working, you’re below.’
‘What about women?’ Jenny was surprised the rasping voice was hers. ‘What’s happening to us, and where are our clothes?’
‘Your clothes are on your back, and you’re going below until they decide where you’re going from here, or until the Lord makes the decision for them.’ As the marines started to move forward, the man held up a hand. ‘Don’t know whether you’ve heard of the riot on the hulk at Portsmouth,’ he said to the convicts.
Jenny hadn’t, but she suspected some of the others had. They straightened their spines for the first time in days. Stories of riots, of insurrection, were frequently embellished beyond recognition, so that the participants achieved glorious escape or ignominious execution. Surely, some of them must just end with bread and water. It was a rare opportunity to hear of such things from a man in an official position, even if she wasn’t sure what that position was.
‘It came to nothing,’ he said. ‘Those involved were flogged. I think they might hang the next lot, if anyone is stupid enough to give it a try.’
Then he nodded to the marines, who herded the convicts towards holes in the deck through which some would emerge for work, and some would never emerge again.
There was the salt, and the air. At least there was that.
Jenny had stared at the sky for as long as she could before they went below. This sky, the one she had once scanned with her father for dragons, might be lost to her soon, and she didn’t know what her new sky would be like.
The hold was split into two cells, one for men and one for women, with holes through which the marines could fire at need, and bars through which the two groups of prisoners could keen at each other.
The seaward shutters were kept open during the day. They allowed a small ration of daylight and air into the hold, but for all its salted h
eaviness the air could not compete with the thick reek of confined humanity. Nor was any breeze able to carry the stench out of the hatches on the other side, as these were kept closed to avoid offending the olfactory sensibilities of people onshore.
Some of the female convicts had been in there for months, some longer. Some had nearly served out their sentence. True to the word of the overseer on the deck, there were no canvas slops for any of them, so that those who had sat in their own ordure for any length of time wore ragged shadows of the clothes they had stood in to hear the sentence of the court.
Each day two marines – usually the spotted idiots who had sized up Jenny and the other women on deck – would come below and, turning their backs to the female enclosure, choose half a dozen men to go and work on shore that day. Jenny caught the name of one marine, Lieutenant Farrow. She would press her face to the bars, so that they scoured her cheeks with their rusted strength, and watch as the men were ironed and taken above; she yearned more for the touch of their rough canvas slops than she could ever imagine doing for any of those who wore it.
Sometimes when that day’s labourers rattled past, Jenny would be the only one whose face was framed by the bars. But that depended on who’d been chosen: certain men drew quite a crowd among the women, who would elbow each other aside for a look. The more popular boys would be shown glimpses of filthy skin as some of the women drew down ragged necklines to expose their breasts, yowling propositions they knew they wouldn’t have to make good on. Those who had been there the longest needed to make little effort to show themselves, their clothing falling open with small, well-judged movements. It did not take long before Elenor joined them, relying on her status as a newcomer to attract some attention.
Some of the men – those walking past, and those watching from the opposite enclosure – would simply leer; others would call out counter propositions. Occasionally, one or two of them would try to start a conversation.
‘Why do you never show me anything of yourself?’ a man said to Jenny one day. He was one of the more popular ones, one of those who had probably been shown more flesh in the past month than a Penmor boy would see in a lifetime.
Jenny didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say, and in any case the man wasn’t given time to stand and talk, his words hurled from the side of his mouth as he passed by. His face was hardly that of an angel, and bore the start of the creases which Jenny had seen the sun gouge, over time, in her father’s skin. But this man had clear blue eyes, and he had not given up.
Others had. Some women, those who had been there longest, barely moved, not even drawn to the bars by the passage of men. They lay on one of the sleeping platforms, some with their faces turned away from the open hatches.
The loudest despair came from women who had struck up relationships with marines or crew and then been cast back into the hold.
‘Might be an opportunity for you,’ an old woman, Dorothy, croaked at Jenny when one sobbing woman was cast down from an officer’s cot, wearing clean clothes that wouldn’t remain so for long.
‘Plenty in here exposing themselves,’ Jenny said.
‘Yes, they are, aren’t they?’ said Dorothy. She seemed amused, her tone that of a mother grudgingly impressed with a prank played by her children. ‘Why would a man be interested in gazing on any of them, when he has seen their sagging reality?’
Dorothy was eighty-one, by far the oldest person Jenny had ever met, and certainly the oldest prisoner. She had been in the hold for six months, but the manacle wounds in her wrists and ankles hadn’t suppurated and her lungs had not collapsed under the weight of phlegm. She spoke, sometimes, of looking forward to being on the sea, the journey started.
But her assumption she would survive until they got to their destination seemed arrogant in this place. The past week had seen a young woman sewn into a shroud and dumped overboard after a lung complaint stopped her breathing.
Jenny felt a strangling desperation at the thought of her mother. She called out, sometimes, as the marines and turnkeys passed the bars. ‘I need a letter sent. My mother should know what has become of me. I can pay.’
Mostly she was ignored, but sometimes men seemed happy to admit that they’d heard; sometimes they laughed. ‘Pay with what?’ they would say. Or, perhaps, ‘We can arrange a price.’ But no one had proposed one to her.
She knew there was a currency she might be able to trade in, a coin she hadn’t yet spent. Better to spend it and get something in return, than to have it stolen. And once she was above decks, she could look around – check the beam of this not-ship, assess whether the distance between rail and water might kill her. Perhaps get a sense of whether there might be lapses in vigilance, lulls when the marines were distracted.
So one morning she pressed herself to the bars with the other women, though she still didn’t open her shirt like the flaps of a tent or rub herself up and down. She waited for the vile Farrow to pass by, so she could waylay him as she would love to have done on the highway.
But when he came to select that day’s workers, Farrow was accompanied not by his equally puerile friend, but by Captain Corbett, a slightly older marine. One of the most senior officers aboard apart from the captain himself, he was lean and lanky, with a hawk-like nose in the middle of a face that bore the rosy skin of a child. When they walked past the women, Farrow’s head stayed bent, and as the warders unlocked the bars of the male cell, he only betrayed emotion in the roughness with which he hauled the workers out into the corridor.
It might have been Corbett’s presence. Perhaps he wasn’t the kind to approve of liaisons with convicts. Perhaps he thought such behaviour was beneath a brother marine.
After the male convicts had been returned from their work, locked back into the cell from which they shouted possibilities to the women, Corbett paused by the female cell.
Jenny was again sitting near the bars. She had discovered, quickly, that to move from such a prime position was to relinquish it. There were those who would have gladly dragged her away and forced her into a far corner. But Jenny was a highwaywoman, while most of the others were country girls arrested for stealing bread or a ribbon. That earned her a certain amount of latitude. Even more so than Elenor and Bea, as she was the one who had drawn blood.
Mr Corbett stopped beside her, then dropped down onto his haunches until their faces were level. ‘I saw you, this morning,’ he said.
Jenny didn’t speak. Was this a prelude? A gentlemanly way to make the same offer the men in the cells had been shouting? A polite start to a transaction that would end very impolitely?
‘Will I find you exposing yourself, next time?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ Jenny said. ‘There’s enough to do that already, and with the same thought they’d give to taking their hat off.’
He smiled, then. ‘Yes, I suppose it has become something of a . . . convention,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, I should be disappointed to see you engaging in the same behaviour. I always am, when the hulk swallows what’s left of a woman. That sort of thing is – well, it’s inadvisable.’
She was still staring at the ladder long after Mr Corbett had climbed up to the deck.
‘He may not be seeking a woman,’ said a male voice close by, ‘but I am.’
Jenny straightened, then dragged herself hand over hand up a bar until she could see who had spoken. It was one of the warders, Prentice, a far less appealing figure than a marine in a red coat. His clothes were the colour of wet sand, and he wore a neckerchief like many of the men he guarded. But he had keys, and clothes not stiff with grime.
He wasn’t a handsome man, as far as she could tell in the dim light. His nose was small and upturned, with the delicacy of a noblewoman’s. And he was balding, with small fringes of hair hanging down over his collar. He looked about the same age as her father. The seams of his skin hadn’t taken on the same amount of dirt as those of the convicts, but it was impossible for anyone on the Dunkirk to avoid attracting a measure o
f grime – even Mr Corbett’s fingernails had dirt under them.
‘And if I go with you . . .?’ Jenny asked.
‘You’ll get food – more of it than now, anyway. A wash every now and then. A night on a mattress here and there, and I heard you say something about wanting a letter sent.’
‘So,’ Jenny said to Prentice, later that night, ‘shall I tell you what I want to say?’
‘About what?’ he asked. He was lacing his breeches up, while Jenny smoothed down her skirts. She was sitting on the mattress in his small hut, one of the hastily built structures on the hulk’s deck. The whole business had been blessedly brief, a little painful at first but no worse than she’d feared. Afterwards, she had put her hand between her thighs to investigate the moisture there, withdrawing it to see a faint smear of blood; she doubted Prentice had noticed, or cared. He’d handed her a small oilcloth bundle, which turned out to contain some salt pork. Jenny had eaten it immediately, as she doubted it would last long in the hold.
‘What I want to say to my mother,’ she explained to Prentice. ‘You said you would get a message to her for me.’
‘Did I? Can’t think why. Don’t have any letters.’
She frowned, wondering why his lack of other letters would prevent him sending one for her, before she realised what he was saying. ‘You can’t write.’
‘Not needed, for this work.’
Then she was up from the mattress and clawing at him, or trying to. He quickly put out a hand and held her away, sending her back onto the mattress with a shove. ‘You might want more salt pork. Have a care.’
‘I’ve no objection to salt pork, but that isn’t the bargain we made,’ she said. ‘My ma is in Penmor wondering whether I’m dead or worse.’
‘It’s worse, then.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she said, and started to cry.
Along with the muck, tears were one of the most plentiful commodities on the Dunkirk, cutting trails through the grime on the women’s faces, and some of the men’s too. Plenty from the young girls who had lifted a cabbage, and the older ones who had been torn from their children. But this was the first time Prentice, or anyone on board, had seen tears from Jenny. In the forest and at the inns, a wet face signalled vulnerability and was an open invitation.