Fled: A Novel

by Meg Keneally

  Still, Dan was one of the most enthusiastic and imaginative of the men, judging by his stated intentions with regard to the women.

  He saw Jenny licking her finger, on a day when the wind was refusing to behave, refusing to decide on a direction, and he said, ‘I have something you can lick.’

  She glanced at him briefly and looked away, held her finger up and stared at the clouds.

  ‘Where is it from, do you think?’ His voice was closer, and when she looked back she saw he was near enough to touch. He wasn’t leering now, or mocking. Nothing in his stance was suggestive. He was looking at her finger, at the sails, at the sky. He was frowning.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ she said. ‘It seems to not be able to make up its mind. It was from the north earlier – did you see the sails? They were stiff as boards, or looked it. Now, though – it’s turning around. It’s getting, I think, stronger.’

  ‘They think so too,’ he said. ‘Look.’ She did, and saw sailors climbing the rigging, nimble on the ropes for the most part, as those without agility did not tend to survive long. The sailors were untying the sails, reefing them in, tying them to the mast.

  She looked again at the sky. The clouds were being smeared across the blue, and they were pendulous now, bruised.

  ‘I remember you saying you’ve been on the ocean,’ Dan said.

  ‘A lot, when I was younger. My father fished.’

  ‘Poor bastard,’ he said. ‘Precious little fishing in Cornwall, now.’

  ‘You’re from the sea too,’ she guessed. Those convicts without childhood training on the waves were showing no interest in what was happening with the sails, no inclination to ask why the sailors were urgently crawling over the ropes.

  He nodded.

  ‘Was it the ocean that brought you here?’ she asked.

  She rolled the question around in her head after she’d spoken it, realising how ridiculous it sounded, how badly she had mangled the meaning behind it. She cared, oddly, that he think well of her, or at least not think her simple. He was tall – taller than her, not always the case with men. He seemed to have retained some of the muscle he had earned on the work gangs, and some of the curiosity that had probably been with him for much longer.

  He took her meaning, though. Did not say: Of course the ocean brought me here, brought all of us here.

  ‘Yes, in a way,’ he said. ‘Fair trading – and an excise man who was less dim than most of them.’

  A smuggler, then. A crime that had killed her father. A crime most didn’t consider criminal.

  ‘You took some bread, or a cabbage,’ he guessed. ‘Or some clothes from a line.’

  ‘No. No, highway robbery.’

  He laughed, a rasping chuckle that had rusted from lack of use. ‘Had you a horse? And a pistol?’

  ‘No. My feet, and a knife. Sometimes a staff.’

  He frowned, then, looking at her from under drawn brows, seeming to search her face for any sign she was lying – that she was perhaps hoping to find a gullible creature from whom she could get some amusement. She would be damned, she thought, if she tried to convince him; if she wasted breath on laying claim to her crime. Anyway, she’d received no better or worse treatment for stealing jewellery on the Kings Highway than she would have had she lifted a cabbage from a garden.

  ‘They hang the highway robbers,’ Dan said.

  ‘Sometimes. Why hang livestock, though?’

  ‘We’re not livestock.’

  ‘We are nothing but. You’re the bullock who drags the plough along, I’m the cow. They’ll be wanting me to produce more bullocks, otherwise they’ll have to do the work themselves.’

  She licked her finger again, held it up. She didn’t need to this time, though. The wind had finally made up its mind, had turned to the south, and was gathering a roar in its throat. Whitecaps were scabbing over the crests of waves, and sailors were scuttling back down the rigging as fast as they could.

  Farrow was walking towards them, planting his feet on the deck as though trying to punish it.

  ‘No more fresh air, then?’ Jenny said to him.

  ‘Too much of it about to be flung at us,’ he said. ‘You’re going below now, all of you. If you complain about it, I’ll do you a great disservice – I’ll let you stay up here.’

  It was, by a long way, the worst storm they had sailed through.

  The ship lurched like a drunk to one side and then the other, so that in the space of a minute Jenny would be forced against the hull, and then scrambling to hang on to the board on which she lay. The nose would tilt up, and up, and the longer it spent in the air the worse the landing would be, as the waves that had forced the ship skywards suddenly disappeared and it smashed back down onto the jagged water.

  The worst of it, thought Jenny, was the noise. The wind was loud and angry, screaming like a madman of the wrongs done to it. There were answering screams from some of the women, which earned them thumps from the more hardened lags.

  Jenny did what she could for the panicking women. She sat with them and rubbed their backs, her murmurs snatched by the rattling timbers. She told them to scream at the storm as much as they liked, as long as they didn’t expect it to listen.

  After the screams came the vomit, as one woman after another evacuated her stomach contents. It was carried on the ship’s movement until it splattered against the deck or the hull or someone’s cheek.

  The storm lasted almost until morning. It must, Jenny thought, have sent gallons of water spilling across the deck during its fiercest hours, for quite a bit of it had made its way down into the hold. It now sat, ankle-deep and refusing to drain, soaking hems and stinging open wounds.

  By sunrise, the worst of the storm was over, and Jenny was grateful the sun couldn’t penetrate here with any great strength, for she knew what she would see: a murky salt pool, a soup of vomit and excrement, as the buckets in which they relieved themselves had been sent spinning across the cell.

  Some of that vomit was her own. But not from seasickness – a malady she didn’t suffer from, something she was profoundly grateful for when she saw the misery even the calmest of days inflicted on others, whose roughest journeys before this had been in a cart on a rutted road.

  It was perfectly calm by the time the contents of Jenny’s stomach flavoured the salt pool. She found it impossible not to draw attention to herself, impossible to keep down the animal noise she could hardly believe her throat was making. She continued to make it long after there was nothing left in her stomach.

  She feared it would take some of the shine off her in the eyes of the others. The grudging respect she had become used to on the hulk, the intermingled fear and fascination towards her status as a highwaywoman, wasn’t as much of a shield here in any case. In the hold of the Charlotte were London women, she-lags who boasted that their criminal pedigree went back centuries, forgers and prostitutes and murderers and batterers. They saw highwaywomen as dabbling amateurs, bored girls playing at crime.

  Susannah Waybright was one of the worst. She had been trained from the age of five to lift items from the pockets of gentlemen as they strode through London’s streets. She’d been good at it, too, particularly in her own retelling. ‘They never knew my hand been in their pocket,’ she would say. Most of the other women would listen with great attention, as inattention tended to attract a blow. For all her self-proclaimed dexterity, Susannah was a big woman, with a flat face and flat hands like small porcelain plates.

  Jenny had disliked her immediately. She seemed only to fully exist when surrounded by adoring – and slightly scared – women, who would exclaim over her cleverness and thank her for striking out on behalf of the poor.

  Jenny had always refused to sit with the women who gathered around Susannah as she outrageously embroidered her adventures on London’s night-time streets. There was one adventure, though, that she never spoke about: the night her legerdemain had failed her. The night she felt a hand encircling her wrist while it was in a gentleman’
s pocket, trying to work free a watch caught between folds of fabric. Jenny heard – for such things were whispered about during strolls around the deck, when women linked arms and pretended they were in Kew Gardens – that Susannah had responded by biting the man’s hand, forcing him to release her wrist while she ran. But the crowded streets that served as a pickpocket’s camouflage were not kind to Susannah that night. She couldn’t move fast enough through the press of bodies until the same hand, smeared with a little blood from the bite wound, came down on her shoulder.

  After hearing that story, Jenny was unable to resist baiting Susannah at every opportunity. She would call out from where she lay on her plank: ‘Do you want help with your food, Suse? Your fingers might not be up to it,’ or, ‘When we arrive, I hope you bite the captain as you get off the ship.’ For the most part, Susannah ignored her, giving her brief glances that consigned her to the status of an irritation.

  But when one of the women spoke as though Susannah was a class hero, Jenny would say, ‘How much of the money did you give away, Suse? Feed any children, did you?’ The woman would push herself up from where she’d been squatting, wade through her acolytes and stomp over to Jenny, raising a hand. Jenny would stand, too, almost taller – they were the two tallest women in the hold – and say, ‘I can bite too, and I have more teeth to work with.’

  Susannah’s concern for the poor clearly did not extend to the matter of food. She and Elenor had formed a devil’s alliance, the pair of them standing over the weaker ones, extracting rations by any means they could. They had tried to talk Mr Corbett into giving them the same job among the women as Dan had with the men, but he’d refused.

  At mealtimes, Suse didn’t care who put some of their own share onto her huge outstretched palm, but knew someone would. Bea tried to, once or twice, but Jenny held her back.

  ‘We’re locked away in here for now,’ Suse would say to some of the younger girls, ‘but what happens when we step ashore? What happens when we’re in a place of monsters and savages, a place which hasn’t heard of English law, and there’s nothing between us and the men? What do you think they’ll do, them who have been locked down here with us, able to hear and smell and rant, but not touch? You will need a protector, then, little thing like you. I can’t protect everyone, but I’ll remember who was generous.’

  It was a tactic she had tried on Jenny early in the voyage. Jenny had replied, ‘And while you’re protecting us from the men, who’s protecting us from you?

  Suse and Elenor had targeted old Dorothy, too. ‘The depravity of these men, mother, you’ve no idea,’ Elenor said to her. ‘You hear what they suggest, day and night. It’s all they’re thinking about, and they won’t hesitate as soon as they’re in a position to do it. Starved as they are, they won’t see age as a barrier.’

  ‘Half my luck,’ said Dorothy. ‘My only chance of surviving long enough to have a bit of a tumble is to keep all my rations to myself.’

  Susannah had been the first to lose her stomach contents to the storm, had been one of the screechers whose terror was expressed through the jangled scream.

  Now, as Jenny lay with her head over the side of her plank, Susannah laughed. ‘The rest of us are better now, the boat’s hardly rocking,’ she said. ‘It takes a special one to still be losing her food hours after a storm has passed.’

  Jenny rolled over, too weakened to get up. She did her best to glare before retching again.

  ‘There she is, girls,’ said Susannah, ‘the queen of the seas. As long as she is on a mill pond, she’ll be fine.’

  A few – perhaps those most frightened of Suse – sniggered.

  The next day, when Jenny was on the deck, she looked over the gunwales. The sea was all tiny smooth peaks and troughs, with no trace of foam. A wonderful northerly wind was pushing the fleet forward. Jenny loved – when she was able to see it – watching the sailors throw a knotted rope over the ship’s side, counting how many knots were forced to the surface by the ship’s movement.

  ‘Five knots,’ one of the men called out. It was a more-than-respectable speed, even for a boat with no waves to impede it.

  Her stomach again contracted to push out whatever it contained, and a small helping of porridge hit the water. Rations weren’t so plentiful that Jenny could see them disappear into the ocean with equanimity, even if they had already been partly digested. Yet she was, uniquely among the women, getting fatter.

  She knew why. But she did not want to. For a start, the weakness her condition brought made any thought of escape impossible, at least for the next few months. And it would make her more vulnerable to Susannah, even though there would, hopefully, be increased rations for a pregnant woman.

  The baby would probably be pushed into the world in a different hemisphere to that in which its father dwelt. It was possible, even likely, that father and child would never look at the same sky.

  CHAPTER 9

  Charlotte Prentice came screaming into the world with another storm, roaring in sympathy with the wind as it forced the ship sideways and folded waves over the deck.

  Jenny had hoped to spend some time on deck before the business got underway. But the authorities clearly believed that allowing the convicts the merest glimpse of a landmass would induce them to hurl themselves overboard and strike out for shore. The lags were tamped down in the hold whenever the ship put into a port, so that places with musical names, Tenerife and Rio, slid past without Jenny having seen them, and therefore might as well not have existed. Any of them, though, might have provided an opportunity for escape under different circumstances, and Jenny wasn’t the only one bent on it. A male convict from another ship, they were told, had scaled down the side of his transport at Tenerife, taken a cutter and sailed around the island. He had found a beach there, looking hospitable enough with its unmarked sand, and pulled the cutter ashore. He may have exhaled, relaxed, started looking for food – before the fleet rounded the island’s corner and saw him.

  But Jenny had been anchored to the Charlotte by her growing stomach.

  Bea attended the birth, wiping Jenny’s forehead and checking between her legs, and yelling at the men who whooped and catcalled every time Jenny let out a particularly guttural moan. They only stopped when Dan told them he’d throttle the next one who opened his mouth. Bea, Dorothy and a few of the other women, who had lost any squeamishness long ago, helped pull Charlotte out into the miasma of salt and sweat.

  A glistening mound of purple tissue followed Charlotte, a nurturing presence that had outlived its purpose, attached to the baby by a fleshy cable which the ship’s surgeon came and cut in the calm that followed. He picked up the little girl, gingerly holding her while protecting his sleeves with a cloth, and examined each part of her minutely without taking her in as a whole person. Charlotte quieted, staring back at him through the protective moons of his spectacles, clenching and unclenching her fists. ‘A fine girl,’ he said to Jenny, and handed her daughter back.

  ‘Here’s one whose ration Suse won’t be able to steal,’ said Dorothy. ‘Best get her on the teat, my love, straightaway now. She’ll have a hunger, after all that.’

  Charlotte clamped on to Jenny, still flexing her fists as though to warn off Susannah or Elenor or anyone else who might make a claim on her portion of the world’s nourishment.

  Jenny hadn’t noticed Susannah sidling over, her arm snaking out towards some hard bread: part of Jenny’s ration that remained uneaten as she’d been otherwise occupied. Jenny would have looked for it later. Found it missing. Suspected it resided in Susannah’s stomach, but been unable to prove it.

  She was saved the trouble by a kick aimed at the back of Susannah’s knee, buckling her leg long enough for another hand to reach out and grab the bread.

  The hand, and the kick, were Elenor’s.

  Elenor gave the bread to Jenny. ‘Leave her alone, Suse. You can’t make milk out of thin air. If her baby dies, we will all have to put up with the wailing.’

  Susannah was
too startled to object.

  Later, with a glutted sleeping Charlotte being rocked by Bea, Jenny went over to Elenor.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ she said.

  ‘Suse needed teaching.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll be expecting repayment,’ Elenor said, in a low, insistent whisper. ‘An opportunity will come.’

  ‘I have nothing to pay you with.’

  ‘Maybe you will.’ Elenor looked over at Charlotte. ‘Can I hold her?’

  A clench of fear, of the kind the sea couldn’t call forth, rose in Jenny. She did not want her daughter held by this woman, this creature of obscure motives.

  ‘She’s sleeping,’ Jenny said. ‘If it’s wails you fear, I wouldn’t wake her.’

  Elenor shrugged. ‘Good though, is it? To have someone belong to you?’

  ‘She doesn’t . . . well, in a way I suppose she does.’

  ‘Course she does, and you to her. That makes you lucky. No one here belongs to anyone now. ’Cept the Crown, maybe.’

  ‘El . . . who did you belong to?’

  Elenor winced and turned her head, and Jenny began to move away. Then she realised Elenor was speaking, very softly, as though to see how badly Jenny wanted to hear.

  ‘A man . . . a man with debts,’ she said. ‘Cards, mostly. In danger, great danger, from those he owed money to. I borrowed from Black, you see, to pay them off. And then he went . . . somewhere, I’m not sure. Just wasn’t there one day. Mr Black needed repaying. I thought my man might find me, come for me. No chance of that now, unless he has wings.’

  Jenny wondered what her daughter – out of her mother’s belly but still in the belly of her second mother, the ship after which she was named – would make of their destination. Charlotte would be carried ashore to a land that didn’t know her, and that likely hadn’t seen a baby of such pale skin and blue eyes since the mountains first rose from the sea.