by Meg Keneally
‘Very well, Gwyn,’ the governor said, turning away. ‘You should return to work for now, but we may be able to find more suitable labours for you. I shall let Reverend Gibson know of your desire to marry.’
‘Thank you, Your Excellency.’ He hesitated for a moment, inhaling deeply. ‘As I’m to take on a child which isn’t mine, and her mother, may I have your permission to build a hut? Barracks living, it’s . . . well, no place for a young one.’
‘Oh . . . well, you’ll have to find your own building materials. Very well then. On the western shore, mind. Near the rocks.’
Lockhart walked off, his aide trailing behind him. Rowe was a man clearly used to walking on ships or paved streets, not to a path where exposed tree roots could snag a toe – and he stumbled on one. Jenny giggled, and Dan was unable to suppress a snort. Both of them immediately regretted it.
Rowe turned around, strode back to them. ‘Do not, Gwyn, think that an escape might be in prospect. If you are allowed on a boat at all, I will ensure it is under the strictest guard.’
‘Escape is the furthest thing from my mind, sir, with my impending wedding and all,’ Dan said. ‘Where would I escape to? We barely got here in those fine ships in the bay, so I would certainly not try to return in a little cutter. I might as well save a lot of trouble and pitch myself into the ocean straightaway.’
‘I may assist you in that endeavour,’ said Rowe, turning and striding off again.
This time, Dan and Jenny waited until he was out of earshot before smiling, laughing. She guffawed in a most unladylike way.
‘Jesus, you even laugh like a fisherman,’ said Dan.
‘It’s for the best, you know,’ she said.
He stopped laughing, looked at her oddly. ‘Best for who? You tricked me into this.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘You don’t seem sorry.’
‘Not in the slightest. You’ve already profited from this, and were happy to do so. It will be good to have a hut.’
‘Why the rush, though? We’re neither of us leaving this place, not soon.’
‘I was afraid old Dorothy might get to you first,’ she said.
‘I’d have accepted. Nothing like a bit of wisdom.’
‘I’ve the wisdom for both of us, as you’ll find.’
He grinned. ‘Will I? What if I’ve no time for anything you might call wisdom?’
‘You will,’ she said. ‘Providing, of course, you keep your end of things going.’
‘My end of things?’
‘Yes. It begins with defending your family against whatever the rest of them plan to do, now there’s all this space, and no one’s managed to build any cells yet.’
He looked down at Charlotte, his smile softening. ‘Perhaps you’ll grow into a more honest woman than your mother.’
‘Dan, if she is to grow into any kind of woman, I won’t have her trampled in whatever is to come. I can tell there’s very little holding the lads back now. The soldiers with their muskets are just about managing it, but when night falls . . .’
‘Yes, not a safe place for a baby, and likely to be more of them made tonight.’
‘You’ll shield us, then, Charlotte and me.’
‘Yes, I’ll protect you from the men. All but one of them.’
The moisture that had been hanging in the air all day found its expression that night, in a sudden rain which was as strange to Jenny as everything else on that shore. It didn’t start slowly, build itself up, let itself be known with a tap on the nose and a drop or two on the forearm. It was dry, and then it was drenched, and there was very little warning that things were about to move from one state to the other. It was loud, hurling itself against the canvas, beating the hulls of the ships out in the harbour, gouging divots into the earth and filling the holes the men had dug.
Not that the men cared, Jenny knew. They had been waiting for the dark, and didn’t particularly mind that it had brought a rainstorm with it. They came into the women’s tents, which was unguarded; as yet, no one had formulated even the most outlandish escape plans. Who would brave the frenetic sea or the unknown woods? And the savages within them, who had already become the scaffold on which uninformed legends were being built.
Jenny later learned that some women were willing when the men stormed in, some were not. Very few, in any case, could clearly see the faces of those they were engaged with in frantic congress, and nobody asked for names.
Jenny and Charlotte were not in the women’s tents, or against the trees where some of the women were taken or dragged. Dan had found for them a little clearing a few paces beyond the tree line, likely further than any of their kind had gone thus far into the land’s uncharted interior. He had managed to take a piece of sailcloth, folded and wadded up, for Charlotte to lie on underneath the branches. They shielded her from the worst of the rain, while Dan kept his promise and protected Jenny from the men. All but one of them.
Jenny waited until the sun was up before she took Charlotte back to the tent barracks.
Bea had not taken her advice – had not taken the hand of a man and marched him up to the governor, insisting he marry her. She was sitting, now, against a tree, looking at the ships as they swung on their anchors out in the bay.
Jenny sat down beside her, Charlotte in her lap.
‘Can I hold her?’ asked Bea.
Jenny handed the baby over, and Bea squeezed her so tightly that the little girl began to grizzle. ‘Ease off,’ said Jenny, putting her hand on Bea’s arm and noticing a graze there, one which Jenny was certain had not been there the day before. ‘Last night?’ she asked.
‘Two of them, I think,’ said Bea. ‘Maybe the same one twice. It was dark.’
‘Did they hurt your arm?’
‘I don’t think so. I think I stumbled at one point, afterwards. Looking for somewhere to sleep that didn’t stink. They got Dorothy too.’
‘But she is over eighty!’
‘I don’t think it mattered.’
‘And the officers. They did nothing, of course.’ A lot had changed on this journey, but not an English soldier’s reluctance to defend a prisoner.
‘They probably thought it’d keep the men quiet. Easier to manage. Whatever the truth of it, they just left us to each other.’
There were no flowers or new muslin dresses at Jenny’s wedding. The event occurred on her first Sunday on this shore. Nor was the day hers alone: she and Dan were one of five couples lined up in front of Reverend Gibson. He stood before each pair and said the words required to invoke whatever magic resided in the ritual, before moving on to the next.
Jenny also had to share the day with the colony itself, brought into being by the planting of a flag, a speech from the governor, and a percussive gun salute that made Charlotte cry.
There was deep suspicion, especially among some of the more prudish marines, that the marriages may not be valid: that they may have been prompted by the possibility of a hut, and the removal of the need for men to storm the women’s tents to gain release.
A marine from the Friendship, Lieutenant Reid, quizzed a few of the couples beforehand, asking them several times whether there was a spouse in England, holding his nose up as though scared of breathing in their criminality. Protestations to the contrary seemed to have no effect on him, as he clearly held the suspicion that at least a few wives and husbands resided over the seas and still had beating hearts. John Carney, Dan’s friend from the Charlotte, had been denied permission to marry due to an inconveniently alive and impossibly remote spouse.
‘They might as well be dead, even if they’re not,’ Jenny said to Dan. ‘No one will ever go back across the seas – no one who came here in the hold, unless they can buy a passage.’
‘If those marriages don’t exist here, these ones surely won’t back there,’ said Dan. ‘This one, for instance. Doesn’t count, except here.’
To the lack of dress, flowers and family, Jenny added a husband who didn’t believe he really was one. She h
ad never been given to fantasies about marriage. But she had certainly never imagined her first conversation with her husband would be a complete repudiation of the vows they had just undertaken.
She felt a tickle at the bottom of her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek to keep the tears from forming. She would, very much, have liked a lover. But she needed an ally and did not want to give him an excuse to abandon a union he didn’t believe existed.
‘Here is what we have, now,’ she said. ‘Here is all there is.’
‘For you, and for the beautiful girl here,’ he said, smiling as he always did at Charlotte, running a finger over her cheek. ‘I have only two years left, though.’
There was, at least, that. Few men would show kindness to someone else’s by-blow. Jenny had seen Dan playing around and joking with some young lads, children of convicts or sailors, who’d been chasing each other and found they suddenly had a larger playmate. ‘They make no demands of you except time,’ he’d said to her. ‘Time is one of the only things we have in abundance here.’
‘How would you even pay for a passage back?’ Jenny asked now.
‘Won’t have to. There will be ships making the journey, ones that might have lost crew on the way over, need replacements.’
The hut they had been promised would be theirs, but of course it would need to be built. It was to be constructed on the rocky western shore, across the water from where the governor’s house was to rise as soon as materials could be made to build it.
When Dan brought Jenny to look at the land they’d been given, she noticed a hole already dug there, wet and empty, with other holes containing four posts already filled in.
‘Mud,’ he said. ‘Can’t build a hut without mud. Get some twigs.’
‘What about wood?’ she asked.
‘They say it’s hardly worth the effort of cutting it down, here. Very poor, not up to much.’
‘Will it not wash away?’
‘You’ve built houses before, have you?’
So twigs were fetched and mixed with mud and woven through the posts. The heat did a decent job of baking it, even though parts began to flake off, prevented from binding properly by the sand in the soil.
One wall was nearly done when the next storm came.
Not as violent, quite, as the night-time storm that had greeted the arrival of the women. But here, rain couldn’t be trusted to fall directly to earth, not all the time, not when the southerly winds blew, driving it horizontally into whatever flat surface impeded its path.
The next morning, the wall was diminished, soft, and unlikely to survive another drenching.
Jenny stood, flicking her eyes between the wall and her husband.
‘You’d be delighted about this, I suppose,’ he said.
‘No. Why would I?’
He scowled at her, and trudged back towards the main settlement, still a collection of tents as the convicts wrestled with the knotty wood from the strange trees. He did not turn to check if she was following.
So bark from the worthless trees – which made excellent firewood but not much of anything else – would have to do.
The wounds to Dan’s pride over the hut’s construction closed over quickly. It helped that he lived under a roof, even a crude one, while the governor was still in a tent. It helped that his workmates on the gangs openly envied his home, and the fact that it contained a woman who was, by all accounts, practical and calm and not above gutting a fish.
But it helped most of all when Dan got what he believed he deserved and became one of the most important convicts in the colony – because it was thanks to him that a great many of them ate.
Whether it was because the government hadn’t had the foresight to sentence many skilled farmers to transportation, nobody knew. Even they may not have been able to convince anything to grow well in the sandy soil, which choked the life out of the seeds, little packets of potential brought all the way from England that refused to develop in the unknown earth.
While the sheep ate the riotous long grass that grew here, they were still thin, and too valuable alive to be slain for food in any great numbers. The cows, showing a bovine prescience that the convicts lacked, had escaped. Then there were the beasts already here, although nothing resembled native cattle or sheep: small possums, not much good for meat; larger creatures who propelled themselves on their hind legs, able to easily outrun the governor’s hounds, and the newly appointed gamekeeper had no better luck.
Fish, though, was another matter, and Dan was put in charge of procuring it. He was allowed to select his crew and go into the bay with a seine net. The ocean was not yet sure about them, not yet willing to provide a good catch all the time, and sometimes there was little to show for a night’s work. But on occasion they would bring back hauls of bream and snapper, and strange creatures: large blue fish the length of a man’s arm, or mottled white and red fish with long trailing spines.
At a time they were assured was early evening, but which had enough light for any early afternoon in England, Beatrice would walk down to the water with Jenny and Charlotte. Bea would care for the little girl while Jenny and other convicts appointed to the task waded into the water, holding the edge of the net and waiting for the call from Dan to haul, haul, haul.
On more than one occasion, as Jenny’s feet splashed into the bay’s surface and the sand closed over her toes, she found Mr Corbett next to her.
‘Oddly enough, the governor has not yet gotten around to building a theatre, or any other place of entertainment,’ he said once. ‘A man must fill the time somehow.’
He would stand near her throughout the night, together with the other convicts – many of whom had to be compelled, as they trusted neither the ocean nor the fish – and seemed to have no quarrel with taking orders from Dan when he boomed out the command to haul.
Corbett, Jenny discovered, was equally happy to be heard praising a convict as taking orders from one. He would mention Dan at every meal where the fish was served.
So nights spent holding the net became, for some, a tempting route towards the approval of those whose decisions could make their lives easier or harder, despite their mistrust of the ocean. Above the water were strange creatures, beasts which offended the natural order, which moved as they didn’t at home, or which had been cobbled together out of other creatures. If the land could generate these oddities, what did the sea hold?
Shells were collected along the shore too, to be burned by some of the more unfortunate men, the weak ones. The resulting lime, which would ultimately be used as mortar, unbound their skin as it bound everything else that it touched, leaving their eyes a staring red.
Many of the women were bored. There had been talk of spinning and weaving, and a lucky few helped the surgeon. All the women did laundry: officers’ clothes, and convicts’, draping the garments over one rock and pounding them with another. Jenny wondered why nobody bothered to ask whether such a practice was cleaning the fabric, as it was certainly destroying it. Beyond that, the women swore and they ranted or they huddled and sobbed, and some of them looked for the kind of distraction they couldn’t find with the men.
Meanwhile, many of the men who had received their rations from Dan’s hand aboard the Charlotte did not wish to be reminded that they still relied on him for sustenance. There were enough orders, too, given by those who wore uniforms, and many convicts felt they didn’t wish to receive them from the hoarse throat of a smuggler as well.
But others had noticed the runtishness of the crops, those which managed to grow at all. They had seen the inability of the governor’s hounds to catch the large birds with the ridiculously small wings. While the dogs sometimes had better luck with those hopping mammals, bringing one down couldn’t be relied on; in any case, the meat tended to end up on the table of the governor and his officers, and few convicts tasted it.
Governor Lockhart had quickly dispatched an officer – one of his favourites, Mr Corbett said – with some convicts to Norfolk Island
, where there was supposed to be good land and enough flax to make all the sails they could want. Even if this officer had better luck than those in the main colony, though, it would be a year or more before they could rely on him for food.
When most people managed to eat something that had once had a heartbeat, the chances were it had been brought in by Dan and his crew. Some saw an advantage in aligning themselves with the man who mined the sea, at least in the eyes of those who had what passed for power here. The number of volunteers for the task increased after muster one morning when the governor, passing Dan, gave him a casual clap on the shoulder, almost as though they were comrades. ‘Here he is,’ Lockhart said, ‘the man who keeps us fed. Stay well, Gwyn.’
The Gwyns did stay well. Allowed to keep a portion of the catch, they were flexible in their understanding of the share which would bypass the stores and find its way to the hut on the western bank. The storekeeper didn’t know. Others, however, did.
Shortly after the governor praised Dan, Elenor appeared at the shore. She walked past Beatrice, who was making faces at little Charlotte, without acknowledging her. She glared at Jenny on the way past, and made straight for Dan. ‘Me and Joseph want to help,’ she told him.
Jenny turned. Just behind her, approaching, was Joseph Clancy: the man whose whining voice had scratched at her ears on the Charlotte, complaining that Dan was being uneven with the rations. Bea had told her that Joseph and Elenor were close.
After that first profane night, men were told they would be punished if they tried to go into the women’s tents. They did try, of course, and a group of men were dressed in women’s clothes and marched through the settlement as penance. It didn’t stop the incursions, though, so flogging was now the penalty for breaching the canvas wall. Elenor and Joe must have found a way to get around the restrictions, as had a great many others.
‘We can both hold the net,’ Joseph told Dan. ‘We will haul when you say, and will take one or two of the smallest for the shovel.’