by Meg Keneally
Many others were far less gleeful at the news about France. As rumour built upon rumour, the soldiers’ banter with the convicts began to seem stilted, forced, as one group looked at the other, wondering whether the news would prompt them to a similar rebellion.
One soldier, though, was delighted.
The morning after she’d heard Elenor’s tale, Jenny had seen Mr Corbett trudging from his hut to the governor’s yard. ‘Wondrous news,’ he called to Lieutenant Reid. ‘I confess I celebrated a little too fulsomely. A brave undertaking, too, and one which will improve the lot of the French people.’
‘Don’t say that too loudly,’ Reid said. ‘Anyone would think you want a revolt against our King.’
‘No, not at all. He’s not a licentious tyrant who spends vast sums on baubles while his people starve.’
It should be me, Jenny thought. Me to whom he crows about some impossibly distant uprising.
If he would not give her back her place among the few he spoke to honestly, perhaps she could take it. A surprise attack, a shock to make him forget to pout.
She approached until she was walking quietly alongside him. ‘What if some of us were to follow the example of the French?’
Corbett glanced at her, pursed his lips, looked away and kept walking. ‘Your freedom was justly taken from you. That does not compare to the freedoms of an entire nation being unfairly curtailed. To escape from lawful imprisonment is a crime, but to risk everything in pursuit of a liberty that belongs to you, and to succeed, that . . . well, that is a miracle.’
He paused, stared at her for a moment and stalked away, his stiff back making it clear he would not welcome further conversation.
Dan didn’t blame the poor farmland or the new fleet for their circumstances. He blamed Jenny. She had forced him to marry her, he said, although the banns had never been read, for God’s sake, and the marriage would not stand. Not at home in England, where he would go after his sentence expired, as soon as he could find a ship that needed a mate.
At first, he mumbled his bitterness to Jenny out of the corner of his mouth, looking away from her as though she wasn’t worth the effort of turning his head.
But it grew, over the weeks, so that it could no longer be contained in a mutter. His words became louder, and they began to reach other ears, especially when he was sharing contraband rum with the other convicts, a practice he indulged in more frequently now he was among them. He still carried weight with some of the men, including most of those from the Charlotte. So people listened, and people talked.
‘It was for you, you know,’ Dan hissed at Jenny one night. ‘I traded the vegetables for you, for the baby. It was for you I took those lashes – you might as well have been holding the flail yourself.’
She could have pointed out that the source of their troubles slept in one of the men’s huts. She knew, though, that no matter what she said, Dan would just throw the same complaints back at her. They became truer in his mind with each repetition, gaining a weight that threatened to drag her down with him.
So she would turn away and silently cry, mourning the half-formed hope that his son would make the marriage real for Dan in a way the reverend’s words never could, in a way the austere Christ of their rulers had failed to do.
Dan’s sentence, to hear him tell it, would expire within the year. But this was no guarantee he’d be released, as the governor had not been given any records relating to the convicts whose fate he now controlled. It was always possible that someone might take it upon themselves to lop a few years off their sentence in the retelling. Those who had previously brought back tales of mines or pastures that turned out to be groundless now regretted it, as anything they said about the length of their sentences was looked on with suspicion.
If Dan went to England, he would be going alone. Jenny’s sentence would not have expired, and while Dan’s skills could pay for his passage, a woman and two young children would have to pay with money. It had been a long time since she’d held a coin in her hand.
Dan irritated her constantly, no question. She’d never had much patience with those who moaned. But the colony without her Dan would be bleak – not the current mass of scar and self-pity, but the one who could read the ocean, the one who would take Charlotte looking for sea dragons, the one who advised the marines themselves on the behaviour of tides and currents.
Jenny would be left alone with two young children, one a confirmed bastard and the other possibly so, if Dan was right about the marriages here not solidifying and retaining their shape beyond the seas.
She decided that if the two of them were going to aim whispers at each other in the dark, they might as well be whispering about something useful.
One night, he complained to her about the freezing water that had lately been finding its way in to the bottom of the cutter. She listened and nodded and offered to rub his shoulders. He accepted with a grunt, and she moved behind him, clenching and unclenching her fingers over his muscles. She made a fist and screwed it into the knots in his back as he sat there, silent, a king being attended by a servant beneath his notice.
After a few minutes, though, his shoulders lowered somewhat. Perhaps he was just tired, but perhaps he was beginning to relax. If she tried to wait for a sunny mood from him, she thought, she might as well give away her plan. So she leaned forward and whispered, ‘There are many here who would not be alive but for you.’
Dan nodded, accepting the praise without offering any in return – without any thought that it was Jenny to whom he owed the knowledge of where to get the best catches.
‘Now you’re reduced to a deckhand,’ she said, ‘expected to do the same work for no reward, no share of the catch, your family herded into the convict huts, separated from your wife.’ She felt his shoulders tense and redoubled her efforts to loosen them. ‘With the right boat, I think you could sail just about anywhere,’ she told him.
‘So do I,’ he said.
‘Do it, then. Sail anywhere. With me, and Charlotte and Emanuel. We have something that most of them here don’t have. The skill to leave, and the courage to do it.’
CHAPTER 18
Odd that it should be fish that saved Jenny from the convict huts. The very creatures that had abandoned Penmor.
In her own hut she had grown too used to her privacy. To hearing one snore instead of ten. Walking six feet without brushing skin with anyone else. She could ride Dan without the catcalls that accompanied coupling in the convict huts, and she could stand naked alone in the clearing afterwards. During those nights, with the sweat pulled out of her skin by the moist air, she had thought of Mawberry, even fancied them sisters.
But while space was the only blessing this colony provided in abundance, it was one of the many denied to the hut convicts. Jenny now lived in a place of wails and screams and sobs and fights, of stench upon stench, of dangers buried in innocent conversation.
She had lived in this world before, of course, in the gaol and the hulk and the ship. She remembered feeling choked by the heavy presence of so many bodies, so many fractured hearts and damaged minds. Back then, though, she had known she would be leaving – perhaps for somewhere worse, but leaving nonetheless.
Then, too, she had not had a baby who was lighter than an armful of officers’ breeches. A too-small boy who mewled instead of wailed, and then only rarely.
Her walks to the shore were for Emanuel, so she told herself and anyone else who inquired. The sun and fresh air might be able to do what her own milk had not.
Charlotte had a child’s understanding that a new baby stopped her mother from holding her back. She would run on ahead if she saw something interesting, although her pace was slowing as the weeks passed. But the figure of a child crouched at the other end of the beach – that was worth galloping for.
By the time Jenny reached them, Charlotte was digging in the sand with a naked boy. They were absorbed, each content with their own company but happy to share their patch of sand with the other.
Mawberry, standing nearby, frowned when she saw Jenny and nodded in the direction of her old hut. Jenny shook her head and pointed up the shore at the convict huts. Mawberry nodded, and Jenny suddenly feared for her, imagining the woman striding up to the main settlement, walking past the male huts – where many of the men knew nothing of beauty, so chose to mock it – or encountering a guard with a musket, made unreasonable by hunger.
Jenny pointed again, then back at Mawberry, and shook her head.
Mawberry shrugged and looked down at the children. They were using their fingers to embellish a small oval mound of sand they had built, giving it scales and placing eyes where they had no business being. Mawberry glanced at this sand fish, then behind her to where a canoe was pulled up onto the beach. Then she raised her eyebrows at Jenny, who smiled.
Mr Corbett looked confused as the fish spilled out of a sack onto a piece of canvas Jenny had laid at his feet. She would have preferred to lay them out like wares at a market, but she was holding Emanuel in one arm. So she had shaken them out of the sack in a tumble: a few silver ones turned grey with death; some of the flattened, sandy creatures with eyes at the top of their heads; two of the delicious green monstrosities with a single black spot on their flank.
Corbett looked up at her, and down again.
‘They’re fish,’ she said.
‘Yes. Yes, so I see.’
‘Thought you mightn’t recognise them, being scarce and all.’
‘And they came from?’
‘The ocean.’
He frowned at her, and she regretted her answer.
‘These haven’t been held back from the government catch?’ he asked.
‘No. I caught them. In a native canoe.’
She didn’t tell him about the heads: the sandstone arms that led from the open sea. Today, she and Mawberry had paddled right up to them and dropped their shell-hooked lines. They’d grinned at each other when the whiskered snout of a seal appeared for a moment above the water. Jenny had felt the tug of the current as the ebbing tide forced unimaginable gallons of water between the heads. She had looked up at the scrub that peered over the edge of the cliffs, then down at the half-submerged boulders that had fallen from them.
She’d noticed the lookout officer at his post on the southern headland. He was gazing to the south, the direction from which the fleets had come. He was surely not expecting to see anyone arriving from the north. Or leaving.
Now, as Corbett stared at the jumble of fish, she said, ‘These are yours.’
‘I’m not at all sure they are,’ he said.
‘I am paying our debt,’ she told him. ‘The fish that was traded for the cauliflower – I’m replacing it, with more to spare. Take it to the governor. You will eat well tonight, or better than you have been.’
‘I see. And you?’
‘We need more than fish,’ she said. She held out Emanuel, all sunken cheeks and ribs. ‘Look at him. He is the quietest baby I have ever seen. Babies should not be quiet, Mr Corbett.’
Corbett frowned as he looked at Emanuel. He reached out and stroked the boy’s cheek with his thumb.
‘Whenever anyone starts coughing, so does he,’ Jenny said. ‘He will not survive the huts, Mr Corbett. Dan has paid, and now so have I. Emanuel has a chance if we have our own place. Please, can you talk to the governor?’
‘I doubt he would listen.’
‘He might, if you remind him of how the catch has reduced since the flogging. If you say you believe it may increase if Dan is given charge of the boats again. And if you tell him that returning our family to our hut will help Dan heal faster, so he can work harder. Perhaps the governor will not act to save a baby’s life, but surely he will act to save his own. Particularly if you tell him this as he is eating one of these fish.’
‘I don’t know what . . . Well, I will ask.’
‘Ask prettily, for all our sakes,’ said Jenny.
Corbett laughed then, the rueful sound of a parent reluctantly amused by a naughty child.
‘Whatever else you say, Mr Corbett, you can’t say I haven’t paid what’s due.’
‘No, I can’t,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘And Jenny – thank you. I admire you for doing this.’
After muster, Mr Corbett told Jenny that the governor was already well aware of the discrepancy between Carney’s catch and Dan’s previous numbers. And Lockhart feared that more ships would soon come, with more convicts and marines. ‘The governor’s not pleased with the condition of the convicts who came off the second fleet,’ said Corbett.
‘I heard it took over three hundred days for the Lady Juliana to get here,’ said Jenny. ‘No wonder they were in such a state.’
‘It’s not only that,’ said Corbett. ‘Those ships, they’re not the property of His Majesty. They’ve been hired from private interests that are chiefly concerned with profit, and so were the men in charge of the vessels. I sincerely doubt most of those on board got their full ration. And I’ve been in the hold of the Lady Juliana – it’s putrid, far worse than the Charlotte on its worst day after a storm with the privy buckets rolling around. The masters had no incentive to keep anyone alive, either. Quite the reverse: anyone who died, they kept the allowance. His Excellency has written home about it, but who knows if his letter will get there before more ships are sent?’
‘In the meantime,’ said Jenny, ‘you have the colony’s best fisherman working as a deckhand and living in with the men. Tools don’t last if you don’t look after them, Mr Corbett.’
Jenny was delighted to carry Emanuel to their family home, and to be getting away from the noxious games of Elenor and Joe. But she worried that the partial restoration of Dan’s status might dull any hunger he had for escape. Still, the marines were to watch him very carefully to make sure that all of his catch wound up in the store. He would not like that.
Dan continued to dismiss the idea of escape, at first. ‘We would need pitch, for starters.’
‘We can bring it,’ Jenny said, ‘and food, too.’
‘Not enough, not without stealing it. I’m not going to steal food, Jenny. There will be no flogging next time, you must know that.’
‘That’s one of the reasons why I don’t think we have any choice. Your last crime wasn’t a crime, we both know it was Joseph talking to the right people – he must have some officers who are friendly to him. And who’s to say he won’t do it again, and see you at the end of a rope? If you stay here, it will happen. I’m certain of it.’
Neither Dan nor Jenny was able to stay away from the shore. They were both known for seeking it out, separately or together. Now they could take advantage of the privacy afforded by an unoccupied stretch of sand without exciting comment.
Dan nodded out towards the bay. A southerly wind was making small foam-headed peaks, and the governor’s cutter rode them as it lay at anchor. ‘That’s the boat you’d have to take,’ Dan said.
‘Unless you want to steal one of the brigs,’ said Jenny. ‘Maybe ask some seamen to join you.’
When Dan smiled, the muscles in his face relaxed so that the pinched and bitter creature was momentarily banished and the man he had replaced came back.
‘Don’t worry about stealing food,’ she said. ‘I’m not suggesting that we go tomorrow. You and I, we’ll salt a little bit away from our rations. The hole in our floor is still undisturbed. We’ll put aside enough rice, enough salt pork. Over a few months, we should be able to get enough for the journey. I’ll bring some of the tea leaves that ward off the scurvy.’
Dan kept looking at the governor’s cutter, of which he had once been master in all but name. Then he shook his head as though trying to clear it, turning to her. ‘I can’t see it working, Jenny. You and I, and two small children. Why would you put them in such danger?’
It was a question Jenny had been asking herself. The voyage would certainly be dangerous. She had only the vaguest notion of what they might do once they were out of the harbour: where they would go,
how long it would take. But Emanuel was small and sickly, and Charlotte had too soon lost her childhood plumpness. If they stayed, they would be in more danger from starvation and disease than from the ocean.
Children Charlotte’s age and younger lay in the graveyard at the end of the settlement. Jenny had seen Amelia, a former London whore, lie on the freshly turned earth that covered the cloth-wrapped body of her young son, refusing to move when night fell as she did not want him to be alone in the dark.
Dan, though, was right that an escape wouldn’t work with just the four of them.
‘Do you not think others might wish to come?’ she asked him. ‘Others who can help. What about John Carney?’
‘He might like what he’s doing now,’ Dan said. ‘Who’s to say he will not do what Joseph did?’
‘You know he won’t. There are very few people I trust, Dan, and he is one of them. Him and Bea.’
‘You didn’t mention me.’
‘Of course, you,’ she said, smiling. She did not mean a word of it – had he not been telling her that their marriage didn’t exist, and that he would take the first opportunity to get a berth on the boat back to England? The only way she could trust him was if they were engaged together in a plan that would result in their deaths should it fail.
She had no intention, though, of laying things out for him quite as baldly as that.
‘This would be a big undertaking,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘Not something we should do without thought,’ she said.
‘No, we shouldn’t.’
‘That’s why, Dan, we should start planning. Keeping our eyes and ears open. If we believe those plans can’t succeed, then we abandon them. But if they can succeed, you will never again have to take anyone else’s direction on a boat.’