by Meg Keneally
Harrigan seemed, finally, to be getting used to the ocean. At least he had stopped dropping the contents of his stomach overboard. He was sufficiently recovered to object when Bruton reached out and casually took his portion of salt pork from him.
‘You’ve dumped more into the sea than I’ve eaten on this whole trip,’ Bruton said. ‘It’s owed, is what it is. Make no objection and I will consider the debt paid.’
Harrigan looked up, and his shoulders hunched slightly. They were, Jenny remembered, the shoulders of a man who could lightly walk away from a farm with a pig under each arm. He may not have Bruton’s strength, or his viciousness, but he was robust enough, even after all the privations of the past week. He was also, Jenny suspected, smarter than Bruton, and he was getting very, very angry.
‘I’ll make no objection,’ he said, ‘if you’re too weak to survive without my food well as your own.’
Bruton stopped eating the stolen food, looked up and narrowed his eyes. ‘It’s this weakness that kept you above water,’ he said. ‘Bailing the boat out while you were leaning over the side with your mouth open, drooling into the waves.’
‘What will you do when we land?’ asked Harrigan. ‘Perhaps they have need of oxen.’
Bruton was impressively quick for a man of his bulk standing on a moving surface. He was on his feet, picking up Harrigan under the arms and turning his torso, in order to get the momentum to hurl him into the water.
‘For God’s sake, John, stop them!’ yelled Dan, who was holding the tiller – letting go could have fatal consequences. Everything depended on Dan keeping the nose of the boat aimed into the highest waves. If the boat turned, and one of those waves caught them broadside, they would almost certainly capsize.
Carney darted forward but seemed at a loss. There wasn’t enough room to separate two fighting men by force, not without one or more of them ending up in the sea. In these conditions, once they were in the water, they would likely remain there.
Jenny was sitting in her usual space, just in front of Dan. She had been stroking the hair of a glassy-eyed Charlotte with one hand and clamping onto Emanuel with the other.
The possibility of a capsize visited her in nightmares. Although she could swim and had been teaching Charlotte, the girl had only paddled around in the shallows of Sydney Cove on a calm day. If the boat capsized, even if Jenny could untie them all quickly enough, Charlotte would have no hope of keeping afloat in these seas. The image of Emanuel, his limbs flailing, his mouth open in new surprise, sinking into the darkness would not leave her.
These two idiots were bringing them perilously close to making her nightmare real.
She had no free hands, engaged as they were in keeping her children on the deck and alive. So she stuck out a foot – unshod, as there was no point protecting them from getting wet – and jabbed her heel into the back of Bruton’s leg.
He did not lose his footing, but he did let go of Harrigan, who fell to the deck where the rough edge of a seat opened a gash in his forehead.
‘Sit down, Bruton,’ Jenny said. ‘Here, near me. I have something to tell you.’
Bruton, who rarely followed commands, did as he was told and sat on a plank facing her.
‘Now,’ said Jenny, ‘lean forward.’
He did his best, in this world where forward could become backward in an instant.
‘Are you really, truly so delicate that an insult from someone like Harrigan can goad you into risking everything?’
‘He called me an ox,’ Bruton said.
‘So you are. An ox who no longer has to work at the government farm, or on the kilns. An ox on his way to making his own decisions again, to deciding which tavern to walk into, which woman to take. You’re an ox who will not starve to death in Sydney Cove. But you very nearly became a drowned ox, and you very nearly took us with you.’
He scowled, but said nothing
‘Now,’ Jenny said, ‘lean a little bit further forward.’ When he did, she drew back the arm that had been around Charlotte and slapped his cheek so hard it forced his head to the side.
He did not cry out, just sat there, rubbing his cheek and looking at her. Had they been on land, with Dan nowhere nearby, she would have had significant fears for her safety. But once she had called on bluster and bravado for assistance, they would not let go of her. Once you decide to make them your allies, she thought, they will not be abandoned.
‘Will you now squall about being slapped by a woman?’ she asked Bruton.
He said nothing, still. He had stopped rubbing his cheek, and now he sat there as still as possible, his hands on his knees, staring.
‘I will, I promise, slap you again,’ she said, ‘if you try to throw anyone over the sides of this boat. If you try to take anyone else’s food. Do you know, Bruton, of the crime for which I was transported?’
Still just the glare, no words.
‘Highway robbery,’ she said. ‘I tended to use a knife. I still have it with me.’ Bruton didn’t need to know that it was old, rusty and barely capable of cutting into a fish. ‘If you ever do anything again to endanger my children, I will slit you from your chin downwards, until we need to bail out your blood.’
CHAPTER 24
When Jenny first woke from the fractured chin-on-chest sleep that had become her only rest, she couldn’t decide what had changed. She felt for the children as she always did on waking, resting her hand on each little chest to make sure it continued to rise and fall. She rubbed her eyes, and found them dry.
The sea was no longer slapping her in the face, no longer peppering her cheeks with spray. The winds, which she had half believed would never die, were beginning to fade. But they had driven the little boat far out to sea.
For the past three weeks, only an occasional glimpse of a smudge of land told them that they hadn’t drifted fatally, irrevocably.
It was still there, that dark line. Such things could be imagined, Jenny knew, by a hopeful mind or a desperate one. But if the low darkness of the land was a fantasy, it was shared by them all. Finally, the waves were settling back into the sea, no longer called out by the wind, and the small boat turned towards shore.
No one had perished in the storm, but Harrigan lay across one of the benches, his eyes open but unfixed as though they had given up the task of holding on to anything in this constantly moving world. The skin was flaking off his face, and a row of blisters had formed on his forehead. None of the men paid him any attention. He was unable to bail, or reef the sail in, or throw out the sea drogue, or row, so he was not worth their attention.
Bruton suggested throwing him overboard. ‘There’s little enough as it is,’ he said. ‘We should not be wasting the water.’
‘Yes, why not?’ said Jenny. ‘Of course, you won’t mind if we apply the same rules to you, if you’re ever unable to row.’
Bruton grunted, and returned to his oar. Jenny resumed her practice – a thrice daily ritual – of trickling enough water in through Harrigan’s broken lips to keep him alive.
‘You know I don’t like Bruton, nor trust him,’ Dan whispered to her that night. When the wind was low, it was impossible to have a private conversation in any but the quietest tones.
‘Yet he is here at your urging,’ she said.
She still suspected that Bruton had threatened Dan and Carney in order to come on the journey. Whether the threat had taken the form of physical violence, or an intention to inform on the party and its plans, she didn’t know. But here he was, with his need for continual bullying, continual threats to prevent him drowning those he held in contempt.
‘Still, I can understand him,’ Dan said. ‘If Harrigan cannot help us . . . Has it occurred to you, Jenny, that you might be giving him water that you’ll need to keep the children alive?’
‘So you would like to dispense with some ballast as well? Roll him over into the sea?’
‘No! No, I’m not Bruton. Perhaps, though . . . perhaps we might reduce the amount of water you’re giving
him, bit by bit. Then allow things to happen as they will.’
‘A quick death by drowning, or a slow death from thirst,’ said Jenny.
‘A chance,’ said Dan. ‘If we’re all to have a chance, perhaps I am being too generous.’
‘We are not holding water back from him, and we are not throwing him overboard. Once we do that, it will not stop, I promise you. Bruton will be wondering what the point of having two children on the journey is. He will start looking at the water Charlotte drinks, wondering if it could be put to better use in his mouth.’
Dan jutted out his lower jaw, as he often did when she disagreed with him. He didn’t argue, though, and when Jenny next raised water to Charlotte’s lips, extracted from rain-soaked clothes she had wrung out, he kept his eyes on Bruton.
Charlotte was not in much better condition than Harrigan. She hadn’t spoken for a week. She sat up to drink the water her mother gave her, and sometimes ate the food. But she had the same unfocused stare as Harrigan. Jenny was no longer being called on to spin stories out of the sea mist, or asked about the possibility of a sea dragon finally breaking the surface. Charlotte had sunk into herself so deeply that boredom could no longer touch her.
Jenny held a shawl over her daughter’s head during the day to save her skin from the worst of the sun. It had reddened and flaked, and the skin around her nose had peeled so many times it was covered in a hard armour of damaged tissue.
Emanuel was shaded as well, and drank from his mother rather than from a cup. But he, too, had gone quiet. He rarely cried, and when he did there was a hoarseness to it, and it seemed to cost more effort than it was worth.
Jenny’s world had shrunk to the length of the bench she sat on, and the two children tied to it. She turned sometimes, hoping to catch Dan’s eye, perhaps smile. He would glance at her, then stare ahead in clench-jawed concentration. Her hand, when she placed it on his knee, was usually ignored, as was Charlotte.
As the spray receded and the waves dropped and they turned towards shore, Jenny wanted to take an oar herself. She was desperate to sleep on ground. The fear had been growing in her, these past weeks, that she would doze and wake to find one of the children gone. To sleep properly, without fear of the sea claiming them, became one of her most fervent wishes.
They managed to find a beach and hauled the boat ashore on land that looked much like Sydney Cove – so much so that Jenny was gripped by an irrational fear that the wind had forced them backwards, and that Mr Corbett would walk onto the beach at any moment with a party of marines to arrest them.
Corbett, though, did not come. Instead, while they were filling their water flagons, two native women and a few children appeared on the beach. They stared, surprised, at the newcomers. They did not turn and flee. But immediately, and piercingly, they started to wail.
Jenny approached them – better her than any of the men, especially Bruton. She made signs to calm them, both palms facing the ground as she moved her hands up and down, but they continued to stand their ground, and they continued to wail. There was only one reason why a frightened, wailing woman would stand her ground when faced with intruders. When she was not wailing out of fear: when she was sending a signal.
Jenny walked back to Dan. ‘Others are being called, and they will be here.’
He looked over at the women, nodded and called everyone back to the boat. They rowed away from shore as a dozen tribesmen arrived. Although Jenny saw canoes on some of the beaches they passed, no one took to them. The natives seemed to be satisfied that the intruders were going; they did not care where to.
The convicts sailed on, then, staying close to shore.
Jenny had been watching Charlotte as she slept. Wondering, as she often did now, if in trying to save her children she had condemned them to a slow progress towards deaths which might not have claimed them in Sydney.
Charlotte’s nose twitched. Perhaps she was dreaming, or perhaps it was a response to the strand of hair that had just been blown across her face.
Then a thick lock of Jenny’s own hair, matted and brittle and studded with white flecks of salt, was thrown across her face by the wind.
When she removed it, she looked up. The clouds, which had been hanging in the sky like white outcrops, were now being scraped across it, melded together and spread too thinly to hold their shape. Sea dragons might be fantasies, but cloud dragons clearly still existed, and were ruffling the surface that, less than an hour ago, had been smooth.
The ocean responded very quickly, and the boat was marched on by ever-increasing hillocks of water, until half the time they couldn’t see the sky without craning their necks.
Jenny had been right to think this coast looked like Sydney Cove. Because it certainly had the same rains: the kind that came on suddenly as though a hatch had been opened, almost thick enough to grasp. Certainly thick enough to add to the water that was filling the boat.
She didn’t realise she was gripping the children so tightly until Charlotte whimpered, waking briefly before slumping again. Langham was the only one bailing. Carney was doing his best to reef the sail while Dan gripped the tiller, looking grimly ahead so that he could steer the boat into the face of each wave. ‘What happens tonight?’ he hissed at Jenny. ‘A new moon. What happens when I can’t see what’s coming?’
Jenny didn’t know. But she knew what would happen if Dan, robbed of sight, allowed the boat to drift side-on to a wave. They were so high that the boat had to travel two, three times its length to reach their peak. If they were caught side-on, with that much water crashing onto them, the boat would not hold together.
Then a wave did break on them, curling over on top as they climbed it. When it passed, the boat contained so much water that the top of the gunwales were inches above the surface.
‘Bruton!’ Jenny yelled. ‘Get the crate – underneath the bench – hurry!’
The crate contained all of their belongings that weren’t immediately needed. Langham had tucked the quadrant into the shirt he wore, together with the chart. But apart from food, everything else they owned lay inside the wooden box. Bruton turned, and she saw an expression on his face she had never thought to see: uncomprehending fear.
‘Bruton, the crate! Do you want to drown?’
He responded this time, reaching under the bench on which she sat gripping the children. He dragged the crate out by one of its rope handles, put it onto the bench in front of him, and then looked at her. He was waiting, she realised, for an instruction.
‘Throw it overboard!’ she yelled.
‘Are you bloody mad, Jenny?’ Dan yelled. ‘We will have nothing. How are we to trade for food when we get there?’
‘How are we to trade for food when we’re dead?’ she yelled back. ‘Bruton, over the side with it! Now!’
Standing up, he kept his legs wide and bent so he didn’t get hurled overboard. He twisted his torso and threw.
Langham cried out when he saw the box sinking, and Carney must have noticed its splash near the bow but was surely too distracted to remark on it.
If ditching the box had made any difference, it was only a fraction.
Bruton sat again silently, not flinching when sprays of water blasted his face.
‘Sitting there with your mouth open, are you hoping a fish will jump in?’ Jenny yelled. ‘Bail! We will founder soon enough. You need to start bailing, and keep bailing!’
‘Nothing to bail with,’ said Bruton, and turned away.
‘There’s the privy bucket! It’s not doing any good.’ Its contents had been spilled over the deck so many times, they had stopped bothering with it.
Even with Langham and Carney bailing, the water was replenished with such speed that it was still, for a while, rising faster than they could get rid of it.
Then the rain stopped, and the water level in the boat slowly lowered, although streams of spray continued to replace it. Bruton and Langham resumed their vacant expressions, as they settled into a rhythm of bailing, propelled more b
y momentum than by conscious will. Jenny watched them as she held painfully on to her children, willing herself not to fall into a sleep that might loosen her grip.
CHAPTER 25
This place didn’t look like Sydney Cove. Not anymore.
On the other side of the storm, the water was so calm and glassy that Jenny couldn’t believe it was the same substance that had battered the boat for so long. The land was different, too. The sandstone cliffs, which Jenny had assumed the country was ringed with, had gone. So, for the moment, had the mainland itself.
They were drifting between small sandy islands, some barely bigger than Jenny and Dan’s hut, some surrounded by sharp and vicious rocks, while others were little more than sand. The convicts were unlikely to find fresh water here, but they needed to land somewhere, and soon. They were out of resin, and their only means of repairing the hull was the soap they had brought with them. It would have to do, though, because the boat was desperately in need of repair. The battering from the heavy seas meant that at least one of them, usually two, had to bail constantly even in calm conditions, and the boat would not survive another storm.
They passed several beaches and inlets, and then a somewhat larger island. One with green on it, and a little crescent of beach. The little slice of sand, innocent of human footsteps, was gouged by the hull as the boat was dragged ashore.
Emanuel was still, floppy, as Jenny laid him on a bed of leaves she had made. She draped her sodden shawl over two upright sticks to shade him. He gazed at her with eyes which seemed not to belong to him, which did not question but just accepted that misery was normal.
Charlotte, on the other hand, was making a lot of noise. Not what Jenny wanted to hear, though – not shouting and laughing, or even grizzling. The noise was coming from deep inside her chest as she shook with wet coughs, trying to expel the sea water that she had inhaled during the storm.
Charlotte was in pain, as they all were, from the sores opened up by salt-sodden clothes rubbing against skin. The rope that Jenny had used to secure her had left an indentation on her wrist, deep and with an angry permanence like the marks from the irons Jenny had last worn in England.