Nanberry

by Jackie French

  Chapter 26

  SURGEON WHITE

  COCKLE BAY HOSPITAL; SYDNEY COVE,

  3 JUNE 1790

  Winter arrived — their third winter here, with even less food in the stores and the marines trudging barefoot in the mud, their fine black boots worn out.

  The Surgeon shivered at his desk in the hospital, trying to break up the lumps in his inkwell so he could sketch a new bird — a fascinating pigeon he’d seen in his garden yesterday, fat and grey with a white stripe around its neck, strutting around under the trees as though it didn’t want to fly. Nanberry called it a wungawunga and that was almost the sound the bird made.

  Outside the hospital the wind blew shivers of ice against the leaky walls. Was there snow beyond the mountains? It felt like it. But there could be anything out there. Lakes, deserts …

  There was no way to tell. Nanberry was too young to know. Bennelong might — but the man had finally escaped, once he had gained the Governor’s trust and had the shackle removed from his leg. Even now he might be urging the natives to wipe out the colony …

  A woman screamed outside, and then another. The Surgeon leapt to his feet and grabbed his bag. For a second he wondered if the natives had really attacked.

  The cries came again. But they weren’t screams of terror, he realised. They were excitement.

  He dropped the bag and ran to the door. Two women rushed past, clutching their babies in their shawls against the wind. One of them grinned at him, showing the gaps between her yellow teeth. ‘The flag’s up! The flag on the headland is up!’

  A flag meant that a ship’s sails had been seen, far out at sea. A ship! Surgeon White shut his eyes, and gave a quick prayer of gratitude. A ship bringing the food, the clothing, the medicines they so desperately needed. A ship bringing news. A ship that said: ‘We have not forgotten you, tiny colony at the end of the world. You are not to perish here.’

  More women ran past the hospital with children in their arms, kissing them and each other. One hag with filthy hair would have kissed the Surgeon but he drew back.

  He threw on his hat and coat and seized an eye-glass, then ran outside and up the hill to see for himself. And there it really was — the signal flag, flapping in the wind.

  There was no sign of the ship itself yet — it might be hours before it sailed into the harbour. But already he could see the Governor leaving his neat stone house. The Surgeon ran down to the cove, heedless of his dignity, to join the party.

  The rowers pushed the Governor’s boat out into the harbour with their trousers rolled, then hopped in and began to pull at the oars. Behind them officers tumbled into fishing boats, ordering men to row, and row fast, desperate to reach the ship. That ship might carry letters with news of the families they had been forced to leave behind in England, as well as stores.

  Surgeon White scanned the great blank blue canvas of sea and sky between the harbour’s headlands. For the first time he felt a whisper of fear.

  What if the ship wasn’t English? What if it were French, or even Russian or American? The French knew that they were here. What if war had been declared while they were away? The colony was hardly surviving as it was. If a French ship attacked they would be helpless …

  And suddenly there it was: a large ship, graceful on the waves. And on her mast … He swallowed, and shut his eyes briefly in gratitude again. The English flag.

  ‘She’s sailing too close to shore,’ muttered one of the men next to him. ‘She’ll be on the rocks if she takes that course.’ The man stood and began to wave frantically.

  White grasped his eye-glass. Disaster indeed if the ship had come so far only to be wrecked, her cargo lost at the last minute. But the sailors aboard must have seen the signal. The ship altered course slightly.

  The man next to him sat down. Surgeon White could see the name of the ship now: the Lady Juliana, and the word ‘London’.

  Beside him the Governor drew a breath of relief. ‘Saved,’ he said quietly.

  Surgeon White nodded. Even with Major Ross on Norfolk Island, the marines were at the point of rebellion, demanding the alcohol that was supposed to be part of their wages. The only thing that had stopped them was the knowledge that there was no more wine, or rum, or even rations, for the Governor to give them.

  ‘No point my meeting the ship myself now,’ muttered Phillip. ‘I need to get the work parties together, get the stores unloaded as soon as we can.’

  The Governor signalled to one of the fishing boats that were following his boat.

  The dinghy drew close so the Governor could step aboard. The Surgeon admired his sense of duty once again. This ship might have news of Phillip’s loved ones, the first news in so many years.

  A sudden scatter of clouds above them began to weep, a winter squall with ice-cold fingers. The rain stopped as they drew closer still to the big ship.

  The Surgeon felt his heart hammer in his chest. Perhaps one of the letters aboard was his recall to England. He had served nearly five years in this job now, if he counted time in England, preparing for the voyage. He had done his duty here for nearly two and a half long years, his duty enough on the voyage. Surely it was time for another posting …

  ‘Pull away, lads!’ yelled the rowers. ‘Hurrah for a bellyful, and news from our friends!’

  The Juliana’s rope ladder bounced as it was flung down so they could scramble up. White was one of the first aboard. He looked around for the Captain. ‘Letters!’ he cried, forgetting all politeness. ‘What is the news from England?’

  The Captain stared at him, his face broken in a sour grin among his wrinkles. ‘You want news? Where do you want me to start? The King went mad, did you know that?’

  The Surgeon stared. ‘You’re joking, man!’

  ‘I am not. But he’s well enough now or so they say. And the Frenchies have put their king into prison — and their queen too. It’s rule by mob there now — and we’re at war with ’em.’

  Surgeon White shook his head. It was too much to take in. Impossible … a king didn’t go mad, nor did mobs tear a king and queen from their thrones. Was the man joking? But the Captain looked sincere; nor were any of the sailors nudging each other as though the colonists were taken in.

  ‘We knew none of this,’ he said slowly. ‘We’ve heard nothing of the rest of the world — nothing at all.’

  ‘Aye, well, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know about the Guardian either.’

  ‘The Guardian?’

  ‘The store ship sent after you, before we set out. Should have reached you months ago. But she was wrecked on an iceberg near the Cape.’

  White stared at him. So they hadn’t been forgotten. But that was poor comfort now, with all the stores lost as well as the poor sailors on board.

  ‘But you have stores?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘Little enough. Only loaded supplies to get us here.’ The man looked at him speculatively. ‘Might have some extra to sell though, if you can meet the price.’ He grinned. ‘Got something else you might fancy below too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two hundred and twenty-five convict women. Women! How does that sound to you? Enough to tickle any man’s fancy, eh? And them being convicts you can do what you want with ’em.’

  ‘More convicts? But we need food, man. Medicines, clothes, candles, blankets. We can hardly feed the wretches we have here.’

  The Captain wasn’t listening. What did it matter to him if the colony starved? He’d soon sail away again. He rubbed his hands and nudged the Surgeon. ‘Had the wenches all to ourselves all the way here. The rest o’ the fleet is following, with the men.’

  White edged away from the man, disgusted, suddenly aware of the stench around him. Not just the natural smells of any ship that had been long at sea — bad meat and salt; the stink of sailors with teeth lost to scurvy — but a dreadful reek.

  He became aware of a muted moaning from below. He had been too excited to hear it before. ‘What’s that sound?’

&nbs
p; ‘Just them women. Now, about the stores you asked about. There’s flour, and dried fruit, and port too …’

  But Surgeon White had already run to the hatchway. ‘Open it,’ he ordered.

  One of the sailors slowly lifted it up.

  White faces, starved and hollow-eyed, blinked at the sudden light. The stench of death and rats, of vomit and muck, struck him so strongly he stepped back. A voice called with desperate cheer, ‘Anythin’ you want for a biscuit, dearie. Anythin’ at all. Just you ask for Maggie!’

  White looked back at the Captain. ‘God help us, man. Are the convicts on the other ships as desperate as these poor wretches?’

  But the Captain was already trying to sell his stores to someone else.

  Chapter 27

  SURGEON WHITE

  COCKLE BAY HOSPITAL, 13 JULY 1790

  It was a scene from Hell.

  The sides of the new hospital tent flapped like a ship’s sails as Surgeon White strode among the bodies of the dead and dying, giving orders. There had been no time to make beds for so many, nor even pallets of straw. The men and women in this tent had only a blanket between them and the cold ground. But it was the best that he could do.

  Most of his new patients were naked, their rags so filthy and crusted they had to be cut off their bodies and burnt. There were men as well as women now, for the other ships of the Second Fleet had unloaded their human cargo, as starved and weak as the convicts on the Lady Juliana. Shadowed eyes looked enormous in skeletal white faces. Some screamed at the light after so many months in darkness. Others muttered, their teeth fallen out, their legs swollen, lost in the madness of scurvy. Rat bites had turned foul, lice crawled from matted hair.

  It was a nightmare. How long had he prayed for ships to come? And now they had, bringing not the stores they needed, nor certainly a letter of recall, but the ill and starving.

  The stench of the smoke from the burning clothes and blankets filled the colony. It was impossible to be clear of it. Impossible not to hear the moans and cries. Not far away the pile of bodies grew: those who had died as volunteers brought them to shore from the ship, those who had died since. Most of the new convicts had been so weak they didn’t even know that they had reached the land they’d sailed for.

  There was no time to bury the dead now; there was hardly time to tend the living.

  One thousand and thirty-eight men and women had sailed from England. Two hundred and seventy-three had died on the eleven-month voyage. Four hundred and eighty-six — he clung desperately to the figures, as though by accurate accounting he could somehow help them — had been rowed from the ship too weak to stand. Many had died on that last trip to shore, never feeling the soil of the land they had been sent to. Others lay wide-eyed and gaunt-faced on the grass, dying before a hand could comfort them.

  One hundred and twenty-four had died here already.

  Even the most hardened convicts of Sydney Cove had run to help these victims as the rowing-boat crews had unloaded them like sacks of wheat. The poor and hungry of the colony had brought their tattered blankets to warm the newcomers, their ragged blouses to cover their nakedness. Men he had regarded as black-hearted rogues cried as they lifted white faces to help them sip fresh water. Women he had damned as whores spooned flour-and-water soup into cracked and fevered lips.

  The convicts below decks had even hidden the bodies of their dead friends during the voyage, desperate for their rations, adding to the stench and rot in the hold. Most of the convicts — alive or dead — had been so muck-covered as they were carried out that you couldn’t see the skin below the crust of filth.

  He wanted to yell accusations, to have the captains put in irons. But they were elsewhere, cheerfully selling the food that they had stolen while their human cargo starved. One had even had the gall to open a shop. Their best customers were the officers, like that upstart Balmain.

  There was nothing the Governor could do, for the captains had at least brought the government stores as ordered. All they had taken was the convicts’ food — and there was no law that said that convicts must be fed or even given water or daylight. The captains had broken no law of England, only the laws of humanity and God.

  The Surgeon would not buy their stores, though he too hungered for familiar food — wheat flour, rice, peas. He would not profit from men like these, nor add to their profit.

  At least the captains hadn’t dared to break into the official stores sent to the colony. The colonists would eat, for a while, even with so many more to feed. Now his job was to try to separate those who were weak from starvation and scurvy from those with fever: typhus mostly, although maybe dysentery too.

  At least today the portable hospital tent had finally been put up. The sailors on the Justinian swore it had been put up in a few hours back in England, but it had taken days to work out how to do it here. The fever cases were quarantined there, hopefully stopping typhus or dysentery killing the rest of the colony. He’d ordered the worst of the scurvy cases — their arms and legs bloated, their teeth fallen out, their gums bleeding — to be taken up to the colony hospital and the huts around it, with directions to feed them teas brewed from wild greens and fruits, and gruel made with flour and water and wild spinach.

  Which left tents like the one he was in now, ragged and leaking, for those who were dying of simple starvation or putrid skin ulcers from the filth they had been forced to live in.

  Surgeon White gazed at the bodies on the ground.

  Some of these poor wretches might recover, with food and time and nursing. He tried to imagine them healthy again, strolling in the good sunlight of New South Wales.

  Maybe some of them might know how to farm — or even how to work.

  Now the colony’s farms were left while every able-bodied man or woman helped nurse the newcomers. Except the marines, of course. They still did what they did best — nothing, or making preparations to sail back to England when the ships left. And good riddance. A specially formed Corps, the New South Wales Corps, had been sent to replace them. The Surgeon prayed that these were better men: men who’d help the colony, not just play at parades and regimental dinners while others worked.

  The Surgeon stood back as a convict helper carried yet another dead body out of the tent.

  And another thousand convicts were due in a month. Please, Lord, the Surgeon prayed, let them not be as badly treated as these poor wretches. Let there be stores enough to feed them. Let the ships bring men who know how to farm, women with courage and good sense.

  We can only do our best, thought the Surgeon. His body needed rest; his mind longed for the green comfort of England; his stomach was long past nagging at him for food.

  He turned towards the huts that housed the fever patients, to check that the quarantine was still in place, to bleed the worst cases. To do his best, as long as he was able.

  Chapter 28

  RACHEL

  COCKLE BAY, 15 JULY 1790

  Rachel Turner sat on the grass down the hill from the hospital tents. Except it isn’t real grass, she thought, but stumpy tufts. And the trees here were too blue and the sky too high and clear.

  It had been nearly a year since she’d been out in daylight — and over two and a half years since she’d sat under a blue sky — but she was sure she remembered what trees should look like.

  Not like these.

  This was a land of forest to the horizon, far too much of it, and only huddles of mud huts and ragged tents for a town. Even the few stone and brick buildings were surrounded by mud. Soldiers went barefoot, dressed in rags; convicts patrolled the streets and assisted in the hospital. Around her a few others who had survived the voyage managed to stumble out of the tents and stare around.

  This was a strange world indeed.

  But Rachel had been in worse. Prison, with rats and slimy straw and buckets of filth unemptied for days. The horror of the ship’s hold. She wondered if the whole fleet had been as bad as the Lady Juliana. A few buckets of stew let down for
the lot of them to grab at, three mouthfuls a day if you were lucky. You only got proper food, ship’s biscuit and salt beef, if you gave the sailors and marines what they wanted.

  She’d said yes to a man once and look where it had got her. She wasn’t doing it again. She’d rather starve.

  And so she had.

  She closed her eyes against the too-bright light. At least she was here, and not bearing a sailor’s bastard either, like so many others, some poor scrap that the father wouldn’t claim, off with his ship again before the babe was even born.

  At least she was alive. Even if the trees were strange, she decided to like them. She’d had enough of city streets, the stench of other people.

  Twice before she was sure she’d soon be dead — once when the judge condemned her to death for stealing the silk scarf, the petticoat, the apron. That young barrister, Mr Garrow, had got witnesses who swore the Master had given them to her as a present, that they’d seen her and him in the taverns, with him talking all sweet and kind and buying her gin and mutton pies. And all the time his wife lying in her bed, giving birth to his baby …

  The Master had lied. Five times, he’d lied: once saying he loved her, that he’d give her nice things. Once, to his wife, saying how Rachel had stolen the clothes. The third time he’d lied had been to tell Rachel that if she confessed she’d stolen the clothes to his angry wife then he’d see she went free and got another job.

  The next time he’d lied had been to the Bow Street runner his wife had called, when Rachel had obediently said she’d taken the clothes, sending her to gaol. The last time he’d lied to the judge, calling her a thief.

  She was no thief. Mr Garrow believed her. No barrister had ever argued in a court before, bringing witnesses to say someone was innocent. But Mr Garrow had, because he believed her and believed in her.

  But the judge hadn’t liked Mr Garrow arguing for her. Prisoners were guilty — why else would they be there? The judge had put on his black hat. He said that Rachel must die, hanged by her neck for the crowd to jeer at.