by Rosa Jordan
FAR FROM BOTANY BAY
a novel
*
Rosa Jordan
OOLICHAN BOOKS
FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
2008, 2011
Copyright © 2008 by Rosa Jordan. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine or broadcast on radio or television; or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Jordan, Rosa
Far from Botany Bay / Rosa Jordan.
ISBN 978-0-88982-249-8
1. Bryant, Mary, b. 1765—Fiction. 2. Women prisoners—Australia—Fiction.
3. Penal colonies—Australia—Fiction. 4. Escapes—Australia—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8619.O74F37 2008------C813’.6------ C2008-903044-3
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council through the BC Ministry of Tourism, Small Business and Culture, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, for our publishing activities.
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Published by
Oolichan Books
P.O. Box 2278, Fernie
British Columbia, Canada
V0B 1M0
Printed in Canada
To my oldest and dearest friends
Esther and Lester Cole
and
Grace and Phil Hampton
who always helped me get to where I wanted to go
even when they and I didn’t know where that was.
1
Upon the Sea, Beyond the Seas
*
*
Was it Mary Broad’s upbringing that caused her to do what she’d done—for which she was sentenced to hang, and more? Those who knew her as a child said, with some reservations, that her parents did their duty. More likely it was an inherited flaw, for wasn’t the propensity to break the law handed down, generation to generation, like the colour of one’s eyes? “Blood will out and blood will tell,” people told each other, as if they had known all along that the girl was in league with the devil. “Like father, like daughter.”
Few recalled that Silas Broad had lived some fifty years without committing a crime, and was not descended from anyone known to have been convicted of an unlawful act. What was remembered was the wild light that blazed in his eyes when a stranger walked into the pub and how, before that stranger spoke a word, Silas had broken a full bottle of rum over his head and fled. Naturally the sheriff had to go after him, for it had been an unprovoked attack plain and simple—not to mention his running off without paying for the rum.
Until that year, Silas Broad had been a seafaring man, that occupation dating to before his marriage to Grace. Silas was only a bosun, but the captain, who had been his friend from boyhood, allowed him to bring his bride aboard rather than lose his most trusted crew member. Grace didn’t care for the sea but adored her husband, and so came with him on many voyages.
It was on the first day of May, 1765, that Grace gave birth to Mary. The baby was born in Cornwall, not at sea, but sailed with her parents soon thereafter. Whether Mary loved the ship because she was the only child aboard and the centre of everyone’s affection or just because she was her father’s daughter, who could say? All her parents were certain of was that even as a toddler she was never seasick and had no fear of the water.
Had Mary been set to work at a tender age, as children of her class usually were, it’s likely she would have been an unattractive child with mouse-brown hair and sallow skin. But her early years were spent scampering about the ship, and in that way, she grew to be a sturdy child. The sun turned her skin to gold, her hair to honey blonde, such hair as her mother brushed until it gleamed, and wove into a braid that hung down to her waist.
Mary’s intelligence was, like her looks, merely average. Yet with both parents and every hand on board having time to spare, she got an exceptional education in those early years. She learned to tie all kinds of knots, play simple tunes on the flute, and read the sky like a sailor. Old salts told her Greek myths, Norse legends, and hair-raising yarns of their own adventures. Her mother taught her to read a bit from the Bible, not knowing that Mary took its tales to be like all the others, which Grace had explained were a mixture of fact and fantasy and wishful hoping.
Silas himself was barely literate, but he did read navigational charts. When the captain caught him teaching Mary to trace their route across the map, he laughed and said it was like teaching a dog to dance, for what use could a girl ever have for such knowledge? Yet the captain sometimes amused himself by inviting the child to his cabin for tea and biscuits, and taught her elements of navigation that even Silas had never mastered.
It was when Mary turned ten that Grace set foot upon land and said they would not go to sea again. “It’s bad enough our Mary’s not had the company of other children,” Grace told Silas. “But to grow into a young woman in the company of women-hungry men isn’t safe or decent.”
Silas agreed, and so for the next ten years Mary remained with her mother in a thatch-roofed cottage there on the Cornwall coast. Grace’s way of mothering was strange, although Mary, having seen little of ordinary family life, didn’t know that when she was young. Most of England’s poor—men, women, and children alike—worked unendingly from daybreak on and fell asleep at night like exhausted animals. When the men had had too much, they went down to the pub and drank. The women, who had a harder time unloading their burdens, added to everyone else’s troubles with their whining and carping.
Not so Grace. Mary’s memories, during that decade when she and her mother lived alone and saw Silas only between sailings, were of being wakened at daybreak by a mother full of surprises. “Come,” Grace might cry, “sunrise is bright as a rose. Let’s take our porridge and have breakfast down on the beach!”
Another day Grace might sniff the air and announce, “I smell berries ripe for picking. Let’s take pails and see what we can find. If there’s plenty, we’ll stop by Farmer Smith’s and trade him some for a cup of cream. What a treat we’ll have!”
Or on a cold winter morning Mary, who was never sent to school, might wake to find Grace sitting by the fire with the Bible, which was their only book. “Come sit here on the hearth,” she’d say, placing a mug of hot milk in Mary’s hands, “and listen to this story of what Delilah did to poor old Samson. Bless me, but that man was a fool!”
What made Grace truly different was that she played with her daughter not after her work was finished, but during the first hours of the day when she was at her liveliest. Later, when the chores must begin and, it seemed, were never altogether done, they worked side by side, each trying to take the heaviest part, to lighten the other’s load. It was how her parents treated each other, and Mary knew no other way.
In time Mary came to understand that because Grace was different from other mothers, her life was different from that of other poor children, who were little more than small bodies in bondage to the family’s struggle for survival. Once, skipping gaily ahead of her mother en route to the forest to search for a treasure of mushrooms, a neighbour’s wife, hoeing in the field, had given them a sidelong glance and said to her daughters in a tone that carried c
ondemnation, “Out larking about as usual.”
Grace smiled and waved as if she hadn’t heard. When Mary asked her about it later, Grace said, “Poor Mrs. Mullen. If I had thirteen children as she does, I’m sure my life would be as full of work and as empty of joy as hers.”
“Why did she choose to have so many?” Mary asked.
“God and men have their way with women’s bodies,” Grace replied shortly.
Mary, whose only experience with birth had been watching baby chicks emerge from the shell, found Grace’s answer more confusing than clarifying.
“Do babies come from God, or from men?” she asked. “Who decides how many?”
“They come from both, my love, and it seems to me that neither give it much thought. Men plant their seed in women as they please, and that seed grows or not as God sees fit. Some, like Mrs. Mullen, seem to give birth every year, while others like me have only one, no matter how often the planting or how ready the soil.”
Mary knew the tool her father used for planting, for their one-room cottage offered not a shred of privacy. Although it was not as big as a spade, it was, she thought, much larger than the hole in her body where, her mother explained, the seed must be put to make a baby.
“What if I don’t want any babies?” Mary asked.
Grace laughed and said, “Then get thee to a nunnery, my dear.”
“Doesn’t God give babies to nuns?”
“I’m sure He would, if men were allowed behind the cloister walls. Only because nuns live without men can they live without giving birth. If this is a choice you’d make, you’ll need be making it before you’re bedded by a man.”
“I’ll not be locked up for any cause,” Mary pouted. It piqued her that women, who carried the burden of children, were given so little choice in the matter of their making.
Though there were days during her teens when Mary felt as restless as the waves, her imagination and that of her mother kept her from being bored. Most of what she lacked she’d never known. What she missed most keenly was her father. It was ever a topic between her and Grace: what they would do when he returned, how good it would be to have him home again. It wasn’t just the gifts he brought and money to tide them through another winter, but the tales he spun night after night, which took Grace and Mary with him wherever he’d been. Long after they had gone to bed, Mary would hear her parents’ cooing whispers. Thus were all his homecomings, until the last, the terrible one.
Silas hadn’t been away many months, only up to Norway and back along the English coast. But the man who crashed through the door that night wasn’t the husband and father they knew. It was a wild-eyed beast caked in filth, half-starved, dragging one leg. Silas was barely able to speak, and gave them only scraps of the story.
Scavengers, he said, had lain in wait and, with misplaced lanterns, had lured the ship upon the rocks. Silas had made it to shore, clinging to a splintered mast, and over a period of weeks had dragged his broken body along the coast to home.
How had he got the awful gash on his thigh that left him too crippled to ever walk right again? Why did he come the whole distance, from the point on the coast where the ship went down to the cottage where his wife and daughter waited, without seeking food or medical care? Why had he not asked for help from good folk along the way? The only answer they got was a frightened look in his eyes. Even Mary could see that what he had not told them was worse than what he had.
It was from Silas’s nightmares that the truth emerged, in bits and pieces at first. Later, when they had heard it all, he would tell it all, again and again. It never really went away. Any number of nights his screams would wake them, not piercing but strangled, as if something had him by the throat. He would jerk erect and fling his feet to the floor to flee. Grace would wrap her arms around him and hold him fast, speaking in a soft voice, repetitious as a lullaby, until he was fully awake. Mary would cross the room from her cot on the opposite side of the hearth, shivering, for the fire would have long since gone out. She would crouch on the earthen floor, embrace his shins, and lay her head against his wounded thigh. He would stroke her hair in the absent way one pets a cat, drawing calm from its silky warmth.
If they were lucky, he would relax before he was fully awake, and would lie back down and fall asleep. But often he could not sleep again till daybreak, and he would tell them what happened when the ship went down and he’d swum for his life and finally managed to catch a spar which was tossed by the waves up onto a rock-strewn beach. Mary often fell asleep with her head on his knee, for by now she had heard the story so often it had lost its horror, like a rough path made easier by repeated passage.
“’Twas her again,” he’d mutter. “Hanging over me with the axe. Still drippin’ blood it was, from havin’ chopped into the cabin boy what washed up along side me.”
The scavengers killed four of his shipmates, all who had made it to shore except for himself. The thing that saved Silas was the moon, which came from behind a cloud for the briefest moment. He saw the woman silhouetted against the light as she swung the axe, and he rolled not away but against her, so that the blade meant for his belly had hit his thigh instead. He had brought her down on top of him and, with her face staring into his, choked the life out of her.
That was not the end of it. There had been days and nights of terror as he dragged himself from one hiding place to another while her companions sought him, wanting to avenge her death and not wanting to leave alive a witness to their deeds. More than once they had come so close to where he lay hidden among weeds or rocks that he fancied he could smell their rummy breaths. Sometimes he dreamed of them, too, of being surrounded, and there being no escape. But mostly he dreamed of the woman.
Then came that night in the pub. Although Silas had no chance to tell them what happened, once Grace and Mary heard the story from the bartender, Mr. Strobe, they knew the why of it.
“He wasn’t drunk, I swear ye that, for he’d just come in and ordered a bottle of rum. I’d barely slid the bottle across the bar. He picked it up in one hand and a glass in the other and turned around, and there was this stranger coming our way. A rough-looking bloke he was, but nothing out of the ordinary.” Strobe stared hard at the floor as if a picture of the stranger was painted there. “I took him to be a traveller with something of a thirst, ‘cause he come fast through the door and straight for the bar. Just then Silas turned around and, droppin’ his glass on the floor, he took the bottle by the neck and laid it against the feller’s head with a force ye can’t imagine.”
The bartender shook his head and gave up trying to see more than he had seen that night. “Bless me if I know what brought it on, for I’ve known Silas Broad since he was a boy, and drunk or sober, I’ve never known him to brawl.”
Grace and Mary knew that the stranger was, or had seemed in Silas’s mind to be, one of the scavengers. In his tortured brain he believed himself still hunted, and yet on the run.
Silas fled home that night with the posse behind. He burst into the cottage and by the things he snatched, Mary knew he intended to take the boat. In the distance they heard horses’ hooves ringing on the rocky roadway. “The sheriff,” he muttered, “but he’ll not find me here!”
“No, Silas, my love!” Grace cried, clinging to his sleeve. “It’s only your body they’ll take! Your soul will still be free!”
“Don’t preach rubbish, woman! Me soul lives in me body. They take one, they got the other.” He kissed her hard, pushed her away, and banged the door on his way out.
Mary ran down the slope after him and saw, through the blinding rain, that the waves that windblown night could have washed over their cottage had it been on the shore instead of on the hill above.
“Father, don’t go!” she screamed. “You’ll die.”
“Then I’ll die a free man,” he bellowed, and pointed the bow of his little boat into a wat
ery mountain.
Then the lawmen’s horses were around her, snorting and circling until she thought she would be trampled. A shot exploded above her head, causing the horses to rear. Had the bullet found its mark? She stared hard beyond the turbulent surf in the direction her father had gone.
There was nothing but darkness to see.
Then lightning split the sky and she glimpsed the small boat, high on a monster wave. Silas, illuminated in blue-white brightness, half-turned and raised one arm to the sheriff’s men in a defiant salute.
Thunder rolled, and the world went dark. Mary would never see her father again.
*
Well before Silas disappeared, Mary and her mother had grown accustomed to a harsher kind of poverty. In Silas’s last year at home, crippled as he was, they no longer had his seaman’s wages to tide them over. They ate what came from Grace’s garden, which in winter was barely more than dried beans and shrivelled potatoes. Occasionally, when it seemed sure that they would starve, a boat-building neighbour would give Silas a bit of work. On those days he went without breakfast and ate only when Mary came at noontime with a pot of soup, thick or thin as their larder allowed.
On one such trip she had seen, from the hill above the boat yard, a lean young man bending over a boat turned up for repair. Her father saw her coming and limped quickly up the path to take the kettle from her.
“Get ye home,” he said.
It was an unusual way for Silas to behave, for normally he looked forward not merely to the food but to an hour of Mary’s cheerful company. Mary suspected that the command had to do with the young man and, not being fearful of her father, asked with a tease in her voice, “Who is he you don’t wish me to meet?”
“A smuggler,” Silas told her, unsmiling. “Such men live for money, and have no loyalty to country, mates, nor kin. Men like that,” Silas wagged his finger in her face, “bring naught but grief to the women they bed.”