Behind the Sun

by Deborah Challinor

  She waited until everyone who could had gone up on deck after supper, then sat up, held her head while it stopped spinning, then shuffled on her backside to the edge of the bunk. She wasn’t the only one still below; there were about thirty women and children still on the prison deck, and she hadn’t seen Bella Jackson go up the ladder. But then Bella had barely been seen since she’d come aboard, except for her appearance at Rachel and Liz’s card game. She didn’t eat at the table and she didn’t exercise up on deck. Was she sick, or just too arrogant to mix with everyone else? Well, it didn’t matter either way — Friday was sorting out this Rachel business and that was that. She slid her feet into her boots and hauled herself upright, clutching the post at the end of the bunk as stars drifted across her vision.

  Holding on to the table and various beams and pillars to steady herself, she made her way down the aisle, rolling with the ship, bumping her hips, knee, and, twice, her head. With each knock, her anger ratcheted up a notch. She was nauseated and horribly weak and her legs felt strangely watery. It was worse than the horrors — which was ridiculous, not to mention unfair, as she hadn’t even had the fun of getting drunk. Nodding to two pale-faced women huddled in a bunk and stepping over a child sitting on the floor, she reached the curtained partition that was Bella Jackson’s berth.

  Friday rapped on the post, but competing against the creaks and low groans of the Isla’s timbers, her knuckles made no discernible sound. ‘Open up, Bella Jackson, I want to talk to you.’

  There was no response.

  ‘Oi, open up!’ Friday called again, louder this time.

  Again nothing happened, so she whipped aside the curtain.

  On the bunk, propped against a heap of pillows, her long legs crossed at the ankle, reclined Bella. The velvet skirt and jacket had been replaced by a long belted robe of pale green embroidered satin, worn over a white corset: Friday could see a shoulder strap peeking from beneath the robe, the edge of the corset’s modest bodice, and the narrow waist the garment afforded the woman. The skin on Bella’s décolletage was smooth and powdered; she wore an emerald silk scarf at her throat, and on her feet were satin slippers to match the robe. Several fat beeswax candles sat on a little shelf at the rear of the bunk, beside a hand mirror, a pair of silver tweezers and a slim enamelled case. Friday had seen the like before — it held cigarillos, the new, fashionable miniature cigars; her cullies sometimes smoked them. She might have known the bitch would smoke those rather than a pipe like everyone else.

  Bella’s face was as heavily painted as the day she’d embarked and her gleaming hair as beautifully curled, though the skin beneath her brows was swollen and reddened. On one side of the bunk — which she clearly wasn’t sharing at all, never mind with three other women — were arrayed the two trunks the Bristol women had laboriously carted down the companion ladder. The air in the close compartment formed by the curtains was redolent not only of the prison deck, but of body odour, tobacco, honey from the candles, and a strong, heady perfume.

  Friday registered all this in a single, stunned second, then let out a fierce bark of laughter. ‘Christ, who the hell do you think you are?’

  Bella Jackson, her white face unmoving, stared at her. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Get out yourself if you’re not sick, you lazy slag.’

  Bella leant forwards, grimacing slightly against the strictures of her corset, and wrenched the curtain from Friday’s hand. ‘I said get out!’

  Friday snatched the curtain back and ripped it open even further. ‘I don’t think so. I want to talk to you. I want to know what you’re doing giving crap like this to my friend.’ She withdrew the paper from her blouse and flicked it at Bella’s satin slippers.

  Bella barely glanced at it. ‘You can’t prove it isn’t genuine.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s genuine or not. I want to know what you’re up to.’

  ‘She was in the market for a particular item, for her special friend, and I provided it.’

  She had a strange voice; melodious, low, deliberate and not unpleasant. A hint of West Country, but a touch of something else, too. Something made up, Friday thought uncharitably.

  ‘Why didn’t you charge her for it?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you just give it to her? She’s gulpy; she hasn’t even realised she owes you.’ Twice over, she added silently. Her blood ran even colder as she remembered Bella’s intercession during the card game. The abbess clearly wanted Rachel and Friday knew all too well how useful such a beautiful child-woman could be.

  Bella shrugged. ‘Not everything I do has to turn a profit. I felt like being generous. I felt like being kind. You really are doing me an injustice, you know.’

  Friday snorted. ‘That’ll be the day.’ A wave of gall for this clever, predatory, nasty, unnerving woman surged through Friday like shit through a flooded London drain. She was cut from the same flash cloth as Liz Parker but was far smarter and far more dangerous. For all her own resolve and bluster, there was nothing Friday could do to erase Rachel’s debt.

  Bella’s eyes narrowed. ‘I know all about you, Friday Woolfe. You just concentrate on getting your next drink and stay out of my way. There’s room for just one boss on this ship, and that’s me.’

  Friday put her hands on the end of the bunk and leant in towards Bella, inhaling the unusually heady, slightly sickening notes of her perfume. Jasmine and violets, gone off in the bottle? ‘You keep out of my way. And if you do anything to upset my friends, Rachel especially, I’ll come after you, I swear it.’

  She let the curtain fall and stomped back to her own berth, ignoring the startled looks on the faces she passed, heading straight for her stash of gin. Nothing calmed her nerves like a good, long slug of Blue Ruin. Halfway back, she realised with a sort of dull relief that, underneath the indignation and aggression and animosity racing through her body, she didn’t feel seasick any more.

  Three nights later, after the long, rolling waves had rocked Captain Holland and Mr Downey to sleep in their cabins and darkness had draped cloaks of privacy over the Isla’s little nooks and crannies, Amos Furniss unlocked the hatch to the prison deck and rapped on it three times. Moments later, a dozen or so shadowed figures emerged, dressed in their finery and smelling of cheap perfume, ready to ply their trade.

  Nine

  May 1829, North Atlantic Ocean

  ‘Tell me, Captain Holland,’ Mrs Seaton said as she helped herself to more preserved potatoes, ‘is transporting a wholly female cargo of convicts the same as transporting a wholly male cargo of convicts?’

  Josiah Holland didn’t much like Hester Seaton — she had ideas above her station and she was fat but not in a particularly appealing way, and she was eating too many of the pickled potatoes, which at this rate wouldn’t last the voyage — however she was doing a reasonable job of keeping at least some of the convict women occupied with her afternoon school, so he took care to be civil to her.

  ‘No, Mrs Seaton, in all honesty I have to say that it is not. In my experience the two classes of cargo are quite different.’

  ‘In what way?’ Gabriel Keegan asked.

  The captain shot him an unreadable look. ‘Well, obviously, the females are females. They have different requirements from the male convicts, and behave in different ways.’

  Keegan nodded. ‘Which cargo do you prefer?’

  ‘The males,’ Captain Holland said shortly and went back to his dinner.

  James Downey disliked these weekly midday meals in Captain Holland’s great cabin, though it was hardly big enough to be described as ‘great’. It was the captain’s work area, and where he convened his meetings with his senior crew members, and once a week the table bearing his charts and other bits and pieces was cleared and set by the cook’s boy with silver and some quite reasonable plate. James knew Josiah Holland didn’t enjoy these occasions either, but the passengers expected them and, in fact, paid for them as part of their fee.

  Keegan said to the minister’s wife, ‘How are you finding the
prisoners, Mrs Seaton?’

  Hester Seaton fussed with a tendril of hair that had slipped from beneath her best lace cap; sweat had stuck the curl to her cheek, giving her a girlish air that jibed with the grooves running from her nose to the corners of her mouth. ‘They are somewhat trying, I must say, but of course I am working with souls who can neither read nor write and, being what they are, one can’t expect them to be well versed in manners and other social graces. The Lord, however, provides one with an eternal source of patience, and one must be grateful that they are sitting still long enough to even begin to come to grips with the alphabet.’

  ‘Well, you must be applauded, Mrs Seaton,’ Keegan said. ‘I’ve no doubt at all you’re doing an absolutely sterling job.’

  Hester Seaton blushed like a maiden. ‘One tries.’

  ‘Have you always been a teacher, Mrs Seaton?’ Matthew Cutler asked, blotting his mouth with a napkin then, rather vulgarly, Mrs Seaton thought, his sweat-sheened forehead. Though it really was extremely hot in Captain Holland’s great cabin, even with the little windows open.

  ‘Oh, no, much of my time has been spent raising our daughters —’

  ‘And what a marvellous job you’ve done of that, too,’ Keegan interrupted.

  Eudora and Geneve, sitting opposite, simpered as he beamed across the table at them.

  ‘Thank you kindly. But when Mr Seaton was accepted for the New South Wales posting with the Church Missionary Society, I thought, well, why not bring some of my talents to bear and use them to spread the Lord’s word among those far less fortunate than my daughters? I have a natural inclination for teaching, as you’ve observed, Mr Keegan, and the Lord knows there are plenty of lost souls in the colony. It has always been my ambition to pursue just such a vocation and now it seems as though God has steered me directly onto my chosen path.’

  Hearing this speech a second time gave James an irrational and childish urge to laugh and he stared very hard at the salt dish.

  ‘And the natives of New South Wales?’ Matthew said. ‘Will you be setting up schools for them also?’

  Mrs Seaton looked nonplussed.

  ‘I mean, you read in the papers occasionally about the mission stations for the Maoris in New Zealand, at settlements like Paihia and so on,’ Matthew went on, ‘but I’ve never come across much about missions in New South Wales. Why is that, I wonder? Is it that there are none? Or have I been reading the wrong papers?’

  James looked at Matthew with admiration; a young man with a social conscience and the gumption to own up to it.

  Clearly concerned that his wife was in danger of dominating the conversation, Reverend Seaton jumped in. ‘Of course there are missions and by all accounts the natives are very grateful for our efforts! Perhaps you have been reading the wrong papers. And naturally if Reverend Marsden sees fit that I should expend my efforts in that direction, then I shall. Though I do have it on good authority that both races, the Aborigines and the Maoris, are doomed to die out completely within the next fifty years, so one wonders why the church goes to such lengths sometimes.’

  ‘Because the Lord never turns a single soul away from the path of redemption,’ Hester quickly reminded him.

  Reverend Seaton looked as though he wouldn’t mind whacking his wife on the head with the meat fork.

  There was a bit of surreptitious elbowing between Eudora and Geneve and a snorted giggle, resulting in Eudora leaving the table to blow her nose. Both her parents glared at her as she returned.

  Captain Holland stifled a sigh of annoyance. Changing the subject slightly, he said, ‘We shall shortly be reaching the equator, Mrs Seaton. I hope you can devise a suitably demanding series of lessons for your pupils, as the doldrums tend to bring out the very worst in those who are not, as you have so aptly described them, well versed in manners and other social graces.’

  So far, in his opinion, the prisoners had not behaved too abominably. They had been tiresome and there had been one or two incidents, but they had been managed. The doldrums, however, in his experience, tested even the most calm and measured of tempers, and the attendant becalming was usually when trouble really arose. Within the next few days, if the trades remained as they were, they would be approaching the smallest latitudes and, in between possible violent squalls that may or may not move them in the right direction, the wind would drop out of the sails, the sun would beat down on the deck like a great burning hammer and anything approaching civility among the convicts, and probably his paying passengers, would be discarded.

  The always trying time would be worse on this voyage because this time he was being haunted. Not by a ghost but by thoughts of the big, loud, round-breasted, copper-haired girl they called Friday Woolfe. At first she had only come to him in his dreams, stepping into the tiny space that was his cabin, crossing silently to him and lowering herself onto his naked body, her breasts swaying with the movement of the ship, her long hair tickling his face, the hotness that was the core of her engulfing him until he awoke in a puddle of his own mess. But now he saw her when he was awake: on deck in chains stripped to the waist, her white back exposed and her breasts jutting, him behind her with the cat-o’-nine-tails; or naked in one of the ship’s boats, her legs raised, smiling lasciviously, ready for him.

  ‘Captain Holland?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ The captain mopped his gleaming face with a large green kerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  ‘I was saying,’ Matthew said, ‘how long can we expect to be in the doldrums?’

  ‘It depends. Days at least; sometimes weeks. But that would be very unlucky. And unfortunate.’

  ‘Is it true that a person can lose their wits while becalmed?’ Mrs Seaton asked.

  The captain looked at James. ‘That’s probably your field, Mr Downey.’

  ‘Yes, that has been known to occur,’ James replied cautiously. ‘It can place considerable stress on the constitution. Though any such mania is seldom a permanent state of mind. If you are concerned, my professional advice would be to find ways to keep yourself occupied.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’m not concerned for myself!’ Mrs Seaton protested, mortified by the very suggestion that her constitution might be at risk of buckling. ‘My daughters, however. Young minds are so much more vulnerable.’

  And bodies, thought Gabriel Keegan, watching the way Eudora’s small breasts rose and fell beneath her bodice. The minister’s elder daughter looked really quite tempting — they both did, in fact. But although his preference was for flesh precisely that young and sweet, he doubted she could be induced to keep her mouth shut, which would only cause problems, especially on a ship this small on such a long voyage. No, it probably wouldn’t be in his best interests to pursue that one. After all, he was only in exile now, en route for a dreary government job in a far-flung colony full of bizarre animals and wild black natives, because he’d misjudged a dalliance with a fifteen-year-old girl. It wasn’t his fault the stupid, spoilt little cow had got herself pregnant and his father had had to call in endless favours. She must have been mad: why on earth would he, a handsome buck more than ten years her senior, want to tie himself down to a whelping bitch?

  Since the seas had settled a couple of weeks earlier he’d managed a number of hurried grinds — the excitement heightened by the haste required — with an assortment of convict tarts on the foredeck; these had cost him but he didn’t mind paying. He glanced at the captain. The old goat thought he had everything under control but had no idea Amos Furniss had turned whoremonger. Keegan suspected Furniss was in cahoots with the madam on the prison deck; it was he who let the whores out every night and raided the cargo for the Jamaica rum and French brandy some of the tarts preferred as part of their payment. When Furniss’s watch ended, and before Silas Warren came up, the tarts would scamper back below, like the rats they were — everyone was happy.

  He, Keegan, had seen the girl he really wanted, but unfortunately she wasn’t one of those who came up at night. Her name, he’d been inf
ormed, was Rachel Winter, and she was very young, petite and exquisite looking. She was also constantly in the company of three other girls: a big redhead he wouldn’t mind tumbling but certainly wouldn’t trust with his purse; a smaller, dark girl who looked at him with more perspicacity than she had a right to and frankly gave him the shits; and another one who fussed about like a mother hen. With a few well-chosen words he knew he could put each of them individually in their place, but collectively they were proving to be a bit of a barrier. And since the stopover at Portsmouth, there’d been two more in the way — new messmates, he supposed — a sallow girl and an ugly pregnant one so close to dropping her bundle she looked as though she might burst any minute. He’d tried to attract the Winter girl’s attention on deck — a bit tricky, as he couldn’t walk among the women — but without success, as the others kept literally closing ranks. It was a problem, but one he was willing to spend time solving.

  He liked a bit of sport.

  Rachel’s blouse was plastered against her back, and sweat trickled annoyingly down her scalp and sides, like the feet of busy little insects rushing to be somewhere. The heat seemed to have a physical body of its own, pressing against her skin and her eyeballs, and was giving her the most awful headache.

  The weather had been sweltering for three days, with barely a breath of wind, the sails hanging flat and empty like an old woman’s tits, and everyone was in filthy moods and moaning and complaining and fainting and generally being horrible. She lifted her skirt and flapped it, relishing the tiny breeze it stirred between her legs.

  They were all up on deck, Mr Downey having expressly forbidden anyone to stay below. It was almost impossible to do so, even had anyone wanted to, as it was so hot down there. The wind sail over the hatch stopped working as soon as the breeze died away and it was like stepping down into a reeking, creaking furnace. It sounded to Rachel as though the Isla were groaning in pain, burning up in the relentless sun. The stink from the water closets was enough to make you pass out, even though they were still being cleaned three times a day with chloride of lime; Mr Downey had just told them they could pee in a bucket on deck behind the bathing screens and chuck it over the side. Not everyone wanted to but she would, happily.