Fled

by Meg Keneally

  Before Charlotte’s birth, Jenny had made the most of her time on deck. It was where she and Bea, and a couple of the other girls, had played a game of quietly mocking their guards. The knot of women would choose a marine, a sailor, an official; they particularly liked the ones who strutted around as though at court. In unison, the women would run their eyes over the man and lean their heads together, whispering, while timing their laughter to emerge at the same instant, peppering the man with derisive grapeshot. Sometimes men had glared back, and Jenny had thought, I will jump into the ocean before I let you tell me where to look.

  Now she was consumed with tracing Charlotte’s soft eyebrows, to holding out a finger to be grasped, to memorising the precise shape of her baby’s nose, to trying to find meaning in the impossibly black hair on her head. She did not know if Prentice’s hair, before it started to grey and fall out, had been black. She still didn’t know, had never bothered to find out, his first name.

  Occasionally, she wondered whether some more refined creature had come into the cells at night, when Jenny was sleeping as well as anyone could on a bare board, and given Charlotte to her, as it seemed impossible that Prentice could be the author of such a being, that the child could have resulted from a physical transaction involving antiquated salt pork.

  ‘Can I have a hold of her?’ asked a male voice.

  Jenny pulled the baby into her and hunched her shoulders as though they were wings that she could close around her child. ‘No! Why would you want to? What would you do?’

  Dan Gwyn. Such a man, with his muscles that refused to waste despite extreme deprivation, and with eyes that still held something more than hunger. She didn’t know why he wanted to hold her baby, and she was certainly not going to allow it. He might dance away, perhaps in jest, while holding the little girl, or dangle her over the edge of the ship. No, he would not be given the opportunity, despite his threat to the other men as they’d matched her birthing moans with their catcalls.

  ‘I only want to look at her,’ Dan said.

  ‘Look, then,’ she said, easing one shoulder back slightly but keeping her arms clamped around the child.

  ‘I thought . . . I thought it might do good, you see. To look at something – someone – uncorrupted.’

  Jenny smiled without intending to. ‘Look at the sky, then. Look at the ocean. Look at how we cut it open and it closes behind us as though we were never there. Where we’re going – I’ve heard there will be savages, but there will be no roads or sewers, no buildings, no gaols. It will be pure too.’

  ‘Yes, maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe, until we get our hands on it.’

  Mr Corbett still enjoyed reading prayers on a Sunday, although Jenny wasn’t sure how he knew which day it was. She had taken to counting the days between readings – sometimes, yes, seven would pass, but more frequently five or six.

  Corbett had a pleasant voice, soft but deep, rumbling sometimes in his throat. He would do his readings on deck when the weather was fine enough, but he seemed to have no objection to descending into the hold, where the wood was surrounded by water. Effluvium from the seamen’s quarters would occasionally drip through, and anyone who spent any time there would find their hair slick with substances best not named.

  Really, it was the captain’s job to make sure the convicts’ bodies were in a sufficient state to survive the voyage, and their souls equally healthy should they need to make another journey. But Captain Archer was a dry man who rarely addressed the convicts, even to bark threats; he preferred to leave that to Lieutenant Farrow and the others who took such pleasure in it. Archer would sometimes read the prayers, say amen, and walk away.

  Then out would come Mr Corbett. He no longer restricted himself just to psalms or homilies; he occasionally read poetry – fairly boring, in Jenny’s view, going on about flowers or clouds. Most of his audience was similarly unengaged in distant and dead men and their views on the wonders of nature. They would wander off while Corbett was reading, if he was doing so on deck, or turn away and gossip with each other if he was below.

  ‘Do you not mind when so few listen?’ Jenny asked him, as Suse herded some of the women into a corner of the cell, possibly to talk them out of their most recent ration. The food was less of a prize than it had been at the start: the rice contained more living things than all the convicts in the Empire.

  ‘Not really,’ Corbett said. ‘It passes the time, whether they listen or not.’

  ‘Why aren’t you reading to the officers, then?’

  ‘I don’t think they’d show any more interest than most of the convicts do.’

  ‘Don’t let them hear you,’ Jenny said. ‘Comparing them with us – Farrow would probably push you overboard.’

  Corbett laughed. ‘Very possibly, and I wish him all the luck in the world trying it.’

  Jenny had noticed that Corbett never held a handkerchief to his nose when he passed a convict, never yelled when speaking would do just as well.

  ‘You don’t seem to mind it down here,’ Jenny said, as rainwater from about half an hour ago worked its way between the boards and dripped onto them both.

  ‘I daresay I’d mind it if I couldn’t get up and leave.’

  She frowned, turning away slightly. It was time he went, anyway. Charlotte, in her arms, had been lulled to sleep by the sound of his voice reading, but was beginning to stir and would want feeding shortly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently, ‘but I do remember, you see, what it is not to be able to get up and leave. I do recall, as much as I don’t wish to, what prison is like.’

  ‘You were never in prison!’

  ‘I was, actually.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I wore a red coat, and I sailed with lots of other men in red coats to America, where I helped fire cannons at people who wanted the right to govern themselves.’

  Jenny nodded, drawing her brows together in what she hoped was an understanding expression. ‘You sound like my father. He spoke of independence too. Loved a fellow called Paine, who said monarchy was against the word of God, or some such.’

  Corbett raised his eyebrows, leaning closer so she felt his breath through the bars. ‘Be careful whom you talk to of Paine and his ilk. Very few appreciate his views as much as we do.’

  ‘Oh, so you know –’

  ‘Yes, and I’m familiar with his argument that government by kings is against scripture – although he doesn’t think much of scripture either, to be honest. But such views are treason, of course, and I’m not sure how much tolerance the governor has for freethinking. We will hold Paine close to ourselves, shall we? Guard him.’

  Did ideas, then, have a value, that they needed to be guarded? Did they, she wondered, grow in pungency like mould when under lock and key?

  ‘Why are you a marine,’ she said, ‘if you want to guard Paine?’

  ‘My father was a dancing master, successful enough to afford a commission. This is the best way for me to rise, anyway. And, I do believe, there’s something to be said for having men of conviction inside the castle walls, and in the garrison rather than the gaol.’

  ‘Will they put us in gaols, when we get there?’ she asked. ‘Will the men build us proper gaols with stone walls?’

  ‘God, I hope not. We don’t need to remake Newgate on the other side of the world. Well, I imagine there will be a guard house, or something like it. I’m sure that not everybody has left their criminal disposition back in England. But the entire place is intended as a prison. We’ll have no need of walls for the most part, it is to be hoped. We’ll have the ocean.’

  ‘But we already have the ocean, and we’re still locked away.’

  ‘Oh, yes. You see, the fear – or one of them – is that you’d mutiny, dooming us all, as I doubt there are many on-board with the skill to sail this ship.’

  ‘Not many. But a few.’

  ‘Not a vessel like this. You know, these cells were supposed to be crowded with stonemasons and farmers and fish
ermen, people who could build the settlement. But I think there is only one fisherman, Gwyn. A few others have some seamanship, including Carney and Langham. Only a handful who can manage a boat, and only one who knows one end of a seine net from the other.’

  ‘I can fish,’ said Jenny. ‘I can fish, especially if better rations come from it.’

  Corbett looked at her, one eyebrow working upwards. ‘I doubt they’ll put you in fishing boat, Jenny,’ he said. ‘But you’ve mended a net in the past, I presume.’

  ‘Mended them, and made them so they don’t need mending,’ she said. ‘I have good eyes, can see a shoal from a distance. I know how to use the tides and listen to what the wind is telling me, and stitch a sail –’

  He smiled, holding up a hand. ‘You’ve a baby to be caring for, as well.’

  A question had settled at the bottom of Jenny’s mind some months previously. She had kept it there, forcing it into the space also inhabited by worries about her mother. The space for concerns that could have no resolution, could only sap her. This question had been growing, though, exerting pressure as it pushed upwards, magnified by each league they travelled.

  She needed to ask it now. Corbett’s visits were sporadic; she didn’t know when she would see him again, or when he’d have time and inclination to talk. As the fleet grew closer to landing on an unseen beach, she thought the calls on his time would probably increase while the visits would decrease.

  ‘Will Charlotte be safe?’ she said. ‘Will she be looked after? Will I have what I need for her?’

  Corbett exhaled sharply through his nose, a sound that unsettled her. A sound that usually meant someone was about to say something they regretted.

  ‘I will do everything I can for you, and for her, but I cannot say whether any of us will have what we need,’ he said. ‘I cannot say anything of the sort. Only one group of ours has been there before, and it was there for a week. So we don’t know if the land will take crops, or if there’s anything worth hunting.’

  Jenny drew Charlotte closer to her, the unknown threats to come suddenly infecting the cell.

  ‘I will tell you this,’ said Corbett. ‘The governor – yes, he’s been given that title, even though he has no idea what he will be governing – will make sure that those who have the greatest utility are well treated. The good reverend, now . . . he’s interested in less corporeal concerns. Your best hope lies in convincing one man that your body is worth saving, and the other that your soul still has a chance.’

  CHAPTER 10

  The ocean was all the world they had after so many months: the blue and the grey, the white flecks of foam and the sun-induced glints. Jenny wondered, sometimes, whether all the land had sunk, whether all that was left were these ships, sailing to a promised destination that no longer existed.

  Then one morning, when the convicts were exercising on deck, the green appeared. Hard to recognise at first, even for those like Jenny who were used to viewing land through the prism of sea mist and distance. It sat on the horizon, perhaps a dark cloud coloured by hopeful imaginations. It grew, though, slowly, and took on shape from the air around it, until even the city lags who had never been on the ocean before this voyage could see what it was. By this time, the lookout’s cry of ‘land!’ was being echoed in the hoarse and rusted-in throats of the sailors who hadn’t used the word for an age, and who were now crawling all over the ship like cockroaches.

  Bea came up alongside Jenny and clutched her arm almost painfully. ‘Is this it?’ she said. ‘Is this where we’re going? Will we be able to get off the ship soon?’

  ‘Maybe, duck,’ Jenny said.

  Then the winds rose, pinching the water’s surface into peaks, piling wave upon wave. Soon the convicts, herded and tamped down, were again being flung into walls and staying out of the way of the privy buckets.

  Bea began to cry. ‘I thought it might be over,’ she said to Jenny. The two of them sat in a corner, and Jenny was holding Charlotte in the crook of her arm nearest to Bea, so the little girl had the padding of their bodies on either side.

  ‘I know,’ Jenny said. ‘But it won’t be long, I’m sure of it. This storm isn’t going to send us back into the blank ocean. We’ll be ashore within days, I promise.’ She hummed to Charlotte until both the baby and Bea were asleep.

  The storm abated as all the others had, and when it did all of the ships in the fleet were still in the world of air and sunlight. The scene returned to blue innocence, making the grey boiling horror seem like a grotesque, half-glimpsed nightmare. It wasn’t, everyone agreed later, the worst storm the fleet had encountered since leaving England. But it was the cruellest, because it had snatched the land away from them.

  When the land had seemed so close, a promise, everyone – bonded and free – was anxious to see it, to step on it. They would make their accommodations with their own situation later, but for now they hungered for the strangeness. When they were blown back, though, everyone in the hold was desolate. Some of the men muttered about a curse, or about a living land that could sense the garbage it would be asked to ingest and had rejected it outright. A few said the only way for them to see land again was to sail the ship there themselves.

  ‘Have you sailed a brig, Vincent?’ Dan shouted. ‘You, Jim? Me, I could take a fishing boat anywhere. But a ship this size? Wouldn’t have a clue, and neither would any of you. You’d just bring them down harder on us.’

  The lads were quiet then, apart from the occasional mutter. ‘Don’t know about sailing,’ said Vincent Langham, a merchant seaman convicted after a tavern brawl. ‘But I could navigate anywhere.’

  ‘You can navigate while you swim, then,’ Dan said.

  Neither Mr Corbett nor any of the other officers knew what was being said below. But Jenny could see that Corbett, at least, had enough sense to know the disappointment afflicting those on the deck and in the cabins would be magnified in the hold. He couldn’t make the land reappear, but he could distract them. He told them stories of men who made wax wings that melted close to the sun, or who had to carry the entire world on their backs; of gods of sun and lightning, and of a two-faced god called Janus whose name was associated with betrayal and deceit.

  Dorothy felt this was unfair. ‘Hardly his fault, is it?’ she said. ‘You can’t help how you’re born.’

  Then Corbett brought down a book and read them the story of a woman called Katherine. Jenny liked her a lot, at first: she refused to do as she was asked, simply because she was asked it. Jenny stopped liking the story, though, when the woman changed into an obedient bride after many attempts by her betrothed to influence her.

  ‘Are you trying to tell us to be good, Mr Corbett?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘I would always advise you to be good, Jenny. Particularly here. The governor, he understands that everyone in the belly of these ships will be needed to build the settlement, and I’m confident that anyone who behaves well will be rewarded for it.’

  ‘She can’t have been happy, though,’ Jenny said. ‘Not afterwards, not when he took her away from herself. He can’t have loved her, not to do that.’

  ‘Pity your husband, then,’ called Dan from the men’s cell. Corbett had a deep voice but was a natural mimic and, to much hilarity, fluted away when reading the female parts. In doing so he had got the attention of the men, who were always happy to see an officer making an ass of himself.

  ‘You’ll be doing well to get a crone with no teeth left in her head, Dan Gwyn,’ Jenny yelled back.

  ‘As luck would have it, I’m unmarried and free,’ Dorothy called.

  Corbett’s story, though, had served its purpose. It had given those who were mourning the land something to latch on to, a world to step into where clothes weren’t routinely salt-soaked, abrading the skin almost as much as the irons had done.

  It would be days, as it turned out, before those in the hold would have any other evidence that land still existed; before the rocking of the Charlotte subsided, and they heard the scrape of the
anchor chain and the feet of the crew jumping around above their heads.

  Everyone in the hold was sitting upright, and even Elenor and Suse had smoothed down their skirts and neatly folded their hands in their laps when the booted feet made their way down the ladder. Mr Corbett, together with Farrow and a few others, unlocked the men’s cell. They chose the strongest ones by the look, Dan Gwyn among them. The others stayed where they were, for now. Dan would be one of the very first of their kind to see this place, and Jenny wondered if she could forgive him for it.

  ‘We’ll have a special welcome ready for you ladies,’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘They’re probably taking you to feed to the savages,’ Jenny yelled. ‘They’ll be picking bits of your beard out from between their teeth by tonight.’ This earned her a bark from Dan that sounded like laughter.

  Charlotte began to sputter and then to cry, a baby of sensibility who objected to her mother’s cruder pronouncements. Jenny replaced the rocking of the ship with her own, to comfort this child who had never been without movement.

  The strong fellows, she knew, had been taken ashore to construct shelter for the rest of them. It was generally agreed that it would be a matter of hours – a day at most – before the women were landed.

  They were still in the ship the next day, though, and the day after that.

  ‘Do you think you could have been right about feeding the savages?’ Bea said to Jenny nervously at one point, but nobody came to unlock the rest of them.

  A horrible thought began to grow in Jenny’s mind – and in the minds of others, for it was soon all the way around the cell. Perhaps they were never to be brought ashore. Perhaps these ships would become hulks, have their masts excised and be left at anchor in this impossibly distant bay that the inmates would never see. There were certainly none of the sounds Jenny had expected: no livestock being unloaded, no heavy boots continually crossing the deck.

  When the thump of the boots did come again, it was accompanied by voices saying words the lags hadn’t expected to hear: ‘A sail! A sail!’ That, of course, started a fresh round of speculation in the hold. Had their government sent fresh shiploads of convicts out a few days behind them, or more soldiers? Perhaps even more provisions.