Fled

by Meg Keneally

  ‘Maybe it’s the same as us not getting sick on the ocean – us who are accustomed to it. Those who aren’t, they retch at the smallest wave. Maybe we’re used to the pox, and the natives are not.’

  ‘Our little bird isn’t used to it,’ Dan said. He often used that name for Charlotte, who knew no other father and was more than happy to accept this one. Dan could be relied on for sea dragon rides: taking the girl into the ocean on hot mornings, holding her hands around his neck, and bobbing her up and down in the water as she sat on his back and giggled.

  ‘I’m keeping her away from the hospital tent, of course,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Good. I need someone free around, to remind me what it looks like.’

  ‘Are you not concerned for me?’ Jenny asked, without any real annoyance. She wasn’t concerned for herself, and did not expect him to be.

  ‘I suppose I would be a little put out if you died . . . Wait, though, can Bea mend nets?’

  Jenny picked up the innards of a fish she had been gutting and threw them at him, whooping when they landed on his face.

  ‘A kiss then, I think,’ he said, standing and letting the guts fall to the ground. He chased her as she ran laughing into the hut at a deliberately slow pace.

  Shortly after Ballooderry’s death, the governor tried to acquire another forced ambassador, and this time he caught Yarramundi in his net: tall and strong where Ballooderry had been slight, gregarious where Ballooderry had been melancholy. Yarramundi laughed and danced and smiled at children. Judging by the greetings he received from his tribesmen, whenever he saw them at the fringes of the camp, he was something of a leader of their people.

  He stayed in the home of Lockhart, the first house built in the colony. He soon spoke English far better than any of the settlers spoke his language, for all their protestations of interest. He was successful at everything he did – including his escape.

  He did not stay away, though. He took to visiting the settlement, and he and Lockhart would sometimes chat away like two washerwomen. Yarramundi became friendly with some of the convicts as well. Dan had spoken to him several times; he delighted in children as much as Dan did, and hurled himself into the chasing games Dan played with the young lads, uninvited but welcome nonetheless. Yarramundi kept a little more distance from the settlement’s women. But when he saw a need for intervention, he intervened.

  He had stepped in front of Jenny one morning as she was carrying Charlotte towards the main settlement. ‘You are Dan Gwyn’s woman,’ he said. He had been taught English by Lockhart and some of the officers, so he sounded like them. She found it odd, though, hearing a voice like that of the judge who sentenced her to death in the mouth of this man.

  She nodded, looking straight at him. Some of the women still averted their eyes from the unapologetic nakedness of the native men; for them, nudity came from punishment or poverty. Jenny made a point never to look away.

  ‘Not as many fish now,’ he said.

  It was not an accusation, though he had every right to accuse. The fish had never been plentiful, had never shown the same inclination as Penmor’s pilchards to sacrifice themselves. Now, though, fewer were coming in with each haul. Sometimes, a night of fishing would produce nothing.

  ‘Tell Gwyn, he will not listen to me,’ Yarramundi said. ‘Tell him to mind the currents. He ignores them. Tell him they are not so . . . so polite as your currents across the seas.’

  She nodded. ‘I will. Thank you.’

  He looked at Charlotte then, and Charlotte looked back. She had shown no surprise at his appearance. Sudden comings and goings were commonplace to her, a girl who had never lived in a fishing town where one saw the same few people from birth to death.

  Yarramundi smiled at her, reached out and tickled her face, and she giggled. Then he looked back at Jenny, frowning. ‘She is not, I think, as well as she should be.’

  ‘None of us are,’ Jenny said.

  He nodded. ‘I will send someone.’

  ‘Send . . .?’

  ‘Someone, yes.’ He nodded, as though confirming to himself he had used the proper word.

  Jenny looked closely at Charlotte’s face, examining it for a spot or a pallor or a rash that could explain Yarramundi’s concern. When she looked up again, he was gone.

  The fringes of the main settlement were not the only places populated by shadows. The Gwyns’ hut was within sight of the settlement but in a small clearing of its own. For the most part it was too small and prone to fire for Jenny to cook in, so she’d built a small fire pit where vegetables were boiled in a battered pot and fish were cooked on the blade of a shovel.

  Her fire pit sat on the only piece of land which, Jenny felt, was entirely hers, although she knew both the King and the Gadigal would disagree. While she peeled potatoes or gutted fish, she would often crouch on her haunches, as she had on the prow of her father’s boat, and watch Charlotte lurching around like a drunk.

  When Charlotte learned to walk, she glared at her mother as though asking why Jenny had not informed her of this wondrous activity. Whenever she could, the little girl was on her feet, racing and tripping and swaying, and not particularly caring about grace or finesse as long as she was moving forward, always forward.

  But when Charlotte did stop, did halt in her wheeling, Jenny knew she had seen one of them.

  Some were quite tall, taller than a man. Covered in a course grey fur, they had a long snout that terminated in a hare-like mouth. Jenny thought that their designer had something of a sense of humour to give them such small forelegs and such large hind legs; if the same proportions were applied to a man, his arms would finish at the elbow and his legs would be six feet long. Those forelegs, though, had far sharper nails than even Elenor possessed.

  The beasts never tried to hurt Charlotte or Jenny, but whenever the girl would pause and then start running towards one of them, Jenny would call her back. The beasts would hop off anyway, but she’d heard stories that the claws on their back legs were sharper than those on the front, and could be used with precision for the purposes of disembowelment.

  When Charlotte stopped careening around one afternoon, Jenny casually glanced up to make sure that the creature wasn’t one of the larger ones, the seven footers, and that it was hopping away into the undergrowth.

  There was no beast, though. There was a woman. She was entirely naked and seemed unashamed of the fact, standing there and staring at Jenny with a curious, open look.

  Jenny stared back, as she would have at anybody who had looked at her too long in the Plymstock Inn. There was nothing mocking in the other woman’s gaze, though, nothing artful. It was mere curiosity, the same gaze that Jenny had directed at the kangaroos when they’d started visiting her little clearing.

  Jenny noticed a small child peering from behind the woman’s legs, wide-eyed and a few years older than Charlotte. After standing from her hunched position by the pot, Jenny put the fish she’d been scaling on a small stone nearby. She glanced at Charlotte, who was still staring. Jenny whistled, as she did sometimes to get the girl’s attention, and beckoned her over. Then, after staring at the woman for a moment more, Jenny beckoned her over too.

  The woman seemed – and it was easy to tell, without clothes – to be pregnant, but early on. Jenny was too. Her usually strong stomach now decided, from time to time, that it couldn’t countenance fish or potato or the wilted leaf from a cauliflower.

  The woman walked towards the edge of the fire. The natives must, Jenny thought, have fires of their own, or how did they get anything cooked? How did they manage in the winter nights? Those nights did not descend with the vicious and suffocating cold that had taken her baby brother’s life, but they were cold enough. So a ring of stones with a fire in the middle was not, Jenny thought, an unknown concept to this woman.

  The woman walked forward a bit further, looked at the fish on the stone, then pursed her lips and cocked her head to the side as though she was assessing the job Jenny had done on the scales an
d finding it adequate but lacking in finesse.

  She looked at the pot, filled with hot water to receive the potatoes Jenny hoped Dan would be able to acquire.

  She walked to the edge of the clearing, confidently leaving her little boy standing by the fire, where he gaped at the small pink girl who was hugging her mother’s leg.

  Charlotte found herself scooped up and clamped onto Jenny’s hip within a few seconds, as the woman beckoned Jenny over to the bush that grew at the side of the hut. She plucked a broad leaf and crushed it between her fingers. While looking at Jenny, she very slowly held the leaf up to her nose, loudly inhaling before handing it to Jenny, who sniffled at it: a sharp smell, not wholly unpleasant. The woman nodded, smiled and picked more leaves. She had all of her teeth, did not share the male characteristic of missing one. But Jenny noticed – as the woman’s hands flew over the bush, quickly removing leaves and placing them into her other waiting palm – that the little finger of one hand was gone below the knuckle.

  When she had finished she showed Jenny the leaves in her hands, twenty or thirty of them, which she crushed together. She walked towards the fire, nodded at the pot and raised one eyebrow.

  Jenny shrugged, before thinking that perhaps shrugs had no meaning here. Nods clearly did, though, so she nodded, and the woman opened her palms and let the leaves fall into the hot water. Jenny fetched two earthenware cups, dipped them in and handed one to the woman. The resulting brew tasted as sharp as the leaves had smelled, but oddly sweet.

  After the woman had drunk, she stood, nodded again, and pointed over at the bush while nodding several times. She put her arm on her little boy’s shoulder, turned and left.

  In the late afternoon Dan returned after Charlotte had drowsed away, with no potatoes or anything else. ‘The vegetables are not to be had,’ he said. ‘If you were a better gardener –’

  ‘How am I to coax a carrot along, when the best farmers we have can’t do it?’ Jenny asked. ‘Fish and carrots and potatoes together would be nice, but out of the lot I’d rather have fish.’

  ‘You’re right, I suppose. And you can haul with the best of them. I’d think you were a man if I didn’t have firm evidence to the contrary.’

  Jenny smiled and cuffed him on the ear, and he smiled back, grabbed her wrist and dragged her, with no need for dragging, into the hut.

  Later, she showed him the brew that the native woman had made. For a moment she expected him to reject it, to say that it wasn’t to be known what was in that pot, it could be poison, it could be a ploy.

  ‘Yarramundi sent her, I think,’ Jenny said.

  He sniffed at it. ‘None of them seem to be showing any signs of lack of food, those that survived the pox,’ he said. ‘Would you not think that the governor would ask the natives how they feed themselves? Would you not think that would be the first question anyone would ask? They’ve shown a willingness to help us – far more than I would, in their situation, I’ll be perfectly honest with you about that.’

  Dan held out his cup to Charlotte, then stroked her hair while he dribbled tea into her mouth. She grimaced but let him feed her a few drops, before he hauled her onto his lap and fed her morsels of his fish.

  ‘They know about fishing, too,’ said Jenny. ‘The woman, she came while I was scaling this one. She looked at it as though she knew how to tell a good job from a bad one. Yarramundi, by the way, says you’re ignoring the currents, and you’re to stop it.’

  Dan grunted, nodding.

  ‘Perhaps he can tell us more about the fish, or she can,’ Jenny said. ‘Perhaps they can tell us about the tides and the currents in places where there are more to be had.’

  Dan nodded again thoughtfully. ‘That, actually, is a good idea.’

  When Dan asked Yarramundi, he was told to go further out.

  ‘But how are we to get further with the tiny boats we have?’ Dan said to Jenny. ‘The officers don’t like me using the cutter, particularly not Major Rowe. He said he might never see me again if he lets me loose with it.’

  ‘Yes, he might never see that belly of his again if he doesn’t let you use it.’

  The vegetable crops continued to fail, and the settlers’ teeth continued to drop out, and the hospital continued to fill and then empty as people died. And Jenny, Dan and Charlotte continued to eat fish, and continued to stay well.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jenny didn’t know whether the woman would come back. Really, what difference would it make? She had Charlotte for company, and of course Bea, who was seen as one of the better-behaved convicts. Whoever was on watch always let her by on the way to Jenny’s hut without the slightest hesitation. If Elenor had so much as looked beyond the camp to the edge of the settlement, she would have been back in irons.

  How, though, had the woman known what the Gwyns’ needed, what the danger was? What might she know still, that Jenny did not?

  Jenny did feel a certain sisterhood. It went beyond the fact that they each had children, one outside and one in. The woman had watched from the margins, and then stepped forward. It was an act that Jenny admired. But now, the woman stayed away.

  Dan was shy, too. Shy, at least, of approaching the governor. Of asking for the use of the cutter.

  ‘Why won’t you do it?’ Jenny asked. ‘You know – better than I do, you saw it first – that our value here, any importance we have, turns on our ability to get fish. The catch isn’t what it was. And there are fewer salt fish in our hut than there were. You need to go out further, Yarramundi said so.’

  Dan looked at her, and then turned back to the shovel he was holding over the fire, a few very thin strips of white flesh roasting on it. ‘We’ve a hut, ’cause I asked for it,’ he said. ‘We’ve a share of the catch, ’cause I asked for it. I would ask for the cutter, too, if it would do any good, but it won’t.’

  ‘Of course it will! Go out further, get more fish. Keep our hut, keep our share of the catch. If you won’t go and ask him, I will.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Dan. ‘You will not shame me, not if you want to stay pretty.’

  Jenny stepped back, for a moment, into the shadows. The threat was delivered in a flat voice, and all the more frightening for it. He was a rarity among husbands, had never hit her, and she had grown used to it. Perhaps, though, the violence had been collecting under his skin, waiting. The thought that he might do something to her face, something that would punish her while preserving their unborn child, terrified her.

  But not as much as starvation did.

  Even Elenor had stopped her requests for an extra fish, aware they wouldn’t be granted, and that anyone caught in possession of extra food would be assumed to have stolen it and punished accordingly. Such punishments had been meted out already. One woman had been tied to the end of the cart, walked through the settlement and then flogged. Another had been hanged, along with a few male convicts. Six marines had made a copy of the key to the stores and taken food in small quantities; they were hanged in a row, dispatched together for their collegial crime. A gallows had been built near the storehouse they had robbed, and Jenny and the rest of the settlement had watched as they fell away through its floor.

  ‘Even if I did, I’d need to know where to fish,’ Dan told her as he removed the shovel from the fire and set it down to cool. ‘It’s a big ocean and the man just pointed outwards, so he could have meant anywhere between here and England – they will be watching me on the cutter. You’ve seen to that, with your talk.’

  Again? thought Jenny. Who had overheard this time, and who had she been talking to? She had to keep track, try to remember whom she said what to, and where.

  With the catch dwindling, she didn’t know how long they would be allowed to keep their share, and their hut. She had started asking around about boats, and stores, and maps, and tides. Oblique questions, certainly. Conversational, bearing no relationship to anything in particular. Jenny had no thoughts on how to use the information. She stored it as she had once stored salt fish again
st the winter.

  She tried, too, to press a morsel of that fish on Bea, who had bruises on her face and had recently lost a tooth to scurvy – the same one that the native men deliberately knocked out. Most of Bea’s afflictions came from injuries delivered by Elenor, while the other women who shared their hut backed against its periphery, all turning their heads.

  Jenny kept looking for the native woman, not only in the trees ringing the small patch at the back of her hut, but also in those at the edge of the beach, where she’d never seen her before. The woman clearly felt no inclination to leave the mothering hinterland and again step into the world of the invader.

  Those watchers on the beach might know her, Jenny thought. The woman may have mentioned to them that she had visited one of the strange new people.

  It had been a month, so the woman’s belly must be more prominent. When Jenny next saw the watchers in their customary spot between the trees, she pointed at them and used her hands to carve out an imaginary pregnant belly in the air, larger than her own real one.

  They frowned at her. Had she offended them somehow? Where was the genial mocking, the laughter that contained both genuine amity and a small amount of contempt for these creatures who stumbled through the same bush the natives moved in so assuredly? Then they turned and walked into the shadows.

  ‘They think you’re asking them to impregnate you,’ said Mr Corbett from beside her. He had been helping Jenny and the convict workers on the net that night, although the catch was getting so light that extra muscle was barely needed.

  Jenny couldn’t stop herself blushing, and was immediately angry. Corbett would assume, no doubt, that her rising colour was due to feminine scruples. But the red flush was put there by embarrassment at her stupidity: she had been miming every bit as lyrically as some of the women had, up against the bars in the hulk. She hadn’t thought properly beforehand about how to get her message across. She must not allow that to happen again.