Fled

by Meg Keneally

  But someone else had a similar idea.

  A crew of five men, most of them from the second fleet, sailed by moonlight down the river from the government farm on a punt. They exchanged it for one of Dan’s fishing boats and slid unseen between the arms of the harbour entrance. No one in the settlement knew in which direction they had turned, although those who’d worked with the ringleader, Richard Tallow, on a government farm later said he was intending to head for Otaheite.

  Very few thought Tallow would get there. The boat the men had taken was not in the best repair, and it was generally assumed they had drowned.

  Their departure prompted a renewed vigilance. No one was watched more closely than two convicts with their own hut, and with seafaring skills. Surely, though, there could be no objection to Jenny and Dan entertaining a friend.

  While Dan was still unsure about Jenny’s idea as a whole, he had at least agreed to think about it. Then, one evening, he brought John Carney to the hut.

  Carney was among the least brutish of the men here. He simply wanted to be on the ocean and have enough to eat, and he wanted to marry a girl named Ann who had come on the Lady Penrhyn. But he was denied permission as there was a wife at home, and his protestations that she was probably dead by now did not count for anything. He was also never allowed to take a share of the catch, and he lived under constant threat of losing the ocean – of being sent to the saw pits or brick mills, or up to the new government farm.

  And, as Carney told Jenny, he was very, very bored. ‘I understand you’re considering a bit of a journey, missus,’ he said.

  ‘Not I, no. I would never consider such a thing.’

  ‘Nor I, of course. But I have met those who would. I’ve spoken to those who have done it.’

  ‘How might that be?’

  ‘When he first arrived, I slept next to Richard Tallow.’

  ‘I’m sure you would’ve reported him to the authorities had you any idea what he was about,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Of course I would have, straight away. He raved like a madman – I barely listened. Still managed to hear quite a bit, though.’

  The details came: how far away Otaheite was, in what direction, how long it might take a crew of convicts – non-existent convicts, of course, because everyone in this hut was far too upstanding to consider such a venture – to reach it, what provisions they would need. Most importantly, where they would find a vessel equal to the voyage.

  ‘Do you know, if anyone was dishonest and foolish enough to consider such a venture,’ Carney said, ‘they would need a navigator. Vincent Langham – you remember him, from the Charlotte? Irritating man, but knows a fair bit about navigating and doesn’t seem to be enjoying his life here.’

  ‘I suppose there could be no harm in having a conversation with him,’ said Jenny. ‘Just to ensure he has no plans of escape.’

  ‘All these conversations are going to get us hanged,’ said Dan.

  Jenny snorted. ‘Joseph and Elenor are going to get us all hanged – most especially you, even if you’re more virtuous than the reverend from this point on.’

  Scowling at her, Dan muttered about his plan to finish his sentence and get a position on a ship that would bring him home.

  Carney frowned. ‘Of course, there’s no point in having any conversations if not everybody is as upright as we are. If not everybody has the same desire to do what needs to be done.’

  Carney didn’t come to the hut again or make any further comment when he saw Jenny. Whenever she raised the possibility of escape with Dan, he would say it was too risky.

  He said a great many other things as well, to a great many other people. Most especially, he kept making his view clear to all who would listen that Jenny wasn’t really his wife, or wouldn’t be once he left these shores. People started taking this seriously. Someone – possibly Joseph, possibly another, as there was no shortage of resentment now that the Gwyns were back in their hut – spoke to the judge advocate about it.

  Then Anthony Price spoke to Governor Lockhart, who helped Jenny more than anybody had for a long time. He decided to make a new rule: one that prevented men with dependent families from leaving the colony, even after their sentence had expired.

  ‘Your husband has only himself to blame, you know,’ said Mr Corbett.

  Jenny had been sent to collect laundry from the officers, including Corbett. She could always tell which breeches were his – they had patches of dirt on the knees, a result of his habit of kneeling to examine interesting plants or help children who had fallen over.

  ‘Dan doesn’t think that,’ she said. ‘He blames the governor. You. Even me. But not himself.’

  ‘It was the way he carried on which prompted this rule in the first place. He put the fear of God into His Excellency, who has enough dependents as it is, that he might have to take on the abandoned wives and children of sentence-expired convicts. And now your husband must feel quite desperate.’

  He did. Desperate enough, it turned out, to tackle the possibility of escape with a vigour she hadn’t seen him devote to anything since before the flogging.

  Jenny knew they were being watched. They were a long way from the only convicts suspected of harbouring plans to escape: little knots of people met at twilight under trees, down by the shore or around fires. Their mutterings could not be overheard by their overseers, and therefore immediately made their overseers curious.

  But some convicts had seen people walking up the track towards the Gwyn hut, then walking back down later than might be expected. People who had never visited before – people with the skill to aid in an escape attempt. It would only take a word to a marine to ruin everything.

  Carney had brought in Vince Langham, the navigator, for starters. Next he brought a rough fellow, James Bruton, who’d been transported for breaking into a house and threatening its occupants with a knife. For that, and for the linens he’d made off with, he had been given seven years – the same sentence as Jenny.

  She felt that was a little unfair. But then, she had to remind herself that a lack of consistency in sentencing had saved her from dangling and rotting at the Four Turnings. In a judicial system where pickpockets were frequently hanged, transportation for a highwaywoman seemed a lucky escape. And if she’d made one lucky escape, why not two?

  Bruton had little beyond his muscular strength to recommend him, but it was enough. Dan said they would need to cut timber in order to make repairs wherever they landed – or would land if they went through with it.

  Jenny soon noticed that Bruton had a habit of clenching and unclenching his fists even when still. He was a watchful one, always listening and never speaking. Dangerous, in Jenny’s view. Dan knew him from the men’s camp and wore a mask of brittle joviality whenever he visited the hut. The man wouldn’t respond when Dan clapped him on the shoulder or laughed far too loudly when he said just about anything.

  ‘You’re frightened of him, aren’t you?’ Jenny asked Dan.

  ‘Not a bit of it. But someone as strong as him – well, the rest of them are a bit slight.’

  ‘Did he overhear you talking about it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Dan protested, ‘I’m very careful.’

  You aren’t, though, Jenny thought. Not stupid enough to talk about their plans openly, but Dan knew that the respect of the strong was valuable, and he wasn’t above bragging if he thought it would do him some good. Would Dan hint at a secret in front of a man who intimidated him? Would that man then demand to join the enterprise?

  Either way, Bruton had been accepted by Dan and Carney. But he would bear watching by someone trustworthy; he needed a foil, a counterpoint. And, Jenny knew, there was still one skill that none among them possessed.

  ‘So are we to sail for the rest of our lives,’ she said, ‘or do you think it’s a good idea to have somewhere to sail and some way to survive once we get there?’

  ‘There’s always fish,’ said Dan. ‘More than enough skill in this room to feed us.’

/>   ‘Is there?’ she asked. ‘When you don’t even know where we’re going, let alone what fish are there. But wherever we land, there will be just that – land. Do you think, in your wisdom, it might be worth bringing someone who knows how to farm it?’

  The man they found, Thomas Harrigan, was from the second fleet and in his fifties – one of the oldest men in the colony. Old, but not slow or weak. His crime in England had been stealing pigs; he’d carried two away, one under each arm. He had lost some of that muscle on the long and malnourished voyage, but it had returned after his frequent woodcutting stints.

  The Gwyns had a crew, then. A vessel – or one in mind. That still left provisions, though.

  The answer came by sea.

  CHAPTER 19

  January, 1791

  The Supply was a nimble little ship often absent from the cove. It flitted around ports where it might acquire supplies for the colony at the best advantage, although it was never able to bring enough food to stave off famine, not with more than two thousand souls needing sustenance. In Batavia the Supply’s master made the acquaintance of a Dutch captain, Pietr Vorst. The master knew that Vorst was shrewd, that he had access to all markets run by the Dutch, and that he had the ability to bargain and therefore to acquire supplies at a better rate than a stranger had any hope of doing.

  There were two things, however, the master didn’t know: that Vorst believed in profit above all else, and that he hated the English. They behaved, Vorst thought, as though the Dutch had no right to their possessions between here and Europe. They believed they were superior, and they spoke loudly and slowly as though he lacked the wit to understand – he, who had learned their language when they seemed incapable of learning his.

  It wasn’t just that Vorst was Dutch. His mother, a woman of Batavia, had given him dark skin that amplified their sneers.

  He took the colony’s money and promised to procure the flour, butter and salted meats required. And he did. But when his ship, the Waaksamheyd, arrived at Sydney Cove, it bore less of everything than had been paid for.

  Carney, unloading the day’s catch at the storehouse, had been given a note by the commissary to take to Government House. It wasn’t sealed, so Carney saw no harm in peeking at it on his way: a list of those provisions most urgently needed, and in what quantities. The storekeeper clearly hoped that the items he’d listed could be unloaded first and brought immediately to him. But there was less of everything, and none of some things for which Vorst had been paid. And the note had gone undelivered – not because it was superfluous, although it was, but because shouting preceded Vorst out the door of Government House.

  ‘I couldn’t understand what Vorst was saying,’ Carney told Dan and Jenny. ‘But it was fairly unmistakable that if you said it in Holland, you’d find yourself laid out pretty quick.’

  The news jumped from one person to the other, as news there did: the rorting, and the powerlessness of the governor to do much about it. Lockhart did insist on an additional ton of butter to make up for the flour and other goods that simply hadn’t been loaded. He also refused the price Vorst asked for transporting some soldiers back to Britain, eventually agreeing on something more realistic.

  Corbett occasionally drifted down to the shore now to look at the fishing boats, although Jenny didn’t know whether this was a sign of increasing forgiveness or increasing scrutiny. He was far less ambiguous in his views on Vorst. On one visit, looking at the Waaksamheyd riding at anchor, he spat on the sand. ‘The man’s a mountebank, a fraud,’ he said. ‘We are on the brink of famine, and he’s using our desperation for profit.’

  ‘I don’t think Vorst likes us any better than Corbett likes him,’ said Carney after the officer had stalked off

  ‘I don’t think he likes the governor very much,’ said Jenny. ‘He might look upon us differently.’

  A mercenary man, Vorst resented – or so Jenny had heard – what he saw as the unfounded high handedness of the British. Such a man might be open to inquiries from convicts.

  When Dan had been sentenced to be flogged, Jenny had taken his purse from the hole in the floor and buried it at the edge of the clearing beneath a distinctive tree. Now Dan dug it up and went to visit Vorst on the Waaksamheyd as it rode at anchor, its captain glaring towards the shore and planning how best to defraud the passengers he would take back to England.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d have enough money,’ Dan told Jenny. ‘I truly didn’t. From what I’ve heard of the man, he’s not one for dispensing charity.’

  But Dan had clearly given Vorst enough, judging by the bundle he’d brought back with him. He and Carney immediately went down to the shore again and landed the rest of his purchases. It was, thank God, a moonless night – detection would have been fatal.

  ‘Vorst was difficult to convince, at first,’ said Dan, as he lowered the supplies into the hole in the floor; carefully, as they didn’t wish to risk a candle at a time when all convicts should be asleep. ‘When I assured him, though, that selling me the goods would ultimately lead to the embarrassment of the governor, Vorst became more cooperative.’ Dan turned a sack of rice from side to side, trying to find an angle that would allow it to fit into the hole. ‘We agreed on a price for this, for a start,’ he added. ‘I’m to return tomorrow, to talk further. See if there’s anything else he has that we want, and see if we can afford to buy it from him.’

  ‘He’s trying to see how desperate you are,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I think he knows we’re desperate enough.’

  ‘He must be somewhat desperate himself,’ she said. ‘I think he’ll be bobbing up and down there for a while. I can’t see the governor inviting him to dinner, but he won’t be willing to leave until he’s settled on a price for the charter and his passengers are ready to go.’

  ‘Life aboard ship in sight of shore or in the middle of the ocean – what’s the difference?’

  ‘Dan, you went ashore straightaway when we arrived. You did not have to sit in the hold, hearing the noise of the ship being unloaded, the splash of the boats as people were taken ashore. I couldn’t see where you were going. But I knew something was there, something beyond. He’ll be sitting in his ship now, looking at the fires, thinking of the governor and his officers at their dinner, knowing that no invitation will be coming.’

  ‘I doubt he’d accept, even if it did.’

  ‘Possibly not an invitation from the governor. But Lockhart isn’t the only one with a roof.’

  The next night, the cargo Dan brought ashore was Vorst himself. He was a slight man, far shorter than Dan, with long dark hair lying on the collar of a finely made coat. He had, no doubt, seen homes far grander than the one-room hut, and furniture finer than the rough wooden table that Dan had built and on which Charlotte always tried to stand. But Vorst was a sailor and a mercenary one at that, so he had probably seen worse.

  Jenny was standing outside to greet him. She did her best estimation of a curtsy, the one she had used with the tribesmen by the beach. When Charlotte saw her mother make the familiar bobbing movement, she did likewise, which dragged a laugh out of Vorst.

  ‘The governor sits there with so much and will not share it with me, and you have so little and yet here I am,’ the captain said. ‘I thought all English were cold and superior.’

  ‘We’re not English,’ Jenny said. ‘We’re Cornish.’

  She told him that the next time Dan came to his ship to purchase something, Vorst should hand his laundry over as well. ‘Life on a ship makes it difficult to wash clothes, I know,’ she said. ‘Frustrating, too, to be in sight of a shore with all the requisites but unable to use them. I will wash your clothes as well as I do the officers’, then bring them back to you at night.’

  Vorst was obviously a lover of clean clothes, and Dan returned from rowing him back to his vessel with salt-stained breeches and a blotchy shirt.

  Jenny was a lot more gentle than she’d ever been with the officers’ clothes, even Mr Corbett’s breeches. She
rinsed Vorst’s garments in fresh water and dried them in the sun, then asked Dan to row her out that night so she could present them to Vorst.

  ‘Such fine fabric,’ she said, after the captain had opened the door to his cabin. ‘The English, you know, they pride themselves on the quality of their cloth – you should hear the ones from Exeter go on, particularly. I have never seen cloth from other parts before now, and it seems to me that are being a little conceited.’

  She tried to forget the bolts from France that had taken up space in her family’s small cottage in Penmor, waiting to run from merchant to merchant through Will Trelawney’s hands.

  ‘Oh, most definitely,’ said Vorst, accepting the folded clothes. ‘More English conceit.’

  ‘It must get a bit sickening, after a while, having to deal with them as much as you do,’ she said, and Dan squeezed her shoulder in warning. She wanted to think he was pulling her back out of fear she was becoming too obviously artful; she tried to dismiss the idea that he simply didn’t like her stepping into the role of the talker.

  Vorst didn’t seem to mind. ‘It does, by God. The masters of the sea, they are, and no one else is able to build ships half as well or sail them with any competence. Everyone else is beneath their notice – unless you force them to notice you. They’ve noticed me now, so they have.’ He sat straighter and raised his chin a little; he seemed to be daring anyone to say he was still a nonentity, just an opportunistic sea captain.

  ‘You must’ve sailed a long way indeed,’ Jenny said. ‘Holland, Batavia, here – would you show me on a map? I was practically born in a boat, you see. Have been sailing all my life. Dan, too. We would be fascinated to hear of your voyages.’

  The three of them sat down in Vorst’s cabin, a dark low-ceilinged room with its hatches open to the night breeze. The captain spread a large chart out on the green baize of the table and dragged his finger along the coast, all the way up to the tip of the continent – a far greater distance than Jenny had realised.