3 Great Historical Novels (30 page)

A foreign vessel was the cause of the commotion on deck, visible in the distance off to the north. It was odd to see an interruption to the endless, vacant miles of ocean. Rhia thought no more about it until she saw it again from the quarterdeck after breakfast. The ship drew closer through the morning until its outline was distinguishable. It was a junk.

‘Chinese,’ said Agnes, knowingly. ‘Seen one on the Thames.’

The wind dropped and the vessel barely drew nearer throughout the day.

In the afternoon, as Rhia was preparing to leave Mr Reeve, there was shouting and the pounding of feet outside. A moment later the steward, James, opened the door. ‘Captain says everyone’s to stay in their cabins.’

Mr Reeve jumped like a frightened rabbit and bumped his head on a shelf. ‘Whatever’s going on?’

‘Chinamen’, said James. ‘Might be pirates. They probably think we’re carrying opium or sterling.’

‘
Pirates!
But why would they think that?’ asked Mr Reeve, his voice close to a squeak.

The steward looked at Mr Reeve as though he’d no clue about anything, which was a fair assessment. ‘Well, we’re this side of India and we’re a barque, sir, and we’re due north. We could be on our way to Lintin Island.’

Mr Reeve was pale to his gills. ‘Then they’ll realise they are
mistaken soon enough,’ he said without much confidence. Rhia couldn’t help feeling a small thrill. Perhaps they’d not make it to Sydney Cove after all! Could it be worse to be a prisoner of a pirate than of the Crown?

‘Might be too late by then,’ said the steward dramatically, and hastened away to do whatever an officer’s servant does to defend his ship against Chinese pirates.

Being confined indefinitely with the botanist was out of the question. ‘I think it would be best if I went below with the others,’ Rhia said as soon as the steward left.

‘I think you should stay. It might be dangerous, Mahoney.’ He buttoned his frayed tweed waistcoat in spite of the heat, as though it might afford him some protection. He didn’t want to be on his own.

‘I think it would be best if I went,’ she said, already halfway out the door. She had no intention of going below. She crept along the dark passageways that Albert had shown her, until she was at the cranny ’tween decks. There was a view of the prow part of the main deck through the scuttle in the timberwork. Orders were shouted down the line from the captain to the ship’s boys. On the gun deck at the prow, half a dozen barrels of black steel were levelled at the approaching ship – its red sails now easily distinguishable. Rhia had seen plenty of these bamboo-masted ships in the port of Dublin, trading porcelain and figured silk. Orders continued to be shouted down the line of barefoot sailors. Cutlasses and pistols had appeared, stuck into belts and cummerbunds. To all appearances, the crew were expecting trouble.

‘Well, well, it’s Mahoney, turned ship’s lookout.’ Rhia jumped. It was Albert. ‘Shouldn’t you be on deck?’ she whispered.

He shrugged. ‘I’m short-sighted, so it’s no good my trying to make a mark with a pistol. I’ll fight if they come on board.’
Albert patted his belt, and she saw his new cutlass glinting there. ‘Give us a look through the scuttle,’ he said.

Rhia stepped aside so he could see the deck.

‘What do you think?’ she asked, suddenly feeling less certain about being the prisoner of pirates. ‘What would they want with a ship of prisoners?’

‘They won’t know it’s a prison ship. They’ll be after bounty. There’s a busy shipping route between Calcutta, Canton and Sydney. Sometimes silver goes through Sydney before it gets to Calcutta, if it’s a clipper or a barque carrying rice or tea or whatever. There’s all manner of dealing goes on in the open sea.’

‘You mean criminal dealings?’

Albert grinned. He was doing his best to look brave, but she could see he was worried. ‘Most traders run rackets of some kind or other – even if it’s only not paying all their port taxes.’ He turned his attention back to the scuttle.

‘What’s happening?’

‘You don’t have to whisper – no one can hear us. The cook’s on deck and he’s talking to one of the Chinamen who’s come up to the side in a rowing boat.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘I don’t know, he’s talking Chinaman.’ Albert was silent for a long moment.

Rhia remembered something she’d been wanting to ask him. ‘Albert?’

‘Mm.’

‘Do you know what the Cook’s tattoo means?’

‘I asked him myself,’ Albert said after another long silence. He would not take his eye from the scuttle.

‘And?’

‘He used to be a silversmith and he says it’s to remind him that there’s more to life than a stinking galley.’

‘But what does the symbol mean?’

‘Silver.’

‘What’s happening now?’

‘If ye’d stop asking me questions I might be able to— ah.’

‘What!’ Rhia wanted to push him out of the way so she could see for herself.

‘They’ve brought the body up on deck. That’s the one thing that’ll ward ’em off. It’s a bad omen to any seaman, English or Chinaman, if a woman dies on a ship. Now there’s two Chinamen on deck and the bosun has his hand on his pistol. They’re looking at the body. Aye, that’s done it, they can’t get off our deck fast enough now!’

Cailleach had been busy. ‘A woman? Who has died?’

Albert looked at her strangely, and Rhia knew the answer before he told her.

‘Dickson,’ he said. ‘Two days ago.’

Margaret.

The afternoon dragged, and so did supper in the orlop. Everyone knew now, and the mood was dark. Just as Rhia was wondering if they would be allowed to attend Margaret’s burial, a warden came below and herded them all up the ladder for an ‘evening service’.

The sea was as smooth as silk and there was barely a wisp of wind. It was still baking hot, even with the sun sinking into the dark water. Reverend Boswell stood at the prow, his hair damp beneath his flat preacher’s hat. His congregation was divided into three parts. The women, barefoot in their black aprons and cloth caps, stood at the back with their heads bent. This deference owed as much to the final piercing rays of the sun as to the solemnity of the occasion. The passengers, half a dozen ladies and the same number of sweating husbands in Sunday
broadcloth, were as far away from them as they could be. The crew comprised another huddle, restless and resentful. The Lord was encroaching on their domain. Behind them on the deck was a long, body-shaped cylinder of sailcloth.

Boswell mopped his brow. ‘Lord have mercy on the soul of the sinner Margaret Dickson.’ A gust of wind lifted up his hat and spun it away into the silken sea. For a moment the preacher looked too startled to speak, but he recovered, and shot a withering look at the women. The laughter was contagious and no one was attempting to hide it. Margaret clearly didn’t take kindly to being called a sinner.

Her body had been sewn into the sailcloth and was now raised onto the shoulders of four sailors. A plank of wood rested on the deck rail, held in place by four more. Margaret was laid on it. Her bier was tilted until she spun into the sea like a spent cocoon. She disappeared instantly into Manannán’s vault.

The cold sea swirled at Rhia’s ankles. The sodden weight of her hem was all that anchored her as they waded to the shore from the
Rajah
’s rowing boats. Her legs felt like they might buckle at any time. They were sea legs, now.

The sunset was a wildfire behind those strange trees. The tallest, whitest trees she had ever seen. Smooth branches and pale trunks glared in the half-light. The air was a choir of sighs and screeches, and the long grass beyond the sand rustled with unseen creatures.

Rhia could hear Nelly praying behind her, little Pearl tied to her front in a shawl. Nelly expected natives to be waiting for them in the trees, ready to run them through with spears and stew them in a vat. Ahead, Jane, who had put her foot down on something sharp in the water, was limping painfully. More than half the women, including Nora and Agnes, had reached the shore. There was something that weighted the air here, something beyond their experience. It had coiled itself around Rhia as soon as her bare feet were drawn down in the soft suck of brown sand. This place felt old. Old. The Wicklow Hills, by comparison, might have sprouted from the earth last spring.

At the edges of Manannán’s kingdom is the land where all earthly souls seek to enter. Each time a wave curls onto its shore, another spirit is granted entry.

Rhia forced her attention onto what she could see. The harbour front was a hundred yards away to the north, lit with gaslamps and braziers. There were two clippers moored at the quay, and at least three more anchored a mile or so out to sea. The sound of men’s voices was tossed about on the waves along with the snatch of a shanty and the creaking of willow as crates were unloaded onto the sand. There were low timber buildings,
bungalows
Albert had called them in Rio, along the seafront. To the south were towering cliffs and dark, jagged rocks and, she presumed, a hundred more coves like this one. The smells of wood smoke and livestock mingled with the scent of Mr Reeve’s uncharted flora.

There was nothing here to remind her of home.

They were herded towards a strip of beach deserted but for a band of soldiers in dusty coats. The soldiers eyed them as they stumbled from the sea. Did they expect someone to try and run into the dark thicket beyond the sand? As if any of these frightened, exhausted women would. Better to face another prison than those ghostly trees and the beasts that inhabited them.

By the light of the soldier’s lanterns they marched along a path through the grass and the underbrush and between the trees to a dusty road. The forest was not as dense as it had looked from the beach, but the trees were as unearthly. They had sparse, silver foliage, and the bark hung from their trunks in strips, as though they were shedding skin. Like snakes. Something thumped close by, making the underbrush quiver and the ground vibrate. Were there bears in Australia? Nelly had taken out her rosary beads.

The soldiers didn’t seem to be paying the bear any attention. They were assessing the herd of women and made no attempt to pretend otherwise. Why would they? They were
female livestock who may as well be fettered, and no longer the sole property of the Crown. They were appraised as they walked, presumably to see who had limbs strong enough for tilling soil and who might still yield a brood.

Rhia kept her eyes to the road, concentrating on not stumbling on the motionless ground, vaguely noticing how the pale dust clung to her wet feet. She swallowed the bitterness that rose in her throat as she remembered her dream of sovereignty. What a time to think of it. Sovereignty be damned. Agnes said that the best way to get out of the female factory was to find a husband. She knew this because her paramour on the
Rajah
had taken two such wives. No one had seen fit to ask what had happened to them. Sailors, soldiers and free settlers could all take convicts for wives.

Rhia felt something prod her in the ribs. She looked up into the dirty face of a boy barely old enough to shave. He had a stick of some kind and he was tapping it against his hand. He looked her over as he had probably seen a superior do. His eyes lingered on her chest. She folded her arms. He looked at her face last, and she was ready. She hissed one of Mamo’s best curses at him, as though she knew the kind of witchcraft that Juliette had suspected her of. He looked away. He was not that brave after all. She noticed that Nelly had attracted the attention of a young soldier with a kinder face. He offered her a drink from a little flask hooked to his belt. He said something to her, and in response Nelly pulled the shawl aside proudly so that he could see Pearl.

A mile or so along the dirt track, there were suddenly fewer trees and wider streets and, at first, rough-hewn bungalows. Further still was red brick and new masonry and even a gaslamp or two. They were being watched with idle curiosity by children playing at the side of the road and men smoking on
steps and women standing on verandahs with infants on their hips. Their expressions said that they had seen many such processions. Rhia kept from catching the eye of any of them. She didn’t want to see either sympathy or indifference.

They passed partly constructed walls and timber frames and then elegant structures of honey-coloured stone as the street widened. They passed a large green with new grass and rosebushes planted around its perimeter and a paved path through the middle, lined with seedling trees. Here was a nation in its infancy and Rhia almost wished that she gave a damn.

They were heading for somewhere called the Barracks, this much they knew. In the morning, most of them would be taken to the female factory at a place called Parramatta. Rhia had clearly not been assigned to private service, in spite of Mr Reeve’s assurance that he had requested her as his servant. She knew he could not afford a servant. He would not have thought to pay her the respect of calling her his assistant.

The Barracks lay opposite the green. It rose above tall, exterior walls and had a paved courtyard. Its external geometry was stern but elegant. Inside, though, it rivalled Newgate for neglect. The dividing walls were unfinished slabs of pine, and the floor was stamped earth and mildewed straw. It was fitting accommodation for livestock. Rhia wanted only to lie in a hammock or on a mat, or even on a wooden pallet. If she could close her eyes, maybe the ringing in her ears would stop and the earth would be still.

The soldiers divided them between two large, open cells. There were no hammocks or mats, only more straw, and there was not enough room on the floor for sixty women to lie down. There was a scuffle for a piece of wall to lean against, but only one half-hearted cuff fight. No one had the energy. They sat and listened to someone retching in another cell.

‘That’s not a good sign,’ said Jane.

‘Think it’s the food?’ Georgina whispered.

‘Shut your ugly mug,’ Jane hissed.

Once they had settled, a beefy turnkey with a beard like a Jew peered in through the iron bars.

‘Don’t think this lot will give us any trouble,’ he called over his shoulder to someone Rhia couldn’t see. He unlocked the grille and dragged in a vat and a bulging sack. The vat was full of thin, salty broth and the sack was crammed with unleavened bread and tin bowls. They ate hungrily in spite of the forewarning. It was something to do.

Rhia closed her eyes. It was growing cold. She would not think of home. She would not think of her family. She would not think of the bathroom at Cloak Lane. She would not remember the dead. She would never think of freedom again, she decided. She sat with her back to the splintered wood, feeling the cold seep into her, and thought of … nothing.

She dozed fitfully, being woken time and again by a raging desire to scratch her itchy skin, or by Nora’s growling snore. In the small hours it seemed that everyone in the cell was awake, and that morale had reached its lowest. Jane was weeping again and each time she sniffed, Nora kicked her, which only made her sobs louder. There were bugs in the straw, so small they couldn’t be seen, and they left itching welts on the warmest, softest areas of flesh.

At sunrise, Agnes passed around some hard arrowroot biscuits, broken into pieces, which she’d smuggled from the ship in her apron. They were stale and tasteless, but the gesture was one of solidarity. They had come this far together, and they had survived.

‘How about a story, Agnes?’ said someone.

‘Not a hope. I’ve none in me.’ She sighed. ‘It’s this place, it’s
so uncanny quiet.’ It was. But it wasn’t the prison that weighted the air; it was a quiet that rose up from the earth like a silent requiem.

When a thin stream of daylight slid through a small high window they were roused by the turnkey, who was sleepy and cantankerous and herded them outside to a line of covered wagons. Rhia’s wagon was full even before she stepped up, and three more women were shoved in after her before the canvas was fastened with rope and buckles. It jolted off on a rumbling, shaking ride. Nothing to look at but the others’ miserable faces. She supposed she looked much the same, with dark rings under her eyes and straw in her hair and the blades of her shoulders visible through the dirty material of her gown.

The journey was short, and before long they were unloaded onto a grassy bank. Even the grass was foreign. It was thick and springy and a little sharp beneath their feet. And then there was the river, like nothing Rhia had ever seen. It dwarfed the distant rows of pale stone and painted timber. It flowed into the harbour from the west, cutting through the landscape as though it was hurrying somewhere important. The waiting barge, tethered to a rickety pier, was like a flat-bottomed freight boat with one large sail. Freight, livestock, it was all the same. At its helm was a withered seaman wearing an over-large military coat with a dirty kerchief tied around his head.

No one spoke. The landscape seemed hallowed, somehow; more than a church – the immensity of the sky above, the smooth dark water with mist smoking above it, and the jungle of silver eucalypts on either bank. From these, periodically, rose flocks of brilliantly coloured parakeets and enormous white birds with yellow crests.

Birds of jewel colour.

Rhia was numb with cold but even so she felt a low, visceral
fear of the green-brown water and its flanking forest. It couldn’t be real. She had, finally, reached the Otherworld.

The July sun was strong and sharp and eventually warmed them a little. Rhia judged that at least one hundred of the
Rajah
women were in the barge, sitting on the long side-benches or on the floor, dumbstruck by the mazarine sky. She saw her own uneasiness reflected wherever she looked. Were there beasts in the forest, or in the water? What were those noises they kept hearing, the same as last night – the thumping through the trees and that high-pitched cry that sounded so uncannily like human laughter? ‘Natives,’ said Nelly between clenched teeth and Hail Marys. She was certain she’d end up in a pot before they reached Parramatta. Her soldier was on the barge, though.

The sun rose and they were issued with more of the unleavened bread to stop the gripe of hunger. Another hour passed, or more, before someone screamed. It was so shrill a sound that a great mantle of birds rose from the trees, shrieking in chorus. There was a man on the shore, standing between two white tree trunks, but he was not white. He was as black as polished leather. Dressed in a cloak of patchwork fur and, it appeared, little else, he didn’t move a whisker. He watched with solemn disinterest as they passed. His rod-straight pose and the stoic rills of his face made Rhia wonder, fleetingly, if he might actually be a statue. His face was the mask of time itself, yet there was something hauntingly familiar about him. Perhaps it was the presence of this man’s people that she had felt the moment she stepped onto their land. The barge passed by slowly but he didn’t move or follow them with his eyes.

When the sun was high above, they chugged over to a cleared part of the shore where there was an inn of sorts. It was an unpainted bungalow with a dangerously leaning verandah.
It proved to be little more than a rum shop, and the only fare to be had, besides rum, was something the lubricated innkeeper called kangaroo pie. This was a stew served inside a wedge of the same tasteless bread they had been eating since they arrived. The innkeeper called it ‘damper’, even though it was as dry as the ashes it was baked in. They sat around the dugout fire on logs, eating their kangaroo pie. The meat was, apparently, ‘wild and to be found hereabouts’. The innkeeper might be described in the same way.

There was no tarrying after they had eaten. They returned to the barge, just as the thumping noise started up again, sounding closer than ever. Then something that looked nothing like a bear jumped out in front of their trudging queue. It was gone in a bouncing grey blur that raised a shriek from several women and, again, from a canopy full of birds. When the creature and its noise disappeared, the slightly crazed laughter of the innkeeper could still be heard.

‘That there’s a kangaroo,’ he called, between splutters.

‘Well,’ spat Nora, with a toss of her head. ‘It’s nought but a monstrous-large hare with the tail of an overgrown rat.’

Rhia laughed from relief and nerves and because the creature was either the largest rat or the strangest-looking hare she’d ever seen. She could tell Nora had been as shaken as any of them, but she still had her mettle. This, too, was a relief. Rhia didn’t know what she’d do if Nora lost her spite. While there was still one amongst them who couldn’t be broken, they could survive anything. The laughter spread quickly and by the time they reached the barge they were all as merry as if they’d been at the rum.

The wind was behind them all afternoon and they knew that they had reached their destination when a high stone wall rose up in place of the tree line. It seemed to run for ever along
the riverbank. The wall was grey and foreboding and almost made Rhia wish she could remember a prayer.

It could only be a prison.

Disembodied voices floated across the water, presumably from the unseen township of Parramatta. They pulled into a pier near some towering, blacked iron gates and Rhia caught Nora’s eye. To her astonishment, Nora winked and leaned towards her. ‘It won’t be for ever,’ she said. ‘And whatever you do, Mahoney, don’t let ’em see you’re afraid.’