Remember Me (21 page)

Mary had never felt this way, although she didn’t see the natives as beautiful people. To her mind the stink of the fish oil on them, their splayed noses and the ever-present bubbles of snot nestling above their thick lips made all but the children ugly as sin. But she was intelligent enough to realize that they probably thought white people just as ugly, and furthermore this was their land, and they were perfectly adapted to it. Her interest in them had been furthered by Tench’s enthusiasm. He believed that the way truly to settle this new country was to learn to understand its people. Mary, however, didn’t want to understand them in order to settle here; she was hoping for their help in her escape.

She persisted in making friends with them. And with a warm smile, and showing interest in their children, it wasn’t hard. She told them her name, they reciprocated. They touched her hair and skin, laughingly holding their own black arms against hers to show the difference. Mary drew crude pictures of native animals in the sand and they told her their names. She drew a picture of one of the boats, then a very long wavy line to show them how far the white people had come to get here. She wished she could illustrate how different her homeland was from theirs, but that was too difficult. She wondered too if they had any conception at all of the nature of the white man’s colony, and what the word ‘convict’ meant.

As Tench had pointed out, until the white man came
these natives wouldn’t even have understood the notion of theft. They weren’t acquisitive people, and they left their tools, canoes and other items lying around. Much of their hostility was due to white men taking their belongings, and who could blame them for retaliating with violence?

Mary continued to cultivate this little group of natives, day after day. They appeared healthy and well fed, and although she knew much of their diet was fish, which they caught from their canoes, she guessed they supplemented this with other things. She wanted to know what, for they didn’t grow or rear anything. She thought such knowledge would help in her escape.

To her shock, the women showed her grubs and insects which they dug out of rotting tree stumps. Although Mary’s empty stomach heaved at the very thought of it, she bravely tried some and found they weren’t as bad as she expected.

Heavy rain prevented her from going to talk to the natives for almost a week, and when she did eventually venture back into the next cove, she couldn’t see anyone. This disturbed her, for although she knew that these people didn’t stay in permanent camps, wandering about as the mood took them, she was aware that this was a favourite fishing spot.

She walked farther than she normally did, until a buzzing of insects and a wheeling of birds overhead halted her. Ahead, she could see something lying up by the bushes above the beach, and to her horror she realized it was a dead native, covered in a swarm of ants. Snatching
Charlotte up in her arms, she ran as fast as she could back to the camp.

She was still running when she saw Tench. He must have come back from Rose Hill the previous night. He smiled at her warmly. ‘You’re in quite a hurry,’ he said. ‘Something wrong?’

‘There’s a body around in the next cove,’ she blurted out.

‘Anyone you know?’ he joked.

Mary couldn’t laugh, for she was afraid the body belonged to one of the group she had befriended. ‘I think it’s one of the natives,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go close enough to be sure. Surely they don’t leave their dead lying around unburied?’

‘I wouldn’t think so,’ he said, looking concerned. ‘I hope it is a natural death, not an attack by one of our people, we’ve got enough trouble without that. But I’ll go and check it out now.’

After advising Mary not to stray so far from the camp again, he walked off.

It was several days before Mary had a chance to speak to Tench again. She’d seen him sailing off down the harbour with a group of Marines the day after she told him about the body, but he could have been going to the lookout on the Heads at the end of the bay.

She was just coming out of the stores with the rations for herself and Charlotte, when she saw Tench coming down the hill from Captain Phillip’s house. She thought he looked very worried and upset.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked as he drew near to her. ‘Didn’t you have a present for him?’

This was a long-standing joke between them. In the early days Tench usually brought a gift of food when he dropped in to see her and Will. It was never anything much, maybe an egg for Charlotte, or some vegetables, but when times got harder and he didn’t bring anything he always apologized and looked embarrassed. Mary would tease him then and say he couldn’t expect a welcome without a present.

This time Tench gave her only a ghost of a smile. ‘The captain’s not happy with my news,’ he said. ‘There’s dozens of dead and dying natives around the bay. Just like the one you saw.’

Mary instinctively clutched Charlotte tighter.

Tench saw her fear and put one hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Surgeon White hasn’t got any similar cases here. It must be something that only affects them. But keep away, just to be safe. Captain Phillip is sending someone down there to see what he can do or find out.’

Telling Mary not to worry was like asking the sun not to shine. She was terrified that this disease would spread to the camp and kill Charlotte, so her whole being urged her to flee now, any way she could.

Just a few days earlier, the
Supply
, the smallest ship of the original fleet, had returned from Norfolk Island with news that twenty-six of the twenty-nine convicts there had devised a plan to lure the crew away from the ship and sail off in her. By all accounts this plan was a first-class one and would have succeeded but for someone informing on them. While this meant on the one hand that Mary’s idea was feasible, it also meant that all security
would be tightened still further now, and punishments for any misdemeanour would be harsher than ever.

This was borne out just a few days later when six Marines were hanged for stealing from the stores. It seemed they had been doing it for months, having made keys for the locks, and when one of them was on guard duty he let his friends get in to plunder.

Most of the convicts were delighted that Captain Phillip was coming down on his men just as hard as on the convicts. But to Mary it suggested that Phillip was panicking because he knew the stored food wasn’t going to last until more came from England.

As usual when a punishment took place, everyone had to be there. As Mary watched the rope put round each man’s neck, and heard the sound of the gallows floor pulled away beneath him, leaving him dangling in space, she had never felt so desperate and afraid.

To her there was nothing good about this place – corrupt guards, women getting thirty lashes just for fighting, and all the time they were slowly being starved to death. It seemed to Mary that she was trapped in hell with several hundred lunatics.

In April, however, things looked up slightly for Mary and Will, as Captain Phillip was forced by food shortages to let Will go back to the fishing, under supervision. Mary smiled grimly to herself for she had been right, they couldn’t manage without him. The catches had been tiny without his skill, and although Will very much resented being watched over, at least he had proved he was indispensable, and they got their old hut back.

Whatever the epidemic was which killed half the native population around the bay, it didn’t spread to the new colony. Only one white man died, a sailor on the
Supply
. Surgeon White seemed to be of the opinion it was smallpox, but how it had come was a mystery. If they had brought it with them on the ships, it would have shown up far earlier.

Then in early May the gloom in the whole colony was lifted for a while by the arrival of the
Sirius
from Cape Town. Although she was mainly carrying flour, not substantial provisions like meat, she brought good news that other ships were on their way, and long-awaited mail for those lucky enough to have friends and family who could write.

Yet the sight of the ship anchored out in the bay seemed to have a bad effect on Will. Mary found him on the shore on many an afternoon before he went out fishing, just staring out at the
Sirius
. When she tried to speak of it he snapped at her, and when he wasn’t working he didn’t come looking for her and Charlotte as he once did.

One day, early in the afternoon, Mary was taking the clean washing back to the barracks, having left Charlotte playing with another child, when she heard Will’s loud voice coming from James Martin’s hut. Mary guessed they’d managed to get some rum from somewhere.

Mary had conflicting opinions about James, the Irish horse thief. She had been delighted to see him again, and Sam Bird too, for the friendships formed on the
Dunkirk
were the basis of a kind of family here. James was a very amusing and charming man, intelligent and articulate, and
able to read and write. But he was a devil for the drink, and women.

Mary recognized him as the sort who led others into trouble but usually managed to wriggle or charm his way out of any blame. He wasn’t bound by loyalty; James Martin looked after himself first and foremost. She felt he was a bad influence on Will.

Mary wasn’t by nature a snoop, but Will worried her when he drank, as he became boastful and often quite belligerent. She also wanted to find out how he and James had acquired the drink; if he was stealing fish to get it she wanted to know in advance.

There wasn’t anyone else around, so Mary crept round the back of James’s hut. If anyone came by she would make out she had just come out of the bushes after relieving herself.

James was talking about some of the men going after the native women. He took the view that a man wasn’t right in the head to do such a thing.

‘I reckons you’d at least be safer than with some of the pox-carrying hags here,’ Will said, and laughed heartily. ‘That’s why I picked Mary, I knew she were clean.’

Mary wasn’t sure whether to take that as a compliment or not. It had a kind of double edge to it.

‘She’s a good woman,’ James said almost reprovingly. ‘You’re a lucky man, Will, in more ways than one.’

‘I’ll be luckier still once I get out of this accursed place,’ Will retorted. ‘And I’ll be off on the first ship when my time’s up.’

‘Won’t you wait for Mary?’ James asked, his tone
slightly arch, making Mary suspect they weren’t drinking together after all. Maybe Will had come visiting after getting some spirits elsewhere.

‘No, I bloody won’t,’ Will burst out. ‘Firstly no ship will take me on with a woman and a child, secondly I can do better than her.’

Mary felt as if someone had punched her in the belly. It was one thing for Will to tell others he didn’t consider himself legally married, quite another to say he could do better than her. She turned and fled, trying very hard not to cry.

Will didn’t come back to their hut before going fishing that evening, so Mary cooked up some rice on the fire, for once barely noticing the maggots that floated up to the surface as the water got hot. She had nothing more to add to it, as they had already eaten their tiny ration of salted pork earlier in the week. But Mary had no appetite, she was only cooking for Charlotte’s sake. She felt weak with misery that Will intended to abandon her.

Charlotte sat right by the fire, as she always did when food was cooking, her dark eyes never leaving the cooking pot. That distressed Mary still further, for a small portion of rice wasn’t anywhere near enough to keep a child growing and healthy. She could already see in her daughter the tell-tale signs of under-nourishment that she’d observed in children from desperately poor families back in Cornwall: the distended belly, sunken cheeks and lacklustre eyes and hair.

If Will left her and went home, escape would be well-nigh impossible. She might be able to plan it, get her
hands on all the necessary equipment and handle a boat well, but it was Will who had the navigation skills. There wasn’t another man in the whole convoy likely to take his place.

The prospect of being left alone here terrified her. She’d lose the hut, the women would jeer at her, the men would pester her. She wouldn’t be able to protect Charlotte from the depravity that was all around. The best she could hope for was to become a ‘lag wife’, the mistress of one of the Marines or officers. But that would only last until he too went back to England.

Mary’s emotions ranged through despair, fear and then anger that evening, but by the time Charlotte had devoured the rice and turned sleepily to her mother’s breast, she had a plan. Just as she’d coolly planned finding an officer lover on the
Dunkirk
in order to survive, she was now going to use the few assets she had again.

As Will made his way back to his hut it was almost dawn. He was chilled to the bone and wet through for it had started raining and turned very cold around ten o’clock the previous evening. He was also exhausted and aching with hunger, for they’d fished all night and all they had to show for the hard work was around a dozen fish. He had experienced all that a thousand times before, both here and back in Cornwall, but what had really got him down tonight was the attitude of the two Marines sent out to watch him.

‘Bastards,’ he muttered, and spat noisily on the sand. But for the fear of another flogging he would have
knocked them over the side. How dare they suggest the lack of fish was because he didn’t know as much about fishing as he claimed! And that he was drunk when he came aboard. He had had a few tots of rum, but that didn’t impair his judgement. There just weren’t any fish in the bay. If they’d been prepared to sail through the Heads like he wanted to do, they would have caught thousands.

As he drew nearer the hut, he was very surprised to see a fire and Mary bending over it.

‘Why the fire? Is Charlotte sick?’ he asked as he got nearer.

‘No, she’s asleep,’ Mary said. ‘I thought you’d be cold and hungry so I made some breakfast for you.’

Will’s spirits lifted. He had expected Mary to be sullen because he’d gone off fishing without seeing her first. If she had found out he’d bought some rum instead of something they could all eat, she’d have been even madder.