Remember Me (3 page)

Dick Sullion was one man who felt this way, and he had cheered Mary considerably with his humour and his philosophy of life. Like her, he had been charged with High Toby, the common name for highway robbery. But Dick’s crime fitted the description more accurately than Mary’s did, for he’d lain in wait on isolated roads for unwary travellers, taking not only their valuables but their horses too.

He was a big man, close to six feet, with a ruddy face, wide shoulders and an irrepressible sense of humour. The first morning after her trial, Mary had woken to hear him singing some bawdy ale-house song about going to the
scaffold drunk. She had of course assumed he was drunk then, for those who had money or goods to bribe their gaolers could be inebriated all day and night. But as she sat up, he smiled at her, and his blue eyes were clear and bright.

‘No sense in lying around moping,’ he said as if to explain himself. ‘I’ve had a good life, and I reckon it’s better to hang than lose my wits and looks in a place like this.’

‘Some of us would rather sleep than think on that,’ she retorted.

Mary had learned in her first few days of imprisonment back in January that it was advisable to befriend someone tough and wily as a protector, and as Dick appeared to fit the bill in every way, she allowed him to move closer to her, and talked to him.

She soon discovered that Dick had no money left to buy drink or extra food. He told her he’d blown all he had in the first few weeks before his trial. But even if he couldn’t make her last few days more comfortable in a physical sense, he was strong, tough and knew the ropes, and his chatter and laughter cheered her.

Dick was Cornish too. It was good to be able to talk about home with him, and it wasn’t long before she told him how she felt about her crime and letting her family down.

‘Ain’t no good worrying about that,’ he said, his local dialect as thick and reassuring as her father’s. ‘We all do what we gotta do to survive. It’s the government’s fault we’ve come to this. The high taxes, the Enclosures Acts,
they rob us blind at every turn and live in palaces while us lot starve. I took from those who could afford it, so did you. Serves ’em right, I say.’

Mary, who had been brought up to be honest and God-fearing, didn’t entirely agree with him about that, but she wasn’t going to say so. ‘Aren’t you afraid of dying though?’ she asked instead.

He shrugged. ‘Been too close to it so many times, it don’t have no meaning any more. What’s hanging compared with a naval flogging? I had my first when I was only sixteen, now that’s summat to be scared of, pain so bad you cry out to death. Hanging’s quick. Don’t you worry, little one, I’ll hold your hand right up to the end.’

Mary took some comfort in Dick’s words. She made up her mind that if she was to die, she’d do so bravely.

Four days after her trial, around ten in the morning, the gaoler came to the cell door and called out for Nancy and Anne Brown. They were the aunt and niece accused of robbing a dwelling-house. He said they had been acquitted due to new evidence and were free to leave.

Despite her own predicament, Mary was delighted for them, and got up to hug and kiss them goodbye. She’d talked to the two women at some length in the previous couple of days and was sure they were as innocent as they claimed to be. They had barely left the cell when the gaoler called out a further four names, three men’s and Mary’s.

‘You lot come with me,’ he said curtly.

Mary turned to Dick in dismay, thinking she was to be led to the gallows then and there.

Dick put one big hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Don’t reckon it’s that,’ he said confidently. ‘At the end of each quarter session they go through the list and pick out likely folk for transportation. My guess is that’s what they want you for.’

The gaoler roared at them to follow him, giving Mary no time to say a proper goodbye to either Dick or Bridie.

As she shuffled along the dark passage behind William, Able and John, her fellow cellmates, their shackles clanking against the rough stone floor, she heard Dick’s voice boom out behind her. ‘Seven years, that’s all it is till you’re free, my little one. Be brave and strong and you’ll see the end of it.’

Able, a sickly-looking man in his thirties, glanced back at Mary. ‘What does he know?’ he said dourly. ‘I heard tell they ain’t sending no more felons to the Americas now the war’s over.’

Mary had heard the same thing too while she was in Plymouth. If it was true, it would be a relief, for she’d been brought up with horror stories passed on by sailors of the terrors that lay in store in that far-off land. Convicts there were treated the same as the black slaves, starved, beaten, made to work on the land till they dropped dead from exhaustion. Yet if not to America, where would they be sent, and would it be any better?

Once out in the yard, Mary saw other prisoners lined up, including Mary Haydon and Catherine Fryer, her old partners in crime. There were five women in all, and some
fifteen or sixteen men. Mary Haydon tossed her head and looked the other way when she saw Mary, but Catherine glowered at her, so clearly they still held her responsible for their plight.

A judge, or at least Mary assumed that’s what he was, by his wig and gown, came down the few steps into the yard, flanked by a couple of other men, then read aloud from a piece of parchment.

Mary could make no sense of what he was reading. She heard ‘At Assizes and general delivery of the gaol of our Lord the King,’ then what sounded like a string of ‘Sirs’ who were all unknown to her. It wasn’t until she heard her own name mentioned that she began to listen more intently. At the words, ‘His Majesty has been graciously pleased to extend the royal mercy on them,’ Mary’s heart leaped. But as the judge read on, her heart sank again, for it was as Dick had said, mercy on condition they be transported for seven years.

After the judge had left the prison yard, leaving the prisoners there alone with the guards, they turned to one another, their delight that they weren’t to be hanged mingling with an acute fear of what transportation would mean.

‘I never met anyone who ever came back from it,’ one man said gloomily. ‘They must have all died.’

‘I know a man that did come back,’ another man retorted loudly. ‘He had money in his pockets too.’

Mary tried to make sense of the babble of conflicting opinions around her. While she personally felt that a seven-year sentence, however hard, had to be better than
hanging, every single person in the yard appeared to be more knowledgeable on the subject than she was, so there was no point in her volunteering that opinion. But as the woman standing next to her began to cry, she put her arm around her to comfort her.

‘It’s got to be better than dying,’ she said softly. ‘We’ll be out in the fresh air, we might even be able to escape.’

Able, who was standing in front of her, must have heard what she said for he turned to her, a scornful expression on his face. ‘That’s if we don’t die on the voyage,’ he said.

Mary thought privately that he wasn’t long for this world anyway. He had a hacking cough, he was very thin and the only one of them in the cell who showed no eagerness when the daily mouldy bread was dished out.

‘As long as I’m still breathing, then I’ll still hope,’ she retorted staunchly.

Less than an hour later, doors in the prison yard opened and two large horse-drawn carts were led in.

The prisoners had all pondered on why they had been left out in the yard, but no one had anticipated they would be moved from Exeter Castle that same day. But that was what was planned, and without any further delay, they were chained together into groups of five and ordered up on to the carts. Once again, Mary found herself alongside Catherine and Mary. On the other side of her was the woman she’d comforted earlier, whose name was Elizabeth Cole, and another called Elizabeth Baker. Behind their bench were five men, one of them Able.

For the first hour, as the cart slowly trundled its way out through Exeter, Catherine Fryer and Mary Haydon kept up a volley of abuse towards Mary.

‘It’s all your fault,’ Catherine repeated again and again. ‘You brought us to this.’

Elizabeth Cole, who went by the name of Bessie, squeezed Mary’s hand in sympathy, and finally called a halt to it.

‘Shut yer mouths, you two,’ she snapped at them. ‘We’re all in this together now, whether we like it or not. There ain’t no sense in blaming Mary, you’d have been caught before long anyway. Besides, none of the rest of us wants to hear all that stuff.’

Mary was touched by Bessie’s intervention. She was an odd-looking woman, red-haired and fat, with a cast in one eye and several teeth missing, but the fact she’d been brave enough to speak out suggested she wasn’t as downtrodden as she looked.

There was an echo of agreement from the men sitting behind them, and perhaps that finally persuaded the two women to stop, for they lapsed into silence.

After a little while one of the men in the back prodded Mary. ‘Sweet-talk the guards into telling you where we’re heading,’ he whispered.

‘Why me?’ she whispered back.

‘You’re the bonniest,’ he replied.

Up until that moment Mary had fully believed she had absolutely no assets – no money or property she could bribe anyone with, no influential friends. All she had was the clothes she was wearing and they were worn and
soiled. But as she glanced at the row of women, she saw she was younger, healthier and stronger than all of them.

Mary and Catherine had been living by theft for years before she met them. Back then she’d been fooled by their gaudy clothes into thinking they were superior to her in every way. But cheap silk didn’t wear well, not in prison, and their pinched features and grey skin, the hollow look in their eyes and their gutter language showed up what they really were. As for Bessie and Elizabeth, while she didn’t yet know what crimes they had committed, or anything of their family background, they both had that worn-out appearance she had observed so often among the very poorest back home in Fowey.

All at once she saw a chance for herself. She was young and strong, no man had spoiled her, she knew she had a quicker mind than most, and she had determination.

She waited until Bessie asked to relieve herself, and once all the women had climbed down from the cart, Mary positioned herself so that she shielded her squatting friend from the guard with her skirt, and smiled warmly at him.

‘Where are you taking us?’ she asked. ‘Is it back to the prison in Plymouth, or straight to a boat for the Americas?’

He was a hard-looking man, with brown, broken teeth and a battered hat pulled down over his slanty eyes.

‘You’re bound for the prison hulks at Devonport,’ he said with an evil grin. ‘Don’t reckon you’ll get much beyond there.’

Mary gasped involuntarily. She might not have seen a
prison hulk but she knew their evil reputation. They were old warships, moored in estuaries and creeks, the government’s answer to overcrowding in prisons. The responsibility for running them was passed over to private individuals whose only interest was making as much money as possible from each prisoner. It was said that the unlucky felons who got sent to them would die either of starvation or of overwork within the first year. For the sideline of these notorious hell-holes was that the prisoners were forced to do slave labour on land, usually building ‘hards’ along the river bank.

‘I didn’t think they sent women there,’ she said, her voice trembling.

‘Times are a’changing,’ he grinned. ‘You’d better pretty yourself up if you want to make it off there alive.’

Mary gulped and looked him in the eye. She knew gaolers and guards were punished too harshly to dare let anyone escape, however ‘nice’ a prisoner was to them. But he probably thought she was stupid enough to be ignorant of this and hoped she might make up to him imagining he would help her in return.

‘But the judge said it was transportation.’ She forced herself to squeeze out a few tears.

‘They mean it to be,’ he said, his voice softening. ‘But they can’t send no one to the Americas since the war. They tried Africa, but that didn’t work. There’s talk of a place called Botany Bay, but that’s on the other side of the world.’

Mary vaguely remembered the sailors in the ale house she’d once worked in talking about a man called Captain
Cook who had claimed for England a country that was on the other side of the world. She wished now she’d listened properly, but at the time it held as little importance for her as whether King George was really mad, or what grand ladies wore to balls in London.

‘Do you think that’s where we’re bound then?’ she asked.

He shrugged and scowled at the other women who were crowding around Mary to hear what he was saying. ‘Get back on the cart,’ he said curtly. ‘We’ve got a fair few miles to cover before dark.’

Once back on the cart, Mary decided there was no point in thinking upon anything more than the present. It might be uncomfortable in the cart, but it was better to be out in the spring sunshine than in a stinking gaol. She would keep herself poised for an opportunity for escape.

She doubted there was any hope of that before Devonport. If the guards on this journey kept to the same routine as those on the way from Plymouth to Exeter, she and her companions would remain shackled together constantly.

But there was a faint possibility that the chains would be removed when they had to get into the small boat to be rowed out to the hulks. If so, she could jump out and swim for it. She smiled inwardly. It was a very faint hope, for surely any guard worth his salt would anticipate such an attempt, but then few people knew how to swim, even sailors like her father couldn’t. The thought of swimming was pleasing, to be able to wash off the prison stink and
make for a stretch of coastline she knew well. It was worth any risk, and even if she couldn’t do it then, maybe she could jump from the side of the hulk at night.

But as the afternoon shadows lengthened and it grew colder, Mary’s spirits began to sink again. Even if she could escape, where would she make for? She couldn’t go back to Cornwall, she’d be caught again in no time. And how would she get anywhere else with no money, wearing filthy clothes and boots with holes in them?