Toward the Sea of Freedom (17 page)

Mrs. Portland nodded, and Lizzie dissolved some flour in the water as Jeremiah had advised. She gave some to Mrs. Portland’s charge, who drank it and managed to keep the mixture down.

The next day the guards did, indeed, open all the portholes for the women held in the tween deck.

“Step up in groups of twenty-four,” said the lieutenant who commanded Jeremiah and the other guards. “Limit yourselves to the separated deck space and move around. Loitering will not be tolerated. Contact with the passengers will not be tolerated. Do not speak to the sailors or guards.”

Lizzie supported Candy, and Mrs. Portland carried the sick girl onto deck. Then they walked around. The women seemed a bit like wild animals on display at the fair; after all, there were plenty of spectators. The sailors treated themselves to prurient looks, and the passengers gathered in front of their cabins and stared at the prisoners. Most of the passengers were middle-aged, retired people who had finished their military or police service and were now taking advantage of the generous land apportionment in Australia. In England, their pensions hardly sufficed to live on, but in Australia they would be rich. Servants were, after all, abundant—the wives of these future settlers would have their pick from among Lizzie and her fellow sufferers.

Going outside awoke the prisoners’ desire to live, but there was a problem. It rained constantly, and the storerooms were not sealed tight. All their clothes were damp, and the spring chill of the Atlantic did nothing to dry them. At least the water that washed over the deck in rough seas did not stand on the tween deck. It seeped through to the lower level and collected there. In some places belowdecks it stood knee-high and stank.

The women were taken outside daily, but the men remained heavily fettered. Not much movement was possible for them, so they were soaking wet and shivering with cold. And they were suffering their first cases of fever and diarrhea. Michael often drifted off in fever dreams and half sleep; his wounds had become inflamed and hurt. But it was not yet so bad that he lost all his strength. He forced himself to eat, and now he could keep the food down. Mostly, Michael suffered from the cold and wet.

“It will get warmer one of these days, once we reach the Bay of Biscay,” his neighbor, the sailor, consoled him as he shivered and coughed.

The sailor was right, but the warmth, followed by the heat of the Indian Ocean, did not improve the prisoners’ situation. The women on the tween deck were happy about their dry clothing, but Michael and the other heavily guarded men were not so lucky. Belowdecks it remained damp, and the warmth encouraged rot. On top of that, bugs gained the upper hand. Michael had the feeling he was being eaten alive by fleas and lice.

When they were taken up on deck, the men tried to master the infestation and their itching a bit by splashing each other with seawater. But the guards did not allow them to undress. The passengers, suffering from yawn-provoking boredom, still liked to watch when the prisoners were led out on deck. The daily “show” was almost their only distraction. Since Michael and the others went back to their berths with wet clothing, no one was surprised by the outbreak of cholera.

Lizzie was horrified when the first people died. The disease quickly took the young girl in her partition, despite Mrs. Portland’s care and the additional food all six women in the partition owed to Lizzie’s relationship with Jeremiah. She shared his presents generously and was angry that Candy did not always do the same after she disappeared with one of the sailors.

The prohibition against looking at the men could not be maintained. A lively trade quickly developed between the women on the tween deck and the lustful sailors and soldiers. Candy was in high demand and soon forgot her love back home. For that, the gin helped her more than anything. While she was good about sharing food in their common pantry, she kept the booze for herself.

The captain held a short ceremony for the dead, and then the bodies were given over to the sea—an entrancingly beautiful blue sea in which dolphins played but in which a shark fin also cut the waves, its owner hoping for prey. “It’s behind them now,” Mrs. Portland sighed. “Who knows what still lies ahead of the rest of us.”

Mrs. Portland no longer held Lizzie’s relationship with Jeremiah against her. She often asked Lizzie to accompany her when she went to visit other partitions to care for the sick. Lizzie was eager to help, and Mrs. Portland patiently instructed her in the most important tasks.

“Where did you learn all this?” Lizzie asked.

Until recently, Mrs. Portland had never said anything about her past, but she had begun to open up to Lizzie. “I helped in a Poor Law hospital,” she explained. “Out of gratitude. They patched me up often enough for free, and I don’t like to take without giving back. They need all the help they can get, especially with the women. It doesn’t feel good to be touched and bandaged by a fellow when your own has just beaten you black and blue.”

She did not say more, but Lizzie could imagine the rest. Mrs. Portland had been married—and her husband had beaten her. Had she left him and thus fallen into disrepute?

“Oh no, child, she killed him.” It was one of the patients who finally cleared it up for Lizzie. Emma Brewster was an aged prostitute who suffered from terrible pains and fluid retention in her legs. Mrs. Portland treated her with cool compresses and gin poultices. Lizzie was applying one such treatment when the subject of Mrs. Portland and her misdeed came up.

Lizzie almost dropped the gin bottle. “She did? Mrs. Portland?”

Emma Brewster nodded. “To be certain, child, I was at the trial. You know how they try us in groups. Anna Portland was up right after me. She did not do a very skillful job, as far as her defense goes. Doesn’t show a scrap of remorse. The bastard beat her over and over, she says. But she took it because she wanted to be a good and righteous woman, and who knows what all else. Till he went after her daughter. She was thirteen. He knocks her down and is standing over her, pants already open, when Anna comes into the house. So she beats him to death with the fire poker. She’s strong enough, all right. And she doesn’t regret it, she says. She’d do it again. And if God don’t like it, she says, well, she can’t do nothing about that; she must just have more in common with the devil.”

Lizzie did not know whether she should laugh or cry. “Wasn’t she sentenced to death, then?” she asked.

Her patient nodded. “Of course, but it was commuted. They commute almost all the women’s sentences.”

“But, but the murderers are all on the lower deck.” Lizzie still could not believe it.

Emma Brewster rolled her eyes. “Child, they locked Anna up half a year in Newgate. They saw pretty quick that she wasn’t scum. The doctor, the reverend, everyone spoke on her behalf, to keep her in England too. That poor woman left seven children behind. The daughter she protected was the oldest. But nothing could be done. They had to send Anna overseas. The children went to the orphanage.”

Lizzie sighed. She thought of her own, unknown mother. Until then she had never thought very highly of her. To Lizzie, it was a crime to put a child on the street. But then again, perhaps her own mother had acted in the same desperation as Anna Portland had.

Chapter 3

While the
Asia
sailed slowly through the Doldrums—where the light winds often brought ships to a complete stop—the fever epidemic reached its high point. Though the rates of illness remained reasonable among the women on the tween deck, down below, the situation was quite different. No one in the lower deck was still able to stand.

The guards were completely overburdened by this crisis situation. At first, they still tried to force the men onto the upper deck; then they took off their chains and left them to their fate. An appeal asking the few still-capable men to care for their comrades wasn’t followed; an attempt to force them to do so was resisted. Soon, even the strongest were too weak to wash and feed the sick and dying every day.

A solution did not present itself until the guards dropped an especially high number of dead into the sea. The passengers, naturally, observed the ceremonies. When they ended, Caroline Bailiff, the brave spouse of a retired police officer, offered a suggestion to the captain.

“Why don’t you have the women take care of them?” she inquired. “True, half of them are good for nothing, and the last thing the poor devils down there need is a whore to finish them off, but there must be a few that have kept some remainder of responsibility and perhaps only faltered once out of necessity. The earlier you select them, the better—for the poor souls down there now, and for the families who will later be looking for servants.”

Understandably, the future free settlers received this idea well, though the guards still had their doubts.

The next time the women were allowed to walk around freely, Caroline Bailiff started looking for helpers. The first to volunteer was Anna Portland.

“D’you really want to do that?” Emma Brewster asked Anna. The old whore had taken the berth left open in Anna and Lizzie’s partition after the frail girl had died. She slept better there than in her previous corner, which she had shared with five very enterprising young girls.

“Ain’t you had enough of the fellows?” Emma asked. “Me, I don’t look at a prick if I don’t have to, let alone if a man’s going to give me a fever instead of cash.” Emma kept her distance from Caroline Bailiff and the sailors who accompanied her noting the names of the volunteers. “You might just come across one who beat his wife to death.”

“They’re not all that bad, you know,” Anna said. “Perhaps I’ll save one who stole a bit of food for his children. There are a lot of Irish among them, and the whole world’s talking about their famine.”

Though Lizzie had never heard anything about the famine herself, she knew that Anna had moved in better circles. Her husband had been an artisan, and she had lived in a proper house. She had been able to feed her children and even buy a newspaper from time to time.

“Anyway, I can care for the sick; others will have to dress them.” Anna said. She turned to Lizzie. “How about you, Lizzie? Are you coming?”

Lizzie followed Anna, her heart pounding, into the office Caroline Bailiff had improvised beneath a sunshade. Mrs. Bailiff immediately noted Anna’s neat little hat, which, when it was new, must have resembled her own. Anna’s hat clearly pleased Mrs. Bailiff, but she looked at Lizzie rather skeptically.

“And what motivates you to care for the men, girl?” she asked Lizzie after Anna had explained her work in the hospital.

Lizzie shrugged. “I’ve been helping Anna since we got here,” she said. “There’s nothing else to do, after all.”

Mrs. Bailiff arched her eyebrows. “And have you always taken care of men?” she asked sarcastically. “You do count among the girls who offered, hmm, special cures in the streets of London, don’t you?”

Lizzie looked at her candidly. “Not by choice!” she said. “Just for money. And really, they were never sick. On the contrary, they were, if anything, too . . . They had rather too much vim, madam.”

Mrs. Bailiff maintained her straight face, but amusement shone in her eyes.

“I’ll keep an eye on the girl, madam,” Anna said. “She’s a good girl and quite capable.”

Lizzie smiled. Her heart swelled. No one had ever said that about her before.

Mrs. Bailiff asked for some time to think it over, but she was soon prepared to accept any offer. The women weren’t clamoring to undertake nursing duties in exchange for minor improvements in their food and living conditions, or for vague promises of good employment in a house in the new country. After all, most of them had long since seen to improving their living conditions themselves. Some of them had made good friends among the guards or sailors who visited them and brought them supplies; some offered their attentions to anyone interested, in exchange for a bit of salted meat or a few swigs of gin. In any case, hardly any of the women wanted to trade her work as a whore for filth, drudgery, and the risk of contagion. And so, in the end, only four female prisoners and two ladies from the group of future free settlers ventured into the ship’s hold with wash water and gin, the only medicine the ship’s doctor provided.