Fled: A Novel

by Meg Keneally

  Copyright © 2018 Meg Keneally

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First North American Edition 2019

  First published in Australia by Echo, a division of Bonnier Zaffre.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or arcade@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Keneally, Meg, author.

  Title: Fled : a novel / Meg Keneally.

  Description: First North American Edition. | New York : Arcade Publishing, 2019. | First published in Australia by Echo, a division of Bonnier Zaffre in 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019001630 (print) | LCCN 2019004906 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948924283 (ebook) | ISBN 9781948924269 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Biographical. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Romance / Historical. | GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PR9619.4.K464 (ebook) | LCC PR9619.4.K464 F64 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001630

  Cover design by Erin Seaward Hiatt

  Cover photograph: © Vectorios2016/Getty Images (silhouette); © Howard Oates/Getty Images (ship); © kentarcajuan/Getty Images (texture)

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Tommy

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Somewhere in the Tasman Sea, off New South Wales, April 1791

  She never slept deeply, not here. Even if she had, this wave would have woken her, elongating up to the sky and then bending its force down onto their small boat.

  She gripped the children before her eyes were fully open. She lived now with the humming fear of one of the ropes she had used to tie them breaking, of waking to find a child gone, of realising they had probably already travelled halfway through the blackness to the sea floor.

  They were both there. If Emanuel was making any sound, she couldn’t hear it, not above the wind. She couldn’t hear Charlotte either, but the little girl’s mouth was open, and stretched by terror. She was probably crying, but it was impossible to tell as the constant spray claimed all tears.

  Her husband gripped the tiller in the fading light, sitting in water that stopped only a few inches from the gunwales. He was grinding his teeth, trying to keep the boat pointed into the waves, probably worrying that the sun would betray him by setting, and that the boat would suddenly find itself side-on to a salt monster.

  Jenny had been dreaming of Penmor. Its stillness; its muted, deadening light. Of her family’s narrow, crammed house. Now, though, its door was splintered, its remnants hanging open on one of the hinges as though somebody had enjoyed pulling it out of its frame and destroying it.

  She had called, or tried to, but it was a whisper. She inhaled, tried again, but no matter how much breath she added to it, the sound would not increase. In any case, there was no answer.

  But someone was there. Her father was lying in front of the fire where they had put him after the wreck, still pale and swollen from the sea. Her mother sat in the same chair as always. Had she moved? Had she spent, in that chair, the years which had propelled her daughter over impossible seas to an implausible country?

  Her mother started to speak, but her cheeks cracked from the side of her mouth to her ears, and instead of speech she ejected a blast of wind that sent Jenny back down the hill, into the dream sea, from which she surfaced into consciousness and the chaos of the waves.

  It must’ve gathered quickly, this storm. There had been some chop when she’d gone to sleep in the late afternoon, and since then the winds had been pummelling the water into a new substance altogether, a landscape of moving mountains where no boat had any business existing.

  And it wouldn’t, not for long, not if they didn’t start bailing. Carney was at the sail, trying to get it down before the wind punched a hole in it. But Harrigan was no use. He had retained enough consciousness to lift himself from the bottom of the boat when the wave hit, sitting up so that he looked like a duchess in a bath. But he still had that stare, still looked as though he was viewing a different world from the rest of them, one far more horrific.

  Bruton, meanwhile, just sat there, hanging on to his bench, his eyes flicking from Jenny to her children. No doubt he was resenting them, useless passengers who contributed nothing to his survival. She rolled her lips together. Why in God’s name did she always have to harangue the men? Why couldn’t they see what needed doing and just do it? She kicked at the privy bucket, its edges sticking up from the water inside the boat. ‘Bail, for God’s sake! We’ll founder, and soon! You have to bail!’

  Bruton kept staring. Not the type to take orders from a woman who’d tied herself to a bench.

  The boat was slowly grinding up a wave, which disappeared underneath them, sending them crashing down. The impact dislodged some of the water, but then added more, and when Jenny wiped her eyes she saw Bruton, stubborn but not stupid, frantically bailing with the privy bucket.

  Somewhere beyond these waves was a place where their choices extended beyond drowning or starvation; where she wouldn’t have to clench her arms around the children and tell the sea it couldn’t have them. But they hadn’t reached it yet. Sometimes, when the sea was at its worst, she wondered if they ever would.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Southern Cornwall, 1783

  The sea had killed him, they said. Jenny did not blame the sea. Jenny blamed the King: the man who taxed salt and windows and wigs to pay for a war in a place where people had decided they’d had enough of taxes.

  So there was nothing left when the pilchards stopped coming, when the shards of silver that had swarmed around the boat every other summer vanished. Their disappearance had forced her father onto the nig
ht-time sea. It was hungrier than its daylight counterpart. It had consumed others in their village, sometimes vomiting them up onto the shore, sometimes simply removing them from the world of earth and sunlight.

  Her mother was fussing, that morning. Dolly, serving at the big house on the hill now, always knew how to calm her. Jenny seemed only able to make her more anxious. Constance licked her fingers to remove an imaginary smudge from Jenny’s face, although there were plenty of real smudges to be dealt with. Adjusting her shawl, sweeping non-existent dust out the door. Going to the window, where the extinguished stub of a tallow candle stood.

  Will Trelawney had never been out all night. Constance would have heard the wind, as Jenny had, attempting to tear away the shutters and push open the door. Anyone on the ocean during that moonless night would have needed to be a lifelong mariner to survive.

  Will was a lifelong mariner, with a thin, etched face that hinted at more than his forty summers. His father had taken him on the ocean before he could walk properly, Will once told Jenny, and he’d begun fishing when his age was still a single digit.

  Perhaps Constance was rolling the thought of Will’s competence over in her mind, looking for flaws. Jenny certainly was. She had sometimes seen sailors asleep in their small boats, too tired or drunk to head home. Perhaps her father was beginning to stretch, cursing the morning cold and the scolding he would get when he walked through the door.

  When he did come through the door, though, it was clear he’d been floating in the sea for some time. His skin was white with a tinge of purple, particularly around his mouth, as though he’d tried to colour his lips with crushed flowers as girls sometimes did.

  There was a gash on his forehead, and Jenny wondered if he’d been killed by a deliberate blow rather than by hitting his head as the ocean tipped him from his boat, the victim of a deal gone wrong. For smugglers, events could take a dangerous turn in the darkness of a Cornish cove. Harold Tippett and his son Stephen, men who had shared the ocean with Will, laid his body in front of the fire, with Harold cradling his head so it didn’t flop back and hit the floor. Jenny wasn’t sure what the point of the gesture was, but she was strangely glad of it.

  Her mother sat, after Harold and his son left, her eyes flicking between Will and the fire.

  ‘Ma,’ Jenny said a few times. ‘Ma, he can’t stay here.’

  ‘This is his home,’ Constance said, and said no more.

  Jenny knelt and kissed her father’s forehead, felt the lack of intention behind it, saw nothing reflected in the half-lidded eyes. She felt the approach of abandoned grief, muted for the moment. It couldn’t fully exist as long as Jenny told herself that this piece of flotsam which had taken her mother’s voice was not her father.

  The grief would come as soon as she admitted that the water-logged hands which lay on his chest had hauled nets with hers, had shown her how to tie ropes. She was not ready, yet, to concede that fact. There was no space for it next to her rising anger. She wanted to pound at the thing by the fire, ask it why it had taken her father’s mind out to sea and hadn’t carried it home. She wanted to take an axe to the boat, to burn it. She wanted to punish anyone who had profited from the penury that had sent her father to the night-time sea.

  A small boy had once lived at the Trelawney house on the hill above Penmor Harbour, a narrow building like its neighbours, mean-windowed and crammed between other buildings which were distinguished only by their occupants. They were confronted in their cramped condition by the vastness of the ocean, and by the bravery of the little boats that punched through the estuary waves to reach it.

  The boy in the Trelawney house, Nathaniel, had shared quarters with his parents while Jenny and Dolly gossiped and occasionally fought in the darkness of the next room.

  Nathaniel stopped living there around three months after his birth, when a vicious winter drew his soul out of his body, leaving a meaningless amalgamation of flesh in the cot.

  It was, perhaps, Jenny’s fault. She did wonder. She’d been doing the work of a boy, even an infant who would not be up to it for some years. Perhaps he had slipped away because he felt he wasn’t needed.

  Jenny and her father were often driven onto the November sea by the revenue men, who sat like great toads, their mouths open, ready to gulp down whatever came in their direction.

  After one blustery day, Jenny dumped out the contents of her creel for her mother’s inspection.

  ‘They’re not as big as they were, are they?’ Constance had said, turning each pilchard over, smelling it, running her fingers over the scales.

  ‘Checking if one of them is a revenue man in disguise?’ asked Will, coming in with an armful of firewood.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Constance. ‘How about this one?’ She flung a fish across the wooden table on which the catch was laid out.

  The pilchard struck Will in the chest, and he caught it before it fell to the ground. He tossed it back on the pile. ‘Late in the season,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that’s why.’

  ‘You can tell these fish, then, that it’s their fault your daughters wear old dresses.’

  ‘Everyone does anyway,’ said Dolly, guiding Jenny to the stool by the fire. ‘I know it’s fun to blame Pa – I enjoy faulting him for just about anything,’ She smiled at her father, who winked. ‘But mother, really, Jenny and I don’t need new dresses.’

  Dolly started trying, as gently as she could, to undo a knot that the wind had tied in Jenny’s hair. A soft girl, Dolly, with well-behaved honey hair that refused to allow the wind to tangle it and concentrated instead on framing her delicate face to best effect.

  Jenny shared Dolly’s impish chin, her upturned nose and grey eyes, but her brown-red mop insisted on mimicking seaweed as often as possible. The matted, salt-crusted thicket was resisting even her patient sister’s best attempts. Jenny was glad it was taking a while; she didn’t want to move from the stool by the fire, even as it baked the salt into her clothes and hair.

  ‘Jenny’s dress wouldn’t last, anyway,’ said Constance. She walked over to the fire and lifted the snarl at the back of Jenny’s head. ‘How hard do you have to try to get it like this?’ she asked, kissing her daughter’s forehead.

  ‘The wind does all the work,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Hm. Will, do you truly need her on the boat?’

  He nodded. ‘Half the deckhands have been press-ganged, and the rest are in the mines. She is good at it, too.’

  Jenny knew she was. A girl of torn skirts and wet feet, a creature of the sea as her sister was a product of the hearth.

  It was the hearth her father sat down in front of each night to remove his salt-soaked boots, while her mother wrinkled her nose and declared she preferred the smell of Nathaniel’s worst emissions to that of her husband’s feet.

  One night, when her mother padded towards the back of the cottage, she did not return with the baby boy ready to settle at the fire and give up her milk. Constance’s moan started softly. Jenny thought it was the wind, until the sound rose to a shriek as her mother carried the small, still bundle to the hearth.

  It alarmed Jenny, later, that she could not remember Nathaniel’s face. The thought that her parents might not be able to either alarmed her even more – it seemed cruel to her that he should exist, that his smiles should be answered and his cries attended to, and then vanish and become faceless thanks to the poor memories of those sworn to love him.

  But she always remembered his absence, which swelled to occupy far more space than his presence ever had. It pushed her mother to the window, there to stand for half an hour, an hour, more. Putting all of her effort into staring; she must’ve done, for clearly she had no energy left to power her ears, which didn’t seem to admit the entreaties of her daughters.

  Before Nathaniel died, Jenny would often go out on the boat with her father. He would sit in the bow and tell her it was her job to watch the clouds, to let him know if any of them might become dragons, so he could bring the boat in.

 
For a time, the absence of his son pushed her father out alone, onto the estuary and past the two squat towers that guarded its entrance into the sea. He would even take his small boat out after a good catch, when he didn’t need to, whenever he could find a deckhand to help with the ropes in the nets and sometimes even when he couldn’t.

  But with one son dead and no prospect of another being born, and a great many of the village’s young men off fighting against the freedom they didn’t understand, Will again brought his daughter out with him. This time, though, her responsibility extended beyond keeping an eye out for dragon clouds. This time, she needed to know how to mend a net on a heaving sea, how to reef a sail against a storm, how to set a net and haul it so that more fish ended up back in the boat than they did in the ocean. It helped that Jenny felt no fear at the sight of a saltwater hill bearing down on the boat, and that she didn’t scream when they were caught side-on by a wave that threatened to return them to the sea.

  Whenever wind began plucking at the ocean, she enjoyed standing or crouching in the bow. Her father would yell at her to sit down, but she could feel the ocean through her feet better than she could through her backside. She could know it.

  When the village men came to take Jenny’s father and put him in the earth, her mother seemed not to notice. Her eyes stayed fixed on the place where he had lain, and she made no attempt to draw her shawl around her when Dolly, given special leave from the scullery, placed it on her shoulders.

  Constance stayed like that after nightfall, well after the house had been set to rights and the laundry done and delivered to those expecting it.

  Then Jenny sat on the floor and hugged Constance’s calves as though trying to prevent her from fleeing to the place where Will had gone. She rested her head on her mother’s lap and wept silently into the rough folds of her skirt, allowing her mind to blur until she became insensible of her mother’s hand creeping from her side and slowly stroking her hair.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘It’s ready, then?’ Constance asked. ‘We can sell it?’