Fled: A Novel

by Meg Keneally

  Charlotte gave her mother a glare that would have felled the governor. She was fidgety and restless, and more than once Jenny had to reach quickly to stop her climbing over the edge of the boat. She had tried to tether Charlotte to herself, as she had Emanuel, but the girl would not submit to it, so Jenny contented herself with vigilance for now. If the weather worsened, though, Charlotte would not be given a choice.

  ‘We’ll need to land soon,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I’m not putting in simply to stop her grizzling,’ said Dan.

  ‘No more am I asking you to. Finding some water, though – that’s a good reason to put in, isn’t it?

  They had been travelling for two days in a boat barely longer than three men laid end to end, and barely wider than one. They slumped on the benches or lay in the hull to rest. For the most part, they’d been able to use the boat’s new flax sail, as the winds had been blowing from the south, not roaring along the coast as they sometimes did, at least not strongly enough to cause the boat significant trouble. Most of the time, those at the oars had been able to rest their arms.

  Carney and Bruton had discovered a shared love of gambling. Neither, though, had thought to bring any dice, so they bet on how many trees they would see on the next headland, or how long it would take before Harrigan was sick again. Bruton didn’t like losing, and when he did he usually accused Carney of foul play; Carney, who viewed himself as a man of honour, would take great offence. The two of them would pull their shoulders back and face each other, animals preparing to charge, until Jenny talked one or the other into turning away.

  She couldn’t do it forever, though. They all needed to land. Not to stop Charlotte grizzling, but to stop the men from killing each other. And to refill their water flagons, although they were not yet running dangerously low.

  When Charlotte slept, and when the men did not require her intervention, Jenny would scan the coast for a landing place. They were probably the first of their kind to slide so close to these cliffs and points and outcrops. Certainly, those who had been on deck when the fleet made its way into Sydney Cove would not have seen this stretch of land, as they had come from the south.

  Jenny looked, too, for faces. For the amused eyes of a man like Yarramundi, or the cautious curiosity in the face of another Mawberry. She occasionally saw natives on the cliffs who did not shake their spears and yell as they apparently had when the first fleet had arrived. They watched, then perhaps sent word northwards, rumours of a strange vessel full of ghosts.

  The word may have travelled as quickly as the boat, for when the little party did make land, a group of natives was waiting on the shore.

  It was a small beach fringed with thick bush, and a little stream ran alongside. Sheltered, with fresh water and even a chance for them to put the net out.

  The natives seemed watchful but unconcerned. They were casually holding their spears, and did not bother to point them or give any indication that they intended to threaten the newcomers.

  Dan, Carney and Bruton vaulted from the boat when it was still in the shallows, beginning to drag it to the shore as Harrigan and Langham got out.

  ‘Stay there,’ Dan told Jenny. She’d been intending to do exactly that, as she could hardly see herself splashing into the water with a baby on her shoulder and a little girl under her arm.

  ‘Give them something,’ she told him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember what Corbett told us – the governor had a box of trinkets with him, to give to the natives. We have to give them something.’

  ‘We didn’t happen to load a box of trinkets,’ said Dan.

  Jenny reached under the bench. There was a small wooden crate housing those items that she had hoped to keep dry. If they were unfortunate enough to hit a storm, anything in the box would get as soaked as everything else on board; but for now, the timbers had shielded the contents from the worst of the water. She pulled out a shirt – she thought one of Dan’s, but she couldn’t be sure – and a bonnet, and handed them to him. ‘Give the natives these.’

  ‘Jenny, we can’t go giving things away every time we land! We’ll have nothing left.’

  ‘You’ll have no use for a shirt with a spear in you. Give them these. If you don’t, I’ll throw them overboard.’

  ‘I’ll throw you in after them,’ he said, with a grin that took the latent violence out of the words. The man who hadn’t yet been flogged had grinned like that. The man who’d felt he had a measure of control over his destiny. Perhaps that man might reappear.

  Dan shrugged and walked over to the group slowly, holding the shirt and bonnet on flat, upturned palms. One of the men stepped forward, looking at these offerings. He glanced up, nodded, and took the clothes. Dan made a circle with his fingers, held it to his lips and tilted his head back. The man nodded again and pointed to the thin stream that snaked around one side of the inlet. Then he turned, together with the others, and walked into the trees.

  The water was sweet enough, and they filled their flagons and drank as much as they could stomach. A small net, when they put it out, returned with enough fish to feed them.

  Harrigan seemed a lot more comfortable, now he was on land, and was examining the fringes of the bush for anything that might be edible.

  ‘Dan!’ he called out.

  He hadn’t found food. He had, however, found the means of cooking the fish. Jutting out here and there were rocks that had little in common with the pale sandstone of which the entire country seemed to be made. These rocks were black and shiny; they looked, if anything, like coal. When Dan broke some off with an axe, they burned like coal too.

  The group stayed for a few days, and Carney started referring to the place as Fortunate Bay.

  Charlotte, in particular, seemed delighted; she had found that the night-time trees contained tribes of possums. She assumed that this was where they were going to live, that the long and boring boat journey was over.

  Harrigan also would have liked nothing better. The soil was poor, he said, but he had managed to bring some vegetables to maturity at Sydney Cove, and surely it could be no worse here.

  Jenny found it comforting to think of their party laying claim to this inlet, of their building huts like those of the natives – which they could see a bit further down the bay – and fishing and farming. But they were barely two days from Sydney Cove – less, for a ship like the Supply. They would, with near certainty, be discovered here. And Jenny did not care for a life as the sole grown female among this group.

  So Harrigan grudgingly accepted the fact that the voyage would continue, cheered somewhat by Dan’s promise that they would put in every few days.

  CHAPTER 23

  By now there would be searchers. No one felt like leaving, but everyone understood the necessity. A wind from the south pushed them along after they launched the boat, freeing Bruton and Carney from the necessity of rowing and enabling them to win and lose each other’s possessions in a never-ending cycle.

  ‘Are we going home?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘Yes,’ Jenny said, ‘but not to our old home. To our new home.’

  ‘Will other children be there?’

  ‘Oh yes, certainly. But no one to tell Ma or Pa what to do.’

  ‘Will there be food?’

  Charlotte was asking a question that consumed all of the adults. Vorst had praised Coepang: its markets and broad streets and hospitality. The Dutch were traders, he’d said. All the delicacies of the world flowed through their hands.

  Whether any of those delicacies would find their way into the bellies of the convicts, none of them knew. None of them knew if they even existed, come to that. Vorst had his own reasons for helping them, and chief among them was to annoy the governor. He could just as easily achieve that goal with talk of an island of plenty that didn’t exist.

  But there was a more immediate concern. The bottom of the boat was slowly filling up with water. Whenever it reached their ankles it was bailed out, to be replenished almost im
mediately.

  The bays here did not announce themselves. There was no shadow in the coastline ahead, nothing to warn of an indentation. Just league after league of striated rock with jutting edges that might hide a small beach, the entry to a magnificent harbour, or nothing. The convicts’ eyes were always roaming over the sandstone, out of fear of missing a haven and sailing on into thirst and hunger.

  Still, they nearly missed it – the small opening, the narrow gate. Not until they had started to pass its entrance did they realise that they were sailing past a harbour.

  Carney saw it first. ‘Dan! About, about! Port, hard aport!’

  Dan rammed the tiller to the side as far as it would go, and Carney quickly pulled in the sail, tying it close to the mast so that the wind wouldn’t push them too far. Bruton, Langham and Harrigan rowed for all they were worth.

  A larger harbour lay beyond the first one, through a narrow point between one cliff and another, a small island choking the entryway. They rowed to a flat beach, sheltered with the gentle slope that would enable them to easily pull the boat ashore.

  Straightaway Carney and Dan had it upturned, attacking the seams with what little resin they had. The nets came out, too, and Jenny stood with her skirts tied up as she had as a child in Penmor, nearly waist deep in the water, telling Bruton and Langham when to haul. By late afternoon, their catch was equal to a reasonable day’s fishing in Sydney Cove.

  ‘The land is getting better as we go north,’ said Harrigan. ‘Why not stay here, or somewhere like it? They may give chase, but you heard them after Tallow escaped – they gave him up for dead, did not even try. And we, low in the water and close into the shore, nearly missed this bay. Who’s to say they wouldn’t do likewise, even if they did come after us?’

  ‘This place is not what we need,’ said Dan.

  ‘It seems to have exactly what we need: fresh water, lots of fish, cabbage trees. Secrecy.’

  ‘No money,’ said Dan. ‘No taverns, no docks. No means of earning a living.’

  ‘We could live for a living,’ said Harrigan.

  ‘If you can call it that. I’d prefer a dock, and an inn nearby, and a deal to be made.’

  They might have argued about it through the night, around the fire that they were about to set with some black rocks they had taken from Fortunate Bay.

  The decision, though, was made for them.

  Jenny had unrolled a length of canvas for Charlotte and Emanuel to sleep on, with her beside them, the three of them making indentations on a beach that may never have seen such creatures.

  As it happened, though, the beach was no stranger to humanity. Some of that humanity appeared with the dying light in the trees. It was hard to see how many there were, at first. One or two only, Jenny thought. As her eyes adjusted, she picked out more white teeth, more eyes. It seemed that all of the spaces between all of the trees were clogged with them.

  This time, there were no women or children. Every hand was holding a spear.

  Jenny cried out, calling to Dan to come, as the natives advanced on an unknown signal. Others emerged until several dozen stood between their group and the woods.

  Dan scrambled to his feet and knocked over a pot in which Jenny was boiling water for sweet tea, scalding himself and cursing. He walked slowly towards the natives, moving his hands up and down in a gesture of calmness, peace.

  It didn’t seem to have any effect. If the natives knew what Dan was trying to tell them, they gave no sign. He hurried back to the boat, running sideways so he could keep one eye on the men near the forest. Jenny scooped up Emanuel and dragged Charlotte back towards the water’s edge, the only avenue now open to them. Still watching the natives, and with the other men seemingly paralysed, Dan reached into the boat and scrabbled around for something, anything that could be given to the tribe as a sign of peace.

  His hand closed on the quadrant, and as he held it up Vincent Langham broke out of his staring stupor. ‘Are you mad, man? How am I to get us there without that?’

  ‘How are you to get us there if you’re dead?’ asked Dan, advancing slowly and holding the quadrant in his upturned palms.

  The man who seemed to be the leader looked back at him and raised his spear.

  Then this place, used to the presence of man, heard a new sound.

  Bruton had worked his way slowly back to the boat, pulled out a musket, raised it in the air and fired.

  All of them had seen, or at least heard of, the effect that a shot fired into the air had on the natives of Sydney Cove when the colonisers first arrived. Mr Corbett had told them of the fear the noise engendered in those who were losing their land. They did not turn and run. But they did back away, they did use caution. They did, most importantly, leave the settlers alone to get on with things.

  These ones, though, did not move, flinch or blink. The one to whom Dan had offered the quadrant raised his palm in the air, said something, and stepped forward. Every man behind him stepped forward too, and kept stepping. There was no time to shuffle sideways now, no time to pick their way cautiously to the boat. They stumbled backwards, turned and ran for it, the men vaulting in, Jenny shoving Emanuel at Dan and scooping up Charlotte.

  Eventually they reached a small island in the middle of the bay. They wondered among themselves if the natives had canoes. Bruton thought not – surely, if they did, they would be rowing over?

  But Jenny saw, as night fell, the fires lit in the canoes, small flames on blackness that she knew to be water. The natives, it seemed, had no objection to the strange intruders camping on the little island. Once they had been ejected from the tribe’s territory, they were free to live or die as they chose.

  Charlotte slept on the canvas next to her mother, and in the morning paddled in the water, gently slapping its surface with her palm, trying to call forth whichever creatures might be lying there. Emanuel fed and slept and gurgled; his pale skin was suited to the land in which Jenny had been born, and she had erected a lean-to out of canvas and twigs to stop his reddening as hers had.

  She and the men gambled and ate and quarrelled and slept through that night and the next, with no attempt by Harrigan to convince them to settle here.

  They rowed out of the bay after two nights on the speck of land, watched as they went by faces here and there among the trees or on the beaches that fringed the bay. Jenny thought, at one point, that she saw a woman. Pregnant, as Mawberry had been. She raised her hand and waved – a ridiculous gesture, but an irresistible one. It was not returned.

  She turned to Harrigan, smiling to reassure him though he did not yet know he needed reassurance. She had noticed what he had not: here, behind two sandstone gates that had given them a calm entry, the wind was penetrating and plucking the water’s surface up into waves that slapped against the boat’s newly caulked hull.

  Conditions were worse once they reached the gap where the bay gave way to the ocean. The winds seemed unable to decide on a direction, filling the sail one moment and leaving it slack and empty the next, before snapping at it from the opposite direction. The blank-faced sandstone cliffs hurled the waves that assaulted them back at the sea, churning the water so that one moment the boat was pitching forward, and the next tilting sideways. Sea spray was fanning up the sides of the boat, curving inwards and landing on everyone, and Harrigan’s composure deserted him along with his breakfast.

  The only way for them to avoid it was to go further out. But there they met flat-faced waves that would rise under them, lifting them up before disappearing so that the boat slammed down into the water from a distance of several feet, as though picked up and dropped.

  Under the noise of the water Jenny couldn’t hear if the timbers were creaking, complaining at this insult, but she would bet they were. Charlotte, she could see, was crying and picking at the rope Jenny had tied around her waist while they were still in the bay, tethering her to her mother and the vessel.

  Each time the boat was lifted and dropped, it settled into the water much lowe
r than they would have liked. Bruton was kept busy continually bailing while Harrigan was continually sick, needing more water than two of the others put together.

  ‘Why did you come, if you haven’t the stomach for it?’ Bruton yelled, deliberately splashing the farmer with the water he was bailing.

  Harrigan shrugged, perhaps asking himself the same question.

  ‘You want to eat when we get there, don’t you?’ Jenny yelled at Bruton. ‘You’ve met Vorst. Do you think the Dutch are in the habit of giving away food for no consideration? What have we to offer but some dirty clothes? If we need to farm, we will need a farmer. That’s why he’s here, and I’ll thank you to try not to kill him.’

  Harrigan turned around and tried to smile at her, although his expression told her that he felt murder at Bruton’s hand might not be the worst of all possible fates.

  Jenny was distracted by her desperate worry about Charlotte. The little girl had been complaining incessantly for the first few days, when the storm was in the business of driving them out to sea. Now that they were here, and facing the constant battering, she had gone silent. She sat next to her mother, cradled in Jenny’s free arm. She slept in starts, took a little water and a mouthful of rice, and slept again. She had lost the will to complain, lost the will to allow her mother to spin stories about sea dragons. If this was what sea dragons could wreak, Charlotte was no longer interested in meeting them.

  Emanuel was fretful too. Born on land, he had never experienced such elemental violence. He was, though, too young for the deadening mixture of terror and boredom that was afflicting his sister. He cried and occasionally emitted whimpers that only Jenny, holding him close into her side, could hear.

  The noise of the wind died down after a few days, but the seas didn’t. They still had to bail; they still had to brace themselves every time another shelf of water obscured half of the sky. The only new thing they were able to do, now that they could hear each other, was quarrel.