by Meg Keneally
She had assumed the men would be chained. Perhaps she would be as well. But a sailor came over with small irons and bent towards Charlotte’s ankles.
‘She is a child!’ said Jenny. ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing?’
‘Captain’s orders,’ mumbled the sailor, refusing to look at the little girl as he fastened the irons.
And then the captain was there, tall and dark-haired and long-nosed and imperious and immaculate, his boots the only items in the hold with any shine. He was followed by another man, also in the dress of a captain, but scuttling, uncommanding, without hauteur.
‘Captain!’ said Jenny to the imposing man. ‘You can’t chain a child! Surely!’
He refused to look at her – not with the same discomfort that the sailor evidently felt, but with a clear indifference. He turned to the sailor. ‘Half rations. No time on deck. No water for washing.’
‘Andrews,’ said the other captain, ‘surely a cabin for the woman and children!’
‘No,’ said Andrews, ‘no, Tennant, I think not. Punishment must be painful, otherwise it is not worthy of the name. And the creature clearly has little regard for the safety of her children, or she would not have taken them on such a journey.’
‘I remind you, Andrews, that the Rembang is my vessel.’
‘And I remind you that I have the authority to commandeer it, and have done so. If you object, take it up with the King.’ Andrews turned and left, and Tennant hurried after him, leaving Jenny, chained to the ship beside her daughter, holding a quieter Emanuel.
The hold was shuttered and had clearly been thoroughly gone over with pitch, so no light came in. Over the past fortnight, Emanuel had gone silent and floppy. A fever had broken out on the Rembang and was afflicting even the paying passengers in their airy cabins. If it touched Emanuel, Jenny doubted he would survive.
Charlotte had cried for the first day. Big, desperate gulps. Jenny wanted to tell her to stop, please stop taking in this poisonous air. But it was the only air they had.
Now Charlotte only cried during storms. There had been one some time ago – a few days? A week? It had pushed the vessel onto one side and then the other, and Jenny had thought it might capsize them. She did not think anyone would come for them if the boat sank.
She’d had hope, at first. Hope that the captain was simply showing his strength; that she and the children would be lifted out of the dark. The guard must have seen this expectation in the way she lifted her head whenever he opened the cell door. He would shake his head. Occasionally, he snuck her more food or water than the captain would approve of.
‘You need to know who you’re dealing with,’ he told her once. ‘The navy’s worst monster.’
Captain Andrews, the guard said, had been sent to round up those who had mutinied aboard the Bounty – the mutiny that Vorst had told Jenny and Dan about. No one had expected these men to be dealt with leniently. But no one had expected Captain Andrews, either.
He had a cage installed on the deck of his ship, the Pandora.
‘We called it Pandora’s box,’ the guard told Jenny. ‘We got some of the mutineers at Otaheite, dragged them from their new Polynesian wives and put them in the box, poor bastards.’
Andrews didn’t like wasting time. He even sailed at night. So it was inevitable that he would eventually sail into a reef.
‘We begged him to unlock the box,’ the guard said. ‘The prisoners were howling, rattling the bars. The water got to their ankles, their knees, and we thought he’d let them out then, that he was teaching them a lesson. But he forbade us to help them. Just before the cage went under, they were pressing their faces to its ceiling, screaming and begging and gulping air. He just watched until the screams stopped, until the cage was gone.’
The guard was silent for a moment.
‘I’ll do what I can for you,’ he said. ‘But do not expect mercy from the captain.’
Jenny spent her days in suspension, allowing her mind to lightly skim the reality in front of her, to sample it briefly before recoiling. Everything softened around the edges, fading in and out of relevance. The only sounds that could call her to full consciousness were those made by her children.
Then Dan started coughing. Not the occasional bark – they all did that, but violent wet convulsions.
She hadn’t addressed a word to him since their first day in the hold.
‘Do you feel you have the credit you deserve now?’ she had asked.
She’d wanted, desperately, to lash out, to throttle him with the chains between her manacles. But she knew her energy might yet be needed in some other service.
Dan hadn’t said anything, simply glanced at her and returned his forehead to his knees.
‘You have credit now,’ she’d said. ‘Credit for our deaths, when they come.’
He was the man she had latched on to as a shield from the other men. The man she had grown to care for. Someone with a seamanship she could respect, and a strength to go with it. Someone who had treated Charlotte with kindness, never once letting her believe she was any less precious to him than his own legitimate child.
Someone Jenny now wanted to kill.
She gradually trained herself to stop noticing him. He was meat in the hold’s corner. To look at him and think that this sack of flesh contained remnants of Dan Gwyn, to think that a fragment of him remained, was more than she could bear.
But the coughs that threatened to turn his lungs inside out were making it impossible for her to ignore him – and for her to ignore what might yet be there inside him.
‘I can ask for water,’ she said eventually. ‘More food.’
‘Will do you no good,’ said a rasping voice from the darkness, perhaps Carney’s. ‘If they’ll not give it for the little ones, they’ll not give it to Dan.’
‘I can ask,’ she said, though she knew it was futile.
A few hours later, she was woken by a jab to her upper arm. Her eyes opened to the same blackness that they saw when closed.
Dan had managed to wriggle close enough to reach out a manacled hand and poke her. He was breathing heavily. Each gulp of air was filtered through the mess in his lungs. She had heard that kind of breathing before, and it never went on very long.
His hand felt down her side, along her lap, and rested on Emanuel’s head. It had been a long time since the little boy had emitted anything more than a mewl.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dan said, and Jenny did not know whether he was speaking to her or his son.
He removed his hand, and she felt a weak squeeze on her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.
She might, then, have fallen back to sleep. In the absence of light, and of anything resembling hope, the boundaries between consciousness and oblivion were disappearing.
Jenny was next brought to awareness by the rattle of the door as the guard brought in their tiny rations.
After she touched Emanuel’s chest, which was rising and falling slowly, she felt around Charlotte’s head until her hand was in front of the girl’s mouth, feeling the light breath.
Jenny was blinking in the dim greyness that the guard had allowed to follow him in. That light, the hard bread and the trickle of water were her only proof that they weren’t already in hell.
The guard placed a bowl into her hand, then moved to the side. He turned back after a moment, handing her another bowl. ‘I’ll not tell the captain,’ he said. ‘Not until the little ones have a chance to eat this. If he knew it wasn’t needed, he’d have me take it back.’
She stared at him, picking out the blurred features in the small ration of light, tracing with her eyes the hard face which nevertheless bore something that looked like concern.
He remained standing there, perhaps waiting for her to say something.
When she didn’t, he sighed. ‘Get it into them, quick as you can. Lest they join him.’ And he nodded in Dan’s direction. ‘I’ll be back for him in an hour or two.’
Then Jenny u
nderstood. The bread and the water, desperately needed by everyone here, was no longer required by the one for whom it was destined.
A short time later, Emanuel’s coughs began to mimic those that had taken his father.
Jenny was not allowed on deck for either burial. She did not know if her husband and son now occupied the same stretch of ocean, or if they were leagues apart.
Emanuel hadn’t outlived his father by long. Less than a day, perhaps. His coughs had become stronger as he grew weaker, and she’d faded out of consciousness to their sound. She was next aware of holding a small, stiff bundle and feeling a wetness on her face.
She was not told if a man of God had said words over the dead. Had they been wrapped in shrouds and slid off a plank, or just thrown overboard like buckets of fish innards?
She didn’t suppose it mattered to either of them. But she was distressed at the thought they might have been sent into the ocean separately, and desperately hoped that they had entered it together. She did not want Emanuel to be lonely.
CHAPTER 30
Jenny knew they must be in port. Out at sea, the usual sounds were the creaking of waves against wood, and ocean birds glorying in sunlight or being drenched by a storm – all inches from her head through a veil of wood, while she knew nothing of sunshine or storms.
She’d still heard coughing, too, though that was less common than it had been. Bruton and Harrigan and Langham had all been taken away. She had wept for them. Particularly Harrigan, a man of the earth who would never rest in it. She had even grieved for Bruton; this malaise, too small to be seen, had taken down one of the biggest men she knew.
Just her and Carney were left. And Charlotte, who occasionally cried for her father or her brother, but was mostly silent apart from coughs that were beginning to build. Sometimes Carney would sing her a rasping song. Jenny had no songs.
Now, there were other sounds. Shouts too distant to come from aboard the vessel. The faraway hooves of horses striking a ground Jenny had forgotten existed. Hatches being opened. And then the door of their cell rattling. Hands on the manacles. Carney was dragged to his feet, but the seaman who had come for them was far gentler with Jenny, and even more so with Charlotte. He glanced at the manacles on the little girl, shaking his head.
‘Are we going home now?’ asked Charlotte.
‘I don’t know where home is for you, lass,’ the seaman said. ‘But I hope you’ll find kinder treatment here than you have had so far.’
Even outside, Jenny didn’t know where they were. The sun punished her for her long absence from its grace by taking away her sight, leaving her blinking and shuffling and clanking. Urged along by a hand at her back, she reached down to Charlotte’s hand and didn’t find it.
‘I have her,’ the seaman said, and he grasped Jenny’s hand and moved it up so that it rested on what felt like her daughter’s head.
When Jenny’s sight did return, she saw a child in the sailor’s arms who was thinner than the one who had left Sydney Cove. The night they had fled, the night Charlotte had climbed onto Jenny’s back, she had been wearing her embroidered white nightdress. She was wearing it still, but it was dark grey and torn. Her skin was covered with sores, and she had marks on her face where she’d scratched herself. Large clumps of her hair were missing. But she was still far more beautiful than any creature her mother had seen, and Jenny smiled.
Charlotte smiled back, showing fewer teeth than had been there before. Then her mouth contracted, opened, and let out a wet cough.
The seaman paused for a moment, and Jenny leaned in to her daughter. ‘Not you, too,’ she whispered. ‘I promise, not you too.’
The sunlight was not theirs to keep. There was another hold, in a ship called the Gorgon. Jenny didn’t see the captain before she left the light again, but he seemed a better sort than Andrews, as she and Charlotte were not shackled. They had more food, too. Narrow rods of light struck the floor from the partly open hatches, and she was given a dish of water and a cloth to bathe Charlotte’s face.
Jenny did not look to her own appearance. Saw no point in washing. So the man who pulled open the cell door next morning gaped at her. He looked as though he was trying to convince himself that he was truly looking at a woman.
‘Good God, Jenny. What have they done?’
She ran her eyes slowly up the man’s legs, which were wrapped in almost impossibly white breeches, his torso a frame for the ubiquitous red coat. His face, though, was unique.
‘You are not here,’ she said.
The man knelt and ran his hand gently over what was left of Charlotte’s hair, frowning as he had when they’d stood in the shallows together, hauling in lighter and lighter nets. As he had when Dan was flogged. Perhaps he had worn the same expression when he’d discovered their escape.
‘I assure you, I am – although you barely are,’ said Corbett. ‘We will see what’s to be done about that.’
Mr Corbett interceded with the captain to arrange a cabin where Jenny could care for Charlotte.
They were, she learned, in Cape Town. The port near which Charlotte had been born, and a staging place between England and its furthest satellite in Sydney Cove. All marines heading to the new colony stopped here; all those returning did likewise.
Jenny wasn’t the only woman aboard. The Gorgon was taking a detachment of marines home, and it carried several paying passengers and their wives. A few of them would come up to Jenny while she was walking Charlotte around the deck to see the sun. They would put out a hand, perhaps to stroke the little girl, and then withdraw it. Jenny could only assume that she owed one of them for the plain, clean dress she now wore, and perhaps for Charlotte’s clean nightdress. Jenny would smile at them, but would not speak. All of her words belonged to Charlotte.
Soon after they came on board, Corbett sat with Jenny as she spooned dribbles of soup between Charlotte’s cracked lips.
‘Governor Lockhart was furious,’ he said. ‘The last time I saw him like that was when he argued with the Dutch sea captain – who had a hand in your plot, I am presuming?’
‘I’m not to say,’ said Jenny. Corbett was speaking as though they were old friends. She knew, though, that she was a prisoner, as was her daughter, in a confinement that had taken her husband and her son.
‘The judge advocate thought Dan had planned it all – that you had found out about it and blackmailed him to take you.’
Jenny chuckled, a rustling without any joy in it.
He was silent for a moment, then asked, ‘You are not going to tell me the how of it, are you?’
‘I will be facing a court on my return, Mr Corbett. And a noose, in all probability. I would not wish to put you in a position where you had to testify in the case for ending my life.’
He nodded, then stood. ‘I cannot come again, you know. Cannot be seen talking with you. But I wanted to . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘Wanted you to know how extraordinary you are. All of you.’
‘We failed,’ said Jenny, ‘and the most innocent among us now lies under the water somewhere south of here.’
‘Yes, and officially I must celebrate your failure,’ Corbett said. ‘But you have done what few could. The captain of the Bounty made a shorter journey to Coepang, but he was a highly trained mariner. To do what you did – well, you have miscarried, but it was in an heroic struggle for liberty.’
He stood, saluted her, and left.
Mr Corbett kept his distance after that, though she suspected she had his intercession to thank for the continued use of her cabin.
She would lie in her bunk, cuddling her daughter’s thin body. It felt like a collection of sticks that shuddered and moaned through night after night, as the small brow grew hotter, sweated and then stopped sweating.
Charlotte’s whisper, amplified by the night, reached Jenny over the creaking timbers. ‘Ma, I want to see the sea dragons.’
‘You will, duckling.’
‘Will you take me?’
‘I might be . . .
somewhere else. Someone would take you, though, I promise. You have family where we are going. They are waiting to take you on sea dragon rides.’
‘Emanuel is across the seas, then,’ said Charlotte.
‘He is across another sea, duckling. One we can’t travel on, not yet.’
Jenny stroked her daughter’s cheek in the darkness, felt wetness there, then withdrew her hand as waves of coughs came back and made words impossible. The tide went out, and Charlotte was left wheezing. Jenny held her and rocked her until she descended into a gurgling sleep.
When sunlight drizzling through the hatch woke Jenny the next morning, a stiffness was in her arms, and Charlotte had gone to Emanuel’s sea without her.
The tears would not come. The wails were so insistent they’d bunched in Jenny’s throat, but never emerged into the air.
The other women on board stood in a knot behind her, taking care not to get too close in case her despair became theirs.
She didn’t listen to the words the ship’s reverend said over the small shrouded form. Nor did she wish to. Entreaties to a god who would allow this were worthless.
The plank was tipped, there was a splash, and Jenny watched the small white form sink slowly out of view.
Then there were whispers. ‘She’s not crying,’ one of the merchant’s wives said to another. ‘She must be a hard woman.’
Jenny turned. She wanted the woman to know she had been heard.
She was young, this lady, little more than a girl. She held a baby tightly to herself as if to prevent it sliding off the same plank that Charlotte had just travelled down.
‘Keep holding him,’ Jenny said. ‘It will do no good, if it’s not fated to – he will be taken from your grasp anyway. But while you can, keep holding him.’ She turned to the captain. ‘As I no longer have a sick child to care for, you’ll be putting me back below, I think.’
‘You may remain in the cabin for a time,’ he said in a thick voice.
