Fled: A Novel

by Meg Keneally

  ‘I do not want to.’

  Jenny turned, walked to the hatch that led down to the hold and waited until it was opened for her, as she knew it would be.

  CHAPTER 31

  London, July 1792

  This courtroom was far less grand than the hall in which she had been sentenced to death. A functional wooden room with no arched windows, no aisles to accommodate a procession of judges.

  The outcome, though, might yet be the same.

  ‘Have a care for your immortal soul, madam.’ He was the second judge to invoke her soul, which seemed to have far more value to the authorities than her body.

  ‘You think I might lie to avoid the noose?’ Jenny said. ‘I welcome it. I beg you to hang me.’

  The murmur of voices behind her crested, then ebbed.

  ‘We are not speaking of hanging,’ the stipendiary magistrate said. ‘Not at this stage.’

  Jenny nodded. She knew they weren’t. And she knew why.

  At the moment, the name Jenny Gwyn was being passed in whispers among washerwomen at their cauldrons, lords on their hunt, and just about everyone else. Her escape, her capture, all that she had lost. It was bundled up and brushed down and flattened onto the pages of newspapers which used her children’s deaths to turn a profit, while their souls were currency in coffee house gossip.

  In Penmor’s church, the reverend read the Western Flyer to anyone who cared to hear and could not read for themselves, while the wet stones of the nave were still digesting the whispered gossip from the last service. She knew that newspapers usually thundered against people like her, calling for their excision from the civic body. But not now. Now, they had found someone of exactly the right shape around which to build a scaffold of martyrdom and heroism. Someone to be pitied and admired all at once. Someone who could bring people close to danger, without them actually having to smell it.

  Several of the papers had taken to calling for mercy for this woman who had risked so much, gained so much and lost so much.

  The problem was, Jenny didn’t want mercy. And in any case, she doubted she would get it from the expressionless magistrate who’d been sent to interview her, and from there to decide what on earth was to be done with a woman suddenly too popular to hang.

  ‘Do you know, Mrs Gwyn, that you would have been free soon, had you stayed in Sydney Cove.’

  ‘Freedom is not possible in Sydney Cove, sir,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Well, whatever your beliefs, why take such a risk with your life? Your children’s lives?’

  Jenny had, over the years, practised bringing a blankness to her features, smoothing away all emotion when confronted with insults from magistrates, or the horror of their decisions. This talent, though, had deserted her. The muscles in her face clenched and contorted at the mention of her children.

  This must have been apparent to the magistrate. He looked over her shoulder, over the heads of those who had crowded into the courtroom, to a functionary standing near the door. ‘A chair for Mrs Gwyn,’ the magistrate called, ‘if you please.’

  Jenny turned briefly, getting the impression of a tall, thin man in a black coat and white breeches. ‘Sir,’ said the man, ‘it is not customary for prisoners to . . .’

  ‘Kindly do not lecture me on what is customary and what isn’t, Mr Binder. A chair for the prisoner.’

  So one was brought, held aloft by the disgruntled Binder over the heads of the voyeuristic mass. It was rickety and probably the worst one the clerk could find.

  ‘You must not consider me insensible to everything you have suffered,’ the magistrate said. ‘I am simply endeavouring to arrive at the facts. To understand why you left as you did. You are, I apprehend, familiar with boats, with the ocean?’

  Jenny nodded.

  ‘So you knew the dangers, yet you chose to face them. Why?’

  ‘Because to stay, sir, would have been more dangerous than to go. And before that place took our bodies, it would have taken our souls.’

  The gaolers, she noticed, handled her gently for the most part. They seemed to be treating John Carney well too. He had been waiting outside the courtroom as she left, and they had nodded to each other. It seemed a ridiculously impersonal greeting for two people who had been mashed together on a small boat for so long.

  ‘You may find a bit more comfort when you get back,’ one of the guards said, as he helped to lift her manacled feet into the cart that would return her to Newgate Prison.

  ‘Oh? Had I not comfort enough?’

  He chuckled. ‘Your story has brought a fever upon people. Some of them, see, have taken up a collection. There’s a packet of money been delivered this morning to the warden. Has your name on it, to be used to buy whatever comforts you wish. Food, bedding. You might find things more bearable.’

  ‘Very kind,’ she said. She doubted, though, that the money would make any difference one way or the other. She had been scoured from the inside. Feeling joy at the prospect of more food, more comfort, would have required the capacity to feel.

  The journey up the Thames in an open boat, from the Gorgon to Newgate, had been the longest period Jenny had sat outside in several months. The boat wasn’t slow enough for her liking, but it made a sedate progress along the river. It was the first time she had seen London. Sydney Cove, she had thought, was crowded: certainly it had more people than it could support. And Coepang was less densely packed, though she hadn’t yet seen every face twice by the time she was arrested.

  She had never seen as many people as those lining the Thames – hadn’t known so many existed. Navvies and ladies and sailors and clerks and whores, calling out to one another or lifting their noses to avoid the worst of the river’s stench, laughing in small knots or walking alone. And none of them paid the slightest heed to the woman in the little boat.

  They paid more attention once she was locked away. The gilded theatres and the gilded actors, the parks and promenades, clearly weren’t providing enough entertainment. Because when they got bored, some of the more idle in the city decided to go to Newgate. They would look at the prisoners, exclaim over their degradation, openly discuss why this person or that had committed their crime, remark that a particular man had the face of a murderer, while another the demeanour of a brawler.

  There would often be a coin or two for Mr Arum, the gaoler, who also took money from the prisoners to remove manacles, provide soap, increase rations.

  Since Jenny had been in Newgate, the coins collected by the gaoler had increased.

  The spectators were waiting when she was brought back from the court, and she heard a collective intake of breath, then a gasp as she was led back into her cell. Some of those who had read her story had been shocked or thrilled by it, deciding that they must see this woman. See if she looked lucky or heroic, see if the journey had left marks on her face, on her body. See, perhaps, if she was even human.

  So Jenny would sit in her cell in the Female Quarter, looking at the floor as fine shoe leather and the hems of skirts moved in and out of view. Ladies clutched the arms of gentlemen and held handkerchiefs to their faces, staring without remorse or apology. Jenny found it tiring to see their incomprehension at the small, dirty, sallow woman with matted hair where they had expected an Amazon. She rarely looked at their faces. When she did, she would choose one person at random and stare, silently daring them to find an answering spark in the large grey eyes that punctuated the grimy face, challenging them to reconcile their vision of the now famous adventuress with the woman in front of them.

  For the most part, though, she ignored them. The wardens were making money off her notoriety; she would not assist them by acknowledging the existence of those who paid so that they could breathlessly tell friends, I saw her, yes, a wild creature, clearly depraved.

  For Jenny, it didn’t end when the paying customers left. The other women crammed into her cell were equally fascinated, and saw the departure of the voyeurs as their signal to pepper her with questions. But instead of staring, th
ey asked – and asked and asked, questions that gave Jenny more information about them than she ever gave back.

  The tarts, for example, asked about the size of the natives’ members, and how many of the marines had been fucking the convict women. Jenny tried, at first, to answer them flatly, factually. ‘Haven’t seen that many male members, but the natives look to be around the same as everyone else.’ ‘There were a few affairs here and there, it happens at the end of the world.’ ‘Me? I had a husband. And family. I had no wish to look anywhere else.’

  And they would cackle, and ask her to confess to profaning affairs with the governor, or his second-in-command, or one of the natives. When they asked about her family, she turned and faced the wall and would not say anything more.

  For some of them, she suspected, it didn’t matter what she said. Those who earned their living on their backs would say to their customers, as a sweetener, that they had heard from the famous Cornish woman that the natives of Sydney Cove were three times the size of any Englishman, and voracious.

  One girl never asked about affairs and male members. Helen was in Newgate for taking a shawl from her mistress. She was, possibly, a little simple: she had a tendency to view her fellow humans as genial, kind beings who were sometimes forced into unkind acts by circumstances.

  Jenny found it soothing, restful, to talk to somebody who didn’t see sex as the most interesting aspect of the colony on the other side of the world. Helen asked about the animals and the birds in the trees, who Jenny’s friends had been, what she had eaten, what her favourite time of day was.

  When the gaoler shooed paying customers out before he delivered the rations, Helen said it was because he wanted the women to have privacy. ‘It’s just so we can eat in peace,’ she explained earnestly to Jenny.

  One of the other women said, ‘He cares about our privacy so much he is going to get rid of people with money in their pockets, but at the same time he’s got us all crammed into this one cell. You’re a daft bitch, you are.’

  Jenny had stood, walked over to the woman, and slapped her across the face. ‘Plenty of others to call us names,’ she said. ‘Don’t need you doing it.’

  There was a more prosaic reason for the gaolers to clear out gawkers before the rations were brought in. Since Jenny’s arrival, there had been so many of them that the gaoler would have had to turn himself sideways and hold food above his head to get through.

  And now, back in the cell after her hearing, after the starers had goggled and had their fill, he did the same.

  She didn’t immediately notice the male visitor who remained. Not until he spoke.

  ‘You might not care if you hang,’ he said, ‘but personally I think it would be a terrible pity.’

  She looked up. He had been fetched a chair that looked far more sturdy than the one which had been brought for her that day. Perhaps he had trouble standing – a silver-topped cane rested between his legs. His waistcoat was made of white silk embroidered with gold thread, and perhaps it cost even more than the cane, given the amount of fabric that was required to cover his paunch.

  Jenny had almost forgotten what jowls looked like, but this stranger had them in abundance.

  He was the kind of person whose death stood politely behind the door like a servant with a tray. Present out of necessity, but easy to ignore. When it eventually did step into the drawing room, its arrival would be marked by a genteel funeral with restrained mourners.

  Jenny’s death sat with her in prison, whispering promises of public putrefaction. It had walked in shrunken skin beside her at Sydney Cove. It sat with her on the boat, eyeless and bloated. And it had crouched just behind the horizon in Coepang.

  ‘You can come and keen at my grave, then,’ Jenny said to the man, ‘but if they’ve a mind to hang me there is nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘Dear girl, I’m quite sure you didn’t get all this way, overcome what you have, by making assumptions. Please don’t start now – they are very tiresome things.’

  Jenny was transfixed by the movement of his jowls as he spoke. They seemed to add depth to a voice that was low and soft: the voice of a man who did not have to yell to be heard. The voice of a man whom others stopped speaking for.

  ‘I’m not forcing you to stay here and listen to my assumptions or anything else,’ she said. ‘You are at liberty to go, God rot you.’

  ‘As shall you be,’ said the man. ‘If you trust me.’

  ‘I have encountered, sir, a great many people since leaving England. I might not have letters, but I’m not a stupid woman, and one thing I have noticed – people who ask you to trust them are the least trustworthy.’

  The man threw back his head and laughed so that his belly shook in its skein of silk and gold, and the timbers of the chair supporting him creaked.

  Jenny had been chained and starved and paraded before the court and jammed into a cell and used as entertainment. She would not be laughed at. She turned her back, sat down, and bent all her effort towards ignoring him.

  The chair timbers creaked again as his laughter subsided. He was getting up, then. So he was capable of it.

  She heard the clink of metal against the bars of the cell, perhaps the buttons of his waistcoat or the top of his cane.

  And she heard something else. Whispering. She looked to the side and saw Helen and some of the other women huddled together, looking at the visitor, looking at her, and whispering. She raised her eyebrows at Helen, a silent request for information.

  The girl sidled over to her, moving slowly as though it was an offence for them to speak together, as though she might be caught and have her rations halved.

  ‘You don’t know who he is,’ said Helen.

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ said Jenny.

  Helen smiled. ‘It’s all right, I didn’t either. But Harriet over there’ – she inclined her head towards a spindly girl with fading freckles, red hair and a chin that had never reached its full potential; a girl who had been parlour maid until a brooch went missing – ‘he used to visit the house of Harriet’s master, you see. Quite famous, he is. A writer. And a lawyer.’

  ‘Then I’m sure he won’t have any trouble finding something other than us to entertain him,’ whispered Jenny.

  The man had been silent during their quiet conversation. He could not have heard what they were saying, but she had the odd feeling he was giving them the chance to say it.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said when she turned around. ‘I was not laughing at you, dear lady. It’s simply that what you’re saying is utterly true.’

  ‘You find the truth amusing?’

  ‘I find it sublime. I laugh with joy when I encounter it.’

  ‘Now that you have encountered it, I presume you will be off.’

  ‘Oh no, not yet. We have a transaction to discuss, you and I.’

  ‘I am not yet that desperate, sir. And you strike me as the type who would be able to afford somebody who didn’t come with a lice colony.’

  The man blushed, making the thin red veins in his cheeks less visible. She had the impression it wasn’t something he did frequently. ‘I did not mean – oh my dear, no, I must be more careful, not that sort of transaction. Do forgive me.’

  Jenny would be damned if she would forgive him, despite his blushes. She continued staring, returning to him the looks she had been given by others over the past few weeks.

  He cleared his throat, perhaps still a little wrongfooted by the misunderstanding. Good.

  ‘My name, by the way, is Richard Aldred,’ he said.

  ‘Told you,’ Harriet hissed to Helen.

  ‘And now we’ve established what I don’t want,’ he said, ‘perhaps I should tell you what I do want.’

  ‘If you like,’ she said. ‘I doubt I’ll be in a position to give it to you, though.’

  ‘We shall see. I am, you understand, a lawyer. Among other things.’

  ‘I have no money for lawyers. There was a collection, I was told, but all the money is gone
to the gaolers.’

  ‘I do not seek payment from you. What I seek is your freedom.’

  It was the cruellest statement he could have made. Freedom to live in a world without her children. Freedom to desperately seek her sister, her family, perhaps to find they no longer wanted anything to do with her.

  ‘As do I, along with the fairies which are said to dwell in the corner of the cell.’

  ‘It is not, Mrs Gwyn, such an impossibility as you might assume,’ he said. ‘Your freedom, that is. Not the fairies. I do believe – given the prevailing sentiment – that a strong case might be made for clemency. Even for a pardon. By one with the right contacts, of course.’

  ‘And you would be such a one, I suppose?’

  ‘I would, as a matter of fact. Went to school with the home secretary, for a start. Didn’t get along with him – dreadfully boring man, but that doesn’t matter. He will see me, and he will hear me. And he might even listen to me, when I say that you have been punished more than sufficiently to atone for your crimes. If your treatment at the hands of that blasted Andrews was not enough, there is your family –’

  Jenny wailed, and threw herself at the bars harder than she had seen anyone else do, in a place where desperation often forced flesh to hurl itself into metal.

  ‘You will not use my family,’ she said, putting her face close to his through the metal, noticing absently that a drop of spittle had landed on his cheek. ‘You will not refer to them, think about them, or talk about them. You will not take the death of my children and make it into a tool to unlock my bars, so you can boast about how you were the clever man who freed me. There!’

  Aldred frowned. ‘I am sorry, truly. It was not my intention . . . But of course, I will do as you wish. I do beg you, though, to consider my request.’

  ‘I’m still not entirely sure, Mr Aldred, what your request is.’

  ‘Simply this – allow me to represent you. Plead for you. Try for clemency.’

  She turned her back and walked as far as she could into the cell’s corner. ‘It is a cruelty you do me, sir. You give me hope where none exists. I have already seen everything I had hoped to preserve taken. And you think I still wish to preserve my life?’