Remember Me

by Lesley Pearse

  The Marines began to drum, and Will was brought into the circle. His guards removed his shirt, then tied his hands to the upper parts of the triangle. There wasn’t a sound for a moment, not a whisper from a concerned friend, nor a cry from a child. Everyone was entirely focused on the hideousness of what they were to witness.

  Will’s punishment was announced again, and one of the Marines who had brought him out of the guard-house gave the signal count of one.

  Mary had witnessed some thirty or more floggings, of women as well as men, and it had always appalled her, even when she thought the victim deserved punishment. Some were given 1,000 lashes, 500 one day, the rest saved for when their backs healed up. Some people died before they got even half-way, and those who survived would bear the scars for the rest of their lives. Mary felt sick even before the Marine lifted his arm for the first lash. She had caressed that broad brown back, knew every knob in Will’s spine as intimately as she knew her own hands.

  Will didn’t flinch at the first lash, he even tried to smile at Mary as if to prove it didn’t hurt. But just that one stroke had left a red weal, and his smile, however brave, didn’t fool her.

  The counting was slow, half a minute between each lash, and by the eighth blood was drawn. Will couldn’t smile any longer, his body jerked with each lash and he was biting his lips as he tried not to cry out.

  On and on it went, flies homing in on the fresh blood which spurted out all over his back like water through a sieve. By the twenty-fifth lash, Will was clinging to the triangle, his handsome face contorted with agony. Mary held Charlotte’s face close to her chest, and shut her eyes each time the drum was beaten. But she could still hear the whip whistling through the still air, and the sound of the Marine’s boots on the ground as he spun round to give each stroke more impact. She could also smell Will’s blood and hear the buzzing of the flies gorging on it.

  It took over an hour in all, many of the crowd almost passing out from standing beneath the hot sun. By fifty lashes Will was insensible, the sinews on his back showing white through the lacerated skin. He hung by the ropes around his wrists, his legs sagging like a drunk’s.

  Mary was crying now, hating the system which ordered such brutal punishment and despising those Marines who had often talked and joked with Will and were now his torturers.

  The drum and the count finally stopped. Will was released from the triangle and he slid down it to the floor. His breeches and boots were soaked with blood, and ants were already carrying off small pieces of his flesh on their backs.

  Mary ran to him, imploring someone to get cloths and salt water to bathe his back. Will was unconscious, his face still contorted with pain, and she crouched down beside him, Charlotte still in her arms.

  ‘Let me take Charlotte?’ a familiar voice asked.

  Mary looked up and was surprised to see it was Sarah with a bucket of water and cloths. She had streaks from tears down her dirty face and it seemed that Will’s suffering and Mary’s distress had reminded her of their old friendship.

  ‘Bless you, Sarah,’ Mary said gratefully as she handed her child over. She washed Will’s face first, then looked up at Sarah again. ‘I ought to get him out of the sun but I haven’t got anywhere to take him now that they’ve confiscated our hut.’

  ‘We’ll take him to mine,’ Sarah said, leaning down and patting Mary’s shoulder. ‘Hold on, I’ll get some men to help.’

  As Sarah walked away with Charlotte in her arms, Mary leaned over and put her lips close to her husband’s ear. ‘Can you hear me, Will?’ she whispered.

  He didn’t reply, but his eyelids flickered. ‘I swear to you we’ll escape from here,’ she whispered, hate for Captain Phillip and everyone else responsible welling up inside her. ‘We’ll find a way, you’ll see. I’ll never let this happen again.’

  It was later that day, as Mary crouched by Will’s side in the small hut, gently bathing his back, that she considered her old vow to escape. She hadn’t thought of it once since her arrival, and now it seemed incredible to her that she had begun to accept this terrible place, even to like it. But she couldn’t bear it any longer. Somehow she was going to get Will and Charlotte and herself away from here and do so as fast as was humanly possible.

  Chapter seven

  ‘Move over, Mary,’ Sarah hissed in the dark. ‘You aren’t in bed with Will now.’

  Mary half smiled, wishing she was in bed with Will, back in their own hut. But however cramped it was sharing this hut with five other women, plus Charlotte, she was very grateful to Sarah and her friends for letting them stay. In cynical moments she put their kindness down to her being back on their level. But mostly she preferred to believe that Sarah, at least, had had such a shock at seeing Will’s flogging that she had regained her old standards of compassion and generosity.

  Will was in a hut with James, Samuel and Jamie, and Mary hadn’t had many chances to see him since the day of the flogging, as he’d been sent to work on the brick kilns the day after. His back still wasn’t healed. Mary was incensed at the further cruelty of forcing a man to do hard physical work when his back was torn to shreds. She had gone to meet him after that first day, and she’d cried at the sight of him. He was dragging himself along, his shirt soaked in blood, his face contorted with the pain. He went into the sea for a swim, hoping that would heal it faster, but he could barely move his arms, and his face went so pale that Mary thought he was going to pass out again. The wounds didn’t heal with all the bending and lifting, and dirt and dust had got into them and caused infections. Will was scarred for life now, both physically and mentally.

  It seemed to Mary that she was in a dark tunnel without even a chink of light at the end of it. She’d been separated from her husband and lost her hut; rations had been cut again, even more people were getting sick and each week the death toll increased.

  It had once been the custom that all work stopped for a funeral and everyone attended, but not any more, otherwise no work would ever get done. Death was commonplace now, no more remarkable than a reported theft or accident. Word would go round that Jack, Bill or Kate had gone, but the only real interest was in who would get their personal effects. That was, if they hadn’t already been stolen even before the man or woman passed away. Children’s deaths had even less impact; to everyone but the mother it was just one mouth less to feed.

  Mary had been pressed into laundry work the day after Will’s flogging. Although washing the officers’ and Marines’ clothes wasn’t particularly hard work, the vigilance required was exhausting. Shirts were at a premium and if left to dry unguarded, would be stolen by other women. But it was always the laundress who was punished if a shirt went missing, even if she wasn’t found with one in her possession.

  Only the thought of escape kept Mary going now. It filled her mind from dawn till dusk, distracting her from hunger, the funerals and the depravity all around her. Four women had run off into the bush, but they were soon recaptured; others who escaped were either killed by natives or died unable to find food and water; sometimes their bodies were found later. Many more just returned with their tails between their legs, only to be put back in chains.

  Mary knew from Tench, who had done a lot of exploring inland, that there was nothing there to run to, just mile after mile of barren bush land. Some men had stolen a boat a while ago, but they weren’t sailors and capsized it and were soon picked up.

  But Mary was familiar with boats and sailing. She knew she’d need a sextant, a great deal of provisions, and charts of the waters around here. Above all, she needed to know where the nearest civilization was, and find a boat suitable for rough seas.

  She had said all this to Will a few days ago, but he’d just laughed at her. ‘A boat, a sextant and some charts! Why don’t you ask for the moon too, my lover?’ he said.

  Mary was well aware of the difficulties involved, but she didn’t agree that it was impossible just because no one else had dared to do it. She knew that Captain Phillip and his offi
cers had tried to communicate with the natives and got nowhere, but she had made inroads in that direction herself and been successful.

  She attributed this to Charlotte. While the natives might be intimidated by men in uniforms, they weren’t frightened of a small child almost as naked as one of their own. While walking along the beach and around to the next cove, collecting wood for a fire, Mary had become aware she was being watched by a group of women natives and their children. She sat down with Charlotte on her lap and sang some songs to her, and to her delight she heard a voice joining in. It was that of another small girl, and when Mary turned and smiled at her, the child came closer.

  Mary did the same again for three consecutive days, and on the fourth the little girl came and sat beside her, the mother standing a little way back, watching. It wasn’t long before other children joined them, and after only a few more days, they all knew some of the words to Mary’s songs.

  She showed the native women some leaves of ‘sweet tea’, the vine-like plant the convicts used as a drink. This was the closest thing they had to a cure-all. It seemed to alleviate hunger pains, it comforted and revitalized, and it was believed to ward off diseases as those who drank nothing else seemed to suffer less from dysentery. The convicts had exhausted all the sources of the plant close to the camp, and Mary hoped the natives would show her where there was more. They did, taking her there so fast she had to run to keep up with them, and they even picked it for her.

  In general the convicts hated the natives. This was partly because these people were so free, while they had to work, but more because they felt they were inferior beings. Convicts were used to being looked down on as the lowest of the low, and to their minds the natives were lowlier still. They bitterly resented the way the officers gave these savages presents and insisted they were to be treated with deference, while the convicts were subjected to cruelty, with no allowances made for their needs.

  Mary had never felt this way, although she didn’t see the natives as beautiful people. To her mind the stink of the fish oil on them, their splayed noses and the ever-present bubbles of snot nestling above their thick lips made all but the children ugly as sin. But she was intelligent enough to realize that they probably thought white people just as ugly, and furthermore this was their land, and they were perfectly adapted to it. Her interest in them had been furthered by Tench’s enthusiasm. He believed that the way truly to settle this new country was to learn to understand its people. Mary, however, didn’t want to understand them in order to settle here; she was hoping for their help in her escape.

  She persisted in making friends with them. And with a warm smile, and showing interest in their children, it wasn’t hard. She told them her name, they reciprocated. They touched her hair and skin, laughingly holding their own black arms against hers to show the difference. Mary drew crude pictures of native animals in the sand and they told her their names. She drew a picture of one of the boats, then a very long wavy line to show them how far the white people had come to get here. She wished she could illustrate how different her homeland was from theirs, but that was too difficult. She wondered too if they had any conception at all of the nature of the white man’s colony, and what the word ‘convict’ meant.

  As Tench had pointed out, until the white man came these natives wouldn’t even have understood the notion of theft. They weren’t acquisitive people, and they left their tools, canoes and other items lying around. Much of their hostility was due to white men taking their belongings, and who could blame them for retaliating with violence?

  Mary continued to cultivate this little group of natives, day after day. They appeared healthy and well fed, and although she knew much of their diet was fish, which they caught from their canoes, she guessed they supplemented this with other things. She wanted to know what, for they didn’t grow or rear anything. She thought such knowledge would help in her escape.

  To her shock, the women showed her grubs and insects which they dug out of rotting tree stumps. Although Mary’s empty stomach heaved at the very thought of it, she bravely tried some and found they weren’t as bad as she expected.

  Heavy rain prevented her from going to talk to the natives for almost a week, and when she did eventually venture back into the next cove, she couldn’t see anyone. This disturbed her, for although she knew that these people didn’t stay in permanent camps, wandering about as the mood took them, she was aware that this was a favourite fishing spot.

  She walked farther than she normally did, until a buzzing of insects and a wheeling of birds overhead halted her. Ahead, she could see something lying up by the bushes above the beach, and to her horror she realized it was a dead native, covered in a swarm of ants. Snatching Charlotte up in her arms, she ran as fast as she could back to the camp.

  She was still running when she saw Tench. He must have come back from Rose Hill the previous night. He smiled at her warmly. ‘You’re in quite a hurry,’ he said. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘There’s a body around in the next cove,’ she blurted out.

  ‘Anyone you know?’ he joked.

  Mary couldn’t laugh, for she was afraid the body belonged to one of the group she had befriended. ‘I think it’s one of the natives,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go close enough to be sure. Surely they don’t leave their dead lying around unburied?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ he said, looking concerned. ‘I hope it is a natural death, not an attack by one of our people, we’ve got enough trouble without that. But I’ll go and check it out now.’

  After advising Mary not to stray so far from the camp again, he walked off.

  It was several days before Mary had a chance to speak to Tench again. She’d seen him sailing off down the harbour with a group of Marines the day after she told him about the body, but he could have been going to the lookout on the Heads at the end of the bay.

  She was just coming out of the stores with the rations for herself and Charlotte, when she saw Tench coming down the hill from Captain Phillip’s house. She thought he looked very worried and upset.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked as he drew near to her. ‘Didn’t you have a present for him?’

  This was a long-standing joke between them. In the early days Tench usually brought a gift of food when he dropped in to see her and Will. It was never anything much, maybe an egg for Charlotte, or some vegetables, but when times got harder and he didn’t bring anything he always apologized and looked embarrassed. Mary would tease him then and say he couldn’t expect a welcome without a present.

  This time Tench gave her only a ghost of a smile. ‘The captain’s not happy with my news,’ he said. ‘There’s dozens of dead and dying natives around the bay. Just like the one you saw.’

  Mary instinctively clutched Charlotte tighter.

  Tench saw her fear and put one hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Surgeon White hasn’t got any similar cases here. It must be something that only affects them. But keep away, just to be safe. Captain Phillip is sending someone down there to see what he can do or find out.’

  Telling Mary not to worry was like asking the sun not to shine. She was terrified that this disease would spread to the camp and kill Charlotte, so her whole being urged her to flee now, any way she could.

  Just a few days earlier, the Supply, the smallest ship of the original fleet, had returned from Norfolk Island with news that twenty-six of the twenty-nine convicts there had devised a plan to lure the crew away from the ship and sail off in her. By all accounts this plan was a first-class one and would have succeeded but for someone informing on them. While this meant on the one hand that Mary’s idea was feasible, it also meant that all security would be tightened still further now, and punishments for any misdemeanour would be harsher than ever.

  This was borne out just a few days later when six Marines were hanged for stealing from the stores. It seemed they had been doing it for months, having made keys for the locks, and when one of them was on guard duty he let his fr
iends get in to plunder.

  Most of the convicts were delighted that Captain Phillip was coming down on his men just as hard as on the convicts. But to Mary it suggested that Phillip was panicking because he knew the stored food wasn’t going to last until more came from England.

  As usual when a punishment took place, everyone had to be there. As Mary watched the rope put round each man’s neck, and heard the sound of the gallows floor pulled away beneath him, leaving him dangling in space, she had never felt so desperate and afraid.

  To her there was nothing good about this place – corrupt guards, women getting thirty lashes just for fighting, and all the time they were slowly being starved to death. It seemed to Mary that she was trapped in hell with several hundred lunatics.

  In April, however, things looked up slightly for Mary and Will, as Captain Phillip was forced by food shortages to let Will go back to the fishing, under supervision. Mary smiled grimly to herself for she had been right, they couldn’t manage without him. The catches had been tiny without his skill, and although Will very much resented being watched over, at least he had proved he was indispensable, and they got their old hut back.

  Whatever the epidemic was which killed half the native population around the bay, it didn’t spread to the new colony. Only one white man died, a sailor on the Supply. Surgeon White seemed to be of the opinion it was smallpox, but how it had come was a mystery. If they had brought it with them on the ships, it would have shown up far earlier.

  Then in early May the gloom in the whole colony was lifted for a while by the arrival of the Sirius from Cape Town. Although she was mainly carrying flour, not substantial provisions like meat, she brought good news that other ships were on their way, and long-awaited mail for those lucky enough to have friends and family who could write.

  Yet the sight of the ship anchored out in the bay seemed to have a bad effect on Will. Mary found him on the shore on many an afternoon before he went out fishing, just staring out at the Sirius. When she tried to speak of it he snapped at her, and when he wasn’t working he didn’t come looking for her and Charlotte as he once did.