Mary’s ankles were raw and bleeding from the chains that had been put back on her earlier in the month when the Gorgon docked at Portsmouth. They had remained on for the last part of the voyage to the London docks. She was also hungry, for she hadn’t eaten anything since dawn when she, James, Bill, Nat and Sam left the ship, shackled together to wait to be escorted to Newgate prison.
Mary had felt very much as she had when she left the prison in Kupang to be transferred to the ship which would take them to Batavia. The difference was that the voices around them were now English ones, and more poignantly, four of the men and the two children were missing.
They hardly spoke as they waited on the busy wharf for the prison cart to arrive. They just sat in a row against a wall, clutching their small bags of belongings on their laps, each wrapped in their own private thoughts. Mary could understand why people passing through the wharf looked at them so curiously, for they must have been a strange sight. Chained convicts were usually ragged, dirty and malnourished, whereas they were clean and healthy. The men had all been issued with canvas breeches and shirts, and Mary was wearing the green and white dress given to her by the captain’s wife. Muscular Bill with his bald head and prize-fighter’s features might look like a dangerous man, but Nat, with his angelic face, blue eyes and blond hair shining in the sunshine, had more in common with a page or a choir boy. As for James and Sam, they gave the impression of being two impoverished, scrawny aristocrats. James looked arrogantly down his long nose at anyone who glanced his way, and Sam was in a world of his own, tawny eyes fixed on the distant horizon.
There was nothing to say to one another. No comment on the hurly-burly of the wharf, where piles of goods were being loaded and unloaded into ships. They didn’t react to casks of wine and spirits being rolled over the cobblestones, nor to the shouts of porters and dockers, nor even to half a dozen horses being led nervously on to a ship.
The long voyage from Cape Town had restored their health, and the horrors of past imprisonments had begun to fade. But as they waited to be taken to Newgate, which by reputation was the hardest and cruellest prison in the whole of England, all of them were struggling to control their fear.
The cart didn’t arrive until mid-afternoon, and it was only once they were in it, trundling slowly away from the frantic activity on the wharf, that Bill broke the silence.
‘I’d forgotten what horse shit smelled like,’ he exclaimed, as their cart joined a throng of others carrying goods along a narrow road between tall, grimy warehouses.
‘It smells like Dublin,’ James retorted, giving an exaggerated loud sniff. ‘Do you think if we asked the driver nicely he’d take us to an ale house?’
Mary half smiled at their show of bravado. She knew they were every bit as scared as she was. She had finally made it to London, the place she’d dreamed of since she was a child, but it wasn’t in her dream to see it from the back of a prison cart, or to die there, dangling on a rope.
Yet despite the knowledge that Newgate lay at the end of the cart ride, all five of them found much to distract them on the way there. The streets, whether wide and elegant or narrow and dingy, teemed with people from all walks of life. Ladies in silk gowns and fancy hats, on the arms of gentlemen in wigs and frock coats, strolled nonchalantly past blind beggars, drunken slatterns and bare-footed street urchins. It was pandemonium, carts and carriages charging along at breakneck speeds, strident-voiced street vendors offering everything from fly-blown meat pies to posies of flowers. There were organ grinders and men playing tin whistles and fiddles. She saw market porters carrying huge tottering piles of baskets on their heads, a fresh-faced dairy maid with pails of milk supported on a yoke across her shoulders, and a bow-legged man with his hands clenching live, fluttering chickens by their claws.
The shops were as diverse as the kinds of people who passed by them. One sold nothing but silverware, the next displayed great pink hams, pheasants and rabbits laid out on white marble slabs. A milliner’s selling hats that could surely only be worn by royalty, and then in complete contrast a shop with mountains of secondhand boots and shoes.
Mary could hardly believe that women could go out on the streets wearing such low-cut gowns, displaying their breasts for the whole world to gawp at. Yet they appeared to be ladies of quality, for all had a soberly dressed maid or footman with them. In Plymouth only a whore would show so much naked flesh.
The clamour, dirt and evil smells ought to have shattered Mary’s long-held illusions that it was the city of miracles. But until she saw Newgate, some hours after they’d left the docks, she was still clinging to them, expecting that any moment she would be rescued.
But no rescue came. The bony horses even picked up a little speed at the sight of Newgate’s forbidding grey stone walls, relieved perhaps that they could now shed their heavy load.
Suddenly all those stories Mary had heard back in Sydney Cove of public hangings at Tyburn Tree, where huge crowds gathered to watch as if it was a sideshow in a fair, took on a new and horrific meaning.
As the gates opened to let the cart enter, the smell hit them. It wasn’t just the familiar stench of human waste, more the certain knowledge that this really was the absolute bottom of the barrel of life.
Even James, who had joked and chatted most of the way from the docks, was silenced as the cart trundled into a small, cobbled, tunnel-like area with more heavy doors beyond. The two burly gaolers who had opened the outer gates closed and locked them behind the cart, then, picking up a cudgel each, stood by as the cart driver unlocked and pulled out the chains that had secured the prisoners together.
Mary was terrified as they were shoved into a small room off the yard. She remembered other women telling her back in Sydney Cove how the gaolers here would knock you out even for asking a question and body searches were just an excuse to humiliate prisoners. She was dreading the moment, too, when she would be separated from the men.
But there was no search, perhaps because they’d come directly from a Royal Navy ship. The only questions asked were for their names, which were duly marked down in a ledger, and after a brief wait, they were led down the passageway to another door.
There Mary glanced behind her at the men. She expected that this would be the point when they were separated. She wanted to say something, but the prospect of awaiting trial apart from them was so daunting that she was robbed of speech.
The gaoler opened the door, and the unexpected waft of warm air and sunshine beyond made Mary gasp. But if it wasn’t enough of a surprise to find herself stepping out into an open courtyard, the sight that met her was so totally astounding that she stopped in her tracks.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ James exclaimed behind her.
It might be a yard within the prison walls, but the scene within it was more like a carnival than a place of punishment. At least a hundred people were milling around enjoying themselves. The noise of drunken revelry was as loud as in any of the taverns they’d passed on the way here.
Mary rubbed her eyes, thinking it was some kind of hallucination. It couldn’t be prison, she could see no chains, no evidence of starvation, many of the crowd were even in fine clothes, men in wigs strutting around like gentlemen, women in what, to Mary at least, looked like ball gowns, bedecked with jewellery. One woman in turquoise satin, surrounded by men in velvet and brocade jackets, was actually fanning herself with a feathered fan as if she was at a private soirée.
Where were the poor wretches in chains they’d expected? The diseased, hollow-eyed old whores in rags, the pathetic young girls who had been led astray, and the scarred brutes who’d finally got their just deserts? These people cavorting, drinking and chatting certainly weren’t being punished.
‘Move along now,’ the gaoler said impatiently, prodding her with his cudgel. ‘It ain’t like you never was in a prison afore.’
‘I’ve never been in one like this before,’ Mary retorted, glancing back at the men to see their reaction. But they looked as stagge
red and unbelieving as she.
Drink obviously played a major part in the festivities. They could see people coming out of a door carrying brimming tankards. There were even a few women dancing a jig accompanied by a man with a black patch over one eye, playing a fiddle.
Noise came from every quarter. Mary looked up at the grey prison building and saw many people craning their heads out of small barred windows and shouting to those below or either side of them.
As the gaoler urged them forward, suddenly a hush fell on the crowd, all eyes turning to Mary and her group.
‘It’s them!’ someone shouted. ‘Give ’em a cheer!’
As wild and frantic cheering went up, Mary suddenly felt like a bride who had turned up at the wrong wedding. She saw no reason why anyone would want to cheer them. It had to be a case of mistaken identity.
The crowd were coming towards them with shouts of welcome, broad grins, and hands outstretched to greet them.
‘It’s a pleasure to welcome you to Newgate.’ A man in a stained black frock coat bowed and doffed a battered top hat. ‘There’s plenty of us know we’re bound for Botany Bay, it gives us heart to hear of your escape.’
‘They’ve found out what we done,’ Sam said incredulously, holding on to Mary’s arm as if he thought she’d faint with shock. ‘God’s teeth! I never thought we’d be famous.’
Clearly fame didn’t preclude locking them up, for they weren’t given a chance to speak to anyone, ask how they knew about them, or anything else. The gaoler pushed them on up a couple of flights of winding stone stairs and into a cell, slamming and locking the door behind them.
Temporarily stunned by what they’d seen out in the yard, and the welcome they’d had from the other prisoners, no one spoke for some minutes. The five of them just stood there, speechless.
Mary pulled herself together first. The cell was very small, the straw was dirty, and the only light came from a small slit window, too high up to see out. But compared with the conditions on the Rembang and in the hospital in Batavia, it was quite decent. To Mary, the best thing of all was that they were all together, and they weren’t sharing it with anyone else.
‘This is better than I expected,’ she said, breaking the silence first. ‘But I’d like to know why those people in the yard aren’t chained.’
‘I can tell you that, me darlin’,’ James said with a grin. ‘It’s money. Didn’t you ever listen to any of those back in Port Jackson who’d been in here?’
‘I listened, but I couldn’t understand them,’ Mary said, recalling how the Londoners with their flash lingo had sounded as if they came from a foreign land. By the time she’d learned enough of it to understand, they had moved on from talking about their old prisons to their plight in the new one.
‘Well, they said you had to pay for what they call “easements”,’ James said with a shrug. ‘They had it in Dublin too. You slip the gaoler something and off come your chains. You can get food brought from outside too.’
Mary nodded. She remembered now that that had also been the case with food and drink back in Exeter.
‘I expect if you’ve got enough money, or at least something to sell, you can have a room on your own and a servant to bring you food and drink,’ James said with a hollow laugh. ‘But as we haven’t got anything, this is all we can expect.’
The men slumped dejectedly down on the floor. Nat fell asleep almost immediately, and Mary was reminded of the women on the Dunkirk. Some of them managed to sleep almost round the clock, it was their way of escaping from the cruel reality of prison.
Mary sat down, arranged her chains so they didn’t dig into her, and hunched her knees up under her dress. Leaning back against the wall, she considered her friends’ plight.
Her own meant nothing to her, she wanted death to rid herself of the mental torment she felt. She might have regained her physical health on the voyage home, but she couldn’t recover from the crushing guilt at taking her two children on such a hazardous journey and causing their deaths. Real hell to her was being sent back to New South Wales, and she would escape from it by jumping overboard at the first opportunity.
But the men hadn’t become reconciled to the certainty of hanging. James had some kind of blind faith he was safe, for his original sentence was up now. Sam believed that if he showed enough remorse they would let him off. Bill and Nat tried to blank out the possibility by sleeping or talking about something else.
Yet seeing London today had sparked something inside Mary. It hadn’t made her want to live again, or lessened her grief, but it had brought the men’s predicament sharply into focus for her.
None of them were bad men, and they’d already suffered so much. Mary couldn’t hope to save them from hanging, but if she could just think of some way to get those ‘easements’, that might make their last few weeks a great deal more bearable.
She thought about it for over an hour, and then smiled as she came up with a solution.
‘What’ve you got to smirk about?’ James asked curiously, moving nearer and squatting down in front of her.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said.
‘If it involves ropes and files, forget it,’ he grinned. ‘I did an inventory of our belongings before we left the Gorgon. We haven’t even got a knife between us.’
‘I’m glad you’ve still got your sense of humour,’ she said, patting his bony face affectionately. ‘That might come in handy for my idea. You see, I’ve been thinking. If we are famous, maybe we can wring some money out of it.’
Nat continued to sleep, looking like a sweet child in the dim light. But Bill and Sam sat up. James only raised his eyebrows questioningly.
‘Will thought he’d make money from our story, that’s why he hung on to his log,’ Mary explained. ‘We’ve still got all the stories in our heads. So why don’t we sell them?’
‘To who?’ he said sarcastically.
‘To anyone who cares to hear them,’ she said, feeling a little of her old self coming back now she had a challenge again.
No opportunity presented itself to Mary before it was dark, but the following morning, when she heard the gaoler coming along the row of cells to unlock them so they could empty the night bucket, she was ready.
She brushed the straw off her dress and ran her fingers through her hair as the key turned in the lock.
‘Come on, get that bucket emptied,’ the gaoler shouted, far more loudly than was necessary. He looked the way Mary remembered the gaolers back in Exeter, fat and unhealthy, with shifty eyes and rotten teeth.
‘How much for having the chains struck off?’ she asked.
He sucked his rotten teeth, eying her up speculatively. ‘That depends.’
‘Depends on what?’
‘Whether I want to or not,’ he replied, and cackled with laughter.
Mary took hold of the front of his greasy shirt menacingly. ‘You’d better want to,’ she hissed at him. ‘We’ve fought with cannibals and killed animals with our bare hands, and we’re going to hang for daring to escape from New South Wales. So we won’t think twice about slitting your throat. Now, do you want to be our friend or our enemy?’
His eyes rolled back in his head in alarm. Mary couldn’t see the men behind her, but she had to hope they were doing as she’d ordered and looking fierce.
‘W-w-what’s in it for me?’ he stuttered.
‘That depends on how you go about it,’ she said. She let go of him and smiled sweetly. ‘I want you to put the word about that we’re ready to receive visitors. They’ll have to pay of course. Enough for the shackles to come off, for food, drink and hot water to wash with.’
It was a gamble. Mary had no real idea if anyone in the prison or outsiders visiting it had enough interest in them to pay for the privilege of meeting them.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, still looking scared. ‘Did you say cannibals?’
‘I did, they had metal-tipped arrows this long,’ she said, holding her arms out wide.
‘
I’ll see,’ he said, and moved back as if to lock the door.
Mary grabbed the night bucket. ‘Empty this before you go,’ she said, and thrust it at him. ‘Rinse it out before you bring it back,’ she added, ‘I don’t like the smell.’
He walked away with it as meekly as a child ordered to go and buy bread, and Mary turned to the men and giggled. ‘I think we’ve got a deal,’ she said.
By noon the shackles were off, they were eating mutton pies, and had a large flagon of small beer between them. The gaoler, whom they now knew as Spinks, was as resourceful as he was greedy, and they had already received two groups of four people, all desperate to meet the escapees and hear about the cannibals.
James was the story-teller and he did it well, embellishing the true story about the native warriors who chased them in a war canoe, to hand-to-hand fighting on land.
‘In their village they had dozens of human skulls on poles,’ James lied cheerfully. ‘We saw piles of human bones. They wore the teeth as necklaces and used human skin to cover their shields.’
After the second group left, Mary and the men dissolved into laughter.
‘Well, they could’ve been cannibals,’ James said indignantly. ‘I mean, we didn’t stay around for long enough to find out, did we?’
Mary thought how good the sound of laughter was, which she hadn’t heard since they were captured in Kupang. Even on the Gorgon they’d been very subdued. Yet she couldn’t help feeling just a twinge of sadness that Will wasn’t still with them. He would’ve loved an opportunity to tell such tales, and he would probably have made it even more exciting than James had done.
‘You are a wonder, Mary,’ Sam said a little later, as he licked his fingers clean of the meat pie. ‘None of us could have thought up such a cunning plan. When James got to that bit about you hitting one of the cannibals over the head with an oar, I almost believed you’d really done it. I reckon you’d think of something to save us even if they were just putting us in the cooking pot.’
Mary smiled. It was good to have the men’s admiration again. And even better to see them lifted out of their gloom. ‘We mustn’t go too far with the stories,’ she warned them. ‘We want sympathy, not people calling us liars.’
Remember Me Page 33
