by Peter McAra
‘Oysters? Oysters is what the gentry eats when they has a feast. I loves ‘em.’ She raised herself carefully and gulped from the open shell Eliza held out to her.
‘Well, more like that and Susannah will be up to her old tricks again.’ She smiled, a trifle wanly, Eliza thought, and lay down.
‘I’ll fetch you some more. And some water. And…night will fall soon. Can you…can I help you to reach shelter?’
‘Surely, my girl. Susannah can walk if she has to.’ She coughed. Her eyes widened with pain. ‘But where can we lay our heads in this Godforsaken place?’
‘I found a cave. Not fifty paces from here. Among those rocks. But your baby? How can you tend her with your arm?’
‘She don’t need my arm. She needs my breast. And that seems to be working like a magic spell.’ Susannah’s lips trembled. Her eyes told Eliza that she was fighting a losing battle with pain.
‘Eliza, dearie. You must help me. When this wrist mends, I’ll…’ She looked at her arm. Tears coursed down her cheek. ‘I mayn’t be much use to a man now as I once was. And it’s hurting cruel. But I have my baby to care for. I’ll make light of it, you’ll see.’ She lay back on the sand. ‘Please hurry with the water, dearie,’ she whispered. Her voice cracked. She closed her eyes, but tears welled from her tightly shut eyelids. Eliza turned and ran as fast as she could to the pool, aches and bruises notwithstanding. Providence led her to a rock lying in the debris at the cliff’s foot. As big as a human head, it had been eroded into a crude bowl shape, suitable for carrying water. When she gave Susannah the bowlful of water and more oysters, the sick woman smiled. Eliza dared to think that she looked a little less pale, sounded a little more alive than before.
‘T’will be dark soon,’ Susannah said. ‘We must go to your shelter. You carry the baby. I’ll follow.’
‘I’ll carry you both, but one at a time,’ Eliza said. ‘It’s but a few paces.’ She did not add that the route passed over a steep, rocky path. She took the baby, who looked up at her through half-opened eyes, and carried her a few paces before she set her down beside the path she would take. Then she returned to Susannah. Carefully, slowly, she stooped, wrapped Susannah’s sound arm round her neck, then straightened. The injured woman gasped in pain but said nothing. Supporting her as best she could, Eliza dragged her to the place where she had left the baby. Then she gathered up the baby and repeated the process. Helping Susannah through the narrow cleft into the cave was difficult, but it was the last step of the journey to relative safety and comfort.
A storm, which had been threatening as they made the tortuous journey, broke with thunder and lightning moments after they dropped exhausted onto the cave’s floor. A trickle of water ran down the rear wall and disappeared into the sand. It was a miracle that their new residence would boast running water, if only during a storm. Eliza ran back to where she had left her new-found bowl, and brought it back to the cave to catch water while the downpour lasted. Susannah saw it and smiled.
‘I have a lady’s maid and a fountain in my chamber. All I need is a privy.’ Then she murmured that she was deathly tired, and fell asleep beside her baby.
Night fell as the storm continued to deluge the land. Eliza lay on her bed of dry sand and reflected on the day’s happenings. In the middle of the previous night, she had staggered ashore in a terrifying storm, battered and half drowned, wondering if she would live to see morning. This was no time to think of Harry, the pain of her separation from the man she would always love. Now she was alive, free, and on dry land, snug and safe from the storm. She gave thanks to God and fell asleep.
The baby cried briefly during the night. Each time she heard those cries, Eliza told herself it was a blessing that the baby had lived. Susannah had called her Ann, after her own mother, she said. Indeed, Ann was still within a hair’s breadth of death. Susannah might die, or Ann might not thrive, considering that she had been born before her time, and also the parlous state of her mother’s health.
When dawn lightened up the cave, Eliza saw that Susannah was awake.
‘We must turn our minds to food, Eliza,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Else we’ll all three of us die.’
‘I know,’ Eliza said. ‘This is a desert land. There’s but little grass, and that dry and sickly. And the trees are no better. There are no fruits. We have no way of making fire.’
‘When you go out to forage Eliza, look for seeds — grass seeds, seeds cast by trees. I’ve heard tell that outlaws living in the forest in England save seeds, things like acorns and such, and grind them into flour. It’s poor flour to be sure. But seeds are the plants’ way of providing for their children. They store their goodness in the seed to set their children on a good path in life. What is wheat and oats but the seeds of grasses? And they do say that the outlaws make their seed flour into little cakes and bake them — ’
‘But — ’ Eliza interrupted.
‘I know, I know. We have no fire. Nor cakes to bake. Nor flour to make them. But we must not despair, child. Go out and gather us some more oysters. And keep your wits about you. You’ll find things you did not expect, I’ll be bound.’
As she walked the path back to the pool, Eliza decided that to get a better vantage point, she would climb as high up the cliffs as she could. She stopped at a large rock which jutted from the cliff to form a platform, and turned to survey the beach. Seagulls fluttered round a dark object at the water’s edge a hundred paces away. Even before she could see it clearly, she knew it was a body. Legs and arms projected from the trunk at unnatural angles, to give it the air of a log of driftwood. She climbed down through the rocks towards it. For a moment, she thought to run from the place. For all the times she had rubbed shoulders with death on the Swan, it filled her with a fear deeper than she could understand. Back in the village, death had been accepted as part of life. Welcomed, even. When old Dame Forsyth had died a year before Eliza’s arrest, she had wished for it.
‘The old man with the scythe can’t come fast enough for me,’ the old woman had often said. ‘My bones aches. They aches all the time, day and night. T’is agony to get on the chamber-pot. T’is agony to sit up in bed.’ When she died, the children who had been her friends went to pay their respects. They had looked closely at the old woman’s dead face without fear or revulsion, and talked about it often.
‘She looks nicer dead than she did alive,’ Eliza’s little cousin Joan had said. ‘I fancy she likes being dead. See, she’s smiling.’
Eliza was less sanguine. She forced herself to walk towards the grotesque shape. As she approached, she saw a seagull peck at an eye in the corpse’s head, then, bolder, take a second peck and worry at it, shrieking and flapping. Soon it pulled a strand of tissue from the socket. As she came close, she recognised the rough red skin and silver-streaked beard of Jake Cowper, the swaggering sailor who had so nearly taken her maidenhood. With a detachment that surprised her, Eliza waved away the cheeky seagulls and squatted down to scrape a grave for him. When she saw that his belt held a knife in a sheath, she unbuckled it. In his death, Jake had done the two women a kindness.
At first, she decided that to go through his pockets was beyond her. Then she reconsidered. The knife represented real wealth. What other treasures might he have left them in his will? She put her hand in the sodden pocket of his heavy seaman’s jacket and drew forth two pennies. She must roll him over to reach the other pocket. With a heave, and a twinge to her uneasy stomach as she smelt the first odours of rotting flesh, she managed to roll the stiff corpse onto its other side. Once more she blenched, then put a hand in the wet pocket. She felt something angular and rough. It was a clay pipe. Then a hard slimy object — a plug of tobacco the worse for its swim in the sea. There was a more bulky shape, held by the cloth which had shrunk round it in the water. She eased it out. It was a metal box which held a flint and steel. Fire! She had the means of making fire! Elated now, she tugged the coat from the body. At worst, it would be a useful coverlet for the baby. The b
uttons were metal. They might be useful in some future crisis. The trousers — why not? She pulled them off, steeling herself for what she must see.
Back at the waterfall pool, Eliza stooped and drank, still sweating from her spell as gravedigger. Silver fish darted away from the bank. They may as well be on the moon for all the chance she had of catching them. On impulse, she waded after them, revelling in the coolness on her hot skin. As she stood waist deep, she reached for the hem of her smock, pulled it over her head, threw it onto the sand. The warm wind playing on her nakedness, the water round her thighs, sent a shiver of pleasure through her body.
She held her nose and ducked her head under the water. To her surprise, she saw more fish, almost within reach. She lunged after them and lost her balance. Then she rolled about in the caressing water, kicking, ducking her head, teasing out her long hair, watching it fan out in the water like seaweed. Perhaps mermaids washed their hair just so.
It was the first time she had disported herself in water for years. She found herself visiting the bliss of her summers with Harry, their last romantic moments together before Louisa discovered them in their nakedness. She could thank him for teaching her to swim. The lake at the Great House was where she had first swum under water, first seen her hair play out around her like a halo. What would Harry be doing, thinking, at this precise moment, likely in his quarters at Oxford? Sleeping, of course. The earth must rotate half a revolution before morning greeted the towers of Oxford. This part of the planet was twelve hours ahead of England. Naked again, she imagined herself lying skin to skin with him beside the lake, or in his students’ quarters at the venerable university…
Harry would be twenty one; a man. Would he have a beard? Would he be tall and well-made? She knew he would still have the secret smile that he reserved for her alone, his habit of looking up at her with the beginnings of love in his eyes. Smiling at the innocent way they had talked of how many babies they might have, she remembered his asking her to show him how to make them. She sighed and pushed the memory aside.
As she waded to the edge of the pool, she noticed that it flowed through a jumble of rocks to the sea. Here and there, the rocks seemed to have been arranged in rows. Fish could be seen swimming in the ponds created by the rock walls. Indeed, as the tide receded, the fish could find themselves trapped in this maze of rocks. As Eliza watched the fishes, she began to wonder how the rocks had become arranged so, and why. These were fish traps, made by men’s hands. The men would come to gather the fish from time to time, no doubt. The very thought made her scan the beach and the cliff, strain her ears for foreign sounds. The bland silence of the place mocked her. Was she foolish to let her mind dwell on the savages so often? She thought of what Susannah would say.
‘These natives may be decent folks, Eliza. I’ve heard tell that some of them sing and dance most of the day. And they treat white folks very charitable. I’ve heard tell about the Indians in America. An Englishman married one, and she went to no end of trouble to be a good wife to him.’
Eliza knew her friend would be impressed if she could bring home a fish. But how to catch one? As she considered this, she cast about for a stone. She found one the size of a pumpkin. She would find a place where the fish congregated, and hurl it into their midst. She did not have to search far. Since she had first found the traps, the tide had receded. She saw a tangle of fish in the shallows, making futile efforts to squeeze through a narrow gap into the stream that ran down to the sea. She flung the rock into their midst. They scattered, but one was stunned. It swam in circles on the surface, mouth gulping air. She splashed into the knee-deep water and grabbed it by the tail. As it wriggled to escape, she flung it onto the sand, watched it die. It was big — longer than her forearm. Susannah would have fish for luncheon, perhaps even roasted if the flint and steel delivered their promise.
Eliza’s discoveries set the pattern for a string of days which saw the trio gradually improve their circumstances. Susannah begged Eliza to gather herbs to make a poultice for the deep cut on her forearm.
‘But there’ll not be English herbs in this land, Susannah,’ Eliza said with a pessimism she wished she had not shown.
‘No matter. The natives must use the herbs from hereabouts. Find something with a strong smell to it, Eliza. Like lavender, maybe.’
‘But — ’
‘No matter. If I don’t get this cut to stop its festering, I’ll die, and Ann with me. And the pain is fit to make me scream sometimes. Go, Eliza.’
Eliza soon found some aromatic herbs. She crushed them between two rocks and made a poultice which she tied onto Susannah’s arm with strips of a flax-like plant she had seen growing near water. Soon the wound healed, and Susannah regained her good spirits.
The attempt to make flour from seeds was less successful. Hours of labour produced a handful of brown grit which baked into a bitter cake. Susannah ate it, and asked for more.
‘If I don’t stop eating fish, Ann will turn into a mermaid,’ she said. Then Eliza discovered a plant with large soft leaves spread close to the ground, not unlike a lettuce. She bit the smallest piece from a leaf and chewed it between her front teeth. It tasted bland. She swallowed it. Someone must undertake the experiment. A day later, she repeated the process with a larger bite of the leaf. Again she suffered no ill effects. Soon the lettuce plant became a regular addition to their diet, and Eliza cast about for other edible plants and berries.
The weather slowly grew cooler, though not unpleasantly so. But rain, which had been plentiful for the first weeks, had not fallen for some time. The waterfall had dried to a trickle, and Eliza wondered what they might do for water if the flow stopped. One afternoon the sun shone with particular brightness, promising a return to the earlier warm weather. Clouds gathered in the west. Soon a storm would break. The wind died and the sea sulked; grey, still. The black clouds grew heavier, and the light began to fail, bringing an early dusk — hot, quiet, heavy with portent.
Crash! A clap of thunder ran down from the clouds, followed by the crackle of lightning and rain spearing down in huge drops. Eliza ran to the cave. Earlier in the day she’d planned against the storm’s coming. She had brought a load of oysters to the cave on a billet of driftwood with a cuplike depression formed from a knothole, and filled all the water containers. Susannah had ground a fair quantity of seeds, and stood ready to bake the flour into cakes. In recent days, her cooking had improved as she found which seeds tasted good and which did not.
After an hour, the downpour suddenly stopped. The sun shone brightly, and the pattering of the rain gave way to quiet. Then, as if the air had been prepared for it, an utterly foreign sound broke the silence. They looked at each other in alarm.
‘Crows,’ Susannah whispered. Eliza shook her head. Once or twice in their earlier days, before her fear of savages had been dulled by the weeks of peaceful solitude, she had had fancied that birds’ cries were human voices. The sound came again — jabbering human voices, shrill and guttural, excited.
The two women stared at each other, horror flashing in their eyes. Eliza felt her heart thud. The voices took up an animated conversation. Susannah motioned to Eliza to look out of the cave’s small opening and down to the beach. She saw five naked black men standing on the sand. Each held a bundle of spears and sticks. Then one gave forth a guttural cry of surprise. He pointed a stick at the white linings of the oyster shells left on the rocks, hard evidence of Eliza’s gatherings. The others answered, as they scanned the beach, doubtless searching for more signs of human presence.
CHAPTER 22
Eliza watched the scene from the cave’s tiny opening. The heavy rain had washed all traces of her steps from the sand. The foreshore gleamed flat in the grey light of dusk. The men began to move independently about the beach. One dug in the sand at the waterline, found some shellfish, opened and ate them. Another stood still, on a rock at the edge of the pool, spear poised, looking not unlike a skeleton tree. Then he flicked his spear into the water. It f
loated up with a wriggling, bloody fish impaled on its point. He recovered his spear and climbed back onto the rock as the dying fish flapped on the sand. Moments later he caught another fish, then stooped over something he had placed on the sand before him, his hands moving quickly. Then a cloud of smoke rose, and he stepped back. A fire flickered up from a handful of sticks. In spite of her fear, Eliza watched in wonderment. He had made fire effortlessly in seconds.
The baby whimpered. Instantly, Susannah buried its face in her breast. Eyes closed, Ann sucked silently. After her terror that the baby might betray them, Eliza began to breathe easier again. She climbed to the cave’s door and looked out. In the half dark, she could see the men eating fish as they lounged round the fire. How long would they stay? She looked at the bowls of water arranged against the cave wall, the pile of oysters in their shells, and wondered what would happen if the men stayed until morning. Susannah rocked Ann ceaselessly, silently, while she watched Eliza with frightened eyes.
Every few minutes Eliza looked out at the men. A puff of wind carried the smell of cooking fish to her nostrils. Then she smelt men’s sweat. Thank God the wind was not blowing the other way. She had heard from a sailor that some native peoples had an incredible sense of smell; able, like a dog, to smell food a long way off. As well, the sailor had heard tell that the people of Botany Bay possessed an ability to track men through the forest by some mysterious power. Indeed, they had been employed by the Governor to find convicts who had run off into the forest, it was said. No matter if the escapee walked along the middle of a stream, or across bare rock, he would be hunted down, and perhaps eaten if the savages had a mind to it. Eliza looked across at Susannah, wondering if she too had heard this story.
Darkness fell. The men did not move from their fire. Eliza sat tense with terror. Ann must cry soon. She had never stayed silent for so long in her life. Though the inside of the cave was by now pitch black, Eliza could tell from Ann’s breathing that she was awake, and like to become bored and want to talk to her mother in her infant language of gurgles and crowings. She began to make fretting noises. Just as Eliza bit her lip in horror at a loud gurgle from Ann, a rhythmic clicking sound from near the men’s fire startled her. A concerted wailing followed. The visitors were dancing round the fire to the clicking of sticks and singing. Eliza inched towards Susannah.
