Taming the Wilde

by Renard, Loki

  But this place was not England. It was filled with new things, new birds and other creatures. I could barely believe my eyes when I saw perched upon a tree, a lizard at least three foot long, black with yellow-banded stripes. It turned its head to watch as we went past, watching with an impassive glittering dark gaze that put me in mind of Master Roake. I could not help but hold back a gasp of surprise, which made the driver laugh. “That’s a Lace Goanna,” he said over his shoulder. “The least of your worries in these parts, but make sure not to be bitten, it leaves a pretty mark.”

  “The least of my worries? What do you mean?”

  The driver laughed. “This place is full of creatures that can kill you before you see ‘em. There are fishes that look like rocks and spiders the size of a dinner plate. General rule is to keep an eye out and watch where you step. And keep yer hand out of dark holes, like boots or cupboards. Red backs and funnelwebs like to make their homes in there.”

  “Red backs?”

  “Black spiders, thick red stripes on their ass. Kill you so much as look at you. Little things, but more poisonous than a cup of arsenic. Funnelwebs are fuzzy black things, hunters, they’ll leap out and catch you before you know what’s ‘appened.”

  I drew myself up in the wagon. “You are making sport with me.”

  “This is the devil’s land, miss, there’s snakes everywhere you look, got yer Taipan. Brown, plain looking thing, but the poison from one bite will stop your heart in a second. Tiger snakes too… and stay out of the water, there’s crocodiles in the rivers and sharks in the seas, both of ‘em will ‘ave you in ‘alf before you can say your prayers.”

  Unpleasant shivers traversed my spine and I fancied I could feel a dozen dangerous crawling creatures making their way across my body. “How does anybody survive here if that is the case?” I tried to maintain some level of incredulity.

  “Luck and care, mind where you put your ‘ands and feet and remember this ain’t England. This place is owned by the devil and his minions are everywhere.”

  I said a quick prayer and hoped that the good lord would see fit to keep me safe. Certainly he had seen fit to preserve me whilst others succumbed to the tricks and traps set before them.

  “There’s the desert people too,” he said conversationally. “You’re not likely to see many of ‘em, but stay away if you do.”

  “Desert people?”

  “Black as night, they live were no civilized man can,” the driver said, enjoying his opportunity to enlighten me. “They ‘unt with spears - and sometimes it ain’t animals they ‘unt, if you catch my drift.”

  I did catch his drift.

  “Stay in the civilized areas, and be glad for the factory. Though a lady like you won’t stay there long I’ll warrant, they’ll be lining up for you.”

  Treacherous creatures, man hunting men and now lechery as the driver leered over his shoulder, letting the horse take control of the wagon as he feasted his eyes on my form. I drew my shawl about my shoulders and looked at him haughtily, but it only made him laugh. “You won’t be keepin’ that attitude long, not out ‘ere. There ain’t any ladies out ‘ere.”

  I made no reply, but prayed for the sanctuary of the female factory. Rather a workhouse than a whorehouse. My prayers were soon answered. My destination first appeared to me as a large wall rising out of the red earth. It was clear that those who had built the female factory had done so with the intention of keeping its occupants firmly inside for the walls were thick and strong and tall, blights on the landscape where little lizards scuttled hither and thither.

  The main building was a three-storied sandstone affair that looked very impressive and stately at first glance. For a moment I thought my luck might be on the rise, but as we drew closer I saw that there were several pinched looking figures milling about the place. They did not look happy, nor rested, nor well fed and they jeered at me as I was drawn past with comments that intimated I would soon join their number and partake in their misery.

  The cart came to a halt and I was hauled down to stand on the steps whilst someone was fetched. My arrival was irregular and had caused some small commotion.

  “What is the meaning of this?” A well-dressed portly lady came sweeping down the steps. She looked fine and unlike some of the other ladies I had seen she clearly knew where the food stores were kept. Her jowls wobbled to and fro when she spoke.

  “This is a prisoner found ‘iding aboard the Valiant, ‘aven’t inquired as to ‘er name.”

  “Very good,” the lady said, looking me up and down in the way a farmer might look at a cow. “Leave her with me,” she said, pressing some silver into the driver’s hand. With a tip of his old hat he was off and I was left alone out the front of that great building, a prisoner once more.

  “I am Mrs. Moore. I am the matron and whilst you are here you will be under my care,” the woman announced. When I did not make any reply, she continued to explain matters to me in a brisk manner that left no place for sympathy. “We have three hundred head here. Do as you’re told and you’ll have the chance to earn your freedom through assignment or marriage. Until that time you’ll work here.”

  “And if I do not wish to work?” I should not have asked the question. I should have kept my mouth shut but a little of my free spirit still remained and manifested itself in that impertinent query.

  “Oh we have a lady in our midst.” The woman’s expression was very cruel. “Well then you’ll earn yourself one of our Parramatta punishments. Millie!” She raised her voice. “Where is Millie?”

  There were several curious faces about the place and the question was passed between them. In short order a young woman who I supposed was the Millie in question was brought over. I quite recoiled at her appearance, though it seemed cruel to do so. She was heavily pockmarked and her teeth were rotting, but worse than that was her head which had been shaved in a patchy bald style. Far from being sympathetic to this wretch’s plight, Mrs. Moore smiled perversely. “Millie decided she wanted to skip out on her labors and fraternize with the laborers. So keep in mind, you don’t do as you are told and you’ll get a fancy new haircut.”

  Faced with cruelty that put anything I had seen to shame, I held my tongue, bowed my head and pretended to accept my situation. Satisfied that I was suitably impressed with her powers, Mrs. Moore lead me inside and showed me to the sleeping quarters, where she left me to ‘settle in’.

  The living situation inside the factory was even more cramped and filthy than the prison deck on the Valiant had been. I appreciated Morrow’s insistence on cleanliness at all costs more greatly at that point than I had at any moment during the voyage. There were a few of the women from the Valiant in residence at the factory, Mary Brawley greeted me with a bear hug and a haranguing about how badly I had made them all feel.

  “You’re a right caution you are Jane, you better be careful or they’ll take those copper locks of yours,” she warned me. There was general agreement that I would have to watch my wild ways, but as it turned out Mary was the first to be shorn under the Parramatta regime for the crime of punching Mrs. Moore dead in the face after the woman denied us our dinner one evening. One did not simply deny Mary Brawley her dinner. She made herself very popular with that action, though we did not see her quite as much after that for she was relegated to the punishment quarters and was no longer able to be chosen by the men who came to pick wives and servants each Sunday.

  I would have followed her lead and had myself put into the same punishment regime, but those third class prisoners were watched too closely for my liking. I had aspersions to freedom, not to further incarceration. To that end I ate as much as I could and threw myself into the work available. There were many tasks in that great complex, wool picking, weaving, needlework, gardening and much more. I was assigned to the laundry, which I rather enjoyed for it was vigorous work that made my muscles strong after a rather indolent journey across the seas and I could move about as I scrubbed and splashed, boiling coppers and all
the rest of it. It was a remarkable opportunity to regain my strength and I found myself being commended for my enthusiasm, so much so that I was at risk of being selected for presentation to the men who perused our number as if we were cattle to be poked and prodded and brought home for milk. I managed to avoid being chosen simply by merit of staying far from those doing the choosing. There were plenty of women desperate to leave the factory and start their lives as free women so my reticence was never reported.

  I was not interested in being a free wife, I was working in order to take my pittance and escape over the high stone walls. It would not be a small matter, but security was relaxed due to most of the captives being complacent and resigned to their fates. Good little prisoners, just like Roake would have had me be.

  Roake. I wondered if he thought of me. I hoped not. I hoped he had not felt much pain when he discovered my loss. I hoped he was back on his way to England without a second thought for me, for I no longer wished to think of him. Our paths had diverged and the time we had spent together, though sometimes sweet, had come to an end. That was what I told myself when heartsickness rose, when I remembered his gentle touch - and some of his harder ones. I had never known a man like him before and I thought I would certainly never know a man like him again.

  I confess that as I prepared my escape I thought of him quite often. I would never have managed it under his watch, but there were precious few people watching over us at the factory and none with any real concern for our well being. The trouble that had dogged me on the Valiant did not follow me to the factory. The punishments handed down by the matrons were uniformly cruel and humiliating and I was able to avoid them simply by appearing to toe the line and work hard. There was no time to get into trouble; I had to fend for myself, to make my own way in this new land before I was forced to marry some ex-convict brute.

  It was a matter of a month before I felt ready to make my attempt. I had secreted some scraps of fabric away in the course of doing the laundry and hidden it in the grounds. Whenever I had a spare moment, which was not very often, I crept out and knotted those scraps together until I had a rope, which I intended to fix to the iron spikes that topped the walls to prevent escapes.

  Scaling a high wall is no easy task, but I had some practice in my youth and I knew that if I could get a decent run up and make a mad leap I could lay hold of the top of the wall and from there it was only a matter of pulling myself aloft. So in the middle of the night I wrapped the rope about my waist, tied my hair back and hiked my skirts into my bloomers.

  It took more than one attempt to scale the wall. The first few times I succeeded in doing nothing besides scraping my elbows and bruising my legs as I missed my mark and slid down the brick face, but I was determined to earn my freedom and as the golden moon broke free of cloud cover I made a mighty leap, laid hold of the top bricks and pulled myself up with all my strength, giving thanks to those large loads of laundry I had labored under for weeks on end. Once atop the wall, carefully avoiding the spikes, it occurred to me it would have been easier to use my rope to get up the wall, but the time for scaling was done and the time for descent was upon me.

  My spirits were high as I made a secure knot about the iron spike and then held fast to the remnants of an old nightgown as I began to let myself down the far side of the wall. It was an awkward descent and I scraped myself several more times before my feet touched the ground, but the moment they did a jolt of joy zapped up my spine as angels sang in my head. I was free. For the first time in well over a year I could roam as I pleased. The world was mine, all I had to do was evade capture and in a place as vast as this Australian continent, which they said was much larger than all the British Isles, that would surely not be too lofty a goal.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A criminal in a land full of criminals is not easily caught. That was my saving grace during those first days of freedom. I assumed I had been missed from the factory, but there was no obvious pursuit. Even if there had been an effort to recapture me it would have been doomed to fail, the colonies were not precisely bastions of law and order. There was a police force of sorts, but it was spread very thin and much more concerned with violent criminals than ladies accused of petty theft.

  My first concern was finding a means of support. There were not many jobs available in the colonies for single women and those that were available were largely located at the female factory. I did not consider myself above brazen acts but even I was not quite so brazen as to walk into the prison I had just escaped from and ask for employment.

  Faced with the immediate need to feed and shelter myself I soon discovered that I had not lost my light touch. More than once my fingers dipped into the flush pockets of those who exploited the criminal underclass through poor wages and false offers of marriage that amounted to nothing more than prostitution. Plying my old trade I fancied myself like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor - the poor being my own poor self. My actions were certainly contrary to the eighth commandment, but I consoled myself with the fact that it was rather low on the ledger as it were.

  In very short order I had enough income to lodge at one of the hotels, where I was of course supposed to be a prostitute. Any unmarried woman living alone in the colonies was regarded as a courtesan and people paid little attention to those such as I except to occasionally sneer in our direction. I kept a very low profile, preferring the company of those who were selling themselves to those who looked down upon us. It was a source of amusement to me that those who had arrived as criminals developed a sense of moral superiority within mere months of being freed through marriage. A fancy bonnet and a wedding ring did not change the content of a woman’s character in my opinion, but nobody was asking me.

  I frequented the same bars as the courtesans did, though I did not ply their trade, rather I took advantage of the occasional slips of mind that took men in an advanced state of inebriation. The hotel bar where we stayed was a place for particularly good pickings as ale flowed freely and the men were distracted by easy flesh. On some evenings I could stumble into enough coin to support myself for a week or more, and I soon had some small savings tucked away in a local bank.

  Freedom was hard won, but it flowed through my veins like fire. The risk of being caught and sent back to the female factory made me dye my hair a deep black. I missed my red locks, but with a few forged papers and a kindly blind eye or two turned by those who were once in chains themselves I had a new life that was all my own.

  One evening I was making my way through the crowd as usual. My dress was quite fine, if a little low-cut, and my face was well painted. I looked nothing like my old self at all. I kept my eyes down, avoiding the gazes of those for whom a glance was as good as a kiss. Anybody who noticed me in the rabble and noise probably thought I was pretending to be shy, but I was watching for the bulge of a wallet, or better still a money roll. As I walked, a hand reached out and grasped mine. I was used to being grasped and grabbed, it was an infuriating price for being near single men looking for feminine relief. I had become accustomed to taking advantage of men who did not keep their hands to themselves for to my mind the grasping type was the most deserving of being fleeced. So I did not tug my hand away in anger, nor curse and swear. I turned towards the man who held my hand in his with a false smile painted broadly across my face. When I saw who had me in hand, the smile trembled then faded. It was none other than Master Roake, clasping my palm in both his hands. He should have been halfway to England, but he was sitting there in that alehouse large as life. My stomach tightened and tingles of preparedness to bolt rushed through my body lest he shout and declare me an escapee, but he simply looked at me with a winsome and longing expression.

  “You remind me of a woman I knew once,” he said, slurring his words slightly as his lids lowered over his eyes. “She’s gone now.” He was quite drunk, but unlike other men who became sloppy and belligerent, Master Roake was a dignified drunk. I knew I should get away from him immediat
ely, but I could not. He looked much the same as I remembered him, but his expression was grim and haggard. Without speaking, I pulled my hand away from his and beckoned to him. He stood, as I hoped he would, and followed me up the stairs to my room. As we passed through the portal to my simple abode Roake placed his hands on my hips and rested his head on my shoulder, breathing deeply from behind. “You even smell like her,” he slurred, “such a sweet girl she was.”

  I still had not spoken a word; I did not know what to say. I turned and he took my face in his hands, pressing a bold kiss to my lips. “And you taste like her, like fire. She was too much for this world, too wild to be contained.”

  His hands roamed my body with a reverent touch. I let them, forgetting propriety in the madness of the moment. I had never expected to lay eyes on him, let alone have him lay hands on me. “Your figure… it is remarkable,” he murmured.

  “Master Roake…” I spoke for the first time and he started at my voice.

  “Jane? Is it you?” His eyes darted back and forth across my face and slid his fingers into my hair; grasping my head and pulling it back to get a better view. “How could this be?”

  “Master Roake, you are hurting me,” I said. He let me go immediately and took two steps back. His retreat was arrested by my bed, which he sat down on heavily as he lost his balance. I related the tale of my hiding and subsequent capture as Roake sat on my coverlet, staring at me with wide and watery eyes. He was as handsome as ever and I felt fondness flowering anew as I looked at him.

  When he had heard all I had to say, he buried his face in his hands. “And now you are a courtesan. You are undone.”

  “I am most certainly not undone,” I said, quite offended that he would think such a thing. It was not only an insult to my virtue, but to my intelligence. “Nor am I a courtesan.”