3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  The captain has made a small, unoccupied cabin on the lower deck available to Mr Reeve. It has a good-sized writing table, upon which he spreads his notebooks and his callow drawings. I don’t much like being in an airless cabin with Mr Reeve, who stares at me when he thinks I am occupied, but the passenger saloon reminds me too much of freedom. The passengers are entirely unaware of their privileges, just as I once was. I was dismissive of the petty vanities of society, yet now I desire nothing more.

  Today will pass under this monotonous regime and then another day and another. I try not to look at the sea but, as you might guess, that is something of an impossibility. So far Manannán has been kind, there have been no real storms, although there is occasionally rough weather and items regularly fall off the shelf in my cabin and off the table in the mess. Maybe today I will see my friend Margaret on her feet. It is a blessing to have her in my mess, but it seems she is to be the last to recover her health for she has not yet left her hammock.

  Patchwork

  Outside, the sky was an intense blue behind the white sails.

  Name the colour.

  Rhia spun around, but the deck was deserted. It was the pesky voice again, as if she didn’t have troubles enough.

  ‘Ultramarine,’ she said, sighing. She knew what the voice was doing, making her take note of things she had once loved and cherished. ‘Ultramarine, a rare blue, once as expensive as gold,’ she added, hoping no one was listening to her talking to herself. She remembered something else. In Latin, ultramarinus meant ‘beyond the sea’, a reference to the origin of the lapis lazuli from which ultramarine was made. When they took Michael Kelly away, they took him to ‘parts beyond the seas’. She and Thomas had discussed it, because when they were children they had believed that the Otherworld lay beyond the seas. Now here she was, going to a place forested with unearthly white trees and inhabited by criminals and other dangerous creatures. Worse still, Michael would have left Sydney by the time she arrived.

  When she reached the orlop hatch, Rhia performed her morning ritual, just as she used to do in the yard at Millbank. She filled her eyes with sky and her lungs with clear air before she put her foot on the top rung of the ladder.

  She had thus far avoided a proper scrap with Nora and Agnes because there was always a warden at hand, but she could feel their animosity building. The last time Nora was on dish duty she had tipped Rhia’s uneaten breakfast gruel into her lap. An accident, she insisted with an evil grin. Rhia didn’t react immediately. She chose to sit, calm and silent, with the sticky slop soaking through her clothing. She could see that it displeased Nora intensely. When Nora disappeared up the ladder with the dish pail, and while nobody was looking, Rhia removed her apron and tipped the gruel into Nora’s hammock. She was still waiting for a counter attack.

  This morning, Agnes was in the middle of one of her brothel tales when Rhia sat down. Nora and Agnes exchanged looks, and Rhia could tell from the way Agnes’s eyes narrowed that she was in a mood. She was probably in a sulk over not seeing her sweetheart. She gave Rhia a toxic look but barely faltered in her narration.

  ‘The landlady at this establishment, Madam Mahoney, fancied herself class, and a cut above the dirty streetwalkers, but she was a slut who’d have it with a donkey if it’d pay her a ha’penny.’ It raised a laugh and Rhia kept her head bent low over her breakfast.

  ‘Don’t be a bitch, Agnes.’ It was Margaret. ‘She’s done you no harm.’ Margaret was still in her hammock, but her pale face was propped over its edge, and when she caught Rhia’s eye she winked before groaning and rolling over. A moment later, though, she was sitting on the edge of the hammock, her legs dangling, looking at the floor as if she was wondering if she could make it that far.

  Everyone was watching as Margaret stood up, grabbing the shelf by her bed to steady herself. ‘Sweet Jesus, my legs are made of rubber.’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme, Dickson,’ snapped Jane, who had recently become excessively pious.

  It took Margaret several minutes to reach the breakfast table. She stumbled twice, but shooed Nelly away when she tried to help. Margaret ate nothing, but made a show of being cheerful. She could no longer be described as plump, and there was a whitish tinge to her lips. Sleeping in the airless belly of the ship was unhealthful enough without the sickness on top of it. The surgeon, Mr Donovan, said that Margaret had something else, something besides seasickness, but he didn’t say exactly what it was. Maybe he didn’t know.

  The temperature and the stink increased at the same rate. One hundred and fifty bodies at one end of the orlop, livestock at the other, and the once-mysterious bilge saw to it. Bilge was an appropriate name for the lowest, internal part of the hull, and Rhia had soon discovered its function. Everything from the cook’s waste and the overflow from water closets to pomade and cosmetics sloshed around underneath the orlop.

  Once the morning’s chores were done, Rhia waited with Margaret until everyone had climbed the ladder. Margaret’s gait was halting and careful as she adjusted to being upright in a moving world. When they reached the top of the ladder, she stood for a moment, squinting in the white light glancing off the sea. She had a firm hold on Rhia’s arm.

  ‘I’ve always said the rich were fools with their money, and here’s the proof. Imagine taking to the sea for enjoyment or to recover from infirmity!’

  Rhia laughed. ‘I’ve missed you, Margaret.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Margaret retorted. ‘I’ve got ears. I know what they get up to and I’ve been after the strength to give Agnes a slap for weeks. Someone’s got to. She’s got the curse, though, and it always makes her worse. I’ll wait a day or two.’ There had been ongoing complaints about the effects of washing laundry in seawater. Cloth became stiff with dried salt, and caused chafing. Almost all the women, Rhia included, had had their courses by now and needed to wash their cloths. They had suffered the consequences. Few in the orlop bothered to spare others their private discomforts. Everything was a topic for conversation. It passed the time.

  On the quarterdeck, each mess sat in a sewing circle under an awning of sailcloth. Little piles of patchwork were scattered about within reach. Several quilts were now under way. The late April sun seemed overly bright. There had been complaints about the sunlight at first. It hurt their eyes after so long in the dark.

  Rhia felt light-hearted to have someone to talk to. Until now her interaction with the other prisoners was limited to an occasional smile or a wary ‘hello’ from Jane. Jane especially liked to roll her eyes at Rhia when Georgina, her arch-rival, said something foolish. This happened fairly frequently because Georgina, a squat Liverpudlian, wasn’t the brightest button in the tin.

  Margaret spent the morning poring over pieces of cloth, pocketing a delicate muslin that reminded her of a once-treasured dress. She was not the first. If a piece was especially pretty or considered to be of value, it would be surreptitiously folded into an apron pocket and no one would say a word. Nelly wept when she saw some white gabardine, saying it looked like it was from a bride’s dress, and she’d never be a bride. Who’d have her?

  The morning wore on and Rhia listened to the talk. She was piecing together the lives her companions had led before becoming prisoners. Jane had been in love, Georgina had lost a child and Agnes had left two wee sons behind in the work-house. The only real difference between them and Rhia was that she had been blessed with good fortune. It made her an outsider here in the same way as any of these women would have been had they come to St Stephen’s Green or entered the Montgomery Emporium. What was the ruin of Mahoney Linen against the loss of babes, or taking a beating every night, which is what happened to Nelly. Until she killed her sweetheart. Nelly hardly looked capable of killing a fly, let alone a man. He’d waggled the kitchen knife at her so she hit him over the head with the lid of the stew pot. And that was that. The only thing that had kept her from the noose was pregnancy.

  Thieving was not always the result of having fallen from the Lord’s grace, as
Reverend Tooting liked to think, but of desperation. Or vanity. Georgina had stolen a pair of boots from her mistress, Jane had hidden a length of ribbon from the market in her apron, Susan had taken a veil and a pair of gloves from a clothier’s. Agnes and Nora had both become professional thieves because they couldn’t make a decent living from needlework. Sarah stole a shawl from her mistress. It seemed perfectly reasonable that a woman who worked all day making pretty things she could not afford to wear herself, might easily be tempted to steal from someone who had finery to spare.

  Tales of loss and violence, as well as tales of love, were told as the squares and triangles of cloth became long strips of patchwork. They might have been stitching together scraps of their old lives and making something of them. The talk was just as often hopeful as despairing. Georgina said she’d heard that they were in need of alehouses in Sydney and that she fancied the trade because her grandmother had been a brewer, and that growing hops was easy. Jane retorted that she hadn’t the wits for the brewing trade. Agnes planned to run a brothel.

  Rhia wondered if she was the only one of them who was leaving behind the best part of her life.

  The talk turned to one of the young deck hands that had shimmied up the main mast as though it were no more than the trunk of an apple tree. While the others were laughing at some remark of Nora’s about the bulge in his breeches, Margaret lowered her voice and leaned close to Rhia.

  ‘Do you remember I told you that I was carrying something for Mrs Blake’s ding-dong maid?’ The conspiratorial note in Margaret’s voice made Rhia immediately alert.

  ‘Of course I remember.’ In fact, she had almost forgotten. Presumably Margaret had changed her mind about keeping Juliette’s secret.

  ‘What would you say if I told you it was nothing more than a plain sheet of parchment?’ she whispered.

  ‘Is it?’

  Margaret shrugged. ‘Not according to Juliette, though how she thinks a plain sheet of parchment hides a portrait, I can’t imagine! I’ve been thinking about the promise I made to keep this flapdoodle to myself, but now I think that I’m only wasting my time with it. I mean, what are the Quaker ladies in Sydney going to think when I give them such a thing?’

  Rhia frowned. The parchment could only be a photogenic negative. ‘But why does Juliette want the Quakers to have it?’

  ‘To pass on to her mother.’

  ‘Then Juliette’s mother is in Sydney?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Margaret. ‘She’s been there more than ten years. What if you were to send such a thing to your mam? It’d break her heart to receive a page with nought on it.’

  Rhia was still trying to piece things together. ‘She didn’t write her mother a letter, then?’

  ‘She can’t write. Brought up in the workhouse, poor fool. But I should never have taken it, so I’m as big a fool myself.’

  What on earth was Juliette up to? ‘May I see it?’ Rhia said.

  Margaret shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. At least then I’ll not have to make the decision by myself. I’ll show you after supper.’ She looked up at the sun. ‘Almost dinnertime, and then you’ll be off to see the boss. Do you suppose Botany Bay’s full of botanists?’

  The thought made Rhia smile. ‘I sincerely hope not. It’s hard to imagine that there’s much there in the way of botany. I don’t know what Mr Reeve expects to find – I’ve seen a picture of Sydney, it looks a colourless place.’

  Margaret shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’ She gestured to the strips of patchwork that coiled around them. ‘That’s the most colour I’ve seen in two years and it’s making my eyes hurt.’

  When they went below for lunch, Margaret went straight to her hammock saying she was worn out by all the sunshine. Rhia did her best to eat whatever preserved meat the cook had seen fit to serve up as stew, and left as soon as possible.

  Mr Reeve’s workroom was on the upper deck, close by his cabin. When she entered, he was bent over his desk, his small wire spectacles crooked on the bridge of his nose. The cabin, which he said was too small, had a bunk and was four times the size of her hutch. It also had considerably more shelves. Both the bunk and shelves were stacked with his little wooden boxes.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mahoney.’ He had picked up the habit of calling her this from Miss Hayter and seemed to be enjoying it. He didn’t look up from his study of an enormous Latin botanical. ‘Just carry on where we left off yesterday.’

  They rarely needed to speak, beyond the cursory, which suited Rhia well. It was her job to refer to his annotated drawings, which told her into which family or category a specimen fell, and then to label a compartment in a box for it. It was extremely useful that she recognised many of the more common plants and herbs from Culpeper’s. She only occasionally managed to match foreign medicinal herbs to Mr Reeve’s terrible drawings. She sometimes had to ask him to confirm that the specimen she was looking at was the same plant he had illustrated.

  She did much of her work kneeling on the rough wooden floor, bent over spiky seed pods and wands of feathery, paperthin leaves. Today, there were dried Michaela’s daisies from America and there was frangipani from Tahiti, as well as henbane and burdock and feverfew. She found it easier to work on the floor, now, and to feel the swelling and falling of the waves beneath her. She did not trust the furniture. She’d been thrown from her bench in the orlop too many times, everyone had. By the end of an afternoon with Mr Reeve, her knees were always cramped and her back aching.

  After an hour or so she straightened and stretched. She caught him watching her again. He looked back down at his book, quickly. She knew he must wonder about her crime and her past, but she doubted that he would ever have the nerve to ask her outright.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about botanicals, Mahoney.’

  She shrugged. ‘I like to find patterns in nature, and I like to know the name of what I’m looking at.’

  ‘But to what ends? What use could such knowledge possibly be to …’

  ‘To a woman?’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes indeed!’

  ‘I don’t mean to shock you, Mr Reeve, but the female mind is capable of more than counting stitches and weaning babes.’

  ‘I don’t expect that you are a conventional woman, Mahoney.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that!’ She had Mamo to thank, really. Mr Reeve looked shocked, which was gratifying. It silenced him for the rest of the afternoon.

  Rhia usually had a few minutes to spare before she was due in the mess for supper. There was a secluded corner in a ’tween decks cranny where, through a vent called a scuttle, she could see part of the main deck and a narrow strip of ocean. It was manageable, this much sea. As they held their course south, there were more daylight hours, and she began to notice how the seascape she had thought so monotonous was, in fact, constantly changing. Sometimes it looked as dirty and lifeless as the Liffey on a winter’s day, and at others like a giant looking-glass reflecting the sky and the clouds. On some days its curves and frills were seductive, and on others there were ridges of water, serrated and menacing. The sea had a mean glint today, so after her first sighting Rhia did not look at it again. In the stories of Manannán, ships that disappeared in storms drifted to the enchanted or haunted islands of the Otherworld.

  Rhia turned her back on Manannán and saw Albert’s frayed breeches emerge through a hatch to the upper deck. She called to him as loud as she dared. He jumped from the stairs to the deck, lightly, and was in front of her, beaming, in a moment.

  ‘I see you’ve found my hideaway, Mahoney.’

  ‘Yours! I thought it was my hideaway.’

  ‘Ye’ll see that me tobacco tin’s here.’ Albert reached into a dark knot in the timbers and pulled it out. ‘Like a smoke?’

  ‘Another time. I’ll be late.’ She hesitated, even though she’d made her decision. ‘Albert. I’ve a favour to ask.’

  He shrugged. ‘Let’s ’ave it.’

  ‘Do you know the passenger Laurence Blake?’

  ‘Wit
h the haystack?’ He gestured to his hair. ‘The one who puts parchment out on deck in the sun?’

  ‘That’s almost certainly him. Would you give him a message from me?’

  Albert’s smile broadened. She knew what he was thinking.

  ‘Tell Mr Blake where my cabin is.’

  His eyes filled with mischief.

  ‘You needn’t think it’s anything – there is nothing – I mean, Mr Blake is a friend. As it happens, I knew him before I was – I knew him in London. I need to speak with him. It’s important.’

  ‘Sure it is,’ Albert said, his grin widening. Rhia didn’t care what he thought. Albert mock-bowed, and swaggered away, whistling.

  Valetine

  Jane and Georgina were laying the table, sullenly, the clang of pewter bowls being slammed down signalled that all was not well between them. Georgina was scowling and periodically scratching her hair beneath her cap. The two had almost come to blows on the quarterdeck over head lice.

  ‘It only takes one itching head to send the little beasties stomping through every scalp,’ Jane was saying, so if you don’t drown them in vinegar I’ll tip a bottle over you with pleasure. Otherwise I’ll ask Matron to shave your head.’ Georgina burst into tears and threw herself onto her hammock.

  Supper was dried biscuits, pea soup and suet pudding. Already the fresh food was being used sparingly, and they were still ten days off Rio. Albert said they would take on fresh water, fruit and meat, rum, tobacco and Portuguese wine – all the essential stocks – when they docked.

  The best thing about supper was not the gritty suet pudding, which occasionally had a little molasses in it, but the ration of wine. It was the cheapest, the roughest imaginable, and was served in a dented pewter tankard, but it may as well have been the best claret in the world. It shortened the shadows and sweetened tempers.

  After supper two lanterns were lit and placed at either end of the table, in order that the women could sit and read the scriptures. No one was allowed to light a lantern or a taper without a warden present, and – as yet – no one yet had broken this rule. There was no means of knowing what punishment dissenters could expect to face. However, it was known that Agnes was a whisker away from a flogging. There were irons chained to the timbers in a certain dark corner where the bilge water leaked into a cupboard of a cell, large enough only for a person to crouch in. The wardens’ favourite threat was being added to the surgeon superintendent’s list. Nobody had a clue who was on the list, or what offences were considered suitably grave to deserve being listed. How would the theft of two tapers, a flint and some matches be looked upon? Rhia had slipped them into her apron pocket whilst a quarrel was in progress. She was a convicted thief, so what difference did it make?