by Maeve Friel
The days of the sessions finally arrived. An eerie calm descended on the prisoners, as they contemplated a fate even worse than the one they shared in their cells. One morning they woke to the sound of hammering and knew that the gallows was being erected nearby. The sound affected the men in different ways. A reckless sort of cheerfulness broke out among some of them. ‘It’s the morning drop for all of us,’ they joked, ‘the last great leap in the dark.’ Others threw themselves to their knees and prayed, declaring that they would put the wickedness of their lives behind them if only they were spared.
William and Annie saw each other again for the first time in weeks when they were shepherded into the dock on the last morning of the sessions. The courtroom was crowded and bewildering. There was a constant to-ing and fro-ing of criminals and nervous witnesses in front of the high bench. A trio of grave, stony-faced judges, like balding crows in black gowns and powdered wigs, handed down their judgments. Weasel-faced lawyers came in and out, brandishing long pieces of paper; white-stockinged ushers guarded the doors; clerks at sloping desks wrote furiously, scattering droplets of ink in all directions. Above them all, a sea of spectators looked down from the gallery, like an audience at the theatre who were determined to enjoy the matinee. They passed food to one another, they smoked, they gasped with indignation as the roll call of crimes was read out, they laughed, they were moved to tears.
William and Annie stood, side by side, waiting for their names to be called. From time to time, William reached out and touched Annie’s sleeve. A sergeant-at-arms stood beside them, tapping his truncheon in the palm of his left hand.
‘William and Anne Spears, formerly of 2, Tanners’ Cottages, Lower Corve St., Ludlow, in the County of Shropshire: Anne Spears, you are accused of the theft of silver plate, cutlery, food and other items to the value of five guineas from Dinham House, Ludlow, the property of Lord Powis, at present tenanted by Lucien Bonaparte.’ The crowd in the gallery drew in their breath at the name of the old enemy and looked down with renewed interest at the children in the dock. ‘In addition you are accused of absconding when placed under arrest.
‘William Spears, you are accused of the theft of two gold sovereigns, the property of Abraham Smart, hatter, of Quality Square, Ludlow and of aiding and abetting Anne Spears in escape. Is there anyone in the court to speak for you?’
Annie looked around, hoping that even at this late stage some miracle would happen, that someone would explain that it had all been a mistake, but no friendly face emerged from the crowd. The judges bent towards one another to confer.
‘These are grave offences, hanging offences,’ said the principal judge at last. The gallery grew still. ‘All the worse for being carried out by ones so young and so brazen. I am determined to rid this county once and for all of those criminals who would contaminate, if they could, all decent God-fearing working people. They are like bad apples that must be thrown out before their rottenness spreads to the good apples next to them.
‘You both, William and Anne Spears, were given every opportunity to improve your station in life with your own labour but you chose to throw those opportunities away, to steal from your employers, to provoke violence, then to run away and evade the law. It is as clear as daylight to me and to any honest citizen that you have inherited your father’s wicked character. Furthermore, your cowardly flight from the law has been a great expense upon the public purse. I therefore sentence you, William Spears and Anne Spears, to be taken,’ (the crowd gasped, anticipating the worst), ‘taken from here to the port of Portsmouth, and from there to be transported across the seas on the next convict ship bound for Australia, each to remain for seven years.’
The hard edges of the court-room dissolved into a haze of moving shapes and figures. Mouths babbled words she could not understand. She could hear the blood roaring in her ears. Her heart was breaking, splintering into a million pieces. Annie looked at William and saw that he was trembling. His face was as white as a sheet but he turned towards her.
‘Don’t worry, Annie, I will be with you,’ he said.
Chapter 14
From Shrewsbury, prisoners were taken to the hulks at Portsmouth to wait for the ship that was to carry them into exile. From start to finish the journey was atrocious. They travelled down to the coast in open carts with their legs shackled together and their arms tied. They were given no food or water unless they had money of their own to buy it at the inns where the carts stopped to change their horses. Although it was early June, the weather was cool and at night-time the temperature dropped still further. William and Annie had nothing but the clothes they had been wearing since the day they had fled from Ludlow.
The sad procession made its way through the English countryside, the men in one cart, the women in another. Worst of all was when they had to pass through a village or town, for then the people would come out of their houses to gawp at them and shout good riddance. Annie felt even more ashamed and despised than before and buried her head in her hands so that nobody would see her tears.
Molly Llewellyn, who had also been sentenced to transportation, spent the entire journey staring into space. She was dazed with grief and had spoken to nobody since an overseer had come to the prison and taken away her baby son. He was to be put in the parish workhouse at Shrewsbury. Molly knew she would probably never see the child again even if she ever managed to return to England when her four years were up, for she feared the poor mite would soon die of neglect. Another woman on the same cart bought gin at the coaching-house and gave Molly sips of it to deaden her pain.
At Portsmouth, they were herded on to the hulks, the foul rotting battle-ships anchored offshore that were a temporary prison for the hundreds of ragged and starving-looking convicts waiting to be taken to Australia. If Shrewsbury prison had been bad, life on board the hulks was indescribable. The air below deck was so stale and foul it made you gag. Every square inch of the ship was soaking wet, even the hammocks and bedding, and the whole place was so overcrowded it was like living in a nest of rats. The sea-water thumped and slapped against the side of the ship. It creaked and groaned and rolled, straining at the rusty anchor. Annie had never seen the sea before – it terrified her, all that greygreen energy heaving and rolling and stretching as far as she could see. When Sam had described it to her, she had imagined it would be as still as a mill pond. The thought of spending six months tossing around on it, beyond all sight of land, made her weak with fear.
A red-headed man with huge calloused hands had set up as a barber, shaving the heads of the newcomers to the hulks. He stood up to his ankles in his clippings, strands and curls of red, brown, black, and blond hair plastered to the wet boards of the deck. Everything about him was brutal. He roughly seized Annie’s long blonde hair and chopped it off – she heard later that he kept the longer lengths of women’s hair to sell to wigmakers – then clipped the rest almost to the scalp. Smarting with pain and humiliation, she was pushed to the back of another long queue which was shuffling slowly towards a table at the farthest end of the deck where the quartermaster was handing out clothes. Annie had to give up her red cape and received instead the convict’s issue, a rough-spun grey striped jacket, a hideous thin petticoat-dress, stockings and a pair of shoes that were far too big. William was heart-broken when they took away his black silk top hat.
‘Can I have it back when we dock at Sydney?’ he asked.
The quartermaster laughed in his face. ‘You’ll have no call for a hat where you’re going, my lad,’ he said.
After that, they were shackled again, ‘to stop you thinking of swimming to the shore,’ the guards told the new arrivals. One of the sailors tied a huge iron ball to Annie’s right ankle. It was so heavy, fourteen pounds, and so clumsy that she could hardly walk, but had to drag her leg along the deck, with the iron band biting into her flesh. Grown men, with three times the strength of Annie, had less harsh irons, but they had the money to pay the bribes, and William and Annie had none. There was a black market
in everything, and everything had its price, from ‘easement of irons’ to pokes of tobacco, white loaves or shoes that fitted.
Without any money, William thought, as he lay on a stinking hammock that first night and struggled to hold down his nausea, they were as good as dead. He had been warned by other prisoners who had been there longer that the government rations that they were supposed to receive were never enough. Everyone from the captain and his officers to the cook and the Portsmouth tradesmen was on the make. They each took a cut to sell: Annie and William would be lucky to get more than a lump of bread or a maggoty slice of fatty bacon. William’s silk hat and Annie’s fine red cape were pawned by the quartermaster the very same night.
For three weeks they waited for the transport ship and they worked. Each morning the prisoners were rowed out to the shore to stand in chain gangs and work in the dockyards, breaking up and shovelling coal. They were wet and cold and hungry and always in fear of a flogging. Not a day passed but someone was flogged, tied to the whipping post and beaten almost to the bone, and for no reason other than to keep the whole colony in a state of terror and submission. Proud men and women were reduced to quivering wrecks who dared not look an officer in the eye for fear of giving offence.
At night, in the cover of darkness in their stinking dormitories, Annie and William listened to their companions’ stories. Some of these men and women claimed they were innocent of any crimes; some were guilty and repentant; others were plainly evil, and some were just so poor that they had broken laws they could not understand. Hunger had driven a man to dig up cucumbers and cabbages from a kitchen garden on the estate of his landlord. A thirteen-year-old orphan girl had stolen a cloak from a teashop. A weaver was accused of organising his workmates into a trade union and ‘administering illegal oaths’. All of these were to be transported under the same rules as a violent slitthroat who had killed three women and left three more for dead.
Right to the last day of these forlorn weeks, there were prisoners who still hoped for a last-minute pardon. They wrote letters (or William wrote for them, earning a few pence or some extra food for his trouble). They urged their families to send petitions to the home secretary, even to the King himself. They begged their local magistrates, or their vicar, sometimes a local duke or landowner, to give them references. Little of this did any good but still the convicts would not give up hope that a word in the right ear or a sum of money placed in the right hand would secure their release. Like drowning men clutching at clumps of seaweed, they held on fast to their conviction that a pardon would come before the ship weighed anchor and sailed out of the harbour.
William wrote too, on his own behalf, not asking for a pardon, but pleading that he and his sister should be allowed to travel together on the same ship and that they should be kept as near as possible to each other on their arrival in Australia. ‘And,’ he wrote, ‘I most humbly and fervently ask if it is possible to have news of the whereabouts of my father, John Spears. We have had no news for over four years. If it is possible, I should like him to know that my sister Annie and I are to be sent shortly to Australia and he should also be told that his wife, Kezia, and youngest daughter Elizabeth, are both dead, perished in a fire at their home in Ludlow in the county of Salop.’
When no reply came to this letter, William would not let Annie out of his sight but came, dragging his painful iron ball behind him, to find her every night when he was brought back on to the hulk after his long, arduous labour on the docks.
‘You must stay near me all the time now, Annie, so that they will not send us on different ships.’
Annie’s eyes opened wide with horror. ‘Can they do that? Oh William, I am so afraid. I could not bear the thought of being alone out on the sea.’
At last, one morning in June, a rumour spread that a transport ship had already left the docks at London and was expected to arrive at Portsmouth to pick up its final contingent of prisoners. The bay draft, the list of people to be shipped aboard the Dunlavin, was read out, one hundred and eighty in all. William and Annie’s names were on it. They were going but at least they were going together.
The news that the Dunlavin was shortly to sail spread like wildfire. Each morning brought more grief-stricken relatives and friends to the quays to take their last farewells. They stood weeping at the dockside, holding up babies, hollering messages, pleading or bribing the steward to be allowed to board the ship to say a last good bye. Some had brought tools – axes and hammers for carpenters, anvils for shoemakers, needles, threads, scissors and tapes for seamstresses – hoping one day their relative would be free to earn the passage back to England.
The holds had already been loaded up at the London docks. The ship had to carry enough provisions for the entire journey as well as all the special orders for the colony, which was still a country without shops or factories, where all sorts of goods had to be brought from fifteen thousand miles away. (The first fleet had landed in Australia only twenty-three years earlier in 1788.) There were crates of glassware for the governor’s house, bales of woollen cloth and mattress ticking, rolls of carpet, boxes of nails, saws, shovels, hammers, writing paper, an entire blacksmith’s forge, cases of Scotch whisky, fishing-line and hooks, four spinning wheels.
Once the Portsmouth batch of convicts were on board, it only remained for the last items of cargo to be laden and the ship would be ready to leave. All day long, the level of noise, the hammering and banging, the slamming of hatches, the barking of orders, drowned out the exiles’ farewells. Cattle, crowded into dockside pens, bellowed with anxiety. A tethered ram pawed the ground or smashed his horns against the post where he was tied. Geese corralled into cages hissed and screeched and a pair of Gloucester Old Spots squealed as if their throats were being cut as the sailors hoisted them up on board ship in swaying slings. The stench, already overpowering, grew worse and worse as the frightened animals steamed and sweated in the hot afternoon sun.
The convicts had been put in irons below deck while the ship lay in the dock. Annie and William heard the commotion but saw none of it. Their hearts were sick with loneliness.
Late in the afternoon, a young man and a smaller child pushed their way through the jostling throng, stopped at the foot of the gang-plank and spoke to the armed guards. The older of the two pointed repeatedly at a piece of paper he held in his hand. The child sat down on a stone bollard and watched the sailors climbing the rigging. One of the guards came on board, and approached an officer. He strode off towards the steward’s berth. The steward, Thomas Everett, came out on to the deck.
‘Midshipman, bring up Annie and William Spears from below,’ he roared at the sentry.
The prisoners’ quarters lay behind a row of iron bars as thick as a man’s wrist. One narrow door was set into this, so low and so tight that a stout man could hardly have squeezed through. The berths were in two rows, each of two tiers, each berth ‘home’ for four people for the entire journey though it was hardly six feet square. The air was thick and foul, like the stench of rotten potatoes, for the hatches were kept shut and padlocked even on that summery English day. The guard called out Annie’s and William’s names.
Dear God, thought William, are we to be freed?
They climbed down to the gangway between the rows of berths, their hearts in their mouths at being singled out like that. Envious eyes watched them as the guard released their irons. Annie and William stole a glance at one another. They could hardly bear to think what might happen to them now and the guard gave no hint as he led them up the steps to Steward Everett’s berth.
The door was open. Two figures stood with their backs to them. As the guard pushed William and Annie into the room, the figures turned and there were two faces neither had ever expected to see again: Sam Price and Arthur, the footman from Dinham.
Neither William nor Annie dared move for fear the steward or the guard would lash out at them; both were instantly engulfed by shame on account of their shaved heads and their convicts’ uniforms. A
rthur and Sam did not hesitate. They wrapped their arms around them both.
‘I had to bring you these,’ said Arthur, handing William a bundle of long slim envelopes all tied up together with an old piece of leather string and smeared with dirt and greasy spots. The top envelope was addressed to Mrs Kezia Spears, in John Spears’ large sloping hand-writing.
‘What are they, Arthur?’ asked William. ‘How did you come to have them?’
‘They are all letters from your father, dating back for years. Leonard Evans gave them to me and told me to make sure you had them before the ship sailed. He was too ashamed to make the journey here himself.’
‘Evans?’
‘Yes, it seems he has had them for a long time,’ Arthur explained. ‘The top one came on the mail-coach the very day your mother died.’ He was truly shocked at how poorly the children looked but tried to keep his voice steady. The long months of imprisonment and daily threats of violence seemed to have nearly broken their spirit. ‘Evans says he didn’t want your mother to be upset by them. He thought she should try to forget your father and make a new life for herself.’
‘Yes, that is true,’ said William, ‘for he always used to tell her she would never see our father again.’
‘The wicked, wicked man,’ said Sam Price.
‘And poor mother never knew he had been writing to her all the time,’ said Annie, close to tears.
‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘and then when she died, Evans could not bring himself to admit how he had deceived you all. He hid the letters in a desk and put them out of his mind until a few weeks ago when Abraham Smart came to see him and he confessed what he had done. The hatter did his best, William, pleading with Evans to help get a pardon for you both. He wanted the authorities to let you both work out your sentences here but nobody paid him any heed for, as you know, they all say the poor man is mad. He has taken the whole affair very badly; he never wanted to see your life ruined for the sake of two sovereigns. “Tell Wills I wish him well,” he said, “I know he never meant to rob me.”’
