Far From Botany Bay

by Rosa Jordan

  “Do you imagine that I can’t tell a good man from a bad one?” Mary retorted. “As a child I knew that much.”

  It was true. Those years she’d spent on shipboard had taught her that there were some crew members who had a look in their eye of wanting something—what she didn’t know—but something they had no right to ask and she was sure she did not want to give. Even before they tried for a whiskery kiss on her mouth, she learned to keep her distance from them, no matter what treats they offered.

  “I know ye’ve not been courted,” said Silas, “and when ye are, by the seat of me britches, it’ll not be by the likes of that one yonder.”

  Mary said no more, but handed over the soup and started back along the path. At the rim of the hill she stopped and looked back at the likes of that one yonder. She couldn’t see his face, only the top of his hat. He was standing with one foot up, his long legs wide apart.

  She considered how peculiar it was that men, whose private parts hang out, so often sit or stand like that, their crotch exposed to the world but for a covering bit of cloth, while women, with everything tucked neatly inside, conceal what little there is to see with layers upon flared-out layers. She stopped on the other side of the ridge and put one foot up on a rock, cocking her leg the way men do, to get the feel of what it was like to have the most tender part of her body so exposed. It was a cool, free feeling, yet a troubling one. It took, she deemed, greater confidence than most women have to sit or stand in such a vulnerable way. Perhaps it was a matter of size. If she had six feet of hardened muscles like that man down at the boat, maybe she could stand with her legs apart without fearing molestation.

  Mary took her foot off the rock and walked on down the path, for it wasn’t a fantasy worth cultivating. Her imagination ran to daydreams which, although improbable, were at least in the realm of possibility. She would fantasize doing some favour for a wealthy person who, in gratitude, would give her enough money to make life easy for her parents in their old age. Or she would dream of meeting and marrying a local lad who would love her company as much as her parents loved each other’s. Or she would catch the eye of a ship’s captain who would take her, in marriage or not, on all his distant voyages.

  Mary’s fantasies about men had little basis, for during her teens she met very few. The nearest she had come to being courted was an exchange of bashful glances with the vicar’s son in church, when the rest of the congregation’s heads were bowed in prayer. All of her twenty years had been spent under the watchful eyes of one or both of her parents. That, of course, would change after her father sailed his boat into the storm and was never seen again.

  She and Grace could not survive on garden vegetables alone, although her mother’s thinness, Mary suspected, came as much from grief as from being half-starved. Mary sought work and found it, cleaning up a doctor’s operating room. Poorly paid and disgusting work it was, but at least the hours were good. The doctor only did surgery in the mornings, so she was home each day well before dark. She would return bone tired from scrubbing, but what a pleasure it was to see the thatch of the cottage, golden in afternoon light, and to find her mother crouched among the greenery of her garden. Mary would drop onto a wooden bench by the door, and tell Grace of the day’s events.

  “’Twas a body we had to move today,” Mary said. “Mrs. Crumb. Her heart stopped when he took the knife to her tumour. Seemed like no one, not the doctor nor her kin, really cared.”

  Mary was silent a moment, then continued. “They say God takes care for every one of us, but I’d swear He took no notice of Mrs. Crumb. I wonder if the Greeks and Romans might have been right about Them Up There being so busy with their own affairs that they scarce notice humans unless one gets in the way?”

  Grace said nothing, but sat there in the garden, stroking the sun-warmed earth as if it was a living thing.

  “Aye, Mother, get your hands out of the dirt!” Mary exclaimed.

  “Why?” asked Grace, wiggling a hand into the soil until it was covered up to the wrist. “’Tis the body of God.”

  Mary’s lips parted in surprise, for her mother read the Bible daily. Mary could not recall her ever saying an unconventional thing about religion.

  “Earth? The body of God?”

  “Why not?” Grace asked, looking off into the distance. “Don’t they say we will all be taken to His bosom, and become one with Him? And aren’t we put into the earth, and don’t we become part of it?”

  “Taken to His bosom, yes—” Mary began, but her mother interrupted.

  “Sure and it can’t be a bosom like yours or mine, not if it’s to hold all the good folks that ever lived.” Grace chuckled, for between her and Mary, the smallness of their breasts was a teasing matter.

  A kind of fear, rising, perhaps, out of having seen death earlier that day, kept Mary from laughing at the joke. “Call the earth God if you like,” she retorted. “But to see you put your hand in the dirt and talk of becoming part of it gives me no comfort.”

  Grace’s reply was stern. “Only children who die young have the comfort of parents to the end of their life. I’d not wish that on either of us.”

  “The least you could do is comfort me while you live,” Mary pouted, tears unexpectedly forming in her eyes.

  Grace’s voice softened a little. “That’s what I’m trying to do, Daughter. I’m speaking to you now of when I’ll not be here, because it won’t be long, and you must get used to the notion.”

  Mary, not a whiner by nature, but because she was so tired, began to bawl like a baby.

  Grace lay back between the rows and gazed up at the sky. “I shan’t mind. The earth is bountiful and the earth is God, and I shall be alive there, one way or another.”

  “What about Father?” Mary choked. “He went down at sea.”

  Grace, her face framed by potato plants, shrugged her thin shoulders, still flat upon the ground. “It comes to the same thing. Have you never noticed how sand and sea rush into each other’s embrace and churn up together into something that’s neither one or the other? As did your father and I, he smelling of sea and I of earth.” Grace lay there a moment longer, watching clouds move across the sky. Then she lifted a dirt-soiled hand, and said, “Come, child. Stop your sniffling. Help me up, and let’s go put together a bite to eat.”

  Mary grasped her mother’s hand and pulled her to her feet. There was something frighteningly insubstantial in Grace’s lightness, as if her bones were hollow, like the bones of a bird. Grace stood there, wavering unsteadily, until Mary put an arm around her waist and walked her to the house.

  *

  That conversation occurred on the last sunny day of fall. Before winter was full on them, Mary knew what Grace knew: that her mother was dying. What surprised them both was how long it took.

  Mary could not stay home to nurse her mother for, without her pittance of a salary, they surely would have starved. She would stoke the fire before she left, and would hurry home after work, only to find it gone out and the cottage icy because Grace was too weak to keep it going. The woman who had never complained now always complained of the cold.

  One morning Mary found it particularly difficult to leave, for her mother continued to shiver even with the fire ablaze. At the door, Mary hesitated. “Shall I stay home today?”

  “No. I’m tired. I rest better when I’m alone.”

  “I’m just afraid—” Mary began, but dared not put into words what she feared.

  “I’m trying,” Grace said, as if reading her mind, “to hold on till spring when the ground gets warm. Just now it’s so cold. And I’ve no cloak for you to wrap me in.”

  Mary came back and stood over the bed. Grace looked up at her, questioningly. “You shall have a cloak,” the girl said fiercely. “The warmest cloak in Cornwall!”

  Then she went out and up the hill to the road. It was a grey mor
ning, the thatch of their cottage grey, the smoke rising from the chimney, the frozen grey field fringed with black rocks that divided it from the sea, itself countless shades of grey. It was like a painting done in charcoal; soft-edged, with no colour brighter than that of smoke and steely dark water.

  Mary had a sudden sense that, inside the cottage, her mother was already dead and turning grey. She felt an urge to rush back. But she was a sensible girl not given to impulsive

  behaviour—not yet. She set her foot hard on the road and walked in the direction of town. For that decision, right or wrong, Mary would never know whether her mother had died that moment or much later, waiting for a daughter who would not return.

  Mary walked quickly, head filled with thoughts of how she would get a cloak this very day. She would go to the store, buy the fabric on credit, and by the evening fire she would cut and stitch it, working all night if need be. If the merchant refused her, she would go to a seamstress, and promise to pay whatever she asked, week by week as her salary allowed.

  But Mary would do neither. Unbeknownst to her, something was about to break. It was as if since birth she had been attached to one end of a rope by which her mother pulled her, hand over hand, through infancy and youth to the crest of womanhood. In that high place Mary had expected to find a broad, smooth path to follow. But just as she was about to set her foot there, the rope, which

  perhaps never had been more than a thread, would snap. Mary Broad would fall, not back into childhood but into a chasm deeper than the ocean. She could swim, climb, save herself. But not for a very long time. Not until the falling stopped.

  It was a busy morning in the surgery and then, in the afternoon, when she would normally have started the cleaning, the doctor undertook an amputation which left the room splattered with blood. It took two hours to clean up afterwards, with hands which were soon half-frozen, for the water she carried from the well was bitter cold.

  She was fetching water when a coach pulled up, discharging a lady whose face she did not see. Mary only glimpsed the coachman, very grand, as he climbed down to open the door of the coach. Mary entered the surgery by the back way as the lady entered the waiting room by the front door. She heard the doctor say, “Just let me take that, Mrs. Trump. If you’ll step this way, into my office?”

  The lady fluttered words of thanks and must have handed him her wrap for, through the doorway that joined the rooms, Mary saw the doctor’s hand as it hung the cloak on the waiting room rack. Their voices moved away from her and were silenced when the door into the doctor’s private office clicked shut.

  Mary finished the floor, which was always the last of the scrubbing. She would have to hurry to see the merchant and, at that, would be late getting home. A vision of her mother’s uncontrollable shivering gripped her and she, with her aching cold hands, began to shiver too.

  She stepped to the door of the waiting room. “I’ll be going now, Sir,” she said into the empty room. It was merely habit, this announcing her daily departure, for the doctor, still sequestered with the lady, could no more hear Mary’s voice than she could hear his.

  Her foot nudged something soft. She looked down and saw that the lady’s mauve cloak had fallen to the floor. She bent to pick it up, intending to hang it back on the peg. But as her hands sank into its softness, something in her went wild, perhaps in the same way some wild thing had taken hold of her father that night in the pub, to do a thing not in his nature and never done before.

  Mary did not notice the pink silk bonnet attached, nor concern herself with what weighted the pocket. All she felt, all she knew, all she wanted, was the warmth of the cloak. Swiftly she bundled it under her shawl. Holding the wrap tight against her belly as a woman might hold an unborn child, she fled out the side door of the surgery.

  She cut across the lot to a narrow alley behind a row of shops already beginning to close. Because she was running, and because her head was down, she did not see the coachman until his crop came down with a slash and barred her way.

  The thread had broken; the fall had begun.

  *

  Mary cared not what dank floor she lay upon, so great were the pains in her face and private parts. Nor could she imagine, when she opened her eyes, what hell this was. What she saw in the gloom above her were the faces of women she had never seen before.

  “They’ve had their way with ‘er, all right,” said a voice as deep as a man’s.

  “Musta been a virgin. Ain’t she bleedin’ like a stuck hog!” said a frail girl who could not have been more than fourteen.

  The deep-voiced woman jabbed a finger into the ribs of the girl. “Lend a hand, you simperin’ tart. Pull up her skirt so’s it don’t get soaked.”

  Mary felt her hips being lifted and her skirt tugged above her buttocks. She opened her mouth to speak, but it hurt so much she merely moaned.

  “Must’ve given them some backtalk, to’ve been beat about the face so,” said a third woman, with frizzy red-orange curls matted around her face.

  “Country girl,” said the deep voice. “Wouldn’t know any better.”

  The red-haired woman lifted Mary’s head into her lap. “I’m called Colleen,” she announced in a lilting Irish brogue. “What’re you in for, lass?”

  “Thieving,” Mary whispered, through swollen lips.

  “Me, I got caught with my Johnny and our bunch, freedom fighters, you know.”

  Colleen motioned to the teenaged waif. “Florie there tried her hand at whoring.” She jerked her chin at the deep-voiced woman. “Cass claims all that and murder to boot.”

  “Murder?” Mary’s body spasmed with fright.

  “Murder and more,” Cass bragged. “If there’s a crime I’ve not committed, I ain’t heard of it yet. Me family’s been highwaymen and the like for ten generations. Lie still, girl, so’s I can wipe you up.”

  As she spoke, the older woman’s hands moved between Mary’s legs like a nurse’s, wiping away the blood. “Gad, but you are a mess!”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Mary said. “I had the cloak in my arms, and then the men . . . .” She stopped. Although she knew there had been men, many men, and many questions, she could not clearly recall anything beyond the face of the coachman. “I don’t remember.”

  “Lucky you,” growled Cass.

  Mary turned her head and saw a fourth woman, slender, almost pretty, leaning against the bars. Florie saw the direction of her gaze and said, “That’s Grace. She stole some ribbon from the millinery where she worked.”

  “My mother’s name was Grace,” said Mary. She was unaware of having used the past tense, yet she used it naturally, either because she had sensed her mother’s passing that grey morning, or because she wanted it to be true; wanted her to have died before someone came next day to explain why her daughter had not returned.

  Although she had never been in a court of law before and many words were unfamiliar, Mary understood well enough what was said. The things she had stolen were described in detail and held up for display. “Valued at eleven pounds, eleven and sixpence,” the prosecutor said. He portrayed Mary as a vain and greedy girl, a menace to society in general and to England’s gentlewomen in particular.

  Mary listened curiously, as if they spoke of a stranger. She herself had never given a fig for fashion. She believed, like her mother, that it was the durability of a garment that counted, with some consideration for softness against the skin when one had the luxury, as they had rarely ever had, of choosing. All that mattered by way of style was that its design didn’t hamper the job at hand.

  Once, as a child during their days at sea, Mary had begged her mother to make her trousers so she could learn to climb the mast. Silas thought it would do no harm but Grace had refused. “No harm to Mary perhaps, but to see my child high on a swaying mast would make me faint away!” Grace claimed. “What can’t be done i
n a simple dress I’ll not have my little girl doing.” And so it was. The only exception was allowing the child to strip down to her underwear to learn to swim; that being permitted because her mother feared her falling overboard and wanted to be sure she could stay afloat until someone came to the rescue.

  As Mary sat thinking of the kind of clothing she had never had and never wanted, she heard, in another part of her mind, the judge’s words, “ . . . on this 20th day of March, 1786, Mary Broad be sentenced to hang.” He asked if there was anything she would like to say, anyone’s pardon she would like to ask, before being taken to the gallows.

  Mary stood, looked up at the judge, and said in a low, clear voice, “I never noticed the bonnet, nor what was in the pockets. ‘Twas the cloak I wanted, not for myself but for my mother, who was always cold.”

  Someone whispered something to the judge. He looked sternly down at Mary and said, “Your mother is dead. It was your wicked deed, perhaps, that sent her to the grave.”

  Mary’s eyes locked his, measuring the truth of his words. They were, she decided, only half-true, for if her mother had not died that morning after Mary had left, in that moment when she had felt the world turn grey, then Grace would surely have died in the freezing night when no one returned to light the fire. In either case, she would have died alone, and cold. Mary bowed her head and said, “Truly, I deserve to hang.”

  The judge had sat too long in judgement of others to be taken in by remorse which in reality was merely evil-doers’ tears for their own lives, which they were about to lose. But he noted that the condemned girl was six weeks short of her twenty-first birthday. He fancied himself a Christian, and had a Christian’s belief in the possibility of redemption for those who genuinely repented their misdeeds. Rarely had the judge felt himself in the presence of such soul-deep remorse. He ordered Mary Broad returned to her cell.

  The judge was no fool, but neither was he clairvoyant. He had no way of knowing that Mary’s remorse was not for having stolen the cloak, but for having failed to bring its soft warmth to her mother before she died.