by Rosa Jordan
“Don’t,” Will gasped. “Not again. I’d rather die.”
“And die ye will, or take forever to heal,” Matey said with no show of sympathy for the agonising pain which he himself had felt more than once.
“Matey knows about healing,” Pip reminded them. “Remember the good he did for Johnny.”
“Right,” said Luke, “and he’s done all the good that’s needed for now. Get out and let the poor devil rest.”
Matey marched off, mumbling about snivellers. Luke, Pip, and Scrapper went, too, but Bados lingered by the door. When the others were out of earshot, Bados said to Mary, “The blacks have something they use for cuts—crushed leaves, and what else I can’t say. But Baneelon would know.”
“Go talk to her,” Cass urged Mary. “I’ll sit with Will till ye get back.”
“Where’s Charlotte?” Florie asked.
“James took her,” Mary said, distracted. “I don’t know where they went.”
“I’ll find them,” Colleen said. “And I’ll give Charlotte supper and keep her with me tonight, so she’ll not be upset by his cries.”
Mary stumbled out of the house then, away from Will’s agonising moans, which she herself could hardly bear.
She searched for over an hour but never found the aboriginal woman who had been brought to the colony, with her brother Bennelong, to live. However, she came upon another native woman down among the rocks, cracking shellfish for her three children. Because Will and Mary’s cabin was near the edge of the forest, they saw the aborigines often, even those who were shy about coming into the settlement. The natives’ shyness had not lessened with the passage of time, for many had fallen ill and died of diseases brought by the Europeans, against which they had no natural tolerance. When the naked woman saw Mary coming, she made as if to leave.
“Wait!” Mary cried. “Please! Help me!”
Although some of the natives understood a few words of English, it was most likely Mary’s tone that stayed the woman when she so obviously wanted to run away.
“They’ve taken the cat-o-nine to Will. Whipped him bad, they did! I need your help!” It occurred to Mary as she said it that she must have been mad to ask for aid from this wild black woman who spoke no English.
To her astonishment, the woman understood. She picked up a stick and pretended to whip the back of her little boy, then opened her mouth in something like a howl of pain.
Mary swallowed her amazement and nodded. “Yes, they whipped him like that.”
The woman’s eldest boy pointed across the bay. Mary came to where he stood and saw that from there the settlement’s main square was distant but visible, as was the now-empty triangle where Will had been whipped.
Mary grasped a handful of leaves from a bush and began rubbing them on the back of the child whom the woman had pretended to whip. The woman gave her a gap-toothed smile, shook her head vigorously and took off at a trot that left Mary trailing behind, barely keeping up. At last the long-limbed black woman came upon a tree. She said something to the boy in her own language. He climbed the tree with remarkable agility and began picking leaves. His mother shouted something up to him and he moved further out onto the branch—dangerously far out, Mary thought—to reach for new leaves. He dropped them as he picked. The two smaller children raced about collecting and bringing them to their mother. At last the woman called her child down, and began walking swiftly in the direction of her camp.
Mary tried to follow, but the woman shook her head and pointed in the opposite direction, toward Mary’s house. Mary made as if to take the leaves. At this the woman made a frightful face. Forceful words in her own language made it clear that Mary was not to follow. Mary hurried home through the tangled, brushy woods, praying that this woman, whom she understood so poorly, had at least comprehended what she was asking, and would not simply wander off and forget their whole exchange.
It was hours later, well after dark, when the woman appeared. She did not knock but walked into the hut as if it were her own. She carried a large shell filled with a stinking, dark green paste. She squatted beside Will and smeared the foul mixture over lash marks that had turned his smooth tanned skin into raw meat. When the woman was done, she gave Mary another of her gap-toothed smiles. She fingered a few objects, one being the comb that Will had had made for Mary. Mary closed the woman’s hand around it, indicating that she should have it. She seemed pleased with the gift, but a moment later dropped it on the floor and pointed to a wooden bowl. Mary handed her the bowl. The woman took it and went away.
Will slept little that night, and Mary, not at all, although she surely would have tried had she been able to foresee the day that awaited her.
It began at sunrise with a thunderous banging on the door. Will moaned, and Mary hurried to the door, fearing it would splinter before she could get it open. Sergeant Scott stood on the stoop, brows beetled.
“Out!” he said, and, looking over her shoulder, bellowed at Will, “Up and out, ye theivin’ bastard! You and your kin can make do as best you can in that shack down yonder.” He jerked his head in the direction they were bidden to go. Seeing that neither Mary nor Will comprehended, he added, “Where them Irish bolters lived afore they went missin’ and got ‘emselves lost and starved to death.”
Mary knew the derelict hut. It was half the size of their cabin and surrounded by head-high brush. Will got to his feet, swaying and muttering oaths, not at Scott—he dared not do that—but at his ragged clothing as he tried to dress without causing himself more pain.
Two men under Scott’s command began flinging the family’s meagre possessions out the door. Along the path, convicts and their mariner guards, already on the way to work, paused to watch the Bryants’ fall from grace.
Scott noticed Cass among the gawkers. “That old hag still a friend of yours?” he asked Mary. Mary hesitated, fearing that to say yes might cause Cass some trouble. “You’ll be needing somebody to stay with anything left behind,” Scott barked. “Else they’ll be pickin’ you clean whilst your back is turned.”
At that, Mary nodded. Scott motioned to Cass who, not being close enough to hear what he had said to Mary, approached with a kind of defiant fearfulness. “You a friend of this here family?” Scott asked again.
Cass likewise hesitated, lest the wrong answer carry some unknown penalty. But at last she mumbled, “Aye, Mr. Scott.”
“Then stay by their goods till all’s removed, and keep the vultures off,” Scott ordered.
“Aye, Sir.” Cass took up a stance between the Bryants’ things and the gaping crowd.
“Thank you,” Mary said, her words meant for Scott and Cass alike. Both were hard as iron and considered overt signs of sympathy to be a kind of weakness. But neither was given to inflicting pain and, when they felt they must do so for duty or survival, took no pleasure in it.
Will was struggling to move a heavy chest, one which on a normal day he’d have hoisted onto his back, but this morning could not. He had paid Cox to build the chest. Except for three stools he had whittled himself, it was their only furniture. By standards in the convict community, where most had no furnishings at all, these things were seen as luxuries. No one in the crowd offered to help carry the heavy chest, so Mary took one end. Together she and Will staggered down the path to the derelict shack to which they’d been demoted.
It took only one more trip to move what little more there was. Cass came with them on the last trip, lugging the cast iron cooking pot. When she saw the holes in the reed roof of the shack, she shook her head. “Drafty is what it is,” she cracked. “Until that’s repaired, you might as well be sleeping outdoors.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done that since coming ashore,” Mary replied.
“Aye.” Cass grimaced. “Most anywhere I’ve been, I could always say ‘I’ve seen worse.’ But I ain’t heard none say t
hat about bloody Botany Bay.”
Cass trudged off, leaving Mary alone with Will. He had collapsed on the floor, though it had not yet been swept and was covered with leaf debris and the droppings of small animals.
“They’ve given me the one day,” said Will weakly. “Tomorrow I’m to work again.”
“Then you’d best get some rest. I’ll go back to the garden and see what I can find for supper, if it hasn’t been stripped already. I doubt we’ll be getting a ration of fish today.”
When Mary returned from the garden with a head of cabbage and some immature beans, she saw that rocks had been arranged for cooking and a fire already laid. She looked around for a bucket with which to go and fetch water—a much further walk it would be to the stream from this cabin—and saw that it had already been filled. She was touched that Will had done those chores in his condition, when it was not normal for him to do them at all.
When she had a small fire blazing, water set to boil, and vegetables washed, Mary went inside the dilapidated hut. Two logs left behind by the previous tenants still remained, squared off with the corner of the room to form a sleeping area. It was now filled with fresh eucalyptus leaves, topped with dry grass. The grass was less fragrant than the leaves but not so harsh to lie upon. Will sprawled face-down on the makeshift bed.
“You went for wood and water and bedding,” she said gently. “I daresay all that moving about in the heat has worsened the pain.”
“’Twas Johnny. He done all that. Damn me, if I ain’t a mess to have a cripple looking after me.”
“You’d have done the same for him,” Mary said, although she was fairly certain that it would never have occurred to Will.
“That woman came from the bush, too, and smeared some balm on my back.” Will grinned weakly. “Had to hold my breath while she was squatted down here, such a rank smell she’s got.”
“You smell pretty rank yourself,” Mary retorted with a near smile. “I can’t imagine what besides leaves she puts in that mix that it gives off such an awful stink.”
“Don’t matter to me how it smells, long as it does the trick. And that I can testify. The pain went down right away.”
“I guess the natives feel the same. If rancid fat keeps off the biting bugs, smear it all over they will, and not mind about the smell.”
Mary sat down on the chest, the first chance she’d had to sit all morning. But her body was made tense by thoughts moving in several directions at once. She must go for Charlotte soon, and look to their meal. Breakfast, lunch and dinner rolled into one—the only food they would have this day—simmered over the fire. Then she must collect more wood and bring more water.
She thought Will had fallen asleep, but when she looked toward him, his bloodshot blue eyes were open, watchful. “What puts that look on your face?” he asked.
“What look?”
“A jumpy look, I’d say it was.”
“Oh that. Just counting the things I’ve yet to do, the ones that can’t wait till the morrow.”
“What else?”
She didn’t like this interrogation. It wasn’t like him, and anyway, she had no ready answer. She went to the door and looked out. Scrub was thick around the shack, either never cut or grown anew since the Irishmen bolted and met with death. She could not see the harbour from here, the glittering blue and green harbour, which was the one truly beautiful thing in this forsaken place.
“I was thinking,” she said slowly, although it had just come into her mind, “how it was one year ago today that we landed here.”
Mary went out then, telling Will that she must go get Charlotte. He had not responded to her remark about it being the anniversary of their landing, nor had he made mention of the fact that in a few more days it would be the anniversary of their marriage. If indeed he thought of himself as married. She had heard others in the colony, particularly those inclined to change partners, claim that none of what Reverend Johnson had called “nuptial blessings” were lawful marriages, because no banns had been published.
However, her legal status as wife was of no more concern to Mary now than it had been the previous year when she and other couples stood before Reverend Johnson for words he was pleased to call a blessing. Foremost in her mind was the thought that, hard as the past year had been, Will’s actions ensured that the year to come would be infinitely harder.
What would he have said to that, she wondered angrily, then felt her anger sag into depression. Being angry with Will was like being angry with a small child. He acted impulsively, without care for consequences, then regretted his folly so bitterly that, despite her best intentions to hold him accountable, she felt the urge to comfort rather than to scold him.
Mary walked back toward the settlement, head held high. She met the gaze of those she passed on the path so that, rather than them being able to stare at her in pity or condemnation, they were forced to drop their eyes and either mumble a greeting or pass in silence. Thus she met all her convict neighbours until she reached the square and saw coming toward her the person she least cared to see. She tried to pass him, looking at the ground, but Joseph Paget stopped, blocking her path.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I had no choice.”
Her head came up at that, and she spat anger at him as if she were a viper and he had trodden on her tail. “No choice? Was it some other who ran tattling for the pleasure of seeing my husband beaten half to death?”
“If he was half beat to death, what do you think they’d have done to me? Five hundred lashes, they said, if I didn’t speak the truth which they well-knowed already!”
“You hung him there!” she shouted, pointing at the triangle on the far side of the square. “You, with your flapping mouth.”
“It wasn’t me what gave the order to carry off them fish and fetch him back his rum!”
“As if you got no part of it!”
“That I did, but didn’t I tell him time and again we ought to call it quits? I knowed we was being watched, and he knowed it well as me.”
Paget stood there twisting a rag of a cap in his hand, waiting for Mary to acknowledge his point. When she said nothing, he added in a defeated tone of voice, “’Twas love of rum that got him them licks, Miss Mary, and I ain’t no better. When a man’s got a need for drink, there’s precious little he won’t say or do.”
Mary’s anger against the man should have lessened then, but it did not, for he had said to her face what she did not want to hear or know. Instead of admitting that he spoke the truth, she stared at him with scorching fury: her anger at his betrayal fuelled by some greater anger she felt toward Will, and on top of both, a blazing hatred for God or Fate or whatever it was that caused her to suffer the consequences of their wilful ways.
Then, like a flame that has run through kindling and has nothing left to burn, her fury turned to something as insubstantial as ashes. Paget must have seen the change in her face, for he said, “I’m sorry, Miss Mary. I never meant to bring hardship on you and the little girl.”
With that he stepped aside, and Mary walked on. Ahead of her loomed the triangle. It made her want to vomit, but she drew her feelings in and, by force of will, blocked out the horror of Will hanging there. He had not been the first and would not be the last. As hunger in the colony grew, there would be more lawbreakers in the year to come than there had been in the one just past.
Her destination was not Colleen and Johnny’s house, not yet. She was headed for a small office in the side of the warehouse where all the colony’s provisions were stored.
James sat working on inventories of what supplies remained. He did not look up at once to see who blocked the light, thus giving Mary time to watch his long tapered fingers move a quill pen across paper, leaving behind a trail of beautiful script. Mary had known few educated men, and she marvelled that one of her acquaintance should have such
skills as James possessed.
When James reached the end of the line he looked up. For one unguarded instant Mary saw in his eyes the pleasure he derived from her mere presence. Then he shielded his feelings from her and said, with his usual formality, “Mrs. Bryant! How is your husband?”
“No better, no worse, than could be expected. I came to thank you for letting me know. And for keeping Charlotte away.”
She turned to go, for being so near to James nudged longings in her that she must not allow to grow. As she had suppressed them on shipboard so she would suppress them here, where they were even less appropriate.
He remained seated at his desk, but his voice reached out and held her in the doorway. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes.” She paused. “But perhaps you could tell me—that ship sent for supplies four months ago, when might she return?”
“Six months hence, at best.
“Six months! Will we not all have starved by then?”
“You think the Crown cares?” James exploded. “If they really wanted the colony to survive, they would have replenished our supplies six months back. What does it matter in London if hundreds of convicts starve, and scores of mariners perish with them? Will there not always be more where we came from?” He moderated his voice. “Why do you ask?”
“Will must be back at work by morning, but you can be sure our ration of fish will be cut. The garden is lost due to our having to move. The shore is all but stripped of shellfish, and now that the birds have all been slaughtered, there are no eggs to find.”
“Is it not the same for all of us?” James said, the tiredness in his voice reminding Mary that in handing out the daily rations, he heard whines of hunger hundreds of times a day. “Who among us is not starving, little by little?”
Perhaps it was his hopelessness that challenged Mary to answer back. “My child”, she said with quiet intensity, “shall not starve”.
Another man might have sneered at such bravado, but James Brown did not. He cocked his head in a thoughtful manner, and asked, with interest, “Do you have a plan?”
