by Meg Keneally
It would not now, Jenny suspected, carry much weight with Prentice.
So she inhaled deeply, taking the opportunity to fill her lungs with air that was slightly less rank than that in the cells. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She said, ‘Where did the pork come from?’
‘From a pig,’ he said, and chuckled softly at his own wit.
‘And one that died around the time I was born, by the taste,’ she said. ‘How did this pig come to be in my belly? From the stores?’
‘They don’t swim around the hulk, you know. We don’t dangle a line over the rail to catch them.’
‘You would, of course, have gotten permission from the quartermaster to use the pork in payment for a tumble.’
He paused, looked at her. Said nothing.
‘Mr Corbett, he seems like an upright man,’ she said. ‘Probably goes to church. Reads us our prayers on Sunday. Pious people can be a bit inconvenient, I find.’
Prentice smiled in spite of himself; stopped smiling as she continued.
‘Particularly when they’re made aware of theft,’ she said, standing and walking over to him until their faces were inches apart ‘Theft of food, especially. Theft of the means to pay for another sin. I imagine Mr Corbett might think that having someone who could do such a thing around the likes of us convicts, who’ve already sunk almost as low as it’s possible to sink, so we are told, would be . . . inadvisable.’
‘You’ll keep your mouth shut about it, of course, if you want more.’
‘Even if this is the last ten-year-old salt pork I get to eat, I still know you’ll give me enough food to keep me alive. If they wanted me dead, they would have turned me off after the assizes. So I have no objection to ancient pork, but I don’t want it as badly as I want to get a message to my mother.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Thing about the pious,’ he said, ‘a lot of them tend to be educated.’
‘I suppose that’s so.’
‘If I were to ask Mr Corbett, as a favour to me, to write and send a letter for you – would you then be seeing any need to talk about people who may have taken pork from the stores?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I believe the relief would wipe any such thoughts from my mind.’
He nodded again, gave her his hand and hauled her up from the mattress. Then he shoved her – not hard enough to make her stumble, but enough to make a point – towards the door.
‘I may be by again, next couple of nights,’ he said. ‘I think you can expect to see Corbett before that.’
Mr Corbett knew, of course he did. He would know Prentice well enough to realise that the man wouldn’t have asked him for a kindness without some sort of inducement. Corbett didn’t mention it to Jenny, though, and did not seem to be judging her. But he did say, ‘I would have done this for you anyway. Why did you not ask?’
He had brought a stool with him, and some writing implements, and sat himself down by the bars where Jenny had wormed her way through the other bodies.
Though he was here to do her a kindness, she suddenly felt angry. ‘Have you not heard me? Every time someone comes for the men, I call out that I need help with a letter. Oftentimes, it was when you were down here. So don’t blame me for not asking. You did not answer.’
He nodded, looking towards the opposite wall. ‘You hear so much, that sometimes you stop hearing it all . . . Never mind, I will write this letter for you, and I will make sure it is sent. What would you like to say?’
Jenny had spent so long trying to get somebody to send this message, she had forgotten precisely what message she wanted to send.
After she’d been silent for a few moments, trying to find a way to wrap her current situation in words that might make it seem less desperate, he said, ‘You can start by telling her you’re alive.’
Jenny snorted. ‘Won’t she know that when she gets a letter from me?’
He smiled. ‘It’s my habit, you see, to send the good news in before the bad. You could perhaps say you’re being well fed.’
She glared at him.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘not well fed. Fed, though. You have to give us that.’
‘Yes, fed. I am in Plymouth where I’m being fed by no less a soul than His Majesty.’
‘As am I,’ said Corbett, beginning to make marks on the paper. ‘So you are being fed, but you are very remorseful because you committed a crime for which you were caught.’
‘What am I remorseful for, do you think?’ she asked. ‘The crime, or the catching?’
He laughed. ‘The latter, of course. But we will let her take whatever meaning she likes from it, shall we?’
‘Very well. Then perhaps we can tell her that the King has extended his most generous mercy towards me.’
‘Does that sound like something you would say? Would she believe the letter was from you, if it came from someone talking about generous mercy?’
‘Yes, all right. Through the King’s mercy I’m not to be hanged, but to be sent . . . where? No one tells us, Mr Corbett.’
‘I promise I will tell you as soon as I have certain knowledge of it. You’re to be sent across the seas, where you shall serve your sentence and make good.’
‘Then I’ll return? I’ll return to help her.’
‘Seven years is a long time, Jenny. I would not be making any promises about returning. You may, in truth, decide that where we are going is better for you than where we have been.’
‘No talk of returning then. But could you put down that I love her. Tell her to eat, and tell her to get into Howard Tippett’s bed so she has the means of eating.’
‘I’ll do all but the last,’ Corbett said. He read the letter back to her, and then spoke the words he’d written at the bottom of the page. ‘Your loving daughter, Jenny.’ She nodded, and he asked, ‘Would you like to sign it? Here, take this.’ He handed her the pen and held the page up to the bars with one hand. With the other, he took her wrist and moved it so that it made a shape on the page that meant no more to her than any of the other scratch marks. ‘You see, you’re making a J,’ he said, as he moved her hand down and then into a curve. ‘Now the T,’ he said, drawing her hand across and then down. ‘JT, you see?’
‘JT – what does that mean?’
‘Remember those letters, Jenny, and remember how to write them, if you can, but please remember what they sound like. Remember what they mean. Those letters are your initials, Jenny Trelawney. They are who you are.’
‘Will we be seeing you with a silk bonnet and pretty little shoes soon?’
The call came from across the way, from one of the boys, and despite its questionable wit it drew waves of laughter from the other men.
Mr Corbett had gone a few minutes before, promising to send the letter at the earliest opportunity, and Jenny had stayed slumped against the bars, thinking.
The speaker, as far as she could tell, was one of the better-looking boys. One of those who kept getting picked for work because of his strong shoulders. She glared at him, looked away.
‘A warder and an officer,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you will try the captain next.’
‘Perhaps I will,’ she called out. ‘You’re all busy with each other.’
Howls, this time, outrage which she knew was hollow – she had heard grunts at night from across the small space between the cells.
‘Oh, but what about the vast sea we have to cross together, my lover?’
She didn’t know the faces that went with most of the voices. But this new voice, this one she knew. It was Cornish. It was soft, belonging to someone who was not in the habit of raising his voice to be heard. The blue-eyed man, Dan Gwyn by name.
‘Perhaps you’ll find a little time for me on the ocean,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll be in need of a little comfort when the weather gets rough. Perhaps you’ll be scared.’
‘Perhaps not,’ she said.
‘Oh, but this sea – the one we’re going on – you’ve never been on it, have you? It’s vicious. That it is,
not polite like our English waters.’
‘I know nothing of English waters. Cornish ones, though, nothing polite about them. I have seen them in their worst tempers, and they have never scared me.’
‘I’ve been on Cornish seas all my life,’ he said. ‘If they don’t scare you from time to time, you’re either a fool or the bravest woman alive.’
Jenny could, probably, swim better than most of the marines. Certainly better than Farrow, she liked to think. Absolutely better than Prentice, if he could swim at all; he sweated too much to be good at cutting through the water.
Escape from the hulk, though, looked like a bad bet. She could probably make the jump and survive it. But the water below was murky, green, studded with rotting things – not a substance with which she wanted to douse the wounds on her wrists and ankles. And the marines, with their slender weapons, often looked overboard. There was always one on duty, and she would make quite a splash even if she kept her legs straight.
It might be better, she thought, to wait until they were underway. Untie a cutter and make for an isolated shore.
The wait was interminable. They had entertainment from the physically impossible suggestions of the men, and the fights among the women, when dirty, cracked nails gouged marks in grime-filmed cheeks. Jenny, at least, had the occasional meal of antiquated pork, when Prentice – whose first name she still didn’t know, nor did she care to – took her up to his hut and pounded at her for a few minutes, handing her that oilcloth bundle afterwards which she always ate there and then.
The hulk occasionally rocked if the weather was bad, a feeble pitch or two. But it was enough to make some of the girls squeal, those who had never sat in a boat even if they had grown up around them. Bea was one of them, always gripping Jenny’s hand if they were near enough when the hulk began to pitch. Jenny didn’t know how Elenor felt about it: she had blown herself out like a storm, expended her anger in the gaol. She had joined those who lay and stared at the bulkhead. She would hit whoever came near her, or anyone who tried to take her food. Otherwise, though, she was an absence.
Two months passed, or three. Jenny hadn’t counted in a while. There was not so much need to sacrifice warmth for fresh air, and the arguments that had often broken out during the colder months over opening the hatches began to abate.
People died, here and there. The impossibly aged Dorothy was still sitting in her corner and offering blunt nuggets of advice: ‘You could have done better than Prentice,’ she told Jenny, ‘had you waited. I’d take an officer over a warder any day – fewer fleas.’ But several younger women succumbed to chest complaints or fevers, and more than once Jenny woke to become aware of a cold stiffness at her back.
Mr Corbett seemed to have decided that the spiritual welfare of the depraved was his responsibility. He came down every Sunday to read them their prayers. He made his voice rise and fall with the words, imbuing them with life.
One Sunday, he brought more than prayers.
‘I said I would tell you our destination when I knew it. We will be travelling to Botany Bay.’
‘Is it closer than America?’ Jenny asked.
‘Much further, I’m afraid. Further still than Africa. I expect we will be at sea for some months.’
The women nearby heard him and groaned at the prospect, and a few began to weep – the ones who seemed to have an unending supply of tears.
Jenny smiled, and after Corbett left she traced the initials into the grime on the cell floor. JT – that was who she was. She had repeated the sounds to herself every night, before sleep, whether lying on a board in the cell or on the thin mattress in Prentice’s cabin. She feared if she forgot them, she would slip away from herself.
There was no risk of that now, though, not with the prospect of months in a moving boat before her. JT was who she was. She was going back to the ocean, and she told it, silently, to try to drown her and see how far it got.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 8
Jenny’s months in the hulk had been dreamless, sleep simply an absence of consciousness, of understanding, of knowing what and where she was. Since they’d been at sea, though, the dreams had happened every night. Often they were of her father failing to save her from drowning, doing so and thinking better of it, or simply deciding to push her in. Or her mother, walking down the shore, gathering pieces of kelp in a basket, the waves visible through her translucent body as Jenny called and called with no response.
When her head was slammed into the bulkhead by the lurch of the boat, she understood why the dreams had come back. They came with the ocean, and were not possible without it.
The Charlotte had been sailing with the fleet for a few weeks now, and there had been rough seas which turned it almost on its side, which drew screams from the women and from some of the men in the cell nearby.
Their confinement arrangements mirrored those in the hulk. But here, with waves hurling themselves at the hull, the hatches weren’t open. Here, with only inches of wood separating Jenny from the sea, she could not smell it. She fell, as they all did, into a boredom that slowly changed its shape, became torpor and then trance. She existed in her guts and resented anyone who spoke to her, who broke the deadening progress, forced her back into full consciousness and the realisation that time was passing, that she had used up another breath and another beat, and had nothing to show for it. Bea was the only person she responded to. Elenor refused to talk to her anyway.
When she was brought above decks for exercise, after the fleet moved out of swimming range of Portsmouth it was the first time she had seen full sunlight in four months.
What she saw on the faces around her nearly made her want to go below again.
Some of the women had been with her since they were loaded onto the Dunkirk, and she remembered feeling envy at the smoothness of their skin, not scratched and creased from sleeping on a forest floor and exposure to wind. They were the faces of girls brought up on green expanses rather than blue ones, girls who had drunk milk straight from the cow or regularly tasted its meat.
These girls, now, were unrecognisable. They wore the clothes they’d been sentenced in, some tattered almost beyond utility, flapping in the breeze on frames far smaller than those the garments had been made for. The chests of many showed skin stretched tight over ridges of bone. Their hair was stiff and matted, but their faces were the worst of it: cracked and bleeding lips, the sag at the jowls after the fat of the cheeks had been used up. And the colours – some were white, and some, an alarming number, were yellow. Old Dorothy’s skin sagged down from her body as though she was a child in a woman’s clothes.
When Jenny glanced at her own wrist, she saw yellow as well.
The men, with more rations, were looking slightly better, but they too showed signs of their confinement, and many mouths had more gaps between the teeth than when the Charlotte had sailed from Plymouth to meet the rest of the fleet.
Jenny grew used to the yellowed horrors who shambled around the deck with her, used to the idea that she was a yellowed horror too.
She studied every inch of the Charlotte. She ran her fingers along knots, committing them to memory. She looked between the planks of the deck to see how much pitch was used to bind them together, how many nails studded the expanse of wood. She counted the sails: thirteen separate sheets of cloth, each bigger by several times than the small sail on her childhood boat. She ran her eye along each of the ropes that held the ship together like a spiderweb, trying to tell where they ran to and what their purpose was. She looked at the sailors, what they were doing, what sails were being trimmed and why. She tested the wind, using a trick her father had taught her, licking her finger and holding it in the air to gauge the breeze’s direction.
The men seemed undeterred by the change in the state of the women, their suggestions increasingly depraved. Of course, they could do no more than on the Dunkirk, but now they had a destination, and many of their suggestions started with, ‘When we get there . . .’
Blue-eyed Dan Gwyn was on the Charlotte too – as rough as the rest of them, and as profane. But the other men loved him, every bit as much as some of the women seemed to. He boasted as much as or more than anyone else, spending one of the few currencies available to him: stories of evaded revenue men and keen negotiations over a bolt of silk.
But Dan was alone in encouraging the others to boast too, and never calling their tales into question. ‘John,’ he would say, ‘tell us again how you hid in the tree while the constables walked right underneath looking for you.’
John Carney, an Antrim thief, would smile and talk, and say, ‘I didn’t hide well enough, though, did I?’
‘Neither did none of us. No shame in that, or we’re all shamed.’
The lads, as most referred to the strange collection of men in the opposite cell, respected Dan. Quieted down, sometimes, when he told them to, with his habit of using such requests to coalesce them around a common cause. ‘Best shut your mouths, boys,’ Jenny had heard him say. ‘No need to give them any more proof that we’re animals.’
Because he had the trust of the men, he got the trust of the marines too. At Mr Corbett’s suggestion, Dan was put in charge of distributing the rations. He would measure out all of the food in full view of the others so that everyone could see he was being even-handed and taking his own share last.
One of the lads, Joseph Clancy, had a high reedy voice that he used mostly to complain. He would daily grumble that Dan had been uneven with the rations, had given him less than John Carney and some of the others. Joseph was largely ignored by the men, most of whom viewed Dan as a bridge between them and the marines. Such a man, one who could win the trust of both the lags and their gaolers, might have his uses.
