Fled

by Meg Keneally

  ‘We’ve enough workers already,’ said Dan. ‘Don’t want to scare the fish off. We’re all fed from the same pot, here. No one who holds the net gets extra rations.’

  ‘You do, though, don’t you?’ said Joseph. ‘You’ve got a hut and a share of the catch, don’t think I don’t know. You can spare one.’

  ‘Joe, we don’t need the extra help, and I’m not giving away fish. Not allowed to, anyway. You know what they’re like about food.’

  ‘Wonderful at sharing things out, aren’t you, when they’re not yours.’ As Joseph spoke, he gradually advanced towards Dan, until he was looking up into a bearded face that was browner than it had been a few months ago. ‘Some might take a view that things need to be more even. Some might take certain steps in that direction.’ Spittle came out with the words.

  Dan, slowly and deliberately, bent his head until his nose was touching Joseph’s. ‘Some people,’ he said, ‘should take steps back towards camp. The ocean, it’s unpredictable, even on a calm day like this. You wouldn’t want to find yourself in deeper than you thought.’ He placed the flat of his palm against Joseph’s right shoulder and pushed.

  Joseph stumbled backwards and fell, landing with a splash on his backside in the few inches of water they had been standing in.

  The other workers laughed. They had seen out the night with Dan and Jenny many times; they knew when to haul and never asked for fish.

  Joseph stood, turned and – with a slow walk that he might have intended to be stately – made his way back up the shore. He spat on the ground near Charlotte and Bea as he passed, with Elenor stalking after him.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sydney Cove, May 1790

  The shack hospital was not a place Jenny would choose to visit. Not without a good reason. But staying in the good graces of Surgeon Drummond, or anyone with any authority, was reason enough. If you went to them when they asked, they didn’t come to you – and would be less likely to notice that more fish were in the Gwyn hut than there should be, or the hole in the floor where salted fish lay wrapped in canvas.

  The fish themselves concealed a small leather purse. Dan had been able to take a small sum – honestly acquired, he swore – with him on the journey. It had been left in care of the captain of the Charlotte, and returned to him when they’d landed. A common arrangement, and no one begrudged the convicts their funds – what, here, would they spend it on? But money was money was money, and would likely disappear if anyone came to know of it.

  Jenny no longer had to carry her daughter everywhere. The little girl was able to make a halting progress along the rutted path towards the surgeon’s makeshift hospital. There were now two streets in the colony, meaner than any Jenny had known, which became churned with mud in the rains. There was little, in fact, to distinguish them as streets, apart from the huts that lined them, poorly built and with twig lattices as windows. They barely held together, far less substantial than the colony’s other buildings that had sprung up like pox around the landscape. The governor’s house, the stores, then the thatched houses of the officers. Only when these were built had the convicts been given the task of constructing their own lodgings.

  Charlotte still did not view walking these paths as a necessity; it was an amusement she engaged in when it suited her. When she tired of it, or when she felt the ground wasn’t cooperating, the small arms would be thrust towards the sky, and the grey eyes would look up at her mother with their silent command. The command was always obeyed – the little girl always found hands beneath her arms as she was lifted and hoisted and slotted into her accustomed position on her mother’s hip.

  There was less, though, of her mother’s hip than there had been, and Charlotte had to stretch her legs a little further in order to maintain her position there. Jenny was one of the very few people in the colony whose bellies were growing.

  Now, nearing the hospital, Jenny shifted her daughter towards the front of her body, so that the girl’s bottom was perched on the top of her mother’s stomach. Jenny expected she might have to wait for Drummond. These days the surgeon was very busy.

  The crops had not shown any more liking for the winters here than they had the summers, and the livestock kept dying. The stores brought from England were long gone. There was word, too, that more ships were coming, not with food but with those who needed to be fed: a second phalanx of officers and convicts who would be disappointed if they expected better rations on their arrival than those they’d had aboard ship.

  The most devastating news, though, concerned two ships that would never arrive. The Guardian and the Sirius had been wrecked oceans apart but within months of each other. Each had been carrying food, and hope with it. The little Supply – the only one of the ships in the first fleet to have not yet trickled out of the harbour – had been sent for food, but she was a woefully insubstantial vessel on which to rest their hopes.

  Rations had been halved, and the stroke of Lockhart’s pen on the order had produced ranks of shambling creatures with protruding eyes and distended bellies, lacking the energy to work, speak and, eventually, breathe. Scurvy had become rampant and did not discriminate between the convicts and the free. People’s teeth dropped out, and Surgeon Drummond was also dealing daily with swollen limbs, fever, and the type of noxious substances that only a navy doctor or a convict could be entirely familiar with.

  The scurvy and the hunger picked off the weak first. Half a year ago, Dorothy had succumbed and was buried just outside the settlement, in a short and flatly delivered ceremony from Reverend Gibson. Jenny had stayed at her grave for a while, weeping for a woman buried in soil that was not her own, and had overheard Gibson say to Mr Corbett, ‘We’re all being buried alive, here. No one is coming save more mouths.’

  The malaise had since made some inroads into the stronger convicts, and several younger women and men lay with Dorothy, ushered into the afterlife by a similarly perfunctory rite.

  Jenny, who’d shed tears for all of them, could not help but feel she was rehearsing for the time when she stood there burying a small, too-thin body. That if she didn’t find the means of removing Charlotte from this place, her daughter would be planted in the earth that had failed to nourish her.

  Escaping into the dark bush was an increasingly tempting prospect. Others went in every few weeks. One convict from Madagascar, an inveterate escapee, seemed to be surviving with the help of occasional raids on whatever crops had managed to defy the conditions. For the most part, though, escape inland wasn’t a good bet. Some who had taken the risk were found later, sinking into the ground. Some staggered out after a few weeks, thinner even than those who had stayed in the settlement.

  Their salvation would have to come from the sea. When the transport ships had left, some had played host to convicts who had secreted themselves along their wooden spines. This, Jenny knew, would be impossible with a young child who could cry out at any moment.

  Every day, Charlotte’s cries were getting weaker. She was not, though, caught in the staring lethargy that so often preceded a trip to the plot where Dorothy lay. And Charlotte’s survival was partly thanks to the leaves Jenny now carried wrapped in a piece of cloth.

  As she pushed through the rickety door of the hospital, Drummond looked up and held one finger in the air to ask her to wait. The fingers of his other hand were coated in a salve that he was daubing on the wounded leg of a young convict, a boy who had helped Dan remove stumps when they had first arrived. The lad now had an unfocused stare and didn’t flinch when Drummond vigorously rubbed in the paste.

  The surgeon rubbed his hands on a cloth, which looked as though it had absorbed the aftermath of many past treatments, before he walked up to her. ‘You have them?’

  ‘Yes. I know where they grow – I can get as many as you like.’

  He unwrapped the bundle, picked up one of the leaves and rubbed it between his fingers, sniffing it. The leaf looked like ground ivy but gave off a sharp scent that no plant in England possessed.

/>   ‘I must say, they seem to have some nutritional properties. Did you try them dried, in the end?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Hard to know whether they’re better or worse, but the tea didn’t smell as much.’

  ‘Hm. We will stay with what we know, then. Brew them, if you please.’

  ‘Yes. But, my daughter . . .’

  ‘Of course. She shouldn’t stay here longer than necessary. Leave her with one of the other women and return straightaway if you please, Mrs Gwyn.’

  Jenny had taken to visiting the hospital a few times a week and brewing an astringent tea out of the strange leaves. This drink seemed to help those stricken with scurvy, if they weren’t too far gone. The ones dying of hunger could be helped by nothing but more food, which refused to grow with the same enthusiasm as the leaves.

  She didn’t know if she was the first to learn of the plant’s effects, and certainly nothing was stopping anyone else from collecting its leaves in great quantities. When she told Drummond she knew where they grew, she didn’t mention that many others knew it too. If he thought she was the best source of the leaves, she was also happy to let him believe that she had, through her own experimentation, discovered their properties.

  She did not, and never would, tell him about Mawberry, the native woman.

  Jenny had first seen the Darug shortly after her wedding day, when she was walking up from the shore one morning, Dan’s share of the night’s catch under her arm. She was getting used to the patterns that the slanted morning light threw onto the sand, the shifting shadows of the unchanging trees. That morning, though, there were other shadows.

  They watched her from the edge of the forest – a few men, holding spears. But their grip on the weapons was casual, as though they had simply been holding them for so long they had forgotten about them. The men offered her no violence as she walked up, made no greeting, but turned their heads slowly as she passed.

  She felt, strangely, as though she owed them some courtesy, these watchers in the woods who seemed to lack the predatory intent that she felt when at the edge of a faraway forest.

  She turned towards them, put her bundle of fish on the ground, and curtsied.

  One of them smiled in response, showing a mouth with a single precise gap made by the absence of one front tooth. When the others laughed, she saw the same gap in their mouths. It was made more obvious by a whiteness in their other teeth, a shade seldom seen among convicts.

  Keeping her eyes on them, she bent over, picked up her bundle, nodded and went on.

  She continued this game – as she suspected they viewed it as such – whenever she saw them. She would put down whatever she was carrying, unless it was Charlotte, and curtsy to the men, earning laughs from them – laughs that got louder when Charlotte was old enough to be taught to do likewise.

  Jenny had seen the watchers mutter to each other: indistinct words, if words they were. A language it must be, for they seemed to convey meaning to one another, but the syllables were unlike any she had heard, and the cadence was more of a slow meander than an artificial singsong lilt or the natural music of her Cornish speech.

  The only words she knew in their language had been taught to her by Mr Corbett, after the Charlotte had first come in sight of the coastline near Botany Bay. She and the others had been sent back down into the hold, but Corbett had told her later that some tribesmen had been seen on the cliffs, shaking spears and yelling, ‘Warra, warra.’ Of course, she had no means of exactly translating the words, but their intent was easily guessed.

  She would never use those words to these men, though. She did not want them to go away.

  Neither did Governor Lockhart. He had tried – very hard, according to Corbett – to build some sort of accord with the natives. The natives had offered the settlers no violence, at least en masse, which in itself seemed odd to Jenny when they had been subjected to unprovoked attacks and dwindling, siphoned resources. Eventually there was retaliation: occasional clubbings, or convicts wandering into the woods and never wandering out again. Their loss was blamed by most of the colonists on the natives rather than the terrain that yielded far more in the way of treacherous gullies than it did food. Sometimes, much later, bones were found, once with the skull missing. Soon afterwards Lieutenant Reid had brought back a skull, which Drummond proclaimed had belonged to a convict; Reid had reunited it with the rest of the remains and buried them under a tree.

  But there had been no attack on the camp, and no attempt to harm or capture convicts as they walked close to the woods. So Jenny continued to curtsy in safety, met with good-natured guffaws.

  She hadn’t a hope of discerning names from the stream of syllables that came from them. But there were some names that she knew.

  Wangal, Gamaragal, Gadigal – an officer was cobbling together a dictionary of the native language, and he had said these were the names of some of the local tribes. That information, imparted by Corbett one night when they were holding on to adjacent sections of seine net, made Jenny oddly sad. If she had been asked, by one of them, what the name of her tribe was – not the Cornish, but this odd collection with whom she had come here – she would not have known what to say.

  She had also learned the names of two tribesmen: Yarramundi and Ballooderry.

  Ballooderry had been captured by the governor in Gamaragal country, when all other means of establishing a dialogue between the settlers and the natives had failed.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Corbett, do you think the governor is stupid?’ Jenny had asked after he told her of the capture.

  Corbett remained her best-placed source of information on the upper echelons of what passed for society. You couldn’t stand in the water next to a man, holding different parts of one skein of rough rope, without remembering he held significant influence here.

  He had spoken to her with uncharacteristic sharpness that night. ‘Mind your tongue with regard to the governor, Jenny. Do not forget who has ultimate authority here, and do not put me in a difficult position.’

  ‘Of course, Mr Corbett. But it doesn’t, to my mind, make any sense.’

  ‘I see,’ said Corbett, still stern. ‘Your mind is trained in the ways of statecraft, is it?’

  She should, she knew, be quiet. Although Corbett was one of the kinder officers, he was still an officer with the power to have her hanged if he put his mind to it.

  She was still musing on the wisdom of remaining silent when she heard her own voice.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said, ‘but it is trained to see what’s in front of my eyes, and no person I’ve ever met would see being captured as a friendly gesture.’

  Corbett rolled his lips in on each other. He was standing before her in the dying light, his breeches soaked up to the knees in the black water from the incoming tide. For a moment she thought he would take her to task again. She feared that she might lose his friendship, the ease with which they spoke, the fact that their delivery of the syllables – in a clipped accent or a Cornish one – didn’t matter to either of them, only the content of their conversation.

  He didn’t berate her, though. His arms went slack, and she thought he might drop his segment of net, so she tensed to be ready to take up the slack.

  ‘The same thought had occurred to me, actually,’ he said. ‘That abduction is not the way to build the bridge. But what else is to be attempted? Everything we have tried has failed. The natives have shown an inclination towards befriending a few individuals – Drew, for instance, who’s writing down their words when he can – but one of those individuals does not happen to be the governor, and there is the problem.’

  Ballooderry was from north of the harbour. The settlers dressed him in English clothing and taught him how to shape his mouth into English words. He had been overjoyed, at first, with the manacle placed on him, believing it to be an adornment, but flew into a rage when he realised it was there to detain rather than decorate him.

  Amicable captivity didn’t suit him. He pined for his tribesmen, and t
ried to escape several times, once nearly drowning after he jumped off the Supply.

  His escape, when it came, was horrific.

  One afternoon Jenny had come out of the woods, where she had been collecting sweet tea leaves. She wandered down to the shore as she often did, looking for wheeling seabirds so she could tell Dan where to send one of the small fishing boats they sometimes used in place of a seine net.

  She saw, from a distance, something near the shore being rolled back and forth by a small wave. Driftwood, maybe. Any wood was useful, and all the better when you didn’t have to go to the trouble of cutting it.

  But wood wasn’t covered in small white blisters. Wood didn’t have puckering skin and a swelling stomach and the blank eyes of a young boy who would never grow.

  Jenny ran to Drummond and found she wasn’t the first to alert him. A woodcutting party had found some bodies in the forest, and several other corpses had choked the stream and been seen floating further out in the bay.

  The convicts started looking at each other, watching for the start of the pustules, the small blemishes that would consume one person, and then the next, and then the settlement. Many of them knew what to expect. More than a few, like Elenor and Suse, had skin pitted by their last encounter with this disease.

  But it never arrived in the colony. It went through the natives, though; it broke over them and left far fewer when it receded.

  Ballooderry appeared at Drummond’s hospital tent shortly after the outbreak started. He sang to those who had been brought there for treatment, or he talked to them, or stroked them. Then he joined them, after the disease jumped into him from one of the many he had tried to comfort.

  But still, no one in the settlement sickened. There were murmurs of divine judgement, or of curses gone wrong.

  ‘They have reason enough to curse us,’ Jenny had said to Dan. ‘Doesn’t seem to be in their nature, though.’

  ‘How else do you explain it, then?’ He was sitting on a stone outside their hut, picking chunks of fish off the freshly caught carcass he had cooked on his shovel blade.