by Meg Keneally
‘They would have a difficult time of it,’ she said to Mr Corbett. ‘Someone is already in there.’
He smiled, reached out and squeezed her shoulder. ‘I thought as much. It’s the only reason here for someone’s girth increasing. Congratulations to you, and to Dan.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. She meant it. She had heard other officers discussing pregnancies in the colony, and the conversation usually started with speculation on the identity of the father, whether the woman in question was married or not. There were a great many here – the pinch-faced, sniffy Lieutenant Reid among them – who thought that all convict women were whores. So Jenny was grateful for Corbett’s unquestioning belief in her child’s paternity.
‘There was a native woman,’ Jenny told him, ‘who came to my hut, a month or so ago. Showed me those leaves, the ones the surgeon is now using on those with the scurvy.’
‘She did you a great service, then.’
‘She may well have. Charlotte doesn’t much like the taste, but I’ll wager she likes the idea of keeping those new teeth in her head.’
Corbett gave a closed-mouth chuckle and knelt down to where the little girl stood next to her mother, her arms around Jenny’s leg. While Jenny had been miming to the watchers in the trees, Charlotte had curtsied as usual and was dismayed by the lack of laughter. She was now, Jenny thought, close to tears, and when tears visited Charlotte they didn’t manifest as a misty dew on her cheeks but as a torrent every bit as violent as the storms here.
Still kneeling in front of the little girl, Corbett bowed his head, lifted up her hand and said, ‘Good morning, Princess Charlotte. May I request the pleasure of your company on a walk through the palace gardens later?’
Charlotte had no way of knowing what a princess was – or a palace, for that matter. But she knew when she was being treated with the deference she felt was her due, and paid Mr Corbett for it with a gap-toothed smile.
‘I want the woman to visit again,’ Jenny said. ‘That’s what I was trying to tell those men – she is pregnant, you see. She told us about the leaves, and I would thank her.’
‘Very good of you to go to that much trouble just to thank her,’ said Corbett.
‘And find out what else she knows, what else may be of use.’
‘Oh. Yes, well, as long as it’s in the spirit of acquiring knowledge that might assist the settlement –’
‘Whether it will or won’t, I’m not to say. But it certainly won’t if she never gets a chance to tell me about it.’
‘Pregnant, you said. Could be Yarramundi’s wife.’
It was widely known that Yarramundi continued to come and go as he pleased, and on his own terms. He continued to receive gifts and enjoy the governor’s friendship, so in reality it was a matter of debate who had captured whom.
‘Do you think he might ask her to come to me again?’ Jenny asked. ‘Perhaps I should talk to him.’
‘Their women tend to stay back, you know, much as I imagine ours would in a similar situation,’ Corbett told her. ‘The natives are protective, certainly, of women and children. Yet more reason to view them not as savage but just differently civilised.’
Perhaps Yarramundi felt one favour was enough, was preventing the woman visiting again. But she had seemed forthright, unafraid, matching Jenny’s stare with her own, and comfortable enough to bring her child into the clearing where the little hut stood.
‘You could ask Yarramundi for me, Mr Corbett. He might listen to you. If I find out anything useful, I promise to tell you.’
‘Very well,’ said Corbett. ‘I shall talk to Yarramundi. Do not hold out much expectation, though. The woman might not be his wife, and if she is, he may not be willing to send her again.’
But the woman did receive the message, and whether on her own or at the direction of Yarramundi, she appeared at the edge of the clearing of the Gwyn hut the next day.
After Jenny beckoned her forward, she and her little boy came into the clearing.
Jenny had been salting fish and was putting aside as much as she could. She took out a salted flathead, its eyes staring at the sky, and pressed so that it lay flat in her palm. She handed it to the woman, who sniffed it and immediately handed it back.
Jenny pointed at her chest. ‘Jenny,’ she said.
The woman’s eyes flicked over her, assessing, as though she was trying to decide if Jenny deserved a name in return. Finally, she said, ‘Mawberry.’
Jenny held up the flathead, pointed to it, and shrugged.
‘Magura,’ Mawberry said. ‘Badiwa.’
She doesn’t understand me, thought Jenny. She doesn’t know I want to find out where they are.
So Jenny took Mawberry’s elbow, half expecting her to flinch. When the woman didn’t, Jenny guided her over to the edge of the clearing, where a gap in the trees afforded a partial view of the bay. Sometimes, in the darkness, Jenny would stand here and watch small fires spring up. Not large enough to be campfires: small red licks of light. Impossible that they were campfires, anyway, for they were in the middle of the bay. They wafted about in the dark, traversing the black absence of the water. One mild night, she decided to stay outside until the lights were extinguished or floated out of view. She sat with her back against a rock, and followed them with her eyes, until she fell asleep.
The bay now lay flat and innocent, for all the world as though it would never be so badly behaved as to rise in foamed peaks and hurl itself against the shore.
Jenny pointed out to the water and then to the fish in her hand, and shrugged again.
Mawberry nodded. ‘Maguri,’ she said. Jenny thought she had been understood. But then Mawberry turned, and Jenny could see a narrow, muscled rear which, from behind, did not look like the backside of a pregnant woman. She and her little boy, without glancing back, walked into the trees.
Perhaps I should try to find Yarramundi, Jenny thought, and speak to him myself.
Later that day, as the light began to slant across the water and through the trees, Jenny sat outside watching Charlotte tear around the clearing, letting her enjoy the last of the day. The girl was also watched by a large grey kangaroo. She hadn’t noticed the beast – would surely have run straight over to it if she had done, probably scaring it off. But Jenny was watching it, alert for any movement towards her daughter, as it bent its head to nibble at a leaf.
Mawberry was there, now. Perhaps she had been for some time, standing at the other side of the clearing. Without her boy this time.
Jenny had seen some of the natives pointing at the English livestock and yelling, ‘Kangaroo, kangaroo!’ at the top of their voices. Perhaps it was their name for any large animal; perhaps it had a different meaning altogether. But as it was one of the only native words she knew, she used it.
She pointed at the mass of grey fur in the trees and said, ‘Kangaroo.’
Mawberry shook her head.
Jenny pointed again. ‘Kangaroo?’
Again, the small and dainty shake of the head. ‘Patagorang,’ Mawberry said.
‘Patagorang?’
Mawberry pointed at Jenny, then put her fingers to her lips and said, ‘Kangaroo’, moving her fingers away from her mouth as she spoke. Kangaroo is your word. Then Mawberry pointed at herself and repeated the gesture, saying, ‘Patagorang.’ Patagorang is mine.
So the governor, the reverend, the surgeon and all the officers had it wrong. They had been using the wrong word, and with an undeserved confidence. Jenny wondered what else they knew with such certainty was false.
Mawberry came over to her and gently clasped her elbow, as Jenny had done to her earlier that day, guiding Jenny towards the opening in the trees. The lights were there again, wafting around in the void. Mawberry pointed at them, one by one, and then back to the fish that Jenny had been salting. ‘Maguri,’ she said again. Then she held her hand out to the side and swept it in a graceful arc overhead, following it with her eyes, then looking at Jenny and pointing to her, and then herself. ‘B
arrabugu, guwing,’ she said.
Jenny thought she understood. Tomorrow night, she hoped, Mawberry would take her fishing.
CHAPTER 14
‘Why would you be bobbing around out there, when I need you on the nets?’ Dan asked. ‘How could you possibly see anything, catch anything? Do they even have nets? No, you’re better on the shore, where you’ll catch some fish at least.’ He ran his hands over the fish he was scaling as he sat on a rock near the hut.
‘I might not, though, Dan,’ Jenny said. ‘There were no fish last week, were there?’
‘Ah, but that was just the winds, wasn’t it? Hard to catch anything in that. It’s calmed down now. The bottom’s all stirred up, that might bring them out a bit. There will be all sorts of tempting little specks floating around in the water that they can’t wait to feed on.’
‘Perhaps. But Mr Corbett says he will help on the nets tonight. I will go, and see what’s to be seen.’
Dan stood and took her by the shoulders. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No, you won’t.’
Jenny stepped backwards. ‘So you’re scared that I might be right, Dan?’
‘No one would be happier than me if you were. All right then, go and prove me wrong. Go and sit in the darkness on a piece of bark, not knowing where the current will take you, and I hope I see you in the morning.’
Jenny hoped so too. Mr Corbett had arranged for Bea to look after Charlotte in the hut, and that night Jenny squeezed her daughter so tightly that she threatened to cry before a bout of tickling averted the catastrophe.
At the edge of the clearing, as the sun dropped, stood Mawberry. The two of them walked down to the shore and then around the headland, over jutting rocks that prevented those in the main part of the cove from seeing beyond it.
A bark canoe was waiting on the shore, well made as far as it went. It looked like the perfect size for one small person, not two with large bellies.
Mawberry began to kindle a fire in the base of the canoe, and Jenny wondered if the whole thing would be burned through. But she’d often seen the lights out on the water, and presumed the natives didn’t build new canoes each morning after swimming ashore with the fish in their teeth.
Looking down the shore Jenny saw more fires being lit, more canoes being launched. Every one of them was being handled by a woman.
With both of them in the little boat, it sat low in the water, and Jenny pushed herself as far as she could from the flames in the middle. They gave off the astringent scent that the tall, ghostly trees always did when burned.
Mawberry sliced her paddle easily from one side of the boat to the other in order to maintain a straight line, following the other boats out towards the middle of the bay. Occasionally she frowned as a turn caused a small amount of water to slop into the bottom of the boat, given the unusual weight it carried. After this happened a few times, she shook her head, looked at Jenny and pointed at the fire, moving her finger up and down emphatically. We will stay here.
She showed Jenny a hook made from a type of shell that seemed to have obligingly curved itself in the right direction. Mawberry had obviously, though, honed it and sharpened it, because when Jenny touched it and rubbed her fingers together she felt moisture, and when she held her hand over the fire she saw a small speck of red.
The hook did its work. It attracted the attention of a silver flash, whose lip became impaled as soon as Mawberry quickly pulled the hook upwards. This fish looked a little like a pilchard, but bigger, much bigger. Jenny, Dan and their workers had occasionally hauled in ones like this in their net. Mawberry put it at her feet where it thrashed about violently, attempting to hold on to life far more desperately than any pilchards Jenny had seen.
Soon enough it was joined by a different type of fish with an ugly mouth and a strange black dot on its flank. It looked far less appetising, far less plump than the one they’d just landed, but Mawberry pointed at it, smiled and rubbed her large tummy.
There were four others by the time they turned back. The other canoes were still out there, and Jenny had no way of knowing what their haul was. Did the six fish that now lay still represent a good or very disappointing night? She helped Mawberry haul the canoe up the beach a little way, so the tide that was slowly coming in wouldn’t snag it.
Mawberry reached into the canoe, took the second fish they had caught and handed it to Jenny, who didn’t feel as though she should accept it. She had done nothing except weigh the canoe down, and she was unused to being in a fishing boat without having a purpose. She would never, she decided, let that happen again. She knew what it was to be a passenger; to have her fate dictated by the decisions of another who may not have as much skill – although Mawberry was clearly far more skilled than her when it came to these waters.
The woman held the fish towards her again, nodding, then pointing to herself and the canoe to show that she would go back out alone. She was probably hoping to have better luck than she’d had with a stranger causing water to lap into the canoe.
So Jenny accepted the fish, taking it carefully to avoid the spined fins, and spoke her thanks in the hope that Mawberry would understand her intent. Without thinking, she reached out and grasped Mawberry’s shoulder, pulling her as close as their swollen bellies would allow, leading with her chin across the gap and kissing the woman on the cheek.
Mawberry smiled, nodded, even waved. Then she settled herself into the canoe, where the embers were still glowing, and broke back out into the darkness.
The fish was delicious, sweet and flaky and flat enough to cook evenly through on the blade of a shovel. ‘Ugly thing, though,’ said Dan.
Jenny had saved the spines from the fins, thinking she’d make needles of them if they hardened up after drying. She was tempted now to use one on Dan.
‘Have you ever cared what a fish looks like?’ she asked. ‘You’re eating it, not bedding it.’
He looked up from his dish – one on which the meat wasn’t augmented by any vegetable – and grunted before returning to it.
‘We weren’t out there long at all,’ she said, ‘and we got six. With a shell hook attached to some sort of vine. We can do better, far better, in the governor’s cutter with a net.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Dan.
‘You can think all you like. If you don’t ask him, I will.’
After Jack Starkey died, Dan became even more difficult.
Jack had been among the older convicts. Though he was thin and wiry, in the early days of the settlement he’d been as able with an axe or a shovel as any of the lads, thanks to a lifetime as a farm labourer – which had ended after his master hit him, and he hit back.
Jack’s frame, though, did not have any spare meat on it. After rations were cut, he gradually became slower, weaker. He was no longer ordered to do hard physical work, and while the gesture was intended to be humane, it robbed him of the muscles he’d brought with him across the sea. Within a year, he shuffled instead of walked. He no longer met people’s eyes, no longer hurled bawdy jokes at the other men. He concentrated on navigating the uneven path to the storehouse, and hiding his rations well enough afterwards.
The storehouse was the last room Jack saw. He had put his cupped hands out to receive some dried peas. He stood staring at them for a moment, perhaps concentrating on keeping his fingers together so that none of the shrivelled green spheres fell to the ground.
‘They’re not going to get any fresher for you looking at them,’ the commissary had called. ‘Move now, Starkey. Let the others through.’
Jack had looked up at the commissary, and kept looking as his knees buckled and the peas spilled from his hands. He was carried to the hospital tent but expired on the way. When the commissary went to sweep up the peas, they were gone.
Jack now lay not far from Dorothy, whose grave Jenny visited whenever she had time to find the strange, cloth-like white flowers the old woman had loved.
Jenny felt the pull of those two deaths eddying around her, and knew they
would drag her down if she didn’t drag herself up. She felt grim now, rather than excited, at the prospect of escape. But it was still an imperative, the only path that led from the graveyard.
Dan saw no salvation in plotting to get away, though. Jack’s death, and the ones since, had convinced him that the only hope lay in silence. He became surly whenever Jenny prodded him on the matter of the governor’s cutter. ‘Why would you wish to remind him of us?’ he said. ‘And of the bargain we struck, that there are fish which never see the storehouse.’
‘It could be her, next,’ she said, and nodded towards Charlotte, who was plucking leaves off every plant she could find and throwing them into a pot on top of the dead fire. ‘Her,’ said Jenny, ‘and the one to come. Do you think they’ll forget about the fish if we stay low? We need to find more of them, not hope Lockhart forgets there’s such a thing as fish.’
He shook his head, turning away. ‘There will be no conversations. With the governor, with anyone. We will do what we can for our own, and let them look after the rest, and hope.’
‘I don’t believe in just hoping,’ she said.
Dan would, of course, be angry when he found out. But his anger always followed the same trajectory, flash and noise with no real fire, followed by a sullen day or two during which she refused to acknowledge any problem, while he slowly forgot. She would far rather face his raging than a dead child.
And while the fish that her request brought in would help, she had another reason for making it, one that she had not yet exposed to the sunlight. There would be no harm, none at all, in getting to know the cutter. If people were used to seeing Dan in it and eating the fish it brought back, they would think nothing of seeing him repair it. Make it stronger.
So she approached Governor Lockhart after Sunday prayers. This was a little easier now, as the odious Major Rowe had been sent off to run Norfolk Island a few months ago. The marines had been delighted, Mr Corbett had told Jenny and Dan, and some had consumed a week’s grog ration on the night he sailed out of the harbour. ‘Should’ve brought some for us,’ Dan had said. Soldiers and convicts had been on the same ration for a while now, the only difference being an allowance of spirits for the free.
