by Meg Keneally
‘A shame this place is so remote, permits no escape,’ she said. ‘Of course, that’s why we are here. It would be very embarrassing to the governor if some convicts were to escape, but they would need somewhere to escape to.’
Vorst looked up sharply. ‘I have no intention of aiding any convicts in an escape attempt.’
Jenny feared he was about to fold up the chart along with any hope of identifying a destination. ‘Of course not, and I would never ask such a thing,’ she said, trying to sound calm. ‘It is simply interesting to think on. The masters of the sea – they take so little account of the waters beyond their own. I am ignorant of anything that does not fall under His Majesty’s domain.’
‘As you say, any disappearance would be very embarrassing to Mr Lockhart,’ said Vorst.
‘Oh yes.’
‘For intellectual interest, then,’ said Vorst, ‘if I were a convict, knowing what I know of the sea, I would consider the venture almost hopeless.’
‘Almost.’
‘Yes. There is a chance, a small one. One that has been taken before. You have heard of the famous mutiny?’
Jenny looked at Dan, who shook his head.
‘Not so famous as the English like to suppose, then,’ Vorst said. ‘It happened on a ship called the Bounty. They’d been in Otaheite, and the crew rather liked the climate and the women. They were sorry to leave, even sorrier after a few weeks back under the command of their captain, who was arrogant and unreasonable. So they took the ship.’
‘Where?’ Dan asked.
‘I’m not sure, and neither was their captain. They put him in a small boat, you see, with a few loyal crew members, and set him adrift.’ Vorst paused and sat back, unwilling to dole out more of the story without some supplication.
‘And,’ said Jenny, ‘he perished at sea?’
Vorst chuckled. ‘You would think so, wouldn’t you? No, he made his way by fits and starts to a haven. One provided by the Dutch. One which may interest you – from a theoretical perspective, of course.’
‘Of course,’ said Jenny. She didn’t try to repeat the two unfamiliar words he had used, fearful to reveal any ignorance.
Vorst leaned over the map. ‘Anyone attempting such a voyage would need a strong vessel,’ he said, ‘and significant skill. If a person had both of those things, they could sail close into the coast all the way up here, then across this gulf – the Gulf of Carpentaria – and along to the north-west. If one wanted to get away from English superiority, one could keep going until one reached here.’ He tapped the chart twice, driving his dirty, broken fingernail into an archipelago on the delicate paper. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is Coepang. That is where the captain of the Bounty ended up. There, one would find no English, no gaolers. Only Dutch. They might be persuaded to help unfortunate victims of a shipwreck. We are generous, you know.’
‘How far did the Bounty’s captain sail to get there?’ Jenny asked.
‘Three and a half thousand nautical miles. It would be a little further from here. While the man was a bastard by all accounts, he was highly skilled and had an experienced crew. I would, of course, strongly advise against anyone taking such a journey, let alone a group of felons with far less experience than the captain. But I suppose it could be done.’
Jenny stared at the lines on the map. She couldn’t interpret the symbols she knew to be letters, but she could divine Vorst’s meaning. With enough supplies, and enough skill, they could leave Sydney Cove behind.
Vorst went through a lot of laundry, and Jenny needed to be stealthy in the washing of it. Early each morning she visited a nearby stream to do this work, before hanging the garments out to dry in the hut. Each evening, Dan rowed her to Vorst’s ship.
They would have liked to have brought Vincent Langham with them, as he might have been able to commit Vorst’s chart to memory. John Carney would have been welcome too. But it was far too dangerous for Dan and Jenny to bring anyone, and Vorst would probably not welcome the additions. It was one thing to be sharing his knowledge of the sea with two people who had shown him kindness, another to be seen plotting.
On each visit they asked to see the chart, and by the third it was already laid out on the table. Vorst made no further remarks on it. He seemed to pretend not to notice the avidity with which they studied it.
After a week, he announced that he had decided to give them a gift. He was a businessman, though – the gift would be theirs if they would also buy two of his muskets, and powder to load them. When Dan dug up his purse and spilled its contents onto Vorst’s chart table, the Dutchman clapped his hands, expressing delight that there was just enough to cover his costs. The muskets may have cost all of their remaining money, but what came with them was worth far more.
Nestled in the wrappings of one of the muskets, they found when they got it back to the hut, was a quadrant. Wrapped around the barrel of the other was the chart.
CHAPTER 20
Jenny desperately needed Dan to keep his nerve, just as he seemed to be losing it again. She had hoped he would be dragged out of his morose fog by their return to the hut and his restored command of the fishing fleet. She missed the blazing, impetuous rogue, but his only animation still came through rum-soaked anger. Rum wasn’t new to Dan, but where it used to spur him to boasts and good-natured scrapping, it now called out a dark, seeping resentment.
Having brought a bottle with him from the main settlement, he sat on the ground sucking on it as Jenny swept spiderwebs and droppings out of the hut. She took care not to send any billows of dust towards Emanuel, who lay silently on a square of canvas nearby. Charlotte played on the ground near Dan, casting little glances at him over her shoulder while staying quiet, not drawing his attention to her. But Dan was usually her playmate, and eventually she tottered up to him. ‘Will you take me to the water?’
He didn’t look at her, swigging from his bottle again. ‘No.’
‘Maybe there are fish there.’
He snapped his head around to face her and bellowed, ‘I said no!’
Charlotte’s tears drew Jenny from inside the hut. The girl ran to her, hugging her legs, and Dan found himself roughly prodded with the broom handle. He turned, snarling, grabbed the broom, dragged it out of Jenny’s hand and sent it spinning across the clearing.
Keeping her eyes on him, she crouched and took Charlotte by the shoulders. ‘Go inside, duckling.’
Her daughter stared for another moment at the monster who had replaced her father, then ran inside, sobbing.
‘She has done nothing wrong,’ said Jenny. ‘She might never trust you again.’
‘Perhaps she shouldn’t.’
‘And should I?’
Dan stood unsteadily and flung the now-empty bottle into the bushes. ‘You have no right to trust me!’ he yelled. ‘No right to expect anything!’
She picked up Emanuel, whose head lolled backwards, and walked slowly towards Dan, half expecting him to lash out at her. Instead, his shoulders slumped and he sat again. She lowered herself onto her haunches in front of him. ‘I took risks to get us back here, because I do trust you. To get us away from here before we starve – before your son stops breathing. I trust you to ensure his survival as well as your own.’
‘He’ll stop breathing if he is tossed from a boat into a heaving sea,’ Dan said. ‘I know the ocean, I know its greed. And you want to dangle the children over its open mouth.’
‘The earth is greedy too. It won’t feed us, but its hunger shows no sign of being sated. Emanuel’s death at sea is a possibility. His death here is nigh on certain. As it is for all of us.’
He wouldn’t look at her, slowly exhaling as his shoulders rounded into the familiar posture of despair. ‘And I can’t prevent it,’ he said.
Slowly, she unwrapped Emanuel’s swaddling. She traced her fingers over his ribs, then reached for Dan’s hand and placed it on the baby’s stomach. ‘Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t. If we stay here, though, he will leave us without ever having r
un or smiled, ever having hit his sister, ever having learned how to fish.’ She paused. ‘Don’t die before you’re dead, Dan. Otherwise your son will slip off while you sit here sucking on a bottle.’
Dan would never acknowledge she was right. The next morning, though, he was up at dawn. She woke to see him bending over Emanuel, cupping his sunken cheek, tracing his ribs as Jenny had the day before.
Dan turned when he heard her moving. ‘We will go,’ he said. ‘God help us, if He has any power where we’re travelling.’
Jenny stood, went to her husband, took his hand and kissed it. ‘You are a brave man.’
‘Not brave enough to defy you, I suppose,’ he said.
Over the following couple of weeks, they all behaved like model convicts. Jenny began to worry they were taking it too far when Corbett pulled her aside after muster one morning. ‘I must say, I’m gratified,’ he said. ‘You and your husband are among the most upright in the colony.’
But Dan kept finding reasons to delay the journey now that they had everything they needed. The hole in their floor was filled with food and weapons and the tools that would take them to Coepang.
Langham had been exceptionally excited when he saw the chart and quadrant, declaring he had what he required to get them to their destination. He said that no cloudy night could stop them. If they were to put his boast to the test, though, it would need to be soon. February was making everyone’s skin slick with its characteristic humidity, and Jenny had been here long enough to know that after the sweat came the storms.
Everyone agreed that they needed to go before the heavy seas and the rain set in. But no one knew what would be waiting for them when they headed north, whether distance from their prison would intensify the winds.
Yet Dan was reluctant to name a day. ‘The boat needs to be made ready,’ he said. ‘That will take time.’ He and Carney were working on it whenever they could, caulking seams while Jenny spent her nights weaving sails out of flax. Ostensibly this was to make the cutter more fit for fishing, an enterprise of which the governor approved.
‘Every day we wait, every minute, puts us at greater risk,’ Jenny said to Dan one night.
‘Don’t worry about the storms. We can manage those, and we won’t leave so late that we will be sailing into a gale.’
‘It’s not the storms, Dan. Not only the storms, anyway. How well do you know Bruton, really? Harrigan? They all have women, don’t they? Do you think they’ve told them? Some of those women, they’d do anything to keep a man once they’ve got him. I’ve lived with them, so I know them well. They might even decide to have a word, give the information in exchange for their own man’s safety, while the rest of us hang. Every day we hold back is a day closer to that happening.’
‘You wouldn’t do such a thing, of course, even if you weren’t coming,’ said Dan.
‘Of course not.’
‘No, because you don’t have to. I’m just about a free man, now, Jenny. Or supposed to be. But because we’ve been united in a false marriage, I can’t leave except in this way. So you don’t have to turn me in to keep me – you’ve shackled me far more effectively than they have.’
The other men were nervous; none believed their luck would hold indefinitely. Bruton, in particular, felt the strain of not drawing attention to himself, the stress of the held-back blow.
Charlotte didn’t know they were soon to leave. Every day, Jenny took her down to wade in the harbour and peer into the bushes to see if they could spot the possums to which the girl was so drawn. Without knowing it, Charlotte was saying goodbye.
Everybody seemed to be living on held breath, none of the conspirators daring to visit Dan and Jenny’s hut now. They were being watched, they knew, but not as a mass: all convicts were watched as a precautionary measure.
Dan and Carney, at least, had opportunities to speak while at their work, though Jenny wasn’t told what passed between them. But she had seen the governor come down to look over their repairs to the cutter and praise them for their industry. Neither betrayed any flicker of shame or guilt when they nodded and grinned and accepted Lockhart’s compliments.
A week later Dan and Carney took the cutter out fishing as usual, one of the last such trips they expected to take. They’d done everything they could think of to the boat; they had even installed a sea drogue, a piece of cloth that could be trailed into the water to steady the vessel.
At Yarramundi’s request, they’d agreed to take some of his kinswomen out with them: a woman with two sons around Charlotte’s age, and a girl who needed to be shown the places where her ancestors had drawn fish from the sea.
Dan and Carney let the boat drift a little further than usual. It came around from the shelter of the point it usually hid behind, and was exposed to the mouth of the open ocean. The harbour entrance was some miles away, but the ocean could still be felt, rolling waves into the bay until they smashed against headlands and reverberated back, sometimes at unexpected angles. Angles that could catch unawares fishermen who had let their boat drift.
Assaults on the cutter by the Tasman’s waves over the past few years had weakened its seams, and Dan’s repairs hadn’t had a chance to cure, to settle in. So the boat did what they could not afford for her to do once they were at sea. It began to leak.
Dan and Carney hurled water out faster than it could get in, stopping the boat from foundering.
The Wangal woman nodded to the girl, who slid beneath the water and surfaced several feet away, swimming strongly but without haste. Then the woman eased into the water too, holding one boy in each arm, kicking as she swam on her back after the girl.
The men kept bailing. But they neglected to keep the nose of the boat into the waves, and the next to hit caught them broadside, tipping the boat over and hauling it towards the rocks. Dan was going to insist that Carney swim for shore anyway. At least, he told Jenny later that that was his intention. No such insistence was necessary: Carney struck out to shore the moment the boat rolled over, no doubt expecting Dan to follow.
But Dan hung on to the precious boat, trying to nudge it out of a current that was bringing it to the sharpest rocks. Trying, and failing.
Then came a splash from the other side of the boat, heavier than water on water. Around the upturned bow Yarramundi’s face appeared, grinning. ‘These are the currents I warned you about,’ he said cheerfully. He pointed ahead and to the side a little, and began swimming in that direction, guiding the boat along with Dan doing the same from the other side.
She still ran aground on a tiny inlet; she was still smashed in places. But, for the most part, she was whole. Some of Yarramundi’s friends – with whom he’d been fishing from shore while keeping an eye on his kinswomen – had jumped into the water and collected the oars. So the cutter was still intact. It was not, however, seaworthy. Some weeks would pass before it could be set to rights.
Dan became known as the convict who had risked his life to save the governor’s cutter. The officers praised him, clapped him on the shoulder and raised their cups to him. No one thought to raise a cup to Yarramundi, without whom the boat would have been firewood.
Dan was again put in charge of repairing the boat, setting her to rights, making her as seaworthy as she could possibly be. This time he made sure every seam was utterly caulked, and he put aside enough resin and soap to make repairs on the journey, secreting them with the brooding mass of supplies under the floor. Jenny could hardly believe visitors didn’t feel the weight of it, hear it begging for release.
She was now the one backing away from the journey. She had seen escape as a choice between the certain starvation of her children and peril possibly followed by freedom. Now, though, each option seemed equally doomed.
Until someone else made a sea voyage: someone who shouldn’t have been alive to do so.
Captain Andrew Harforth had always been among the lustier marines. It was rumoured he’d participated in the debauchery that first night, while his brother officers had turne
d away, above such animal behaviour. Harforth had, though, now gone too far even for those experienced in the turning of blind eyes.
He had come upon the daughter of a convict, Julia Morrow, in the forest. Julia’s mother had been transported for drunkenness and continued her offence in Sydney Cove, so her daughter was haphazardly raised by other female convicts who pitied her and gave her what attention they could. She was left with hours of leisure when she often wandered into the woods, and some had feared she would be attacked by natives. But the attack, when it came, was from Harforth, and its nature was easy to guess for those who knew of his appetites.
Julia was forced to describe the incident to the judge advocate. She was eight years old.
In a place where theft of food ended lives, it was widely assumed that such an attack on a child would lead to execution. Instead, Harforth was sent to Norfolk Island. The governor tried to forget about him, though Julia would never be able to.
‘She cries all the time,’ Bea told Jenny. ‘She won’t play with the other children, and won’t let me hug her when before she was always pestering me for cuddles and stories.’
Jenny looked at Charlotte. If she survived, she would soon become prey for those with the same leanings as Harforth. Such men might be emboldened by the fact that apprehension would earn them no worse fate than banishment to a penal satellite, where they could continue satisfying themselves away from the governor’s gaze.
Jenny again urged Dan to go faster, to get more work done on the boat each day than he had the day before.
‘If I go fast and it saves us a day, we might all drown because I missed something,’ he said.
So she paced around her yard when no one was looking, breathing her frustration into the open air. Occasionally she ejected an inarticulate, full-throated scream into the twilight. Otherwise she did as she was told, mending nets and collecting oysters and their shells, and dressing fish and washing clothes. And she waited.
