by Meg Keneally
So Bruton picked up his oar and rowed along with the rest of them, and another two hours passed before everyone felt secure enough to haul in the oars and let the wind push them onwards.
It was, actually, a decent wind. One which, if it held, and if the chart was correct, would take them straight to Coepang.
They used the last of the light to spread out the chart again and see if its lines had resolved into a somehow more promising shape.
‘This is our best chance,’ said Jenny. ‘If you’re right – yes, yes, I know you are, I did not mean to question your skill. It seems we’re as close to Coepang as we can get without turning.’
‘We should cross the Gulf,’ said Langham ‘A straight line, then. No wasted movement. And it will give us a chance to get more water.’
‘And a chance to be attacked again,’ said Bruton.
‘We don’t have enough water to last us, though,’ Dan said.
‘Do the winds always blow from this direction up here, or is this a lucky one?’ asked John. ‘What if it turns, blows in our faces?’
‘That’s true,’ said Langham. ‘I don’t know what the winds do up here. Nor does anyone else. For all I know, this could be the first southerly that ever blew over these waters.’
‘If the wind turns, we’ll float until we are picked off, or we die,’ said Jenny. ‘We will just have more time to run into bad luck. And do any of you really believe this boat will survive another storm? If we go, we might die. If we don’t, we will die.’
Dan clapped his hand on Langham’s shoulder, an affectionate gesture and the first she had seen him employ for many weeks. It was hard to forgive him for making such an effort with Langham but not with her or the children. Although Langham, she supposed, was far more important to their survival at the moment.
‘If the wind holds,’ Dan said, ‘and if we’re lucky, how long will the crossing take?’
‘Two days, maybe? Perhaps a little less.’
Dan turned to Carney and asked, ‘Will the water last two days?’
‘Barely,’ he said. ‘If we are on half-measures.’
Dan looked at Jenny, raising his eyebrows. ‘What do you think?’
She almost forgave him, in that moment, for the weeks of petulant silence, and the way he now held back affection from the children as though it was a commodity to be hoarded.
‘We have kept moving, up to now,’ Jenny said. ‘If we stop, we may never start again.’
He nodded. ‘We will go then. We will go.’ And he turned the tiller, and John moved the sail, and the boat turned, slowly, to point out into the featureless blue of the Arafura Sea.
CHAPTER 27
Another night, and another day. Then darkness again, and Jenny wasn’t sure if there had been two nights, or three, or a hundred.
The wind held, more or less, and did not strengthen to the point where the boat was endangered. Occasionally a small amount of spray splashed onto the convicts, who welcomed it. The air was getting hotter, and it had a smothering heaviness that made Jenny’s skin slick and wet.
She dozed from time to time, dipping in and out of the world made up entirely of ocean. In her dreams she visited a grotesque Penmor where her mother had starved for want of assistance, where her sister cursed her name.
Now that it was no longer possible to see the underwater forest, Charlotte had retreated back into herself. Leaning against her mother, she took the occasional mouthful of rice or sip of water but otherwise was still and silent.
Emanuel lay far more still than a baby should, far more still than any baby Jenny had ever seen.
Dan shoved her shoulder. She was shallowly unconscious, and the push bumped her chin against her chest and brought down her teeth on her tongue, so that she was turning as she sat up, thinking of which curse to use on him. He wasn’t sneering, though, or tight-faced. He was pointing – pointing ahead.
She turned and saw it. The dark line on the horizon. The seabirds, in the distance. It was not until she felt the wetness on her cheeks that she realised she was crying.
There was a man standing on the dock, dressed in breeches and a shirt with a neckerchief, looking as though he could be on the sea wall at Penmor Harbour. When he saw them, though, he yelled in a foreign language. After not getting a response, he turned and ran, pushing aside a man carrying a basket of fruit and dodging a group of women, skimming the paving stones towards the town and the squat tower above it.
Soon enough he was back, as they were approaching the dock. He’d brought more men like him, wearing the strong and rough clothes of dock workers, and other people wrapped in coloured strips of cloth or in smocks with small caps on their heads. All of them crowded towards the end of the dock, waiting for the boat to close the last few dozen feet.
The man who’d first seen them reached down and handed a rope to Carney, who tied it to the bow. The man ran to the back then, leaned over and gripped Charlotte beneath her arms, lifting her until he stopped with a jerk. The girl was still tethered to the boat and her mother.
It hadn’t occurred to Jenny to untie them. It hadn’t occurred to her that they might reach a place where such a precaution was no longer necessary.
The man vaulted into the boat, a movement only possible for the well fed. He untied Emanuel and handed him up to a woman standing on the dock. She smiled and tickled him, then frowned when she got no answering gurgle.
Charlotte was hoisted up to one of the bystanders who wore a colourful cloth in place of breeches. The little girl reached out to Jenny and whimpered, but it was a small sound, rasping and lost in the noise.
Jenny didn’t know how many languages were being spoken, but she didn’t understand any of them. People shouted to one another and more came down to the dock while the man who had first seen them kept shouting a command over his shoulder. He seemed not to aim it at anyone in particular, perhaps just hoping somebody would catch it.
Jenny, untied now, tried to stand. She had never been unable to get herself out of a boat – had as a child reached up to the dock and pushed herself up with her arms at low tide, doing it far more smoothly than many of the boys. But now her legs would not support her. They buckled, and she crashed painfully back down to the bench. Her tears were still clearing a passage through the grime on her face, and the thought that she had arrived only to be unable to clamber onto the wharf, forced her into great, gulping sobs.
The man lifted her as easily as he had the children, but she noticed that some of the men on the dock, those with black caps, stepped back, reluctant to receive her. She lay on the wooden planks, staring at the frantic shadows around her.
The woman who’d taken Emanuel had also accepted Charlotte as a charge, and she came over saying words of comfort which Jenny could not understand. Their tone, though, left no doubt as to her meaning, when she laid Emanuel on Jenny’s chest and moved her arm around him.
Dan pulled himself up from the boat, repeating again and again a phrase that Vorst had taught him. ‘Ik heb uw hulp nodig. Ik heb uw hulp nodig.’ I need your help.
Jenny started to giggle with a sound she had heard from some of the women in the hulk, those who had been there longest, who cackled at the nonsensical. She thought that if it wasn’t evident from their condition that they needed help, no amount of repetition of the rote-learned phrase would convey the message.
Jenny limped to the end of the dock with an arm around one of the wharf men, the other holding Emanuel. The woman walked next to her with Charlotte, still saying unknown words in her comforting voice.
Dan was able to hobble by himself, making slow progress, as was Carney, and Bruton refused any help, walking more strongly than any of them. Harrigan’s eyes were open, but he made no attempt to move as he was hauled by three men onto the dock and then carried by them, arms under his shoulders and one sun-spotted hand on each ankle.
They were all loaded into a horse-drawn cart, and Jenny nearly screamed in protest – she hated carts. Experience had taught her that such jou
rneys rarely ended well. This one, though, drew to a stop outside a handsome stone house with wide windows to catch what breeze there was. A man stood waiting, well fed and with sharp, darting eyes, dressed in what seemed to be the clothes of an administrator: a plain, neat brown coat over an impeccable shirt.
When Dan saw him, he repeated the phrase that now seemed to be all he was capable of saying.
The man nodded, frowning. ‘I would say you all do,’ he said in accented English.
‘We were wrecked,’ said Dan. ‘Wrecked off . . .’ He was breathing heavily. The exertion of hauling himself along, on legs that had not stood in weeks, was beginning to tell, and the words of his story were already jumbling in his mouth. Jenny worried that they would become unintelligible or, worse, implausible.
But the man held up his hand to silence Dan. ‘There will be time to hear your story, and I will listen with great interest. But a dead man cannot speak, and you will be one soon unless we give you the help you are asking for.’
So each member of the group limped, or was dragged or carried through the door by which the man stood. They made their way into a flagstone courtyard with a tree in its centre that produced flowers of an almost violent purple.
The men were taken into a room at the end of the courtyard, and Jenny and the children into a side room, in the company of the friendly woman. She guided Jenny – who was still clutching Emanuel – to a couch, then lifted Charlotte up beside her. She left and came back a few minutes later with a plate bearing slices of a strange white fruit. When she lifted a piece to Charlotte’s lips, the girl just stared at it. Jenny picked up a slice and began to eat, slowly and then with more urgency, unable to stop, unwilling even to delay the strange fruit’s arrival in her stomach by chewing it.
The woman quietly took a small bowl from a nearby table and carried it over. She handed it to Jenny when her stomach revolted at the forgotten feeling of fullness, ejecting the fruit. Then the woman gently cleaned her, clicking her tongue and muttering. She cleaned the children, too, and brought Charlotte a plain muslin smock, the cleanest and brightest garment Jenny had seen for some time.
Charlotte had been able to keep down a small amount of fruit, and Emanuel had been given a water-soaked cloth to suck on. Both were still barely moving, the skin on their faces supported by no fat at all, so that it drew back and emphasised the hollows of their eye sockets, their eyes seeming to protrude as though in permanent surprise.
The woman picked Charlotte up and carried her into the next room, then returned to pick up Emanuel in one arm while helping Jenny to her feet with the other.
The next room contained the most valuable treasure Jenny had seen.
It was a bed of plain and meticulously sanded wood, and a mattress stuffed with more feathers than on all of the fowl Jenny had seen during her time at Sydney Cove.
Charlotte was already tucked in and drowsing. The woman pulled back the covers and gestured, and Jenny sank into the mattress, tugging the light cotton sheet up to her chin despite the heat. She cradled Emanuel and found sleep even before she reached out for it.
Dan was lying there beside them, stroking Charlotte’s hair, when Jenny woke. He was on top of the covers and dressed in rough but clean clothes of the type the dock workers had worn.
This was the first time, Jenny realised, that they had lain together in a bed with legs, on a mattress that was raised off the floor.
When she moved to get up, he placed his hand gently on her shoulder, pressing her down. ‘No need to move. No need to get up, no need to bail, no need to look for water.’
She smiled, feeling one or two of her teeth move as she did so. She pressed them gingerly with her tongue, not wanting to lose them but unable to resist seeing how far they would go.
After a minute she gave up and focused back on Dan and the sleeping Charlotte. Jenny kissed Emanuel’s head and squeezed a small hand that should have been padded with far more flesh than it was.
When she woke again the corners of the room were dark, the light slowly backing away through the window. Dan was still there, still awake, but frowning now. ‘We are to dine with the governor,’ he said.
She sat upright before a sudden dizziness dragged her back to the pillow. How had Governor Lockhart made it here? Had he led a group himself to recover the escapees? And why on earth, if they were found out, would he wish to dine with them?
Dan smiled. ‘Not that governor,’ he said. ‘The Dutch governor of this island, Van Dalen. The man who spoke English to us. He wishes to hear our story.’
‘And you will tell the story?’
‘Yes. We are the crew of a whaler,’ Dan told her. ‘We were wrecked, somewhere near Batavia. We got away in the cutter, and our captain and some others managed to clamber aboard another small boat. We will warn the Dutch to keep watch in case other survivors arrive.’
‘Is it not cruel, ungrateful, to ask them to stand on the dock waiting for phantoms?’
‘It is what’s needed,’ he said.
‘And this whaler – we did not agree on a name.’
‘The Janus.’
‘Dan, don’t be stupid. Don’t amuse yourself with a little joke that could get us found out.’
He smiled, even winked. Clearly delighted. Jenny wanted to hit him. ‘I’m not responsible for what the ship is named,’ he said.
‘You are if you’re the one naming it! Why on earth call the ship a name that makes educated people think of liars?’
‘Well, Janus it is. I’ve already spoken to all of the lads – even Harrigan, who will be too weak for dinner tonight but is conscious now. Thanks to you, I must say. He says it too, and will say it in person when he’s well enough.’
‘That is wonderful – at times I thought he was already dead.’
‘All he needs is food and sleep,’ Dan said with a smile. ‘So, as for the finer details of our tale – when we were wrecked, I helped get you into the cutter before the rest of us. We collected everyone we could, and then we saw the other boat with the captain and a few men rolling in the opposite direction. We tried to call to them, but they didn’t hear us. We hope, pray, that they will find land, perhaps even this land if God is with us.’
Jenny shook her head. ‘How do you explain the presence of a farmer on a whaler?’
‘We will think of something. Harrigan isn’t well enough to be quizzed tonight. Perhaps he was paying for passage, and we brought him with us for the same reason we actually brought him with us – his experience may be useful.’
‘And our revered captain? His name is . . .’
Dan swore. ‘We forgot to name the bastard, didn’t we. I’d better go back to the lads. Let’s call him Captain . . . Captain Spikerman.’
‘And do we like Captain Spikerman?’
‘Well enough. He can be a hard bugger at times, but generally fair, and nice to the children.’
Jenny sighed. ‘All right. Oh – and how long have we been floating around for, if they ask?’
‘Close to a month,’ Dan said quickly when the governor asked. ‘As near as we can reckon, at least. It’s very easy to lose track.’
‘Yes, that’s what Captain Halifax found too,’ said Mattias Van Dalen from the head of a long table, covered in candles. Other local worthies were studded around it, interspersed with the convicts. Everyone else’s attention was focused on them, the strange visitors. ‘Extraordinary to have two such parties arriving within the space of a few years. His voyage was much longer than yours, though, of course.’
‘Oh, yes. It must’ve been.’
‘Mrs Trelawney,’ said the governor, turning to her and smiling.
She smiled back. Dan, in the end, had introduced himself by her name, had even smiled at her while doing so.
Van Dalen nodded to one of the servants, a man wearing a smock tied with a piece of cloth around his waist. He set in front of her a dish of the same white fruit she’d been served on arrival, this time soaking in a bowl of milk.
The governor
addressed her again. ‘Your shipmates, my dear, have praised your courage, your tenacity. Mr Larkin, I believe, told me there were times when your urging was the only thing driving you all forward.’
Carney, at the other end of the table, smiled and raised a cup in her direction. She did not turn to look at Dan, but could feel him tense beside her.
‘I don’t believe any one of us was responsible for the happy end to our voyage, sir,’ she said. ‘Of course, without my husband’s direction, we would have been in a far worse state. And we would have very possibly been lying dead now had it not been for your kindness.’
The governor smiled again and inclined his head.
‘My wife was our saviour, at times,’ Dan said. ‘I was very clever to marry her.’
This, even delivered as a fleeting compliment, delighted Jenny. It was not the talk of a man who believed he wasn’t really married.
‘I must remark,’ Van Dalen said, ‘that I was surprised by the state of you all. You were in no better condition than Captain Halifax and his crew, and they had been sailing for at least twice as long. You looked as though you had endured a voyage of two, three months, not one.’
‘Well, we had some bad luck with the weather,’ said Dan. ‘I can’t be sure it was a month. We did drift around a bit, having no way of knowing where we were headed.’
‘Yet your navigator is, I am told, in possession of a quadrant,’ said the governor.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Dan. ‘But not in possession of the wit to use it.’
Langham, next to Carney, narrowed his eyes.
‘Well,’ said Van Dalen, ‘I rejoice that you found us, and that we were in a position to assist. You may stay here in Coepang for as long as you wish. You may find the climate a little warm, but the people are congenial enough. Men such as yourselves, when your strength returns, will have no trouble finding work on the docks, and I will recommend you for it. Of course, we will also understand if you wish to seek passage onward.’
‘You’re kind,’ said Dan. ‘I fear we must eventually leave you. If we can stay for a short while, though, we’d be very grateful.’
