There was nothing to be gained by arguing with him, any more than you might profit from arguing with a barking dog. Still, I argued.
– Yes, I said, and this new fellow will have been told that there is a passenger aboard with the temperament to challenge the captain of his ship to a duel. That is no triumph, Mr Macarthur!
He gave me a glance as if to say, how could you understand. There was a smirk, too, and a movement of the shoulder halfway to a shrug.
– Would it not have been the wiser course, sir, not to make an enemy of a person with such power over us?
I heard my voice gone shrill with fury, was shouting, did not care who heard.
– No matter what tricks you can perform with your damned pistols?
The smirk did not shift.
– Well, wife, he said weightily, as if with some pronouncement in mind. What a fine thing.
But even as he said the words he seemed to lose interest in them. He brushed at a speck on his sleeve, smoothed his hair above an ear, held out his hand to inspect the nails. Then, as if I had not spoken, as if he had not begun a thought, he left the cabin.
EAVESDROPPING
Far from bringing Mr Macarthur to his senses, the duel on the wharf spurred him on. Within a week of the ship finally sailing, he alienated the new captain, a Mr Trail, by complaining on behalf of the soldiers about their ration. Fumed and sputtered. Suddenly nothing was more important than the welfare of the men.
– Let someone else take up their cause, I said. Nothing good will come of you interfering.
– I consider it my duty, he said, smug as a parson. These poor fellows are being cheated, actually going hungry!
He tried to pull his superior into the fight, but Captain Nepean was too canny to be drawn. He was a cold fish, very conscious of his position: commander of the New South Wales Corps until an officer of higher rank could be persuaded to take on the task. Beyond that he was one of the Nepeans of Saltash, his brother Evan an influential person high in the government. Evan Nepean had gone to school with Mr Macarthur’s brother James, and it was thanks to that connection that Mr Macarthur had been offered his new post. Captain Nepean must have known that Mr Macarthur’s position in the regiment was solely due to his brother’s influence. Would have known, too, about the five hundred pounds. He bowed courteously to me with my swollen belly when he saw me taking the air on the after-deck, but was always on his way somewhere else and never paused.
Nepean’s refusal to support him further inflamed my husband.
– But sir, I said, trying to jolly him out of his rage. Captain Nepean knows on which side his bread is buttered, and so should you!
Now Mr Macarthur became convinced that Captain Trail and Nepean were plotting against him. This officer and gentleman was moved to creep up the passageway so that he could apply his ear to the door of the captain’s cabin. What did he hear? Something to heap fuel on his rage—or perhaps nothing. By now he was taken over by a conviction that nothing could shake, a pale outrage at the perfidy of Captain Trail, Nepean, the bosun, anyone.
Nepean and the captain had comfortable quarters in the upper deck, which outraged Mr Macarthur, for we were relegated to a half-cabin below, with the convict women on the other side of a light partition. He smarted under the indignity—it offended not his compassion but his pride, that he should be reduced almost to sharing a cabin with felons.
Oh, I remember that vile cabin. The convict women swore and groaned, shouted, screamed, farted. There was an unceasing clatter and rumble, the confused din of too many women shut in too tight a space. Now and then one of them sang in a loud cracking voice. Love divine, all loves excelling. I never saw the women, but came to feel that I knew the one who sang, because the others shouted at her to close your damn cake-hole, Mary Anne, for the love of God!
Mr Macarthur maintained that every one of these women was a harlot who deserved nothing better, but I did not believe him. By now I had learned enough about the narrowness of a woman’s choices to guess that they were not all harlots, only less lucky than I had been.
Their situation was far worse than mine, but I shared some of their sufferings. There was one—or perhaps more than one—who groaned and puked, and I knew that on the other side of that thin wall was a woman racked with the same morning sickness that was racking me, and must be awake with the same sweaty fear for the future of herself and her unborn child.
But I had privileges unimaginable for those women: a degree of privacy, the assistance of a girl who uncomplainingly endured the hardships alongside me, and the power to go up onto the deck and take the air whenever I pleased.
Until, that is, Mr Macarthur’s eavesdropping on the captain and Nepean was detected, at which point the passageway was nailed shut. Actually nailed. Mr Macarthur braved the other passageway—which I had never used, for it was the hospital for the convicts—but he forbade me to risk contagion. Confined in that smelly cabin with my sick child, sick myself, without the respite of an hour up on deck, I was better off than the women I could hear, but not by so very much.
We were nailed into the cabin for twenty days, and Mr Macarthur spent them scheming. Not how to free us, but how to bring Nepean before a court martial as soon as we got to New South Wales.
– Mr Macarthur, I pleaded, for God’s sake forget Nepean, forget Trail—think of us, and find a way to patch up the quarrel!
But each time he came down again from the deck it was to record on a growing pile of paper some new proof of Nepean’s perfidy so it could be given in evidence later.
There was no actual escape, but I found some form of it within my own being. My self withdrew into a smaller and smaller space until it was too distant to be touched. I would have accepted death with indifference. In that merciful blur, time was suspended. At a great distance I heard Edward’s feeble cries and attended to them. They were nothing more than a sound, of no more importance to me than the creaking of the ship’s timbers or the groans from beyond the wall. The creature that was me had crept away and left nothing more than the shell of a woman curled up on the bunk.
TO ACT SO PROVOKINGLY
Then my husband came to me and Anne and told us to pack all our belongings, for we were to exchange our place in the Neptune for one on the Scarborough. I had no idea that it was possible to decamp from one ship into another in the middle of the Atlantic—husband, wife large with child, infant, maidservant, baggage—but he assured me it was, as soon as there was calm weather. He was as triumphant about it as if it were exactly what he had always wanted.
How was he able to get his way? Or was it that Trail and Nepean wanted him gone? I was too sick to care, only knew it as deliverance.
On the Scarborough Edward and I shared a cabin with the wife of Lieutenant Abbott. She made room for me and Edward with grace, although our gain was her loss.
She pitied me, I saw it in her eyes. Everyone on the ship knew that it had pleased Mr Macarthur to act so provokingly as to make our lives on the Neptune a living hell. That, having created the problem, he had then gone about solving it in the way that gave the greatest inconvenience to the greatest number. It was not my imagination that, on the Scarborough, the captain, the officers, even the seamen, treated Mr Macarthur warily, as one might deal with an unpredictable dog.
ALMIGHTY PROVIDENCE
We reached the Cape safely, but my husband contracted some virulent African fever there, and during our passage through the Southern Ocean he lay in the cramped dirty cabin they called the hospital. I nursed him, in so far as I could, and was in that cabin with him for weeks, for Mrs Abbott feared contagion and could not risk herself and her own child. Nor would I risk Anne, who had put her fate in my hands. Good woman that she was, Mrs Abbott took over the care of Edward, and made sure Anne brought me what I needed and left it in the passageway. Other than that, it was myself and my groaning husband alone in that cabin. When a dangerous dog falls ill, who will come to help?
But I exerted myself in every way I had eve
r heard of to keep him alive, fighting the fever with cold cloths that became hot as soon as they touched his skin, tipping such remedies as were available into his mouth, until I was dizzy with exhaustion and felt the child inside my great belly shifting as if to complain.
I could not let him die. Bad though it was to be Mr Macarthur’s wife, it would be worse to be his widow. There would be nothing for me in New South Wales, that place of prisoners and soldiers. There would be no genteel families whose children would need a governess. No one would need a seamstress. Possibly someone might think the widow would do as a wife, but it was unlikely. Mrs John Macarthur, pale, thin, with a sickly runt of a boy and a baby at the breast, would not be any man’s first choice.
I would have to take a passage on the next ship back to England, along with Anne if she would return with me, and if my small dower could stretch that far. And then? I felt a choking panic at the picture of myself standing on the dock at Plymouth with my bags and boxes, Edward beside me and the new child in my arms. My mother would feel obliged to give us refuge for a time. I would embrace the half-sister I had met only at my wedding, and we would all say how glad we were. But they were strangers to me, and I to them. There would be no home to be made there.
With Bridie I might pass a few hours. We had exchanged letters just before we sailed, from which I gathered she was still at the vicarage and still unmarried, though putting the best face on it with cheery news about the doings of her brothers, as if marriage was nowhere in her thoughts. She and her mother would welcome me and Edward with the courtesy due a visitor. I would try to explain what would be unimaginable to them, the voyage to New South Wales and the voyage back again. When the visit was over, they would embrace me and speak vague phrases about another visit, and Edward and the baby and I would step out into the lane.
And Grandfather? He might forgive me, because forgiveness was what our Lord taught. But I would never again have the same place in his heart that I once had. I would always love him, would always for his sake pretend a faith I did not have. He would perhaps always love me, though with the grief of recognising I was a lost sheep.
But how would it be, sitting in his kitchen at the scrubbed table, his boots beside the hob, and Edward sulky and fearful at this bristly bearded stranger who could not warm to the child who was the living proof of my sin? Good old man, he would take me aside and with those eyes sharply blue in his sunburnt face he would ask me in what status I stood with my redeemer, and I would tell him he need have no apprehension for my religion. But those eyes missed nothing. He would know that I spoke a cunning form of words in which a lie can pretend to be the truth.
THE PRICE TO PAY
My most earnest and sleepless work did its job, and it seemed that Mr Macarthur would live. But those weeks exacted their price. At the point where he began to recover, I felt the pains of labour begin, many weeks before their proper time.
That daughter could not have lived. Yet she did live for an hour, this tiny bony creature, her blueish lips puckering at the air she was not yet ready to breathe, her veined eyelids flickering at the light she was not yet ready to see.
I knew she could not live, could not have lived even if I were safe at Bridgerule with the doctor beside me. Still I held her close and hoped. In that extremity I persuaded myself that a merciful Providence might hear me, and prayed. I held her frail body and willed the warmth and strength out of my own into hers, nothing existing in the world except the places where her skin touched mine, where life might flow between us.
Anne was clever enough not to try to clean her, or wrap her. Drew a shawl over the two of us together and sat quietly with us.
I called her Jane, in honour of good Mrs Kingdon. Whispered her name into her tiny ear, Stay with me, Jane, thinking that if she had a name she could not go. Perhaps I only said the words in my mind, but was sure she heard. Stay with me, stay, stay. But there was not enough skin, not enough shawl. No skin, no shawl, would have been enough.
When I could no longer pretend she still breathed, a great cold numbness crept in where hope had been. By the time the parson came I wanted no man near me. I was perhaps a little wild with him. I remember him going sideways through the doorway ducking his head, a spider in his dark clothes, the Bible big and black in his hand the last part of him to disappear.
The hereafter. I bowed my head with everyone else as Captain Marshall read the service over the canvas bundle, but I knew there was no hereafter. Only the here, the now, and then silence.
Still, each year on the day of her birth and death I think of Jane. Not with grief, not with regret or longing or rage, but in stillness, honouring the fact that there was, for a short time, such a person in the world.
No one would remember her, only myself and Anne. Now you, too, know of her. It eases my heart to record her existence. To tell you her name, and tell you that she was loved.
Mr Macarthur walked off the ship at Sydney unsteady, the pock-marks a nasty pink on the chalk of his cheeks. But walked.
FORM OF WORDS
I composed a glorious romance about all this for my mother. I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth. I am reading over the copy now, decades later, with admiration for my young self. I did not refer to the horrors of the nailed-up cabin. The dangerous Captain Trail became merely amusing: a perfect sea-monster. To reassure her of my husband’s power to arrange things for my advantage, I let her believe that it was I who had requested an exchange of ship. This exchange proved in every respect satisfactory to me, I wrote, as if the event was no more significant than taking a turn in the garden.
It gave me a mocking angry satisfaction to fool everyone so well. But I well remember the bleakness of folding up that letter and sending it off. To be clever in quite that way is to live within a great solitude.
At the end of this letter full of sunny embellishments, there was a message to Grandfather. Since the day he had been told of my fallen condition I had not seen him. I had written to him several times, but received no answer. Now, aware of how unlikely it was that I would ever see him again, I longed to beg his forgiveness. He might refuse to reply to any words from his lost sheep, but I hoped he might soften enough to hear them. Tell my Grandfather, with my love, I wrote, that I have not forgotten his counsel to have ever present to my mind the duty due by us to our Maker. I was not claiming to believe or to obey his solemn instruction, only to remember it. Like a Trojan horse, my words would I hoped open the gates of his heart to the ones that I wanted so much for him to hear: with my love.
PART THREE
INCREDIBLE
It was perfectly true to say that the crops of New South Wales were flourishing in a manner nearly incredible. In fact the flourishing was so nearly incredible that it was not credible at all. The reality was that the wheat had shrivelled and died, the corn had parched up into rustling dry leaves on creaking stalks, the barley had not even sprouted.
The prisoners had been described as making rapid progress in building, and that was another lie in truth’s clothing. Yes, many things were being built. It was not a falsehood to withhold the detail: that what was being built were hovels made of crooked posts holding between them a few woven wattles daubed with mud, sad messes that a dog would be ashamed to live in. Oh, and rapid progress in building also involved mildewed canvas, some structures nothing more than a sheet of sailcloth flung over a rope between two trees, the edges of the canvas held out with a few stones to make—you could call it build—a small triangular space that a human might creep into.
That first morning in Sydney, looking at the place we had been allocated—a low, mean house with a roof of palm thatch—I saw that Mr Macarthur doubted for the first time. His lip curled, his brows drew together. It was the forerunning, like heaped clouds on the horizon, of a tantrum. Next would be the hard-heeled stalking to the governor, the raised voices, the hand chopping the air. My wife, he’d say. My son! That w
ould cut no ice with anyone. Who would bring his wife and infant to such a place, when with a little humility he could have been sitting in some cosy barracks in Gibraltar?
– Much better than I expected, I said. And look, so superior to that other one!
I pointed to where an officer’s backside could be seen as he bent to enter a hut even meaner than ours.
– They must respect you, sir, I said, to have given us this one, and look how conveniently close to the stream it is!
Providence now caused a commotion in the next hut. The owner of the backside stood rubbing his head where it had met the lintel, which was now dangling like a broken arm in the doorway.
– We could do worse, you see, Mr Macarthur, I said in my gayest tones. Quickly, best take possession before his envy of our better fortune causes him to eye off ours.
That was an argument I knew would strike home.
Sydney Town was a dusty ugly angry place, a sad blighted bit of ground on which too many souls tramped out their days dreaming of somewhere else. It had been two years since a thousand prisoners and two hundred and fifty of His Majesty’s marines sailed into the bay called Sydney Cove and stepped onto a wild shore of which absolutely nothing was known. Since then they had been cut off, with no supplies and no exchange of news beyond those first, nearly incredible reports.
ROACHES
At the start everything was shocking to me. The prisoners were men and women whose lives had made them vicious enough to steal the bread from each other’s mouths, and who seethed and schemed with plans for escape or revolt, and proved endlessly ingenious in the slyness they used to rob the storehouse or their neighbours. Certain of the marines were not much better, and seemed to take pleasure in the floggings meted out, as if they were punishing the prisoners not for their crimes alone, but also for causing the marines to be in this place. There were times when the screams could be heard in every corner of the settlement.
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