3 Great Historical Novels (22 page)

It occurred to Rhia that there was no point in sitting on the floor when there was a perfectly good hammock to lie in. She climbed into it with some difficulty and pulled a blanket over herself. It smelt mildewed and was rough on her skin, but if she closed her eyes she could just imagine the feel of cambric sheets and soft eider quilts.

If today were a cloth it would be sailcloth.

The rapping knocked through the dream of a hammock swinging above a pit of sea serpents. It was a half-waking dream, but Rhia was still relieved to put her feet on the solid timber floor. Then the floor moved. She kept her legs braced and leaned across to open the door. It was the other boy, the steward. He was gangly and hunched and seemed shy and unsure of himself. He was two or three years older than Albert, she judged, but had none of the midshipman’s pluck. He held his dirty wool cap in his hands, agitating it as he spoke.

’You’re wanted in the passenger saloon.’

Rhia followed the steward along the timber railings towards the prow for almost the entire length of the lower passenger deck, and then up a short flight of stairs, marvelling at his steady gait. The light had improved, and the hulks were visible. They only looked more sinister for their visibility, and a very real reason to feel grateful. Beyond, the shore of Woolwich where a tangle of vessels was moored – tall-masted merchantmen, pretty little sloops with brightly painted prows. Rhia quickly looked away from land and freedom.

The passenger saloon was an airy, spacious room, with windows all along one side and freshly lacquered woodwork. There were oil paintings of ships and palm-fringed islands on the walls and an upholstered divan at either end with a mahogany occasional table bolted to the floor nearby. It was
like a drawing room and a dining room combined. A slight, fair-haired man stood with his back to her, inspecting one of the paintings. The botanist, presumably. The steward had already disappeared.

The man turned. His skin was as delicate as porcelain and his face characterless, though not unpleasant. He was, she judged, much the same age as she was, which surprised her. She’d expected someone older. He had an air of downtrodden respectability that suited his vocation. His morning coat was of good quality twill, but worn and old-fashioned. A naturalist needed a patron if his vocation was to become a profession. Though perhaps Mr Reeve had found himself one, to be undertaking such a long voyage? He was inspecting her, as well. He took a deep breath before he spoke, as if to steady his nerves.

‘Miss Mahoney?’

‘Mr Reeve?’ He nodded. He was struggling to know what to say, and Rhia didn’t feel like helping. She might have, once. She waited. She had all the time on God’s earth. Except that she was no longer on the earth, she remembered, she was in Manannán’s realm now.

‘I hope we can work well together,’ he managed finally, lamely.

Rhia almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation. She supposed she would have to rescue him after all. ‘What sort of work do you do, Mr Reeve?’

He laughed nervously. ‘Of course. Foolish of me. I have a … sizable collection of preserved flora – herbs, seed pods et cetera, et cetera – that I am cataloguing. I intend to establish a research provision in Sydney, to study the plant life of the Antipodes and compare it with that of the Continent.’

When he spoke of his work and his ambition he was almost engaging and Rhia didn’t have to feign interest. ‘It must be
exciting, making botanical discoveries. But I still don’t understand why you need my assistance.’

‘You were recommended.’ He coughed self-consciously, as though to play down the admission. Could it have been Antonia who requested that she be assigned to private service on the
Rajah
? Maybe it didn’t matter who had recommended her.

Mr Reeve hurried on. ‘I’m told you will be required to undertake sewing duties with the other women. Shall we devise a schedule – if this is suitable?’

Rhia snorted before she could stop herself. ‘You’re forgetting that I am a prisoner, Mr Reeve. I must do as I am told.’

He looked perplexed, but he nodded. ‘Very well. I will confer with Miss Hayter. Um, you are … dismissed.’

Rhia dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands as she walked back along the rocking leeway to her cabin. She had
asked
for that. She was a prisoner
and
a servant, and her self-respect had already failed her. It had happened so naturally. If she wasn’t careful her spirit would be snuffed out entirely. Ironic that she’d so recently thought she didn’t know who she was any more. At least she had established that Mr Reeve did not understand irony. She would be more cautious in the future.

She experimented with a wide gait until she reached her cabin. Each footfall touched the deck before she expected it. It made her sick to think that, in more ways than one, the Otherworld was rising up to meet her. She cast a furtive look to the sea. It was dove grey and as smooth as silk. The cloth that she had named the morning after the fire. If this was the reason that Mamo had sent her away then it served her right for listening to a ghost.

The sails had been unfurled. Rhia counted them. Five were square and rigged to the main and mizzen masts, and one was
small and triangular; rigged aft. She barely noticed the two hurrying seamen who brushed past her, though the funk of sweat and damp canvas lingered after them. She felt the rigging shudder and then the rhythmic rocking motion of the great hull. They were hauling anchor.

She hurried, as best she could, back to her hutch. When she was safely in her hammock, she fixed her gaze on the ceiling. She would not, she
could
not watch the shoreline disappear, and with it all of her hopes. No one and nothing could save her now.

You must save yourself
.

How could she save herself? She closed her eyes and saw her own wretched form, huddled and swaying in the hammock. She saw the entire ship, sails set and masts as straight and tall as watchtowers.

The watchtowers are places between the world of men and the Otherworld. Wild honey drips from the forest’s trees, and there are endless stocks of mead and wine. No illness comes from across the seas, nor death nor pain nor sad decline.

Rhia sat up, her heart pounding. The hammock was swinging wildly. She looked around. It was not Mamo’s voice, it was her own… Was it little Rhia the fey that she kept sensing, with some message from the past?

Rhia reached into the pocket of her apron and closed her hand over the fold of paper there. She had read the letter Dillon had delivered many times now and always kept it in her pocket. She unfolded it carefully.

Rhia folded the letter carefully and put it back in her pocket. She took her book from the shelf that she could reach without leaving the hammock, and untied the ribbon around her silver pen. The little key to her trunk was still fastened to it with a tight knot. The ribbon was long enough to tie around her neck so that the key was hidden by her underclothing. The cartridge of the pen was full of ink, she could tell by its weight. She looked at the delicate engravings on its shank, the looping
pattern of the three-way knot. This symbol stood for all that was holy, if you believed in the old stories. The knot was the three fates: past, present and future. It stood for the trinity of spirit, mind and physical body long before the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was conceived. It represented the three phases of the moon, by which the tides – of oceans and of women – were measured. It was, some said, the triple goddess.

The red book felt thicker than it should. A piece of cloth had become lodged in its pages. Rhia removed the fold and opened it out, staring at it in confusion. It was her chintz, the sampler that Thomas had woven for her. The square of patterned linen lay like a window to a place where there were brilliant birds and flowering, curling branches bright with berries.

Albert rapped on her door whilst Rhia was gingerly placing one foot in front of another and holding onto the wall.

‘If you’re up and about, Mahoney, your matron says you’re to come up on deck. I’ll wait for you, if you want.’

At least illness had provided refuge from the others, and from Mr Reeve. Rhia groaned as she pulled a stiff black calico cap over her cropped hair, and tied the dour black apron around her uniform. The coarse blend of wool and flax irritated her skin more than usual, but it was warm. Not, of course, in the same way as the soft stroke of cashmere petticoats against silk stockings. It seemed that she’d been cold for ever. In Millbank, the damp from the river stone seeped into everything; air, clothing and bones. Her clothing was heavy with the perennial moisture of Manannán’s domain. Now they were due south, at least the temperature should improve, if nothing else.

Albert was his usual chirpy self. He’d been feeding her morsels of gossip to keep her mind from her miseries. She’d heard of the first tryst, between a galley hand and a convict, and knew that the preacher, Reverend Boswell, had a bad case of flatus. Or as Albert called it, ‘tooting’. Albert said he’d never heard anything like it, and that he’d had the bad luck to be downwind more than once. There was, according to Albert, a passenger who went on the deck early in the morning to lay pieces of parchment in the sun.

‘He’s not right in the head, that’s what I reckon,’ Albert said, pointing out a coil of rope on the deck so that Rhia wouldn’t trip over it. Then he stood still, looking over the sea. ‘Will you look at that, Mahoney,’ he said, pointing out across the waves. She followed the line of his finger, and saw a loop of silver, and then another, and a line of large fins carving through the waves. ‘That’ll be porpoises,’ said Albert. ‘You don’t normally see them in this latitude, they’re usually closer to the South Americas. They’ve come ’specially to say hello, I s’pose.’

This made Rhia smile. ‘Well after all,’ she said without thinking, ‘Rhiannon was the wife of Manannán, and queen of the sea.’

Albert looked at her as if she was speaking Greek. ‘Manna-who?’

‘The king of the sea.’

‘You mean Triton.’

‘The same.’

Albert looked at her suspiciously. ‘Then who’s Rena—?’

‘Rhiannon. I was named for her.’

Albert frowned. ‘What’s her game?’

‘She could restore the dead to life and lull the living to death.’

Albert let out a low whistle and looked at Rhia suspiciously. Then, as though he thought better of standing so close to the deck railings with her, he set off hastily along the side of the ship he called leeward. Rhia followed gingerly, keeping her gait wide and her gaze anywhere but on those capering waves.

The assembly for morning prayer was small, fewer than fifty prisoners and no passengers. Albert paused before they reached the top of the last, short flight of stairs before the quarterdeck. ‘Rev Tooting says he’s returning to his flock in the colony, so I suppose he’s got some merino.’ Rhia laughed aloud.
Albert looked surprised, either because he’d never heard her laugh or because he hadn’t been joking. He shook his head. ‘Never known there to be a preacher on board a transport.’ He added, ‘Captain says it’s a good omen.’

Albert left Rhia to climb the last few stairs on her own, and she felt his absence acutely. He had succeeded in lightening her heart. She took her place at the back of the ragged assembly. The sour smell of sickness hung in the air. She probably reeked of it herself. Reverend Boswell droned his lesson, a sermon on deliverance from sin and damnation. She wondered if the deliverance of a shipload of sinners to the colonies counted as redemption.

Rhia soon lost interest in the sermon and edged a little closer to the brass railings of the quarterdeck so that she could see more of the main deck. There was ceaseless activity. A command was passed from the bow of the ship to the mate or the bosun – she was not sure which – and then to a sailor who scurried up the rigging and adjusted a sail. The bosun kept his eye to the sails, to judge any change in the direction of the wind, Rhia supposed. She looked up, following his gaze. It was astonishing that these men could read the wind and the sea so that a ship could travel, at speed, to the farthest reaches of the earth. For a moment she felt a sense of wonder, rather than horror, at the thought of what she was undertaking.

When the sermon was over, Rhia did her best to fall in with the others as they filed behind a warden on their way back to the mess. They descended four short flights of stairs, through two lower decks and past dark, musty recesses ’tween decks. Their destination was a hatch in the floor of the lower passenger deck, from which the tip of a ladder protruded.

Before she even put her boot on the top rung of the ladder, Rhia smelt the stale air below. On a passenger vessel, the orlop was assigned to those travelling at the cheapest rate, along with
livestock, luggage and provisions. On a merchantman such as the
Rajah
, it was also the part of the ship that would be used for transporting cargo. On this occasion, human cargo.

She descended into the dark, airless space below feeling increasingly fortunate to have her hutch. More reason to feel grateful. Her eyes slowly became accustomed to the dim interior of the hull. Eventually she could make out that the length of the ship’s lower chamber was divided up into partitions by sailcloth. She glimpsed two other messes and could now see two rows of six hammocks hanging from the great struts of oak that supported the deck above. A long table, with benches at either side, was bolted to the floor in between.

Several of the hammocks looked like large brown cocoons which occasionally issued a moan. The odour of sickness was almost overwhelming in this stuffy, confined space. On the table sat pewter bowls, a cast iron pot and a plate of hard, dry biscuits. The stale smell and the sight of food did nothing for the delicate balance between Rhia’s belly and that of the ship.

Most of the women who had attended prayer passed through the first mess to one of the identical chambers running the length of the orlop. A few stayed and sat at the table in the first mess. Rhia didn’t know what to do, so she stood back from the ladder, against a small patch of bare timber hull, and waited to see what would happen next.

‘You might as well stay in this mess, Mahoney,’ said the warden irritably when she noticed Rhia. The woman was skinny and beak-nosed and enjoyed being in charge. Amongst the half-dozen women who were now around the table, Rhia recognized Nell, Agnes and Jane. She sat beside Jane, who was tall and angular and stooped a little. She was habitually gloomy and silent but, if provoked, could conjure an impressive tantrum.

‘Mahoney,’ barked Beak Nose, with her sinewy arms crossed over her flat chest, ‘sit at the table. You’ll eat your meals here in Mess One, and there’ll be instruction for you all from your mess captain this morning.’ At least she would not have to venture any further into the belly of the ship. It was bad enough here, even with the hatch open.

No one at the table spoke to her, which was probably because of Agnes. Agnes was the only prisoner Rhia knew of who had darker skin than her own. She prayed that Nora was not in one of the brown cocoons.

Rhia’s stomach protested at the mere sight of the sticky gruel. She slipped some of the hard, soda biscuits into her apron pocket. Afterwards, two women cleared the pewter utensils into a pail, and helped each other hoist it up the ladder to the deck. The others took out their sewing. Beak Nose lit a lantern, which illuminated the dim corners of the mess, but barely made it less gloomy. Rhia had never much liked the slick smell of lamp oil and wick but now she inhaled it as though it were tea rose.

She cast her eyes around warily. The chamber was neat, with a hook beside each hammock and a low shelf to fold belongings onto. She scanned the hammocks for clues about their inhabitants, and thought she saw a frizz of orange hair poking out of one. It could be Margaret.

The women were talking amongst themselves with the ease that comes from sharing every waking hour. Rhia listened silently. As usual, she felt that she was trespassing amongst those who had earned their sentences through poverty or cunning. She hoped that she was as invisible as she felt, but she knew she wasn’t because she sensed Jane’s eyes on her intermittently. She felt awkward and miserable sitting with nothing to do and no one to talk to.

A sharp jab in her ribs from Jane’s bony finger made her jump. She slipped a piece of patchwork onto Rhia’s lap and put a needle and thread on the table in front of her. When Rhia stole a look at her, Jane was innocently absorbed in her own needlework.

Agnes was retelling the tale of her arrest. Everyone had heard it before, but it acquired more vibrancy at each telling. Today, the constable who had pursued Agnes to the St Giles brothel, finding her dressed only in her stays and bloomers, was far more handsome than at the last telling, and she more saucy.

‘So I hid the banknotes – the ones I took from
herself
, and I put them in my garter,’ she said. Rhia was sure Agnes had hidden the stolen banknotes in her corsage last time, rather than in her stockings, but no one seemed to care. She was a natural storyteller with her Gypsy ancestry, and she made them laugh. The Mess had already formed a sisterhood. She had felt less alone in her hutch.

Miss Hayter’s sturdy black boots and brown wool stockings appeared through the hatch and descended the ladder. When she had found her balance after a tilt of the floor, she looked around, her eyes resting on Rhia.

‘Fetch your sewing things, Mahoney,’ she said briskly. ‘Now that enough of you are on your feet, we will start working on a quilt together.’

Rhia felt light-hearted at the prospect of a few moments alone in the light and air. She climbed to the deck wondering how she would ever survive weeks and months of this. In prison there had always at least been the idea of freedom, with the horses’ hooves on the cobbles of Newgate Street, or the sounds of river traffic drifting across the water at Millbank. Here there was only ocean and sky.

And Mr Reeve.

The botanist was standing at the deck rail not far from her cabin door, gazing across corrugations of steely water. Rhia came as close as she dared to the railings and noticed that he held a pocketbook. He was intent on sketching something, a sea bird perhaps, but he looked frustrated. When he saw her he snapped the book shut quickly.

‘Miss Mahoney. I am pleased to see that you are improved.’

‘You weren’t ill yourself?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not afflicted. I was, at first. I spent much of a voyage to the Greek Islands in my bunk.’

Rhia gestured to his pocketbook. ‘Were you drawing?’ He shook his head and looked embarrassed. ‘Only scribbling. I am a poor illustrator – a calamity in my profession.’

‘I suppose it is,’ she agreed. ‘I am expected below. I must …’

‘Of course. Yes. Ah, Miss Hayter has agreed to release you after lunch each day. I will be in the passenger saloon at one o’clock.’

‘Is that where we will be working?’ She was relieved. She had feared they might be alone together in his cabin.

‘The captain has agreed to assign an empty cabin. I am travelling with rather a large number of samples, you see.’

Rhia’s heart sank, but she was not going to make the mistake of waiting to be dismissed again. ‘I will see you at one o’clock.’ She hurried away.

In her cabin, she collected her sewing bag and as many patchwork pieces as would fit in her apron pocket. She wondered which half of the day she would come to dread more, mornings in the orlop or afternoons with Mr Reeve. She hoped, at least, to catch sight of Margaret soon.

Below, two more women had joined the sewing circle. One of them was Nora. Rhia braced herself, but Nora was still too
ill to cast even a withering look at her. In fact, she had to be commended for even getting to the table.

Miss Hayter cleared her throat and straightened her back as though she were addressing a regiment rather than a few women only an arm’s reach away. ‘We are blessed that, by the good grace and hard work of the ladies of the Convict Ship Society, there will be no idle hands on this voyage. In two weeks’ time, if the wind stays behind us, the
Rajah
will put into the harbour of Rio de Janeiro, in the Portuguese kingdom of Brazil.’ She said this as though it were a great privilege to visit another kingdom on a prison ship.

‘Any quilt finished in time will be sold in the São Sebastiao market in Rio, and the proceeds will be returned to the mess who sewed it. I hasten to add that these wages will be kept in trust, to avoid … loss during the voyage. You will be supervised daily in groups, on the quarterdeck, so that you have fresh air and sufficient light to sew by.’

It was then ascertained whom amongst them were the most skilled needlewomen. Of the eight now at the table, both Jane and Nell had been seamstresses, Nora, surprisingly, a stay maker, Agnes a bonnet maker, and someone else a muslin sewer.

Miss Hayter proceeded to reel off a list of rules. No woman was allowed on deck without permission; there would be no gambling and no selling of clothes or other possessions; there would be weekly assignations from each mess to collect provisions from the galley and a daily rota for washing dishes and utensils. Each woman must attend to her own laundry and under
no circumstance
must fresh water be used for this purpose. Seawater was perfectly adequate and available in abundance (as though they needed reminding). Finally, each woman was expected to conduct herself in a quiet, orderly and
respectful manner, and a list of dissenters would be kept by the surgeon superintendent, and delivered to the governor’s office when they arrived in Sydney.

The daily routine formed another set of commandments. At daylight, roll up and stow hammocks and bedclothes. At half past six, clean the water closets, decks and messes – only then would they be issued their daily allowance of drinking water, along with a ration of biscuits. Then, the surgeon would visit any who were ill. Breakfast was at eight a.m., followed by more cleaning. Then it was time to sew. In fair weather the sewing would take place on the quarterdeck, otherwise, below. There was a specific time for the issue of the allowance of lime juice against scurvy, and a time for a healthful dose of wine. (‘Hally-bloody-lujah,’ said Agnes under her breath.) Tuesdays and Fridays were laundry days. Wednesday was for bathing. In seawater. After eight-thirty p.m. they were forbidden to talk or make noise of any kind.