Great Historical Novels (29 page)

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.

20 March 1841

My dear,

I am in haste to catch the last post so I must be brief. I have longed to come to you, but your father is so frail. Lately he thinks he sees Mamo at night in her long johns and old
shawl. He says that she is not pleased to have him in her cottage. I have told him again and again that Mamo has been dead years, and that if she were going to show herself to anyone then it would be to you. When you were wee, you believed that you could travel between the Otherworld and the world of men, just like the Rhiannon of the stories. Mamo always said that this was why you were afraid of the sea – that within it you saw the reflection of your true self.

I am comforted only by the certainty of your innocence and the belief that it will be proven. Mr Dillon has explained to me the circumstances of your arrest. He seems genuinely concerned for your welfare, and this also is a comfort. I hope that I may one day meet him.

The world will spill her sorrows time and time again. Mamo would say that it is in ourselves, not in the church, that we find what is Holy. In this, she and I did not always agree, but you are a woman now and can decide for yourself. You are always in my heart.

I will always be,

Your loving mother,

Brigit Mahoney

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.

19 April 1841

Albert assures me that he’s never known anyone to die of seasickness, which surprises me. The simple engineering of the knotted and looped ropes that suspend the hammock offsets the tilt of the keel, so as the ship rolls across the waves, the hammock remains stable. More or less. The stomach does not. Albert says the sickness is something to do with the balance between my belly and the belly of the ship. He delivers my ration of three pints of fresh water every morning (without spilling a drop, he says) and his is almost the only face I’ve seen, besides Miss Hayter, who looks in every day and gives me arrowroot biscuits and ginger cordial, the ship’s surgeon’s remedy for nausea. Miss Hayter tells me that half of the women below and most of the wardens are incapacitated, so it has been impossible to begin any kind of regimen. She seems disappointed. If there’s one thing I’ve come to realise about her character, it is her love of order and routine. She is perfectly suited to her profession.

As to my daily ration of water, I may choose either to drink it or wash in it. Albert advises drinking it, since there is plenty of seawater for washing. He says that the sickness
should
run its course before we arrive in Brazil, though he’s known some who’ve passed the time between Woolwich and Rio bent double over the railings. No sea legs at all, apparently. It is, by his account, a four week voyage to Rio, so we must be almost halfway there already. I am better today, but it has still taken the better part of an hour to write this, and it is crooked and the ink has run.
I’d best be sparing with ink, I’ve no idea how or when I might obtain more.

Knots

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.