Great Historical Novels (41 page)

The soldiers didn’t seem to be paying the bear any attention. They were assessing the herd of women and made no attempt to pretend otherwise. Why would they? They were
female livestock who may as well be fettered, and no longer the sole property of the Crown. They were appraised as they walked, presumably to see who had limbs strong enough for tilling soil and who might still yield a brood.

Rhia kept her eyes to the road, concentrating on not stumbling on the motionless ground, vaguely noticing how the pale dust clung to her wet feet. She swallowed the bitterness that rose in her throat as she remembered her dream of sovereignty. What a time to think of it. Sovereignty be damned. Agnes said that the best way to get out of the female factory was to find a husband. She knew this because her paramour on the
Rajah
had taken two such wives. No one had seen fit to ask what had happened to them. Sailors, soldiers and free settlers could all take convicts for wives.

Rhia felt something prod her in the ribs. She looked up into the dirty face of a boy barely old enough to shave. He had a stick of some kind and he was tapping it against his hand. He looked her over as he had probably seen a superior do. His eyes lingered on her chest. She folded her arms. He looked at her face last, and she was ready. She hissed one of Mamo’s best curses at him, as though she knew the kind of witchcraft that Juliette had suspected her of. He looked away. He was not that brave after all. She noticed that Nelly had attracted the attention of a young soldier with a kinder face. He offered her a drink from a little flask hooked to his belt. He said something to her, and in response Nelly pulled the shawl aside proudly so that he could see Pearl.

A mile or so along the dirt track, there were suddenly fewer trees and wider streets and, at first, rough-hewn bungalows. Further still was red brick and new masonry and even a gaslamp or two. They were being watched with idle curiosity by children playing at the side of the road and men smoking on
steps and women standing on verandahs with infants on their hips. Their expressions said that they had seen many such processions. Rhia kept from catching the eye of any of them. She didn’t want to see either sympathy or indifference.

They passed partly constructed walls and timber frames and then elegant structures of honey-coloured stone as the street widened. They passed a large green with new grass and rosebushes planted around its perimeter and a paved path through the middle, lined with seedling trees. Here was a nation in its infancy and Rhia almost wished that she gave a damn.

They were heading for somewhere called the Barracks, this much they knew. In the morning, most of them would be taken to the female factory at a place called Parramatta. Rhia had clearly not been assigned to private service, in spite of Mr Reeve’s assurance that he had requested her as his servant. She knew he could not afford a servant. He would not have thought to pay her the respect of calling her his assistant.

The Barracks lay opposite the green. It rose above tall, exterior walls and had a paved courtyard. Its external geometry was stern but elegant. Inside, though, it rivalled Newgate for neglect. The dividing walls were unfinished slabs of pine, and the floor was stamped earth and mildewed straw. It was fitting accommodation for livestock. Rhia wanted only to lie in a hammock or on a mat, or even on a wooden pallet. If she could close her eyes, maybe the ringing in her ears would stop and the earth would be still.

The soldiers divided them between two large, open cells. There were no hammocks or mats, only more straw, and there was not enough room on the floor for sixty women to lie down. There was a scuffle for a piece of wall to lean against, but only one half-hearted cuff fight. No one had the energy. They sat and listened to someone retching in another cell.

‘That’s not a good sign,’ said Jane.

‘Think it’s the food?’ Georgina whispered.

‘Shut your ugly mug,’ Jane hissed.

Once they had settled, a beefy turnkey with a beard like a Jew peered in through the iron bars.

‘Don’t think this lot will give us any trouble,’ he called over his shoulder to someone Rhia couldn’t see. He unlocked the grille and dragged in a vat and a bulging sack. The vat was full of thin, salty broth and the sack was crammed with unleavened bread and tin bowls. They ate hungrily in spite of the forewarning. It was something to do.

Rhia closed her eyes. It was growing cold. She would not think of home. She would not think of her family. She would not think of the bathroom at Cloak Lane. She would not remember the dead. She would never think of freedom again, she decided. She sat with her back to the splintered wood, feeling the cold seep into her, and thought of … nothing.

She dozed fitfully, being woken time and again by a raging desire to scratch her itchy skin, or by Nora’s growling snore. In the small hours it seemed that everyone in the cell was awake, and that morale had reached its lowest. Jane was weeping again and each time she sniffed, Nora kicked her, which only made her sobs louder. There were bugs in the straw, so small they couldn’t be seen, and they left itching welts on the warmest, softest areas of flesh.

At sunrise, Agnes passed around some hard arrowroot biscuits, broken into pieces, which she’d smuggled from the ship in her apron. They were stale and tasteless, but the gesture was one of solidarity. They had come this far together, and they had survived.

‘How about a story, Agnes?’ said someone.

‘Not a hope. I’ve none in me.’ She sighed. ‘It’s this place, it’s
so uncanny quiet.’ It was. But it wasn’t the prison that weighted the air; it was a quiet that rose up from the earth like a silent requiem.

When a thin stream of daylight slid through a small high window they were roused by the turnkey, who was sleepy and cantankerous and herded them outside to a line of covered wagons. Rhia’s wagon was full even before she stepped up, and three more women were shoved in after her before the canvas was fastened with rope and buckles. It jolted off on a rumbling, shaking ride. Nothing to look at but the others’ miserable faces. She supposed she looked much the same, with dark rings under her eyes and straw in her hair and the blades of her shoulders visible through the dirty material of her gown.

The journey was short, and before long they were unloaded onto a grassy bank. Even the grass was foreign. It was thick and springy and a little sharp beneath their feet. And then there was the river, like nothing Rhia had ever seen. It dwarfed the distant rows of pale stone and painted timber. It flowed into the harbour from the west, cutting through the landscape as though it was hurrying somewhere important. The waiting barge, tethered to a rickety pier, was like a flat-bottomed freight boat with one large sail. Freight, livestock, it was all the same. At its helm was a withered seaman wearing an over-large military coat with a dirty kerchief tied around his head.

No one spoke. The landscape seemed hallowed, somehow; more than a church – the immensity of the sky above, the smooth dark water with mist smoking above it, and the jungle of silver eucalypts on either bank. From these, periodically, rose flocks of brilliantly coloured parakeets and enormous white birds with yellow crests.

Birds of jewel colour.

Rhia was numb with cold but even so she felt a low, visceral
fear of the green-brown water and its flanking forest. It couldn’t be real. She had, finally, reached the Otherworld.

The July sun was strong and sharp and eventually warmed them a little. Rhia judged that at least one hundred of the
Rajah
women were in the barge, sitting on the long side-benches or on the floor, dumbstruck by the mazarine sky. She saw her own uneasiness reflected wherever she looked. Were there beasts in the forest, or in the water? What were those noises they kept hearing, the same as last night – the thumping through the trees and that high-pitched cry that sounded so uncannily like human laughter? ‘Natives,’ said Nelly between clenched teeth and Hail Marys. She was certain she’d end up in a pot before they reached Parramatta. Her soldier was on the barge, though.

The sun rose and they were issued with more of the unleavened bread to stop the gripe of hunger. Another hour passed, or more, before someone screamed. It was so shrill a sound that a great mantle of birds rose from the trees, shrieking in chorus. There was a man on the shore, standing between two white tree trunks, but he was not white. He was as black as polished leather. Dressed in a cloak of patchwork fur and, it appeared, little else, he didn’t move a whisker. He watched with solemn disinterest as they passed. His rod-straight pose and the stoic rills of his face made Rhia wonder, fleetingly, if he might actually be a statue. His face was the mask of time itself, yet there was something hauntingly familiar about him. Perhaps it was the presence of this man’s people that she had felt the moment she stepped onto their land. The barge passed by slowly but he didn’t move or follow them with his eyes.

When the sun was high above, they chugged over to a cleared part of the shore where there was an inn of sorts. It was an unpainted bungalow with a dangerously leaning verandah.
It proved to be little more than a rum shop, and the only fare to be had, besides rum, was something the lubricated innkeeper called kangaroo pie. This was a stew served inside a wedge of the same tasteless bread they had been eating since they arrived. The innkeeper called it ‘damper’, even though it was as dry as the ashes it was baked in. They sat around the dugout fire on logs, eating their kangaroo pie. The meat was, apparently, ‘wild and to be found hereabouts’. The innkeeper might be described in the same way.

There was no tarrying after they had eaten. They returned to the barge, just as the thumping noise started up again, sounding closer than ever. Then something that looked nothing like a bear jumped out in front of their trudging queue. It was gone in a bouncing grey blur that raised a shriek from several women and, again, from a canopy full of birds. When the creature and its noise disappeared, the slightly crazed laughter of the innkeeper could still be heard.

‘That there’s a kangaroo,’ he called, between splutters.

‘Well,’ spat Nora, with a toss of her head. ‘It’s nought but a monstrous-large hare with the tail of an overgrown rat.’

Rhia laughed from relief and nerves and because the creature was either the largest rat or the strangest-looking hare she’d ever seen. She could tell Nora had been as shaken as any of them, but she still had her mettle. This, too, was a relief. Rhia didn’t know what she’d do if Nora lost her spite. While there was still one amongst them who couldn’t be broken, they could survive anything. The laughter spread quickly and by the time they reached the barge they were all as merry as if they’d been at the rum.

The wind was behind them all afternoon and they knew that they had reached their destination when a high stone wall rose up in place of the tree line. It seemed to run for ever along
the riverbank. The wall was grey and foreboding and almost made Rhia wish she could remember a prayer.

It could only be a prison.

Disembodied voices floated across the water, presumably from the unseen township of Parramatta. They pulled into a pier near some towering, blacked iron gates and Rhia caught Nora’s eye. To her astonishment, Nora winked and leaned towards her. ‘It won’t be for ever,’ she said. ‘And whatever you do, Mahoney, don’t let ’em see you’re afraid.’

26 July 1841

I’m losing count of the weeks, but shall never forget the first night. We were gathered together on the spiky lawn at twilight, surrounded by the silhouettes of eucalypts. That’s what the strange trees here are called. They are like sentinels at the edge of the world. That night, the superintendent told us that there are three classes of women here at the House of Female Correction, otherwise known as the female factory. The classes are Crime, General and Merit. The
Rajah
women are firmly ‘Crime’, and we’ve had our heads shorn again as a mark of this. It was not as bad as that first time at Millbank, but I had only just started to feel less like a hedgehog. I can’t fathom how men put up with prickles on their chins, it is like sleeping on a pincushion.

As to the class system, General class inmates are girls who’ve returned pregnant after being assigned to service. There are a significant number of them. Merit class have managed six months of good behaviour and can leave the grounds, though they must be back by nightfall. If you are Crime, you work all hours. We are the machines in the factory and we are the servants of the ruling class of turnkeys and wardens.

The superintendent is a heavy-jawed harpy, much like her counterparts in Newgate and Millbank. I realise now how lucky we were to have Miss Hayter on the
Rajah
(and by the way, Albert told me that she and Captain Ferguson are engaged to be married!). I suppose the superintendent has a name and a mother, but it is hard to imagine it. She presides over a number of outbuildings including stores for wool and flax and places for bleaching cloth.

It took me some time to notice it, but the female factory is not unattractive to look at, for a place so miserable. It is three-storeys of sandstone with a clock tower and cupola and an oak-shingled roof. The upper windows are lead glazed and those below are barred, of course, but still lead-lights. There’s a kitchen and bake house, a spinning room and dungeon-like privies. It is in the privies that all manner of illicit activity takes place, from rum smuggling to trysts with soldiers and, I hear, between women, too.

Inside the main building, the entire ground level is a refectory lined with long, narrow tables and benches, and the floor is paved with slabs of a pale timber called stringy bark. The sleeping quarters, where I am now, are nothing new. By the light of the tallow (the first one I’ve managed to steal) you can just see that the floor is covered with bodies. We sleep on bedrolls that we fold up in the morning, and are so close to each other that if you venture an incautious leg out in the night you can easily start a scuffle. Some of the women have collected scraps of fleece and piled them together to sleep on, but it’s dirty and flea-ridden and I prefer the hard floor and blankets, though they are made from the roughest wool you can imagine. It is spun here at the factory, and it is a coarse tweed that is, not surprisingly, called Parramatta cloth. I’ve heard that it is being exported to England, but I cannot see it making much of an impact – it makes your spun wool seem as soft as silk by comparison, Mamo.