Remember Me (38 page)

Mary’s heart sank. They all looked so sick that she felt sure she was never going to see any of them again. But the guards dragged her away, and she felt even more demoralized, for the teeming hordes of small, brown-skinned natives who milled around them were sickly-looking too.

The surgeon’s words about Batavia came back to her as she saw crudely constructed shanties instead of fine houses. The sticky heat, the revolting smells and the flies which bombarded her made her feel queasy and terrified for her children.

Her first impression of the two-storey hospital was that the builders had left it only half built. A few windows were shuttered, but the rest were just holes. There was a
foul-smelling bonfire smouldering in the yard in front of it, and at least a hundred people were sitting or lying outside. Many of them had filthy, bloodstained bandages around their heads or limbs, flies had settled on those too weak to swat them off, and the sound of their wailing and groaning was terrible to hear. Charlotte clutched her mother’s dress, whimpering with fright, but the guards prodded Mary on through the door, which suggested to her that the people outside were in better condition than those within.

The smell inside made Mary recoil in horror. It was utterly evil, so thick she could barely breathe. She knew then that nothing short of a miracle could prevent Emmanuel from dying. Even on the ship he’d given up crying, he just lay in her arms staring up at her. She had kept trying to make him drink, but he couldn’t keep anything down. One moment he was so hot she could have fried an egg on his forehead, the next he was shivering violently.

An aging nun with a filthy apron over her white habit came forward. The guards said something to her in Dutch, and she peered at Emmanuel, making a tutting sound with her tongue, and indicated that Mary was to follow her.

As they passed several rooms, Mary saw that each held thirty or forty adult patients lying on mats, but she was led into a room at the far end of the hospital where there were only babies and small children being nursed by their mothers.

The nun left after pointing out where the spare mats,
washing bowls and buckets were kept. There was no explanation as to where the water was, whether a doctor was coming, or where food came from.

Mary put two mats in a corner, laid Emmanuel down and sat Charlotte beside him, telling her not to move. Then she picked up a bucket and asked the nearest woman in sign language where she could get water.

As night fell Mary lay down with the children. She had got water from a well outside to wash all the ship’s filth off them, and found a grimy kitchen from which she could get a daily meal of rice. Anything else had either to be bought from a formidable-looking native woman who presided in the kitchen, or brought in from outside.

She heard the familiar sound of rats scuttling around the room, even above the moans and cries of the mortally sick, and put her arms protectively around Charlotte and Emmanuel. Her last thoughts before she fell asleep from exhaustion were to wonder how you got food and water if you were a patient without friends or relatives, and if a doctor ever came near the hospital.

She found the answer to her questions in the next day or two by observing and communicating in sign language with the other mothers. A doctor visited occasionally but saw only those with money to pay him. A handful of Dutch nuns did what they could, but faced with the huge numbers of sick people, it was like trying to empty a lake with a thimble.

It was soon apparent to Mary that this was more of a pest house than a hospital. People were sent there in an attempt to contain infection. Those outside in the
courtyard were suffering from injuries rather than disease, and often had to wait up to a week to be examined. Most of the inmates died without ever being spoken to, let alone examined, and very few made a recovery. The children’s room was kept reasonably clean by the mothers, but a glance into the adult ones revealed a horrifying sight. Vomit and excreta lay on the rough wood floors, walls were splattered with blood and pus. The cries, screams and delirium of the patients were ignored.

Mary sold her pink dress on her third day there, to buy soup and milk for Emmanuel, and to have some meat and vegetables in the rice for herself and Charlotte. She thought about running away, for it would be easy enough to slip out and mingle with the crowds outside. But she couldn’t bring herself to subject Emmanuel to being carried about in the hot sun, and at least in here it was cooler, with a plentiful supply of water. She had to make his last days as comfortable as possible.

Her isolation was the worst aspect of the hospital. There were as many nationalities as there were in Kupang, but no one she had met so far spoke English. There was no one to turn to for help. Dying children were a fact of life here, it seemed, and even Emmanuel’s ethereal appearance extracted no sympathy. She bathed him with water to cool him down, wrapped him in blankets when he shivered, squeezed water into his mouth drop by drop, but each day he grew weaker.

She desperately wanted to share her anxiety for him with someone. She was terrified to think of what would become of Charlotte if she caught the fever herself. It
was no place for a healthy child to be either – daily, Charlotte was subjected to sights that would make even an adult turn pale. It wasn’t fair that she had to spend every day surrounded by desperately sick children. In many ways it was worse for her than being on the ship – at least there she’d had the men to tell her stories and sing to her.

Sometimes Mary thought she might go mad with the noise, smells, heat and filth. She wondered too what she’d do when the money from selling her pink dress ran out. All she could do was blame Will, and vow to herself that when she got out of here she’d kill him.

Towards the end of November, one of the nuns who spoke a few words of English told her Will had been brought into the hospital too. Even if Mary had wanted to see him, she couldn’t, for Emmanuel was far too sick. She had begun bribing one of the other mothers to get the rice and water for her because she didn’t dare leave his side.

On 1 December, Emmanuel died in Mary’s arms. She was rocking him and singing him a lullaby, when he just stopped breathing.

‘What’s wrong, Mumma?’ Charlotte whispered, as she saw tears coursing down her mother’s face.

‘He’s gone,’ was all Mary could say brokenly. ‘Gone to live with the angels.’

She had expected it. She had believed she was prepared. Day by day she had seen his flesh shrink until he looked like a little wizened monkey, yet even in his sickness, his
small fingers had felt for hers. Now suddenly those fingers were motionless and cold, and she wanted to scream out her pain.

He hadn’t even survived to see his second birthday, yet in the short time he’d lived, he’d given her so much joy and hope. It wasn’t right that his whole life had been overshadowed by suffering, and that he should have died here in such an ugly, dirty place.

His body was taken from her by one of the nuns, to join others who had died that day, in a communal grave. Mary expected they’d come back for her when the service was due to start. But there was no service, a nun told her later. Too many people died here for that.

The following day, Mary sent Charlotte out into the yard, telling her to stay there till she came back. She was full of rage, and she wanted to find Will to tell him she held him responsible for his only son’s death, before she had to go back to the guard ship.

She found him in a room at the far end of the hospital. The smell coming from it was so evil that she had to cover her nose and mouth when she looked in. There were at least fifty men inside, far more than in any other room she’d seen. They were squashed up together so tightly that they were lying in one another’s vomit and faeces. The groaning and retching was so awful that she was about to turn away when she spotted Will. He was the only one not lying down.

He was almost skeletal, sitting huddled up in a corner wearing nothing but a pair of breeches. His fair hair and beard were matted with filth, his once bright blue eyes
pale and red-rimmed with fever. He was twenty-nine, but he looked like a very old man.

Mary had told herself she would laugh if he was dying, she would speed his end by berating him for what he’d done to her. Yet as she stared at him, she wondered why it was she didn’t feel appeased by finding him in such obvious misery.

A memory shot into her mind of him carrying her down to the sea to wash her after Emmanuel was born. He’d been so gentle and loving with her, making her forget she was a convict. That day, and on many more besides, she’d felt equal to any honoured wife and mother back home.

It had become very easy for her to believe Will was all bad. She had made herself forget that he had saved her from rape, married her to protect her, and that his skill and hard work at fishing had kept her from starvation. He had often given Charlotte part of his supper, pretending he wasn’t hungry. She had been proud to be his wife, and despite Will saying he was going to get a ship home when his sentence was up, he didn’t.

All at once she knew she must nurse him. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to forgive him entirely, but for all that they had been to each other in the past, he deserved better than to die like a dog without one kind word.

Mary picked her way gingerly through the filth and bodies to his corner.

‘It’s me, Will,’ she said softly as she reached his side.

She was appalled that such a big, strong man could end up like this. It reminded her of the way the convicts on
the Second Fleet had been when they got them off the
Scarborough
.

‘Mary!’ he said weakly, trying to lift his head. ‘Is it really you?’

‘Yes, it really is me, Will,’ she said, bending towards him. ‘I’ve come to take care of you. First I’ll get you some water, then I’ll get you into a room which isn’t quite so dirty and crowded.’

He caught hold of her hand. ‘Emmanuel! How is he?’

She was touched that his first thought was for their son.

‘He died yesterday,’ she said abruptly.

‘Oh no,’ he groaned, squeezing her hand tighter. ‘I am to blame.’

Part of her wanted to agree, to ease her own pain with spite, but the greater part of her felt soothed by having someone to share her grief with.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It was the cruelty of that Captain Edwards, this stinking place, and bad luck.’

He opened his eyes wider and tears ran down his cheeks. ‘You can say that after the way I treated you?’

Mary didn’t trust herself to answer that question. ‘I’ll get some water,’ was all she said.

‘Charlotte! Where is she?’ he asked, looking stricken.

‘She’s fine. I told her to wait outside while I came to see you.’

‘Thank God for that,’ he said, crossing himself.

She got Will drinking water, helped him into a cleaner room, then washed him all over. It was horrifying to see
his once big, strong body so emaciated, and she browbeat one of the nuns into giving her a clean shirt for him so that at least he still could have some dignity.

Mary knew he was going to die; since being in this place for three weeks she’d learned the signs. But she told him he would get better, stroked his forehead until he fell asleep and then crept away to get Charlotte.

As she went out into the backyard by the well, she paused for a moment, suddenly aware that this was a perfect time to escape, before Emmanuel’s death was reported and Captain Edwards sent guards for her. She could sell her good boots, buy some provisions, then take off into the jungle with Charlotte. She had made friends with the natives in Kupang, and she could do the same here. Maybe in a few months, with a false name and a plausible story, she could get on a ship out of here.

Mary took a few steps towards Charlotte who was sitting on the ground making mud pies in the damp earth around the well. She was dirty, thin and pale-faced and moved lethargically. She hadn’t been that way in Kupang, and it hurt Mary to see what the prison regime on the ship had done to her. It was another very good reason to run for it now while they still could.

‘Did you see the man?’ Charlotte asked, looking up.

That question caught Mary short. All she had said to the child when she told her to stay out here was that ‘she had to see a man’. If Charlotte had known who the man was, she would have wanted to see him too. She had been asking, sometimes several times each day, when they were going to see Dada again.

Will had always treated Charlotte as if she were his own daughter. When Emmanuel was born he’d made no distinction between the two children. Even when they had rows, he never once used Charlotte’s parentage as a weapon. Will loved Charlotte, and that was evident today when, sick as he was, he wanted to know she was safe.

So how could Mary run out on this man and leave him to die alone?

She lowered the bucket down into the well, filled it and pulled it back up.

‘Let me wash you,’ she said, pulling a rag out of her pocket. ‘We’re going to see Dada.’

The heat seemed to increase with every day, and Will became weaker and weaker. Mary sold her boots to buy food for the three of them, but he never managed more than a couple of spoonfuls before falling asleep again.

When he was awake he would lie there looking at Mary, just the way Emmanuel had. He found it too much of an effort to talk, but he would smile when Mary told him stories about her old neighbours in Fowey, of smuggling yarns she’d heard from her father, and described the harbour and the people who worked there.

Every day, at least two people in the room died, and their places were quickly filled again. When Will was asleep, Mary would wash the others and give them water. It made no difference to her whether they were natives, Chinese or Dutch, they all had that same pitiful, childlike
expression in their eyes, and at least when they took their last breath they weren’t alone.

The nuns looked at Mary as if they thought her mad. Yet sometimes they brought Charlotte an egg or some fruit, which seemed to indicate they also had some sympathy for the English convict woman who was risking her own health staying in such a hell-hole to nurse her husband.