Great Historical Novels (31 page)

Rhia allowed herself the smallest of smiles, not because she had pleased the botanist with her powers of observation, but because she was not alone after all.

24 April 1841

It is early, barely light. The air cloys. It is too warm for linsey, but no other uniform is provided. I sleep in my chemise. Last night I almost removed it, but I cannot lock my cabin door. Miss Hayter says she will purchase cotton in Rio so we can sew summer dresses. Presumably she has an allowance from Whitehall for such things.

I suppose it was foolish to imagine that Laurence might discover my quarters. How could he without drawing attention to himself? Besides, he would assume that I’m in the orlop with the others. I don’t dare try and find his cabin. I hear that Mr Wardell is on the prowl because Agnes was caught meeting the galley hand, her sweetheart, two nights ago. She was only cautioned, but if it happens again she’ll be whipped before the entire ship.

The captain has made a small, unoccupied cabin on the lower deck available to Mr Reeve. It has a good-sized writing table, upon which he spreads his notebooks and his callow drawings. I don’t much like being in an airless cabin with Mr Reeve, who stares at me when he thinks I am occupied, but the passenger saloon reminds me too much of freedom. The passengers are entirely unaware of their privileges, just as I once was. I was dismissive of the petty vanities of society, yet now I desire nothing more.

Today will pass under this monotonous regime and then another day and another. I try not to look at the sea but, as you might guess, that is something of an impossibility. So far Manannán has been kind, there have been no real storms, although there is occasionally rough weather and
items regularly fall off the shelf in my cabin and off the table in the mess. Maybe today I will see my friend Margaret on her feet. It is a blessing to have her in my mess, but it seems she is to be the last to recover her health for she has not yet left her hammock.

Patchwork

Outside, the sky was an intense blue behind the white sails.

Name the colour.

Rhia spun around, but the deck was deserted. It was the pesky voice again, as if she didn’t have troubles enough.

‘Ultramarine,’ she said, sighing. She knew what the voice was doing, making her take note of things she had once loved and cherished. ‘Ultramarine, a rare blue, once as expensive as gold,’ she added, hoping no one was listening to her talking to herself. She remembered something else. In Latin,
ultramarinus
meant ‘beyond the sea’, a reference to the origin of the lapis lazuli from which ultramarine was made. When they took Michael Kelly away, they took him to ‘parts beyond the seas’. She and Thomas had discussed it, because when they were children they had believed that the Otherworld lay
beyond the seas.
Now here she was, going to a place forested with unearthly white trees and inhabited by criminals and other dangerous creatures. Worse still, Michael would have left Sydney by the time she arrived.

When she reached the orlop hatch, Rhia performed her morning ritual, just as she used to do in the yard at Millbank. She filled her eyes with sky and her lungs with clear air before she put her foot on the top rung of the ladder.

She had thus far avoided a proper scrap with Nora and Agnes because there was always a warden at hand, but she
could feel their animosity building. The last time Nora was on dish duty she had tipped Rhia’s uneaten breakfast gruel into her lap. An accident, she insisted with an evil grin. Rhia didn’t react immediately. She chose to sit, calm and silent, with the sticky slop soaking through her clothing. She could see that it displeased Nora intensely. When Nora disappeared up the ladder with the dish pail, and while nobody was looking, Rhia removed her apron and tipped the gruel into Nora’s hammock. She was still waiting for a counter attack.

This morning, Agnes was in the middle of one of her brothel tales when Rhia sat down. Nora and Agnes exchanged looks, and Rhia could tell from the way Agnes’s eyes narrowed that she was in a mood. She was probably in a sulk over not seeing her sweetheart. She gave Rhia a toxic look but barely faltered in her narration.

‘The landlady at this establishment, Madam
Mahoney
, fancied herself
class
, and a cut above the dirty streetwalkers, but she was a slut who’d have it with a donkey if it’d pay her a ha’penny.’ It raised a laugh and Rhia kept her head bent low over her breakfast.

‘Don’t be a bitch, Agnes.’ It was Margaret. ‘She’s done you no harm.’ Margaret was still in her hammock, but her pale face was propped over its edge, and when she caught Rhia’s eye she winked before groaning and rolling over. A moment later, though, she was sitting on the edge of the hammock, her legs dangling, looking at the floor as if she was wondering if she could make it that far.

Everyone was watching as Margaret stood up, grabbing the shelf by her bed to steady herself. ‘Sweet Jesus, my legs are made of rubber.’

‘Don’t blaspheme, Dickson,’ snapped Jane, who had recently become excessively pious.

It took Margaret several minutes to reach the breakfast table. She stumbled twice, but shooed Nelly away when she tried to help. Margaret ate nothing, but made a show of being cheerful. She could no longer be described as plump, and there was a whitish tinge to her lips. Sleeping in the airless belly of the ship was unhealthful enough without the sickness on top of it. The surgeon, Mr Donovan, said that Margaret had something else, something besides seasickness, but he didn’t say exactly what it was. Maybe he didn’t know.

The temperature and the stink increased at the same rate. One hundred and fifty bodies at one end of the orlop, livestock at the other, and the once-mysterious
bilge
saw to it. Bilge was an appropriate name for the lowest, internal part of the hull, and Rhia had soon discovered its function. Everything from the cook’s waste and the overflow from water closets to pomade and cosmetics sloshed around underneath the orlop.

Once the morning’s chores were done, Rhia waited with Margaret until everyone had climbed the ladder. Margaret’s gait was halting and careful as she adjusted to being upright in a moving world. When they reached the top of the ladder, she stood for a moment, squinting in the white light glancing off the sea. She had a firm hold on Rhia’s arm.

‘I’ve always said the rich were fools with their money, and here’s the proof. Imagine taking to the sea for enjoyment or to recover from infirmity!’

Rhia laughed. ‘I’ve missed you, Margaret.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Margaret retorted. ‘I’ve got ears. I know what they get up to and I’ve been after the strength to give Agnes a slap for weeks. Someone’s got to. She’s got the curse, though, and it always makes her worse. I’ll wait a day or two.’ There had been ongoing complaints about the effects of washing laundry in seawater. Cloth became stiff with dried salt, and caused
chafing. Almost all the women, Rhia included, had had their courses by now and needed to wash their cloths. They had suffered the consequences. Few in the orlop bothered to spare others their private discomforts. Everything was a topic for conversation. It passed the time.

On the quarterdeck, each mess sat in a sewing circle under an awning of sailcloth. Little piles of patchwork were scattered about within reach. Several quilts were now under way. The late April sun seemed overly bright. There had been complaints about the sunlight at first. It hurt their eyes after so long in the dark.

Rhia felt light-hearted to have someone to talk to. Until now her interaction with the other prisoners was limited to an occasional smile or a wary ‘hello’ from Jane. Jane especially liked to roll her eyes at Rhia when Georgina, her arch-rival, said something foolish. This happened fairly frequently because Georgina, a squat Liverpudlian, wasn’t the brightest button in the tin.

Margaret spent the morning poring over pieces of cloth, pocketing a delicate muslin that reminded her of a once-treasured dress. She was not the first. If a piece was especially pretty or considered to be of value, it would be surreptitiously folded into an apron pocket and no one would say a word. Nelly wept when she saw some white gabardine, saying it looked like it was from a bride’s dress, and she’d never be a bride. Who’d have her?

The morning wore on and Rhia listened to the talk. She was piecing together the lives her companions had led before becoming prisoners. Jane had been in love, Georgina had lost a child and Agnes had left two wee sons behind in the work-house. The only real difference between them and Rhia was that she had been blessed with good fortune. It made her an
outsider here in the same way as any of these women would have been had they come to St Stephen’s Green or entered the Montgomery Emporium. What was the ruin of Mahoney Linen against the loss of babes, or taking a beating every night, which is what happened to Nelly. Until she killed her sweetheart. Nelly hardly looked capable of killing a fly, let alone a man. He’d waggled the kitchen knife at her so she hit him over the head with the lid of the stew pot. And that was that. The only thing that had kept her from the noose was pregnancy.

Thieving was not always the result of having fallen from the Lord’s grace, as Reverend Tooting liked to think, but of desperation. Or vanity. Georgina had stolen a pair of boots from her mistress, Jane had hidden a length of ribbon from the market in her apron, Susan had taken a veil and a pair of gloves from a clothier’s. Agnes and Nora had both become professional thieves because they couldn’t make a decent living from needlework. Sarah stole a shawl from her mistress. It seemed perfectly reasonable that a woman who worked all day making pretty things she could not afford to wear herself, might easily be tempted to steal from someone who had finery to spare.

Tales of loss and violence, as well as tales of love, were told as the squares and triangles of cloth became long strips of patchwork. They might have been stitching together scraps of their old lives and making something of them. The talk was just as often hopeful as despairing. Georgina said she’d heard that they were in need of alehouses in Sydney and that she fancied the trade because her grandmother had been a brewer, and that growing hops was easy. Jane retorted that she hadn’t the wits for the brewing trade. Agnes planned to run a brothel.

Rhia wondered if she was the only one of them who was leaving behind the best part of her life.

The talk turned to one of the young deck hands that had
shimmied up the main mast as though it were no more than the trunk of an apple tree. While the others were laughing at some remark of Nora’s about the bulge in his breeches, Margaret lowered her voice and leaned close to Rhia.

‘Do you remember I told you that I was carrying something for Mrs Blake’s ding-dong maid?’ The conspiratorial note in Margaret’s voice made Rhia immediately alert.

‘Of course I remember.’ In fact, she had almost forgotten. Presumably Margaret had changed her mind about keeping Juliette’s secret.

‘What would you say if I told you it was nothing more than a plain sheet of parchment?’ she whispered.

‘Is it?’

Margaret shrugged. ‘Not according to Juliette, though how she thinks a plain sheet of parchment hides a portrait, I can’t imagine! I’ve been thinking about the promise I made to keep this flapdoodle to myself, but now I think that I’m only wasting my time with it. I mean, what are the Quaker ladies in Sydney going to think when I give them such a thing?’

Rhia frowned. The parchment could only be a photogenic negative. ‘But why does Juliette want the Quakers to have it?’

‘To pass on to her mother.’

‘Then Juliette’s mother is in Sydney?’

‘Aye,’ said Margaret. ‘She’s been there more than ten years. What if you were to send such a thing to your mam? It’d break her heart to receive a page with nought on it.’

Rhia was still trying to piece things together. ‘She didn’t write her mother a letter, then?’

‘She can’t write. Brought up in the workhouse, poor fool. But I should never have taken it, so I’m as big a fool myself.’

What on earth was Juliette up to? ‘May I see it?’ Rhia said.

Margaret shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not. At least then I’ll not have to make the decision by myself. I’ll show you after supper.’ She looked up at the sun. ‘Almost dinnertime, and then you’ll be off to see the boss. Do you suppose Botany Bay’s full of botanists?’

The thought made Rhia smile. ‘I sincerely hope not. It’s hard to imagine that there’s much there in the way of botany. I don’t know what Mr Reeve expects to find – I’ve seen a picture of Sydney, it looks a colourless place.’

Margaret shrugged. ‘I don’t mind.’ She gestured to the strips of patchwork that coiled around them. ‘That’s the most colour I’ve seen in two years and it’s making my eyes hurt.’

When they went below for lunch, Margaret went straight to her hammock saying she was worn out by all the sunshine. Rhia did her best to eat whatever preserved meat the cook had seen fit to serve up as stew, and left as soon as possible.

Mr Reeve’s workroom was on the upper deck, close by his cabin. When she entered, he was bent over his desk, his small wire spectacles crooked on the bridge of his nose. The cabin, which he said was too small, had a bunk and was four times the size of her hutch. It also had considerably more shelves. Both the bunk and shelves were stacked with his little wooden boxes.

‘Good afternoon, Mahoney.’ He had picked up the habit of calling her this from Miss Hayter and seemed to be enjoying it. He didn’t look up from his study of an enormous Latin botanical. ‘Just carry on where we left off yesterday.’

They rarely needed to speak, beyond the cursory, which suited Rhia well. It was her job to refer to his annotated drawings, which told her into which family or category a specimen fell, and then to label a compartment in a box for it. It was extremely useful that she recognised many of the
more common plants and herbs from
Culpeper’s
. She only occasionally managed to match foreign medicinal herbs to Mr Reeve’s terrible drawings. She sometimes had to ask him to confirm that the specimen she was looking at was the same plant he had illustrated.