The Lantern Moon (11 page)

William took the precious package. There were about half a dozen letters, dating right back to when their father had left for exile. William's head was scrambled with conflicting emotions. He was overjoyed to know that Abraham Smart bore him no ill will, but, more than anything, he was heartbroken. He was overwhelmed by Mr Evans' deceit; he could not bear the thought of poor Kezia dying without knowing that her husband had been writing to her all those years and he was angry to think of his father, all alone in exile, believing that his family had loved him so little they could not be bothered to answer his letters. But he also felt a fool for allowing himself to think he and Annie were about to be freed. Why on earth had he dared hope they were to be plucked from the ship at the last moment? He could not bear the thought of going back down below deck. Arthur put his arm around William's shoulder and pulled him towards him. Annie's cheeks burnt with rage.

‘How could he do such a cruel thing?' she asked. Arthur
shook his head. Sam slipped a hand into hers and squeezed it.

‘We are going to sea, too,' he said, cheerfully. ‘Me and Arthur. We're going to India on a merchant ship.'

Annie turned to look at Arthur. ‘You too?' she said.

‘Yes, Lucien Bonaparte and his household have recently moved out of Ludlow to live near Worcester. There is no one at Dinham House any longer.'

‘And did they not ask you to go to Worcester with them?'

‘To be honest, Annie, no, they didn't want me and I didn't want to go.'

‘And how did you find each other?'

‘I went to Bristol,' Sam said, ‘like we were trying to do the first time. It took me ages to find the Lamb Inn where Arthur's brother worked. There were sailors lodging there and they got me the job as a cabin boy on their ship.'

‘And when I lost my job at Ludlow,' Arthur interrupted, ‘I went to Bristol too, hoping David could help me find work with him. And what do you know but Sam was already there, all done up in a sailor suit – I hardly knew him for I had never seen him before with such a clean face.'

Sam looked down at his feet, almost embarrassed, and pulled at his trousers.

‘That is enough,' said the steward, not unkindly. ‘You will have to leave now. I only let you on because they are so young – the youngest on board the ship.'

William, Annie, Sam and Arthur looked at each other, fighting back tears.

‘Thank you for coming, Arthur,' said William. His voice cracked. ‘I shall never forget your kindness in bringing us the letters but I am sick and ashamed to let you see us like this.'

‘It is a bad business, William, but there is no need for you to be ashamed. In Australia, you will find your father, I am sure of it, and God willing, make a life that is fairer to you and your sister than this one in England has been.'

‘Come along, now,' said the steward again. ‘You have had more than enough time to take your leave.'

Arthur put his arms around Annie and William in turn.

‘May God bless both of you,' he said. Then he and Sam were led away.

The first letter that John Spears had written to his wife was dated nearly four years earlier. William read it out.

‘… after six months at sea, we had our first sighting of the great cliffs and the entrance to Sydney Bay. The harbour itself was empty: not another vessel lay at anchor, but when they caught sight of our sails, every man and woman came down to see the Julius Caesar come in to dock, for we were the first ship to come for many months and everyone was eager for letters and news from England. Behind the harbour lies the new town of Sydney, every bit of it from the barracks to the governor's house built by the hands of wretched convicts like myself.'

He described how he and his fellow-convicts staggered down the ladder to stand on solid earth again after all the
months at sea, many of them sick and feverish or with ulcerous sores from the leg irons they had worn for so long. He said he was working clearing land and trees for building. ‘The landscape here,' he wrote, ‘is still very strange to me. All around are the tallest trees I have ever seen in my life, gum trees with grey-green patchy bark that we cut down to use for building and fuel. There are giant ferns too and shrubs and grasses, all alien to our eyes, and strange animals and flocks of brightly-coloured birds, yellow and red and pink, flitting and screeching around us, as free to come and go as we are not.'

William stopped. He picked up Annie's hand and held it tightly.

‘Is there no more?' she asked. William nodded.

‘Then go on,' she said. ‘Read them all.'

The last letter ended: ‘… when I think how I have been set down at the edge of this huge empty continent, far from everyone and every place that I love, my heart sinks. At night the endless canopy of sky is filled with stars that you in England have never seen. It is only when I look up at the moon – it is almost full tonight, Kizzy, and hanging so low down over the bay like a huge white lantern that I feel I could stretch out my hand and touch it – it is only when I look up at it that I have the comfort of knowing that you too may be standing under the same moon and thinking of me. Please kiss my little ones, William, Annie and Libby, and know that I am and have always been a loving husband and a dutiful father.'

Later that night, Annie woke with a start. Molly Llewellyn, lying next to her, was moaning and sobbing quietly, her body jerking in sleep, reminding Annie of how little Libby used to keep sewing in her sleep though her hands were empty. She reached across and stroked Molly's back until her breathing grew more even. In the berths below and all around her, people snored or coughed or rattled their leg irons as they tried to shift in their sleep, but mostly it was the wind she heard, screaming in the sails, and the cables straining. The Dunlavin was bucking like a horse, rocking and rolling, rising and falling in a way she had never known before. It was dark, dark as only a starless night can be out on the open sea. Sometime, while she had been sleeping, the ship had weighed anchor and slipped out of Portsmouth harbour. England already lay behind her, Australia fifteen thousand miles away. She thought of her father, standing there alone under a lantern moon.

‘There is no one of that name listed in the 1811 muster.'

The sergeant closed the book.

‘But there must be,' insisted William. ‘He has been here for almost five years. S. P. E. A. R. S,' he spelt out the name, ‘John Spears, please look again. Or let me look for myself.'

The sergeant was the ugliest man William had ever seen, small, with a barrel-shaped gut hanging out over his trousers, and a fleshy red face which almost covered up his close-set black eyes. He stank of rum. William was not sure the man could read.

He pulled the ledger closer to him so that William could not see the page. ‘He is not here. There is nobody of that name, I'm telling you.'

‘Isn't there any other list?'

‘This,' the officer tapped the book with the point of his pencil, ‘gives the names and whereabouts of every living soul in all of Australia.'

‘Did you check Hobart or Norfolk Island? Perhaps he is
out on a work-party in the bush? Or with the chain-gangs up in the coal mines. He could be working for a farmer in the Hunter Valley.' William listed off all the places he had heard other transports talking about. ‘Could he already have come off stores like the man my sister and I work for? He can't just have disappeared.'

The sergeant shook his head at every suggestion. He snarled at William through clenched teeth. ‘Every man, woman and child's name is in the muster book, whether they're still on government stores or taking care of themselves. If he was anywhere in Australia, his name would be here.'

‘Then where is he?' asked William.

‘I couldn't say.' The sergeant sucked his teeth. ‘He could be dead, I suppose; he could have perished from typhus. He could have been murdered. I don't know and I don't care. Maybe he ran away and is living on his wits in the bush. Only Tuesday last a party of surveyors found another skeleton out there, picked clean by those dingo dogs. Maybe that was your father.' He spat on the floor, then grinned maliciously at William. His teeth were stained dark black from his chewing tobacco. ‘On the other hand, he might have got pardoned, I suppose, and gone back to England before he knew his thieving, good-for-nothing son was on his way out here too.' He cocked his head at William and sneered.

‘How can I find out what has become of him? I must know,' insisted William.

‘What you must know, you impudent rascal, is of no concern of mine. All I know,' he said, standing up and closing the ledger, ‘is that you're wasting my time here. Forget your father. If he's still alive, and I doubt it, he has probably taken a new wife and has another family of pups to feed. He won't want you turning up out of the blue. Now get out before I have to throw you out.'

William fled as the soldier threw a punch at his head and kept running all the way down the long dusty road under the grinding white light of the Australian summer until he reached the cattle yard where Robert Traylor was waiting for him. William had grown taller since he had arrived in New South Wales. His shoulders were broader and he now had feathery blond hair growing on his upper lip and along his arms and legs. He also had a defiant look in his eyes, the look of a young man who has witnessed terrible things but has learned to survive.

He and Annie had finally reached Sydney after one hundred and sixty days at sea. The journey had been unspeakable. Each day for almost half a year, he had seen men at their worst. It was like a secret, brutal world where there are no rules. Officers, sailors and convicts alike all behaved in the most inhuman way. William had seen men flogged so hard their bones had poked through their skinned backs. He had seen the twisted, satisfied looks on their torturers' faces as they wielded their whips. Many men and women had died of hunger and disease and neglect. Those
who survived grew hard-hearted. Once, a man had told no one that the prisoner in the berth next to him had died so that he could claim the dead man's food rations. It was only when the stink had become unbearable that the truth came out. Everyone, William and Annie too, became infested with body lice which bit and burrowed into their skin day and night so they never had enough sleep. After months of this, it was hard not to think the world was an evil place.

Whatever the weather, the living conditions were awful. Soon after the ship left England, it became cold and wet and they shivered beneath their thin blankets. Later, it was hot and there was no air in the hold for weeks. The ship was becalmed for days with no wind. Later still, after they had left Rio de Janeiro, they met violent storms. For days, the ship rolled and tossed on waves as high as a cathedral steeple. Water poured down on them so that everything on board was soaked through. Lying helplessly below deck locked into their leg chains, William and Annie listened to every ship timber groaning and cracking and the winds screaming.

When the Dunlavin finally arrived in Sydney, they were both half-starved to death and so shocked by what they had seen and suffered they were hardly able to say their own names, but they were in luck. Almost immediately they were assigned together to Robert and Peggy Traylor, farmers who had land up along the Parramatta river. William worked with the stockmen, sometimes riding out for days on end with the cattle the Traylors reared and fattened for beef. He grew to
love the horses and the heat and the wide open spaces and could hardly believe he had once wanted nothing more than to make top hats. One day when Annie saw him riding into the yard leading a bullock on a rope she realised with a jolt that they were no longer the children they had been in England, and that the life they had led there was gone forever.

Although she was still working as a servant, the Traylors' home could not have been more different from Dinham House. There were no liveried footmen or high-ceilinged salons full of crystal and fine furniture, but a crudely-built wooden farm-house of small hot rooms full of rough men with rougher manners. Annie looked after the three youngest Traylor children, all of them under three years of age, and helped prepare the men's rations but even though it was tough, and the hours were long, Peggy Traylor made a kinder employer than Mrs Stringer from Dinham House. She and William were not slaves; far from it, for the Traylors were kind people and treated them both as well as their own children. They had once been convicts themselves and had suffered cruelly during their early years in Botany Bay. When they had heard about the young brother and sister newly arrived on the transport ship, Dunlavin, they had asked to take them in.

Robert Traylor had been sent out from England on the infamous Second Fleet in 1790 when he was twenty years old.

‘Any of us that survived Captain Donald Trail can survive anything,' he told William. Of the four hundred and ninety
nine convicts who had set out on the Neptune, one hundred and fifty eight had died on the voyage; only a handful of those who disembarked were fit enough to begin work. It had the most calamitous record of all the convict ships that ever sailed from England.

During the seven years of his sentence, Robert had tried to escape twice. The first time he had headed inland into the bush but after two weeks wandering around dazed with heatstroke and hunger, had come back into Sydney and given himself up. He was given one hundred lashes with the cat o' nine tails and sent to Norfolk Island, a settlement several thousand miles off the coast, where he and four others had almost immediately begun to build a raft, with the hope of reaching China. That escape ended in disaster too when they were washed up on a small coral island where an East Indies trader picked them up and brought them back to Sydney.

When the seven long, hard years of his sentence were finally up, he had stayed on, reckoning he could make a better go of things in Australia than in his native Sussex. He had been one of that first generation of convicts to come off government stores, one of the first men to be given a grant of land, the tools to clear it, and convict labour to help him work it. It was only thirty raw acres of bush to begin with, but by the time the Spearses were sent to work for him he had more than three hundred acres along the Parramatta river. He had done well, raising cattle for beef which he sold back to the government.

Peggy Traylor, Robert's wife, was an Irishwoman who ruled her home and her farm with an iron fist. She could fell trees, build fences, dig drains, ride a horse, take hold of a tangled-up calf and pull it out from its mother, and lower a pint of rum as well as any man. She was as big and broad as the blacksmith who called on Saturdays to shoe the horses. At weekends her house was full of loud Irishmen, singing ballads into the small hours or holding arm-wrestling competitions at the kitchen table. The floorboards trembled as Peggy pushed and shoved people around the room, shouting out instructions for the céilí dancing at the top of her voice. She was a ‘political', transported for her part in the failed rebellion in Ireland in ‘98.

‘I'll help youse find your father,' she told Annie and William when they told her the story of how Leonard Evans had deceived them and kept their father's letters. ‘God bless him, he must be terrible anxious with no news from you all these years.'

It had been her idea to see if John Spears' name appeared on the muster which had been taken the previous year.

‘Wouldn't it be a fine thing if you could all be together again after all the hardships you've been through? There's worse places than Australia, you know, though I'm sure you didn't think that when you were standing in the dock back in England.'

‘Don't you miss your home in Ireland?' asked Annie.

‘Oh, I do indeed, darling. I miss my people but sure I
have Robert here now and the children. There's relations of mine back in Wexford that would have forty fits if they knew I had gone and married an Englishman! And, to tell you the god honest truth,' she lowered her voice, ‘I'm a million times better off here than ever I could have been in Wexford. I'm not denying the early years were a terrible hardship, but there's a future to be had here, for you and your brother too.'

‘I don't miss England,' said Annie, ‘for there is no one there for us any more. I like it better here with you – but I wish we were able to find out where our father was.'

‘You and your brother will always have a home here with us, Annie, even if you don't find your own father. Now would you put on a couple of eggs to boil for the children's supper? I'd better get back to my digging though I doubt if anything we sow this year will grow unless the rains come soon.'

Peggy Traylor was as good as her word. When Robert said he was taking the cattle down to sell at Sydney market and bring back new stock, Peggy insisted that William should ride along with him and go and check the muster list. They had been away for days and Annie was hardly able to sit still for five minutes at a stretch with the excitement as she waited for them to return.

It was late at night when the stockmen got back to the farm on the banks of the Parramatta river. Annie had woken up when she heard the horses out the back and the racket coming from the kitchen where Peggy was putting out food
and drink for the exhausted drovers. She got out of bed and went out to look for her brother.

She found him sitting on the stoop outside, watching the reflection of the full moon gliding over the surface of the river. Even in the early hours of the morning it was hot. The air was heavy with the smell of eucalyptus. Cicadas croaked. It was enough to see his slouched shoulders and the exhausted look on his face to know the news was bad. He looked up as she sat down beside him.

‘I'm sorry, Annie,' he said. ‘No luck.'

In the corral behind the farmhouse the horses were restless. They whinnied and raced round in circles. Flickering shadows moved behind the gum trees. The earth which had been baked dry for months was like a piece of skin stretched to tearing point. A lizard had clamped itself against the step of the veranda next to William but scuttled away over the carpet of brittle fallen leaves when Peggy Traylor came out from the house.

‘Robert tells me your father's name was not on the muster, William,' she said.

‘No,' said William. ‘The officer said there is no one in the whole country with the name of Spears.'

‘Arrah, you wouldn't believe that. There are hundreds of people not on any of their old lists. They might have spelt his name wrong. He'll show up one of these days, take my word for it.'

William shook his head. ‘I don't know any more, Mrs Traylor. I feel like giving up.'

Peggy put her hands on her hips and glared at him.

‘What sort of talk is that? That's what the System wants you to do, wanted all of us to do, just shut up and ask for nothing. You have every right to know what has become of your father. And he has every right to know what has become of you.'

Annie nodded enthusiastically. ‘Mrs Traylor is right, William. We must not give up until we find him.'

A loud explosion of laughter came from the kitchen.

‘Have you talked to the drovers to see if any of them ever came across him?' asked Peggy.

‘Of course,' said Annie, ‘and it is always the same. Nobody has ever heard of him.'

‘Now, darling dear, don't give up hope. People are always being moved around from one settlement to another. That way they think the men will have no time to hatch plots and set up a rebellion against the whole stinking system. Sure, I was never more than a couple of months in the one place myself until I got my ticket-of-leave and came out here to Parramatta with the bould Robert. I suppose they thought an Irishwoman like me would contaminate all around me with my opinions.'

There was a shuffling noise from under the veranda.

‘What is that?' said Annie, as an awkward-looking beast blundered into view. It was like a small bear and yet quite
unlike a bear, with a blunt snout and short thick legs. The land was full of strange wild beasts, weirder than anything ever dreamt of in England. Every day huge flocks of kangaroos bounded across the dry brush. Only the day before, down by the river, she had seen a creature that looked as if it was made up of parts of a whole lot of other animals for it had a furry body but a beak for a mouth and feet like a duck. It laid eggs, but then suckled its young! And now here was something else just as odd.