Behind the Sun (24 page)

It occurred to Keegan that he might actually kill her and he raised himself off her so she could breathe again, but planted his elbows on her arms so she couldn’t hit out.

Grateful for the reprieve, Rachel lay still. His cock was too big and she was as dry as emery paper. It hurt badly. It was nothing like it had been with Lucas. Keegan tore her, and when he began to slide more easily she knew she was bleeding.

She let herself drift away, until it felt as though it were happening to someone else. She thought about Shannon. She remembered a rhyme about magpies she and her brothers used to chant until it drove their mother barmy.

She said it again now, over and over and over.

Keegan came to a vicious, thrusting climax that drove her into the mattress and rammed her head against the cabin wall, then rolled off her and lay panting. Rachel stayed motionless, too frightened to move.

After a minute or so he drew down her skirt, used it to wipe the blood and semen off himself, and removed the pillow from her face, frowning at the stain across it where her nose had bled.

Without looking at her, he said, ‘You can go now.’

Rachel sat up, her head and face throbbing, a fresh line of blood trickling over her top lip. It tasted coppery and salty. She swiped it away with the back of her hand and gingerly swung her legs over the side of the bed. She felt as though she were suddenly eighty years old. Her back ached, her legs felt wrenched out of their sockets, everything between them stung and felt swollen and there was a deep ache in her lower belly.

As she shakily found her feet, a gush of something warm came out of her, and she prayed it was only his mess, not blood.

She staggered the few feet across the cabin to the door.

Matthew hadn’t been able to sleep, and there had been a thumping noise going on and, about ten minutes earlier, a strangled sort of yelp that had sounded quite close. It had bothered him, so he’d climbed out of bed and pulled on his trousers and shirt.

Now, someone’s cabin door was opening and closing. He went to his own, opened it a crack, and looked out.

Hester Seaton sat up in bed, her hair in curling rags under a lace bed cap, staring into the darkness, her daughters swaying in their hammocks gently above her. She, too, had heard worrying noises — a girl’s cry?

Octavius would be snoring his head off next door, having spent himself, she reflected disgustedly, thinking about all that nubile flesh scampering about on the deck below him.

Really, it was hard enough trying to teach them to read and write: she couldn’t be responsible for what happened to them if they chose to run about after dark. Truly, they were morally bankrupt and quite beyond redemption.

Deliberately, she lay down and jammed her chubby fingers in her ears.

In the corridor’s dim light, Matthew saw what he at first thought was a pile of rags on the ground. Then he made out a small, white foot and realised it was a child.

The child pushed herself into a kneeling position and burst into tears.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

She looked up at him. She had long, pale blonde hair, strands of which, he saw to his horror, appeared to be stuck to her face with blood. His heart thudded even more wildly as he realised she was one of Harriet Clarke’s friends.

‘Oh God, are you all right?’ he said again, bending down to help her to her feet. ‘What’s happened? Has there been an accident?’

But she shook her head and shoved him away, then sort of slumped to the ground again. So he picked her up and carried her to the door that led out to the waistdeck, struggled to open it, and stepped outside into the chilly darkness.

She thumped his chest weakly with a fist and muttered something.

‘I’m sorry?’

She said it again and he only just realised her intent before it was too late. Quickly, he set her down in the shelter of the foredeck so she could crouch and vomit.

As he rested a steadying hand on her narrow back something struck him across the side of the head and sent him sprawling, his ear on fire. He lay stunned, face against the tar- and salt-smelling deck, then his head was hauled back by the hair, almost ripping off his other ear, and he was staring up at another of Harriet’s friends, the big red-haired girl. The loud one.

‘What the
fuck
have you done to her, you dirty little scourer?!’

She gave his head a sharp shake and he thought his hair might come out by the roots. He attempted to roll away, but her other hand tightened around his balls. Oh God. He could hear the little blonde girl coughing and spitting, then her wispy-sounding voice.

‘Friday, no. He was helping me.’

The pressure on his crotch eased.

‘What?’

‘She’s had an accident,’ Matthew wheezed. ‘She was in the corridor outside my cabin. On the ground.’

The vice-like grip on his hair abruptly let go as the one called Friday hissed, ‘It was that
fucking
Keegan, wasn’t it? Oh Jesus, Rachel, your
face
!’ She abandoned him to crouch beside the smaller girl, draping a muscled arm around her.

The little one, Rachel, started crying again. ‘He had some work for me. I thought the money could go towards my Lucas fund. It was supposed to be laundering.’

‘But it wasn’t?’

‘No.’

‘But he helped himself despite the “misunderstanding”?’

Rachel nodded.

And Matthew received the most awful, gut-plummeting shock: he was looking at a girl who had just been raped. A moment later he felt sick to his stomach, then a complete and utter fool for assuming over the past weeks that Gabriel Keegan was a decent fellow, for spending hours passing the time of day with him, for dining at the same table pretending they were all perfectly civilised people.

But he expected it was nothing compared to the way this girl Rachel felt.

‘Who goes there?’

Matthew jumped: it was young Joel Meek, the third mate, doing his rounds on the early watch, his lantern held high.

‘Sorry, sir, didn’t mean to interrupt, like.’ Meek sounded embarrassed.

‘You’re not,’ Matthew said. ‘In fact, I’d like to make a complaint. Please go and wake the captain. There’s been —’

‘
No!
’ Wincing, Rachel struggled to her feet. ‘No, please, don’t.’

‘No, don’t,’ Friday repeated quietly, but with such an undercurrent of menace in her voice that the hairs on Matthew’s arms stirred. ‘We’ll deal with this our way.’

‘There’s been what?’ Meek demanded, peering at them suspiciously.

Friday shook her head. ‘Nothing. Forget the man said anything, or don’t bother looking for me next time you’re lonely.’

And Matthew received yet another shock. Obviously he was even more naive than he’d known. He wondered who else aboard the
Isla
knew. Clearly the crew were in on it, but surely not Captain Holland and Mr Downey? Feeling more than a little silly, he watched Meek struggle between loyalty to the master and desire for his favourite whore, then turn and walk off into the darkness.

He protested, ‘But you can’t let Keegan get —’

Friday turned on him. ‘Look, what do you think the master’s going to say when a convict girl complains of being raped in some cove’s cabin in the middle of the night, eh?’

Matthew knew exactly what Captain Holland would say, whether he was aware of the after-dark prostitution or not and, for the shortest of seconds, to his mortification, he caught himself thinking the very same thing.

His face betrayed him and Friday saw it. Her lip curled in disgust. ‘Ah, you’re all the fucking same.’ She slid her arm around Rachel’s waist. ‘Can you walk, love?’

Rachel nodded. ‘I think so. But it hurts.’

‘We’ll get him, sweetie. Don’t worry, he’ll pay.’

Together they shuffled towards the hatch to the prison deck. Friday squatted, raised the hatch cover with impressive ease, and they disappeared down the ladder, leaving Matthew standing on deck in the wind and the dark, feeling like a thorough cad.

When Rachel awoke early the next morning she could barely move. Her whimpers woke Harrie, who let out an appalled squeak when she caught sight of her friend’s swollen, blood-smeared face.

‘Oh, Rachel, sweetheart, what happened? Did you fall in the night?’ Harrie scuffled up onto her knees. ‘Why didn’t you wake me? Here, let me have a proper look.’

‘Shush, them in the next bunk are still asleep,’ Friday said tonelessly over her shoulder. ‘And no, she didn’t fall.’

Harrie’s heart contracted as though dipped in ice water and all of a sudden she wanted to put her hands over her ears. She hadn’t felt like doing that for ages, but now, just like that, she did.

She ran her fingers down Rachel’s slender arms — badly bruised, she saw now — and gently closed them over the battered little hands. The nails were broken and rimmed with dried blood. And Harrie knew.

‘Keegan got at her,’ Friday confirmed.

Harrie began quietly to weep. She reached for Rachel, pulling her into her arms. Rachel flopped bonelessly and Harrie cradled her, rocking her slowly, stroking her tangled hair, wiping away the tears and bloodied snot with the corner of a blanket.

Sarah, lying on her back staring at the bottom of the bunk above, said bitterly, ‘So what are we going to do about him?’ She’d been awake for hours, woken by Friday then too angry to sleep.

‘She needs to see Mr Downey,’ Harrie said in a low voice over the top of Rachel’s head, brushing away her own tears with the heel of her hand.

Friday said, ‘No. She doesn’t want to. And this is our business, just the four of us.’

‘But what if he’s hurt her?’

‘He’s bloody done that, all right. She could hardly walk last night.’ Friday told Harrie how she had found Rachel. ‘You can have a look, can’t you?’

‘But I don’t know what to look for.’

‘You birthed Janie’s baby,’ Sarah pointed out.

Janie’s face appeared upside down over the end of the upper bunk. ‘That’s true, you did a grand job of that.’

Friday looked up crossly. ‘Have you been listening to our private conversation?’

‘I can’t help it if the babe needs feeding at all hours.’

‘What about Sally?’

‘Dead to the world.’

‘Well, shut up about it, all right?’ Friday growled. ‘This really is private. I mean it.’

‘Fair enough,’ Janie said. ‘I knew that Keegan was a bloody queer gill. When you catch up with him, give him a good kicking from me, will you?’

In the end Rachel agreed to see James Downey, but only because she didn’t want to encounter Gabriel Keegan and to stay below deck she needed the surgeon’s permission. Harrie told James that Rachel had walked into a post in the night and banged her face and couldn’t manage the ladder, so James, reluctantly and only because it was Harrie who had asked, unlocked the door in the bulkhead between the prison and the hospital.

He was expecting to examine someone who fancied a few days in bed, as many of the prisoners often did when they tired of their daily chores, so when Rachel Winter limped through the door from the prison deck, he was startled by her swollen nose and the purpling bruises beneath her eyes. He ushered her through to his cubicle and helped her to sit up on the examination table.

‘Harrie said you walked into a post?’

Rachel nodded. James turned up the wick on the lamp hanging above the table to see better.

‘Last night, this was?’

Rachel nodded again.

‘You walked into it, or you
ran
into it?’

‘I walked into it.’ Her voice sounded very nasal, which wasn’t at all surprising.

‘Look up at the ceiling, please.’

James peered up Rachel’s nose. Both nostrils were full of dried blood and mucus, and the septum cartilage was markedly crooked. He didn’t want to touch it: it would only hurt her.

‘It does appear to be broken, I’m afraid. However, I really am at a loss to understand how you did this simply by walking into a post.’ It looked to him as though she had been punched directly in the face.

‘I might have been running,’ Rachel admitted.

James caught her eye and held it; there was a long moment of silence, but she didn’t drop her gaze. He’d noted the limp of course, and there were also fresh bruises on her right wrist, not quite hidden by her sleeve, and several torn fingernails. He knew she was lying.

‘How are your teeth? None have come loose?’

She shook her head.

He gave her another chance to tell him. ‘Would you like me to attend to anything else? While you’re here?’

‘No. Thank you.’

James sat down. ‘I can’t do anything to fix a broken nose, Rachel. I can give you laudanum for the discomfort until the swelling and bruising go away.’ One more opportunity. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else?’

She hesitated, then said, ‘I don’t want to go up the ladder. I feel dizzy. But I can do my chores below, just for a few days.’

James winced, then made himself stop, aware she was watching him. He’d forgotten she wanted a sick note; this was even worse than he’d suspected. If someone had hit her and she didn’t want to go up on deck, it was likely one of the crew. And if that were the case, there might have been more involved than just simple assault. Oh Christ. This had happened on one of the other transports he’d superintended and it had been an utter nightmare.

‘Rachel, I know —’

She cut him off. ‘I’d be very grateful for a note. And I’ll take the medicine, thank you very much, sir.’

James looked at her. She was sitting up straight, her head was held high and her huge cornflower-blue eyes were bright with tears, but he didn’t think they were tears of misery or pain. He could see anger in them, and a flash of pride, but nothing that spoke of weakness.