Behind the Sun (31 page)

Sarah wasn’t much better. She never really said much anyway and was saying even less these days. She was very patient with Rachel, surprisingly so, and Harrie had caught her crying once when she’d thought no one was looking, after Rachel had had a particularly ugly fit. But then Harrie had watched her when they’d buried Liz Parker — well, dropped her body over the side of the ship — and her face had been as hard as rocks and wearing an expression, she’d realised later with shock, close to triumph. And she’d wondered, guiltily, whether Sarah had done it, had killed her. And Sarah must have read her mind, in that way she had, because the next day she’d said, ‘You think
I
did it, don’t you?’

And Harrie, who’d known exactly what Sarah was talking about, had gone red and said, ‘Did what?’

‘Topped Liz Parker.’

‘No, I don’t!’

And Sarah had laughed. ‘I was up on deck with you, remember?’

But not straight away you weren’t, Harrie had recalled disloyally.

Then Sarah had said, ‘It wasn’t me, Harrie. I certainly felt like it, she was such a bitch to Rachel. She was a bitch to everyone. But it wasn’t me. You know me better than that.’

Harrie did, and felt bad for even only half thinking it.

Sarah had given her one of those rare, real-Sarah smiles that not many people saw. ‘It’s all right, Harrie, I’m not offended. And if I had done it, it would have been for Rachel. You know that.’

And, strangely, the more Harrie thought about it, the more acceptable that notion seemed. Which frightened her badly, so she’d pushed the thought to the very back of her mind.

Except it kept popping back out.

Gabriel Keegan peered out of the small window of his cabin at the distant shoreline. It was miles away, the dark line of land shrouded in low cloud. According to Holland, they were less than two weeks out of port, which was fortunate as he’d polished off his personal supply of cheese and wine and was sick to death of taking his meals in his cabin, not to mention his own company. Downey had made it clear he wasn’t welcome either in the great cabin or on the foredeck, thanks to that sanctimonious prick Cutler and the self-righteous Seatons. But he only left his cabin at night now anyway.

He’d made that decision himself though, never mind Downey. A few days after the little blonde tart had attacked him he’d been on the foredeck when some slag on the waistdeck had hurled something at him. The missile had been a turd.

Bloody slit-arsed bitches.

Josiah Holland carefully rolled up his blueback charts, slid them into a leather map case and hung it on its hook. He’d left two charts out on the table, their curling corners held down by glass paperweights, as he’d need them for navigating into Sydney Cove, but the remainder he wouldn’t require again until the return voyage in six weeks’ time. Once they’d dropped anchor, the convicts had been disembarked and the — slightly depleted — cargo unloaded, he would pay the crew then write up his report. He had also decided to inform Amos Furniss he wouldn’t be required on the homeward journey. And now that the threat of mutiny had passed, if he coerced other crew members to resign, then so be it: there were plenty of sailors in Sydney willing to work. He’d just about had enough of the man’s insolence. He would severely dock his pay, too, to compensate for the missing rum and brandy from the hold.

This voyage had been a nightmare. Thank God it was almost over.

Sarah knew they would be split up after they left the Parramatta Female Factory, but while they were there, they’d be all right. She’d heard talk of the Factory in London and, though by all accounts it wasn’t a pleasant place, as in any prison there were ways in which life as an inmate could be made better. She’d also gathered that the assignment system itself could be worked to advantage if you kept your wits about you, which was something she understood well. But she wouldn’t know what that would entail until they actually arrived, and sitting around on this ship waiting for that was stretching her nerves almost to tearing point — and there was still another whole week to go.

Once they left the Factory they’d need money — they might well have spent their kitty by then. Who knew what they’d have to pay for inside? And it didn’t look as though Rachel would be playing broads for a while, if she ever did again. Their assignments as servants wouldn’t earn them anything, so that meant reverting to the skills that got them transported in the first place. Harrie would make a hopeless criminal, so she was out as far as that went. But Friday, Sarah knew, would be on her back at the first opportunity as it was the quickest way to pay for gin. She could make a
lot
of money and was happy to share it, and Sarah had plenty of schemes of her own.

The money would go first to care for Rachel. Sarah didn’t know what form that care would take, but she didn’t need to yet. Harrie would be provided for next, as she couldn’t make her own money while virtually enslaved to someone else. She deserved an allowance — she was the loving heart that held them all together. (There, she’d said the word that always gave her such trouble: love. Thought it, at least.) And if Rachel
were
pregnant, there would be a child to support as well, because soon it would be too late to do anything about it. It would come and it would not be Keegan’s child, just Rachel’s.

It could all be done with careful scheming, a bit of hard graft, and money, because money fixed most problems. And in Australia there would be no flash man like Tom Ratcliffe to take it all away from her, or to beat the hell out of her or tell her she was ugly and unwanted.

She wasn’t unwanted here. Or unloved. She had Harrie and Friday and Rachel.

Matthew Cutler sat at the desk in his cabin writing what would be the last of his shipboard letters home to his mother in England. Some weeks it had been a colossal strain coming up with something interesting to tell her, but lately, over the past month, there had been plenty to write about.

There had been the terrible storm, though he’d played that down so he wouldn’t worry her; the sighting of the
Flying Dutchman
, which he’d described at length as she was very interested in matters concerning the spirit world; the mysterious death of the convict woman; and the increase in flora and fauna as the
Isla
neared the southern coasts of Australia.

There had also been the ongoing tension concerning Gabriel Keegan, who had shut himself in his cabin, to the relief, Matthew was aware, of almost everyone. He saw the girl Rachel Winter on the waistdeck from time to time and was gratified to see that, remarkably, she seemed to have recovered from her awful injuries, though James Downey had hinted she wasn’t as hale as she looked. She appeared even more of a waif with her trailing, silver-white hair and stick-like wrists, but then Matthew supposed that travails of the nature she had endured would certainly sap a person of her strength. He definitely hadn’t mentioned to his mother anything about that particular affair; she would have found it all extremely distasteful. He had himself and couldn’t wait to see the back of Gabriel Keegan.

Because of it, he’d never summoned the courage to speak to Harriet Clarke and now he supposed he never would. He might
have if Keegan hadn’t sullied the waters by committing his brutal assaults, but since then the line between the prisoners and the passengers had been as impassable as a brick wall, crossed only by Mrs Seaton and her school for letters. He’d lost his opportunity, and he’d lost his convict girl.

He took up his pen again:

Matthew nibbled the end of his pen. Should he also add that he was very much looking forward to not having to listen to any more of the Reverend Seaton’s interminable sermons, or the sound of his snoring through the cabin walls every night? No, perhaps not.

7 September 1829, Port Jackson

The girls were on deck with everyone else watching Port Jackson open up before them. Last night barely anyone had slept, such had been the level of excitement as the
Isla
had sailed the last few nautical miles through the Tasman Sea up the coast of New South Wales, and this morning everyone had been out of their bunks well before the ship’s bell had rung, ready to come up on deck. More than a few had taken the time to pretty themselves: for those who used it, rouge had been applied to cheeks and lips, bright scarves retrieved and the mould wiped off, and silk flowers and ribbons threaded into prison bonnets. Many women wore their own clothes beneath their prisons slops, the cheap Navy Board garments now in varying and immodest states of disrepair. They had passed through the towering cliffs of Sydney Heads after breakfast and the women had hurried through their chores to be free to watch the scenery and other ships pass by on the final leg of their journey into Sydney Cove, where they would drop anchor later in the morning.

To the English and Irish women aboard the
Isla
, the landscape appeared utterly foreign.

For a start the rocks that rimmed the vast harbour were coloured a startling peach to orange to grey, and stood or lay in great slabs that dropped right into the sea. The trees, too, were disconcertingly strange. They ranged from scrubby clumps of acacia and paperbark and banksia, low and dense and hugging the earth, to fan-crowned cabbage-tree palms, to eerie, soaring stands of blackbutt and red gum with slender white trunks like the bones of a hand. Absent entirely were the majestic trees of England, the elms and oaks and beeches. But Port Jackson was breathtaking, the sea eating
into the craggy shoreline and reaching fingers far inland, forming tiny islands and endless sandy bays and coves and peninsulas and headlands, making patterns like the gaps in an intricate piece of filet lace. Nothing like the Thames, which drilled into the side of England and simply kept going until it was absorbed.

At first the landscape seemed to be empty, but soon a patchwork of fields and a handful of tiny buildings near the shore became visible. And the farther the
Isla
sailed into the long harbour, the crew shouting to one another and tacking furiously as the wind changed direction, the more evidence of civilisation was revealed. Then, rounding a headland and encountering the bristling masts of dozens of schooners and cutters, brigs and barques, whalers and even warships, the women realised they had reached Sydney Cove.

To their right lay a scrubby headland that dipped then rose again to a hill on which squatted Fort Phillip. Behind it, inland, were various prominent buildings including a vast windmill. On the horizon were half a dozen more windmills and perhaps three or four church steeples. Buildings several storeys high, solidly built of pale stone, dotted the low hills that ringed the harbour — from this perspective appearing as though placed at random by a child playing with miniatures. Where the hills ran down to the sea the clusters of buildings grew more dense, in places seeming to grow out of the rocks themselves, and stores small and great lined the shore where several wharves extended into the water.

On the deep cove’s left was another headland, on the tip of which sat the rather mediaeval tower of Fort Macquarie, and behind that lay a vast expanse of park land. Overall the impression was one of open space. To the women on the
Isla
there appeared to be none of the cramped, overhanging garrets and rookeries of London, no smoke and soot-blackened lanes, no festering cesspits brimming with shit and the corpses of cats and dogs. On the sea air there was, however, the unmistakable taint of a slaughterhouse somewhere not too far distant.

‘It looks pretty enough,’ Sarah remarked, gesturing at the shore.

‘It isn’t home, though, is it?’ Harrie said, her voice cracking. Home was where her mother and brother and sisters were, and that wasn’t here in this strange, bright new land.

‘But is this where the Female Factory is?’ Friday said.

Amos Furniss, eavesdropping as he secured a rope, laughed unpleasantly. ‘Hell no. That’s miles upriver, and what a shithole it is, too. Nothing but preachers and bloody farms. And cows. Like
you
lot.’ He spat and walked away.

‘Arsehole,’ Friday muttered.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Harrie said, anxious to avoid a last-minute scene in spite of her unhappiness. ‘We’re nearly there.’

‘We are, aren’t we?’ Rachel said brightly. ‘And guess what? I’ve got such good news.’

Harrie, Friday and Sarah stared at her with sudden frightened expectation, each knowing already what she was about to say, but still hoping it would be something else.

Rachel clapped her hands delightedly. ‘I’m having a baby!’

September 1829, Parramatta Female Factory

The great anchor chain descended through the bow with a deafening rattle as First Mate Warren bellowed orders. The women, jammed onto the waistdeck with their ratty possessions heaped around them, waited expectantly. Bella Jackson stood beside her two trunks wearing a full skirt of oxblood velvet, a beautifully fitted jacket in emerald taffeta, a very fancy bonnet with a black ostrich feather and her grey kid boots; her prison slops were nowhere to be seen. Her waist was
tiny
.

Friday, Harrie and Sarah stood in silence, feeling unsettled and vaguely sick, even though they weren’t particularly surprised by Rachel’s news. Harrie held Rachel’s hand. Rachel was crying, upset that they weren’t as thrilled by her announcement as she’d expected.

Mr Warren strode about, waving his arms and clearing a path between the door beneath the foredeck and the gap in the ship’s rail where the bosun’s chair had been rigged. There was already a great pile of luggage on the crowded deck, presumably belonging to the paying passengers, brought up from the hold this morning and in the process of being lowered into the wherry waiting below.

The Seatons themselves then emerged from the cabins, Mrs Seaton wearing a bonnet even fancier than Bella’s, followed by Matthew Cutler. Hester Seaton waved regally as she shepherded her
daughters towards the bosun’s chair. One by one they descended into the wherry, until only Mr Cutler remained.

The women watched restlessly, muttering among themselves, and Captain Holland and James Downey, standing on the afterdeck, watched the women. They had discussed the matter several days earlier and decided there was no easy way of doing this. Perhaps if the
Isla
had come in to harbour at night something could have been arranged, but she hadn’t and, frankly, Josiah Holland hadn’t felt inclined to make much effort.

At last, Gabriel Keegan appeared.

The convict women fell silent, the only sounds the creaking of the
Isla
’s timbers, the sea washing against her hull and the cry of sea birds overhead.

His arrogant gaze swept over them as he walked across the deck towards the ship’s rail.

Someone made a loud pig noise.

‘Oh Friday, don’t,’ Harrie whispered.

It was picked up and the women launched a barrage of grunting, jabbering, snorting animal sounds, the pitch and volume rising until the alarmed crew clapped their hands over their ears.

‘Pig!’ a voice shouted.

‘
Pig! Pig! Pig!
’

Matthew Cutler glanced over his shoulder as Keegan approached.

‘Hurry up!’ Keegan urged.

Matthew fiddled about with the sling on the bosun’s chair. ‘I seem to have the ropes tangled. Won’t be a moment.’

Keegan bared his teeth as behind him the taunts continued. Finally Matthew slid the seat beneath his backside and was launched into the air.

‘
Rapist!
’ someone shrieked.

‘Dirty
bastard
!’

A pottery bowl flew through the air and hit Gabriel Keegan on the back.

‘Are you going to do anything?’ James Downey asked the captain.

Josiah Holland examined his fingernails for a moment. ‘No point, really. He’ll be off in a minute.’

‘That’s true,’ James said.

The bosun’s chair returned and Keegan threw himself into it, at last descending into the wherry below. Before he was even seated the watermen pulled away from the
Isla
in a wide arc and set out for the shore, passing the line of four lighters waiting to collect the latest shipment of convict women to arrive in New South Wales.

A crowd awaited them on shore — a number of women, but mainly men with a hankering for a wife or simply come to inspect the plumage on the most recent cageful of His Majesty’s canaries. Some of the convict girls played up to them, and Friday was one of the worst, swishing her skirts about, showing her legs all the way up to her thighs and yelling out ribald comments. She was angry about Rachel, and this was the only way she had of letting it out. Sarah sulked and was aggressive. Walking on solid ground after so many months at sea was surprisingly difficult and the women staggered about as though in their cups. A man in the crowd shouted at them, ‘Drunken whores!’ and Sarah lunged out of the line into which they’d been herded and spat at him before a guard knocked her down and dragged her back. The crowd cheered, thoroughly entertained, then roared even more loudly when Friday swore the air blue then bared her backside at the guard.

Harrie slipped a comforting arm around Sarah’s shoulder, but Sarah shrugged her off. Blinking back tears, Harrie looked around for Rachel, trudging along behind them, dragging her sack of possessions, still crying quietly, lost in her own muddled little world.

Unable to stop it, Harrie burst into tears herself. This was absolutely awful. It seemed that they were as despised here as they
had been in London, never mind that Sydney Town was filled with folk who had been convicts themselves, the mean buggers. And no matter how cheerful they’d tried to be on the
Isla
about their prospects in New South Wales, they were now thousands of miles from family and home and on the eve of a minimum seven-year sentence of what amounted to slave labour. It couldn’t get much worse.

A hand slipped into hers; Rachel’s.

Harrie squeezed and held on.

They stayed only one night in Sydney Town, under lock and key in a shed on the waterfront, where they were mustered and had their papers checked by a man who announced himself as Mr William Tuckwell, superintendent of the Female Factory at Parramatta. The next morning they set out for the Factory, a journey of around fifteen miles up the Parramatta River, in six boats rowed by two dozen burly watermen. Their military escort distributed themselves two to each vessel, Mr Tuckwell riding in the lead boat. On the first leg, Harrie had sat only inches from a waterman, his face red and sweaty, his knees banging against hers as he’d rowed, and he’d not looked directly at her once.

They had stopped so the watermen could be relieved, and now the river was narrowing, its banks lined with mangroves whose roots reached down into the water. It was warm and muggy on the waterway and hordes of voracious mosquitoes were out in force, giving rise to energetic swatting and swearing.

At times, between the grumbling and slapping and the steady dip of oars into the river, could be heard the harsh cries of a familiar bird.

‘That’s a raven!’ Friday exclaimed, a note of pleasure in her voice. ‘Fancy having English birds here.’

‘’Tis not. Them’s crows,’ Matilda Bain argued.

Friday shook her head. ‘Ravens.’

‘Crows.’

‘
You’re
a bloody old crow.’

Harrie held her breath, worried Friday would lose her temper. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? They’re both English.’

‘No, these ones are native to Australia,’ the young soldier sitting in the stern said. ‘Nearly the same as the English ones, but bigger. And it’s a raven. Ravens go “aarr, aarr, aarrrrrrrrrrrr”; crows go “ark, ark, ark”.’

Everyone turned to stare at him. He went pink, adjusted his cap and looked away.

He proved useful again later when an unearthly cackle rang out across the river and made them all jump and look around wildly, advising that it was a bird called a kookaburra, even though Matilda pronounced it to be the sound of the devil himself laughing at them as they were rowed towards their doom. This time Friday pinched her until she squawked.

Rachel, who was getting a headache, slumped with her head in Harrie’s lap and her legs across Sarah’s.

Finally, when they were convinced their backsides couldn’t tolerate the wooden seats any longer, the watermen veered towards the right bank and landed the boats. The women, stiff from sitting so long with their knees bent, disembarked with their possessions and trudged in a long ragged line towards a high, pale stone wall, their military escort marching beside them, Mr Tuckwell leading the way. Fearing that she might have a fit in the boat, Harrie had lightly dosed Rachel with laudanum: now she was dozy and Friday carried her on her back, Sarah following with an armful of sacks and bags.

Skirting the moat beyond the base of the wall, which was easily fifteen or sixteen feet high, they plodded along in the wall’s lengthening shadow until they came to tall wooden gates set into an archway. The gates were flanked by towering pillars of sandstone — and they were closed.

‘It’s a prison,’ someone remarked, with an almost comical note of disappointment in her voice.

There was a bit of weary laughter at that. What else had they expected?

Friday said in Sarah’s ear, ‘Give me the kitty. And a bit of cloth, a kerchief or something.’

A wicket was set into the left-hand gate: Mr Tuckwell rapped on it and it creaked open. A short exchange occurred with an unseen person, then it closed again.

They all waited.

‘Jesus, hurry up,’ Friday said loudly as she crouched and slid Rachel off onto the ground, where she slumped, her head nodding. ‘Me bladder’s bursting!’ She walked off a short distance, turned her back, lifted her skirts and squatted. The soldiers stared.

Discomposed, Mr Tuckwell shouted at Friday, ‘Hey, you, no! Wait until you’re inside!’

A moment later the big gates swung ponderously open, grinding across the dirt and gravel beneath them.

Bella Jackson, her girls struggling with her trunks, shoved her way to the front of the line. Harrie and Sarah picked up Rachel between them, leaving Friday to carry everything else. The soldiers closed in and herded the women inside.

Behind them, the gates shut with an echoing bang.

They found themselves packed into a small outer yard; ahead of them rose another lower wall and a second set of gates. One of the children started to cry, which set them all off. But not a single mother slapped or reprimanded; the day had been long and everyone was tired, thirsty and hungry.

A porter — or port
ress
, as she was a woman — opened the gates. Through they went, leaving their military escort behind, into yet another yard, this one reasonably spacious and well-kept. Directly in front of them rose a wide, three-storey building with windows along each floor, divided exactly in the middle by a blunt,
full-height transept more likely to be found in a church, and, rather incongruously given the unwelcoming appearance of its unadorned, sandstone facade, an elegant cupola on the roof and a clock set under the eaves of its entrance. The yard was enclosed by buildings on three sides, including the three-storey structure, and by the wall and gates through which they had just entered.

In the centre, facing them, stood a woman. She looked middle-aged, was solid but neatly built and wore a white ruffled bonnet and a black dress that gave off a slight sheen in the late afternoon sun. For a long moment she observed them in silence, her face unsmiling, hands clasped loosely at her waist.

‘She looks a dour piece of work,’ Sarah said out of the side of her mouth.

Friday stifled a snort of laughter.

The woman’s head turned and her hooded eyes narrowed. ‘Is that girl ill?’ she demanded, pointing a short-nailed finger at Rachel.

Harrie, struggling to support Rachel, felt a squirt of panic. ‘No, ma’am, just sleepy.’

There was a ripple of laughter and the woman clapped her hands sharply. ‘Quiet! My name is Mrs Gordon and I am matron of Parramatta Female Factory. This will be your home until you are sent on assignment. For some of you that will occur almost immediately, which I certainly hope will be the case as at present there are four hundred and eighty-nine women and seventy-two children here, not including yourselves.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘The Factory operates a class system. All inmates eligible for assignment are drawn from first class, and first class only. Second-class inmates are on probation and third-class inmates are those confined to the penitentiary for crimes committed while on assignment.’ She paused again and deliberately swept the faces before her with a stern gaze. ‘My task is to ensure every adult inmate is eventually assigned. Until that occurs, all inmates fit for work will undertake industrious employment while at the Factory. Shortly
you will bathe, undergo inspection, and be allocated quarters. I understand you were issued slops when you boarded your transport at Woolwich. You will only be issued with replacement slops if those which you currently possess are unserviceable.’

From somewhere in the middle of the shuffling, rag-tag group came the unmistakable sound of fabric being torn. Someone tittered and soon it had spread until everyone was giggling and laughing.

Mrs Gordon clapped her hands again. ‘Quiet!
Quiet!
Let it be known now that I will
not
tolerate
insubordination or wilful disobedience.’ She waited stonily until the giggling had died down. ‘The Female Factory fulfils many roles. It is a labour exchange, a manufactory, a lying-in facility, a nursery, a hospital, a penitentiary, and I have even heard it referred to as a refuge and an asylum, but above all it is an institution for convicts and
that is what you are
. This entire colony was originally established as a gaol. It will serve you well never to forget that.’

‘As if we could,’ Friday muttered.

Mrs Gordon turned on her heel and walked off, her full black skirts swishing, crossing the courtyard and entering the three-storey building.

‘So what do we do now?’ Sarah said grumpily.

‘Well, I can’t muck about,’ Janie Braine said behind her. ‘I have to feed these babies. Me tits are bursting. Here, hold Rosie, will you?’

Sarah took Janie’s baby while Janie opened her blouse and put William, Evie Challis’s orphaned infant, to her breast. He suckled half-heartedly, his delicate eyelids closing, long lashes brushing his cheeks, mouth working weakly.

‘Poor little tyke,’ Janie said, gazing down at him. ‘He’s so sickly compared to Rosie.’

‘Will you keep him?’ Sarah asked.

Janie nodded and looked up, her bung eye staring blindly. ‘As long as I can. Well, he’s got no one else, has he?’