Remember Me (43 page)

She thought about it for over an hour, and then smiled as she came up with a solution.

‘What’ve you got to smirk about?’ James asked curiously, moving nearer and squatting down in front of her.

‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said.

‘If it involves ropes and files, forget it,’ he grinned. ‘I did an inventory of our belongings before we left the
Gorgon
. We haven’t even got a knife between us.’

‘I’m glad you’ve still got your sense of humour,’ she said, patting his bony face affectionately. ‘That might come in handy for my idea. You see, I’ve been thinking. If we are famous, maybe we can wring some money out of it.’

Nat continued to sleep, looking like a sweet child in the dim light. But Bill and Sam sat up. James only raised his eyebrows questioningly.

‘Will thought he’d make money from our story, that’s why he hung on to his log,’ Mary explained. ‘We’ve still
got all the stories in our heads. So why don’t we sell them?’

‘To who?’ he said sarcastically.

‘To anyone who cares to hear them,’ she said, feeling a little of her old self coming back now she had a challenge again.

No opportunity presented itself to Mary before it was dark, but the following morning, when she heard the gaoler coming along the row of cells to unlock them so they could empty the night bucket, she was ready.

She brushed the straw off her dress and ran her fingers through her hair as the key turned in the lock.

‘Come on, get that bucket emptied,’ the gaoler shouted, far more loudly than was necessary. He looked the way Mary remembered the gaolers back in Exeter, fat and unhealthy, with shifty eyes and rotten teeth.

‘How much for having the chains struck off?’ she asked.

He sucked his rotten teeth, eying her up speculatively. ‘That depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘Whether I want to or not,’ he replied, and cackled with laughter.

Mary took hold of the front of his greasy shirt menacingly. ‘You’d better want to,’ she hissed at him. ‘We’ve fought with cannibals and killed animals with our bare hands, and we’re going to hang for daring to escape from New South Wales. So we won’t think twice about slitting your throat. Now, do you want to be our friend or our enemy?’

His eyes rolled back in his head in alarm. Mary couldn’t see the men behind her, but she had to hope they were doing as she’d ordered and looking fierce.

‘W-w-what’s in it for me?’ he stuttered.

‘That depends on how you go about it,’ she said. She let go of him and smiled sweetly. ‘I want you to put the word about that we’re ready to receive visitors. They’ll have to pay of course. Enough for the shackles to come off, for food, drink and hot water to wash with.’

It was a gamble. Mary had no real idea if anyone in the prison or outsiders visiting it had enough interest in them to pay for the privilege of meeting them.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, still looking scared. ‘Did you say cannibals?’

‘I did, they had metal-tipped arrows this long,’ she said, holding her arms out wide.

‘I’ll see,’ he said, and moved back as if to lock the door.

Mary grabbed the night bucket. ‘Empty this before you go,’ she said, and thrust it at him. ‘Rinse it out before you bring it back,’ she added, ‘I don’t like the smell.’

He walked away with it as meekly as a child ordered to go and buy bread, and Mary turned to the men and giggled. ‘I think we’ve got a deal,’ she said.

By noon the shackles were off, they were eating mutton pies, and had a large flagon of small beer between them. The gaoler, whom they now knew as Spinks, was as resourceful as he was greedy, and they had already received two groups of four people, all desperate to meet the escapees and hear about the cannibals.

James was the story-teller and he did it well, embellishing the true story about the native warriors who chased them in a war canoe, to hand-to-hand fighting on land.

‘In their village they had dozens of human skulls on poles,’ James lied cheerfully. ‘We saw piles of human bones. They wore the teeth as necklaces and used human skin to cover their shields.’

After the second group left, Mary and the men dissolved into laughter.

‘Well, they could’ve been cannibals,’ James said indignantly. ‘I mean, we didn’t stay around for long enough to find out, did we?’

Mary thought how good the sound of laughter was, which she hadn’t heard since they were captured in Kupang. Even on the
Gorgon
they’d been very subdued. Yet she couldn’t help feeling just a twinge of sadness that Will wasn’t still with them. He would’ve loved an opportunity to tell such tales, and he would probably have made it even more exciting than James had done.

‘You are a wonder, Mary,’ Sam said a little later, as he licked his fingers clean of the meat pie. ‘None of us could have thought up such a cunning plan. When James got to that bit about you hitting one of the cannibals over the head with an oar, I almost believed you’d really done it. I reckon you’d think of something to save us even if they were just putting us in the cooking pot.’

Mary smiled. It was good to have the men’s admiration again. And even better to see them lifted out of their gloom. ‘We mustn’t go too far with the stories,’ she
warned them. ‘We want sympathy, not people calling us liars.’

It was on the following day that they discovered how the other prisoners had found out about them. A forger by the name of Harry Hawkins came to see them. Like many others in Newgate, he expected to be transported. He was a slimy character, small and thin, with a beak-like nose and strangely unkempt long hair for a man who dressed well.

‘I read about you in the
London Chronicle
,’ he said, and proceeded to prove it by fishing a dog-eared cutting from his pocket.

All of them had assumed the news about them had merely passed by word of mouth, that was the usual way in prisons. It was a shock to find someone had written about them in a newspaper.

James read it aloud, then passed it back. ‘It’s not completely accurate. It was the Governor’s boat we stole, not Captain Smith’s,’ he said airily.

Mary was astounded that James could be so blasé about such a florid and admiring account of their escape.

‘Who wrote it?’ she asked. She hadn’t for one moment expected anyone in England to be sympathetic to them.

‘It don’t say,’ James replied, looking at it again. ‘But whoever it was, he knows a lot. He might have got it wrong about who owned the cutter. But everything else is right.’

The five friends had no further chance then to discuss where all this information came from, because Harry Hawkins wanted to talk about his plight. It was clear that
what he wanted from them was inside information about officials in Botany Bay.

It amused Mary somewhat that this man, and everyone else waiting for transportation, still thought the settlement was in Botany Bay. Apparently no one here knew that place had been rejected by Captain Phillip. In fact it seemed that very little information had yet reached England about the colony. Mary suspected most of it had been withheld purposely as the government wouldn’t want to publicize their terrible mistakes. That made the situation even better for her and her friends.

‘It isn’t like this place,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘You can’t buy a better hut or bigger rations, the only way you can advance yourself is by having a skill they need.’

Hawkins looked disappointed. ‘But you must’ve had some inside help, or slipped someone a back-hander!’ he retorted.

‘We didn’t,’ James said indignantly. ‘It was all down to Mary charming the Dutch sea captain for the navigational instruments and charts.’

Hawkins gave her a disbelieving look and Mary blushed. She supposed he couldn’t imagine a plain and worn-looking woman being able to charm anyone.

‘The captain was lonely,’ she said by way of an explanation. ‘Me and my husband used to talk to him. He would come and have supper with us sometimes.’

‘So he’ll be the one who paid for you to have this cell?’ Hawkins asked with a touch of sarcasm.

Mary and her cellmates looked askance at each other.

‘Paid for this cell?’ James exclaimed. ‘No one paid for it.’

‘Someone did, before you even got here,’ Hawkins said, looking a bit uncomfortable. ‘You’d have been put on the common side otherwise.’

An hour later, when Hawkins left, Mary turned to her friends. ‘Who could have paid for it?’ she asked them.

Hawkins had been happy to explain the prison system to them. Everyone, unless someone had intervened on their behalf prior to their arrival, got put in with the common criminals, hence the name ‘common side’. These cells were filthy, stuffed to capacity and hotbeds of infection. The prisoners were at the mercy of the insane and the dangerous, and you’d be lucky to wake to find you still had your boots on your feet. Young women and boys were certain to be raped on their first night, and rarely by only one person.

Hawkins then went on to explain that as long as a prisoner had some money or goods to sell they could buy their way into somewhere cleaner and safer, and get the extras they’d already discovered for themselves. The merriment in the courtyard was proof of all this; the people they’d seen were either wealthy or had rich and influential friends. But once a prisoner had run out of money, it was back to the common side for him or her.

Hawkins had cited a highwayman who had his own feather bed brought in, hot water for a bath brought up to him each morning, his shirt laundered, meals with fine wine, and during the afternoons he was visited by his mistress. He was eventually hanged, but as Hawkins pointed out, bribes couldn’t get you out of everything.

‘Do any of you know
anyone
in London?’ Mary asked the men in bewilderment. None of them had any idea who their mysterious benefactor could be.

‘I used to know a few people,’ James replied. ‘But not the kind who’d even buy me a pint of ale, let alone a decent cell.’

‘Maybe it was someone who felt sorry for us after reading that in the
Chronicle
?’ Sam suggested.

‘That would be it,’ Bill said, stroking his beard thoughtfully. ‘There was a man murdered in Berkshire when I was a boy, he left a wife and five children, and when people heard the story they sent money for them.’

‘That’s fair enough. But who told the story about us in the first place?’ James asked, looking puzzled. ‘That paper was four or five days old. We were still on the ship in the English Channel. How could they have got the story?’

‘Someone must have talked when the ship docked at Portsmouth,’ Sam said, and his face broke into a wide grin. ‘Captain Edwards left then, and he would have informed the authorities about us. A big number of people left the ship there too, anyone of them could’ve talked to a newspaper.’

All at once Mary realized the story could only have come from Watkin Tench. Captain Edwards had no sympathy with them or the mutineers he’d caught, so any information from him would have cast them in a very bad light. As for any of the other officers who went ashore at Portsmouth, their accounts wouldn’t have been so accurate.

Tench would also know about corruption in prisons
from his time on the
Dunkirk
, and how to go about fixing a cell for them in Newgate.

Instantly Mary decided to say nothing to the others. She was a little surprised they hadn’t considered Tench, but then none of them had been as closely involved with him as she had. To tell them what she thought now would only raise questions she didn’t want to answer. Besides, if Tench had done it in secret, he wanted it to stay that way – it might put his career at risk if it got out. Better that they continued to think it was a benevolent stranger.

‘Luck’s smiling on us again,’ James chortled gleefully, not even noticing Mary had made no comment about it all. ‘Maybe if the money keeps rolling in we’ll end up like that highwayman, sleeping in feather beds.’

‘Bless you, Watkin,’ Mary thought, and she had to turn away from the others so they didn’t see the tears of gratitude in her eyes.

In the days that followed they had many visitors to their cell. Some wanted to hear only of their escape, but more were facing transportation themselves and wanted to know what to expect.

Mary felt a little guilty that they were taking money from these people. It was bad enough for them to face parting from their loved ones, without compounding their misery by telling them of the dreaded flogging triangle, of hunger and unremitting heat. But as James said, it was better for them to spend some of their money on preparation for what lay in store for them than to drink it away, and she supposed he was right.

The first time they were allowed out into the prison yard, Mary felt she was entering a select party. People greeted them with genuine warmth, offering drink from the tap-room, advice and friendship. James and the three other men accepted this with alacrity, especially the overtures from women prisoners. But Mary hung back.

While it felt good to be admired, rather than scorned or pitied, her emotions were too raw to want to talk and laugh with strangers, however well-meaning. All she wanted was to sit quietly in the sun, but this was denied her, for everyone wanted something of her.

Some were after details of the escape, others asked her about their friends and relatives who had been transported, some women even wanted to know her experiences in childbirth. Then there were men either trying to court her or making lewd suggestions.

Within a few hours Mary had seen and heard enough. She didn’t want to be a performer in this circus, or even part of the audience.

She had never before considered her feelings about the criminal world which she’d belonged to for so many years. Whether on the prison hulk, on the ship or in the penal colony, she was just another convict serving her time, doing whatever was needed to survive. As such she was loyal to her fellow prisoners, covering up, aiding and abetting sometimes in thefts from the stores and other wrong-doing, because that was the code by which they all lived.

But losing both her children had opened her mind wider.

She had never really been sorry she stole that woman’s bonnet in Plymouth. She was sorry she was caught, angry with herself for being so reckless. But she’d never put herself in that woman’s shoes and imagined how it was for her to be struck and robbed.