Behind the Sun Read online

  Harrie, mending a rip in the armpit of Friday’s jacket after yet another fight, severed the thread with her teeth, licked her fingers and rolled a knot into it. She pulled on the seam, scrutinised the tiny, immaculate stitches in the candlelight and said with satisfaction, ‘That should hold it.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Friday said, sitting in her shift, skirt and shawl. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Harrie carefully wove the needle into a folded piece of cotton and placed it back into her sewing kit. It was a collection of very basic needlework tools she’d added to Sarah’s gift by buying or barter and kept in a little tin box, but one day, when she could afford it, she would buy herself a proper sewing compendium with a needle case and all the things a dressmaker needed. She passed over the jacket.

  Friday slid off her shawl, revealing tattoos on both pale, well-muscled arms. Along the inside of her left forearm the name ‘Maria’ was inked in uneven black letters. ‘Just someone,’ she’d answered vaguely when Harrie had first asked. On the same arm, above the elbow on the outer aspect, were a dagger stabbing a heart and a set of initials. The other arm featured an anchor and another set of initials. Friday insisted she couldn’t remember who the initials belonged to. Lovers, Harrie assumed. Brothers? Though Friday had never said anything about having brothers. Harrie had been fascinated when she’d first seen them: men, she knew, were occasionally tattooed, sailors in particular, but she’d not seen many tattooed women. At least, not until she’d found herself in Newgate.

  Friday put on the jacket, fastened the buttons, flexed her shoulders and grinned. ‘Perfect. Fits even better now.’

  ‘I let the darts out around the bosom. It looked a bit…snug before.’

  Friday snorted with laughter. ‘It was meant to! It’s a tool of the trade!’

  ‘Oh.’ Harrie looked around — the other women in the ward were enjoying a good giggle at her expense — and smiled ruefully. ‘Should I take them back in again?’

  ‘No, it was a bit tight. Squashed the hell out of my tits when I had the curse coming.’

  At the mention of menstruation, Rachel began to blink hard.

  Sitting next to her, knowing what would come next, Sarah warned, ‘Stop that!’

  ‘But he’ll be so disappointed when I tell him,’ Rachel said, her voice rising to a pre-weep whine.

  Sarah hurled her dinner basin across the ward, scattering a trio of rats skittering along the base of the wall. ‘For Christ’s sake, Rachel! When are you going to face facts? He’s not coming!’

  ‘He is!’

  ‘He isn’t!’

  Rachel punched Sarah’s shoulder. ‘He bloody well is!’

  She pulled back her arm to do it again but Sarah grasped her wrists and held them. Rachel kicked out and caught Sarah’s shin with her boot; Sarah held on, not looking at Rachel, staring impassively at the far wall.

  ‘Let me go!’ Rachel demanded, and bit Sarah’s hand.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let go!’ Shrieking now.

  Sarah shook her head. Everyone was watching.

  Slowly, Rachel bent forwards, her silver-white hair tumbling over her face. She gave a long, low moan like an animal in pain and subsided with her head in Sarah’s lap. Sarah let go of her hands.

  Then the sobs started, Rachel’s slight body jerking as they coughed out of her, deep and raw and ragged.

  Alarmed at last, Sarah looked at Harrie, mouthing, ‘Now what?’

  Harrie, for once not being the one to calm or mollify, made a gesture indicating that whatever happened next was up to Sarah.

  She did nothing for almost a minute while Rachel continued to sob, then, hesitantly, Sarah laid her hands on Rachel’s head and began gently to stroke, one hand after the other, as though petting a cat. Harrie and Friday exchanged glances. The other women lost interest when they saw there would be no more entertainment. Gradually, Rachel quietened; and eventually she stopped crying.

  A while after that she sat up. ‘Will we all be together when we get to New South Wales?’

  They had no idea, but Friday, Harrie and Sarah told her they were quite sure they would.

  Rachel wiped her nose on the back of her hand. ‘That’s all right then.’

  Part Two

  Across the Seas

  Five

  April 1829, Woolwich Dockyard

  Woolwich Dockyard had been Henry VIII’s idea, the warships he built there insurance against possible attack from Catholic neighbours angered by his desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon. By the time convict ships were departing there for New South Wales three hundred years later, Woolwich was still a busy naval yard.

  Gulls screeched and wheeled overhead and the tang of salt sharpened the air even though Woolwich was miles from the sea proper. The river smelt a little sweeter here, London’s torrents of shit having either settled on the banks farther upstream or washed out into the estuary. It was almost as busy, though: several dozen deep-hulled civilian ships and those of the Royal Navy stood just offshore, their tall masts like denuded trees, tilting lazily as the river flowed beneath them. The dilapidated prison hulks HMS Retribution, Prudentia, Bellepheron and Justitia, mastless and crippled, squatted just beyond the navy ships, close enough for the convicts aboard to be ferried ashore each day for work, but too distant for them to swim safely to freedom.

  Prison hulks had been moored off Woolwich for over fifty years, housing male prisoners awaiting transportation to New South Wales, though some unlucky men had served their entire seven- or fourteen-year sentences aboard the rotting shantytowns. Thousands had died of gaol fever, dysentery and any number of other epidemics that swept the dripping, weed- and rat-infested decks — more unsanitary even than Newgate Gaol itself — and from lack of suitable food and from overwork. Each day the prisoners were rowed ashore to labour around Woolwich Dockyard and nearby Woolwich Arsenal and put to work dredging the Thames to ensure the river’s main channel remained clear, returning at dusk to the floating dungeons exhausted and broken. Banishment to New South Wales, even for life, was far preferable to a sentence served on the hulks, which was guaranteed to shatter a man’s spirit if not his body.

  The navy’s dockyard extended along the right bank, its covered and uncovered slips, dry docks, mast and mould lofts with their towering roof-lines, manufactories, mast ponds, gun bastions, offices and massive workshops surrounded by a high stone wall, intersected by a single wide wooden gate and gatehouse. Great ear-splitting clangs rent the air; there was an underlying cacophony of hammering and shouting; laden carts trundled in a steady procession to and from the ships moored at the quay; and jacktars and civilian workers trotted about busily, like ants scurrying between their nest and some tasty discovery. It was a startling contrast to the Kent countryside rolling hazily off into the distance beyond the dockyard’s walls.

  The Newgate women had been left for some time in the closed carts that had brought them from London. Long enough for Friday’s boredom to override their caution, at any rate.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere in that,’ Sarah said over her shoulder as she peered though a gap in the canvas covering their cart.

  Friday folded the flap aside and, in silence, they regarded the ship moored alongside the quay as she heaved and dipped gently on the tidal swell of the Thames.

  ‘But is that it?’ Rachel asked. ‘The one we’re going on?’

  ‘It says Isla on the side,’ Harrie said. ‘It must be.’ Her eyes were swollen from crying and she had a dull, aching headache. Saying goodbye to her mother and the children, who could not afford to make the trip to Woolwich, had been the most upsetting thing she had ever had to do. She was leaving them to perish and it was her fault and she felt like lying down and going to sleep and never waking up.

  ‘It is quite a bit smaller than I thought it would be,’ Friday said, her voice notably bereft of its usual enthusiasm.

  ‘Hey! You lot!’ a voice bellowed. ‘Put that flap down! And stay out of sight ’til you’re told
!’

  Friday dropped the canvas a second before it was struck with something that made a flat, cracking sound. ‘’Til we’re told what?’ she shouted back.

  ‘Less of your lip!’ the voice responded. Boots crunched away over gravel.

  ‘Have they got whips?’ Rachel was shocked. ‘We’re not cows!’

  ‘Yes we are, dear,’ the woman sitting next to her said with fatalistic assurance. She looked to be in her fifties; her grey hair hung limply about her ravaged face and those of her teeth that remained were a transparent green, testifying to repeated doses of mercury, the treatment for syphilis. ‘We’ll be herded onto yon ship and sent across the seas and when we get to New South Wales we’ll all be sold to highest bidder.’

  Alarmed, Rachel looked at Friday, who said, ‘Shut up, Matilda Bain. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I do. My niece were transported five year ago and she were sold to highest bidder.’

  ‘Ignore her,’ Friday said, and peeked out under the canvas again. ‘The front cart are getting out.’

  It was almost five o’clock and they’d been sitting in the cramped carts all afternoon. Told not to attract attention by lifting the canvas covers, forty women from Newgate had been driven through the streets of London, roughly following the course of the Thames, until they’d come to Woolwich. Yesterday a small cavalcade had transported the first forty women from the prison, who were now aboard the Isla. Shortly they themselves would board; and tomorrow the remainder — those who had children with them — would be brought to Woolwich and the Isla’s captain could sign off her manifest.

  They had attracted attention, though — and deliberately, following a tradition that had begun decades ago when men and women sentenced to the boat had been forced to walk the distance between Newgate and Woolwich in irons, at the mercy of jeering and missile-hurling crowds. The convicts had retaliated then by swearing, making vulgar gestures and baring their bottoms, and regardless of the carts — a recently introduced convenience — the latest lot had no intention of being deprived of a last swipe at a citizenry who viewed the convicts’ position at the bottom of the social dung heap with total disdain. Friday had a stone bruise on her arse the size of an egg.

  At last they were told to get out. Sarah was almost crippled by the need to empty her bladder. Wincing as she lowered herself from the cart, she hobbled away from the male turnkey’s prurient gaze and squatted, grimacing with relief as urine hissed onto the stones. She glanced about, her mouth twitching as she realised that most of the cart’s occupants were following suit.

  ‘Bugger me!’ Friday exclaimed loudly. ‘The relief!’

  She nodded sympathetically at Harrie, who was also squatting, staring off into the distance at nothing, her face scarlet. Rachel, on the other hand, was standing, the front of her skirt raised, legs slightly apart, directing a jet of urine at the cart’s wheel.

  ‘Brothers,’ Sarah remarked.

  The guard with the whip was staring at them openly now.

  Friday gave herself a shake and stood. She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. ‘Oi! Where’s your chink? Nothing’s for free, you know.’

  The guard laughed and spat on the ground. ‘Whores, the lot of yis!’ He pointed his whip at a line into which the women from the other carts were being herded. ‘Get your belongings and hurry up.’

  From the cart the girls collected the little they owned and trudged the short distance to join the line.

  At its head, beside a gangway connecting the quay to the Isla, stood three men. The eldest, a short and stocky man with greying sideburns and ruddy, windburnt cheeks, appeared to be in charge. At his side stood a younger man holding a board onto which were clipped some papers. The third, tall and perhaps in his early thirties, wore a smartly tailored blue uniform coat and white trousers.

  ‘Not a navy ship, then,’ Friday remarked.

  Rachel said, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The only Royal Navy uniform is on that tall cove and I’m betting he’s not the master. The short-arse will be. The tall one’ll be the surgeon. It’ll be a contracted ship.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  Friday shrugged dismissively. ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’ Sarah said.

  ‘The surgeon. The master. The provisions. The weather. How should I know?’ Friday snapped. ‘I’ve never been transported before.’

  Harrie suddenly realised that Friday was nervous — a very uncharacteristic state for her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You don’t like the sea, do you?’ Rachel said.

  Sarah and Harrie gaped at her; Rachel had not displayed much in the way of perceptiveness.

  Friday said nothing for a long moment, then let out a resigned, irritated sigh. ‘No, I don’t. It scares the shit out of me. I’ve had nightmares about drowning since I was a little kid.’ She swallowed. ‘And it doesn’t like me. I can’t even cross the sodding Thames without spewing my guts out.’

  There was another shocked silence at this: after all, the voyage to New South Wales would take months.

  The turnkey with the whip chose this unfortunate moment to crack it in Friday’s general direction. She strode across to him, snatched it out of his hand, hurled it on the ground and shrieked, ‘Will you fuck off with that!’

  A hearty cheer erupted from the line of women. Friday, tackled immediately by several guards, was manhandled across the gangway and into the bowels of the Isla.

  Harrie picked up Friday’s sack of belongings and balanced it awkwardly on top of her own smaller basket, shuffling forwards in the line. When they reached the gangway they were brusquely told by the younger of the two civilian men to state their names, ages and sentences, were ticked off the ship’s muster list, and ordered to go below and get squared away. The man in uniform also informed them that they would be receiving a medical examination the following morning.

  Rachel said, ‘What if we fail it?’

  Harrie gave Rachel’s ankle a little tap with her foot, to let her know she was pushing her luck. Rachel had already asked Matron at Newgate that question, and Matron had terrified her with stories of being left behind to rot in the blackest and most rat-infested of holes in Brixton or Newgate Gaol until she had reached the end of her seven-year sentence. If she reached the end of it. Matron had been a bitch, but she’d probably been telling the truth. But here was Rachel, having another go anyway.

  The two men in civvies looked at Rachel blandly, as though this weren’t a particularly original question.

  ‘Would that mean we’d have to stay behind?’ Rachel said, clearly gambling that Matron’s threat had been an attempt to put her off playing the invalid card. ‘You see, I’ve been quite poorly for a while.’ And it was true, Harrie knew — Rachel had been feeling a little out of sorts.

  ‘Aye, it would mean that,’ the man with the grey sideburns answered gravely. He leant sideways and consulted the muster list. ‘In Newgate or Brixton. For seven years. Not up to me, though, is it, being only the master? You’d have to discuss that with surgeon superintendent Mr Downey here.’

  The surgeon gave her a stern and uncompromising look. Harrie watched poor Rachel’s face fall.

  ‘Move along,’ the master growled. ‘You’re holding up the line. Collect your prison slops before you go below.’

  ‘But I can’t!’ Rachel blurted, panicking now. ‘My fiancé will be coming for me any time soon.’

  ‘Move along,’ the master repeated, not meeting her eye.

  Harrie gave Rachel a gentle shove and they followed Sarah across the deck of the Isla, weaving past coiled ropes and teetering piles of crates and barrels and boxes. There wasn’t much room, though even she, a complete sailing novice, realised that at least some of the clutter would be packed away by the time they sailed. But there would still be little deck space. At the bow was a raised foredeck, its boards forming the ceiling of the cabins that lay beneath, in the middle the lower wais
tdeck and at the stern a raised afterdeck. Companion ladders provided access to all levels.

  On the afterdeck, just before the mizen mast, were the great wheel and the capstan. Above the waistdeck were suspended two upside-down longboats — surely not big enough to take them all should the ship sink? — and on the starboard side hung a smaller quarterboat, ready to be launched. Set into the waistdeck were four hatches. Three were about a yard square. One was open to the elements but covered with a sturdy wooden lattice with a canvas cover rolled neatly to one side, while the other two had timber covers, presently lying open. The larger hatch, its solid cover also currently open, suggested access to the hold. Nearby two small animal pens had been built, at the moment unoccupied. The small foredeck was relatively clear, access to the cabins beneath being from the waistdeck, except for the great beam of the bowsprit encroaching onto the deck space and down into the ship’s gut, the anchor windlass, assorted piles of coiled rope, the casing housing the gleaming ship’s bell, and the handgrips on the gunwale near the bowsprit forming the ‘seat of ease’, which Harrie privately vowed she would never use even if it meant she would die from constipation.

  Everywhere — all along the gunwales from bowsprit to stern — were attached ropes and rigging and shrouds from the three masts, interspersed with arrangements of blocks and tackles for hoisting sails and moving equipment and cargo. Harrie peered up at the main mast, its tip appearing to scrape the clouds as they scudded past. The flags snapping at the very top seemed so high and so far away she felt dizzy and lost her balance, staggering slightly until a grinning sailor gave her a gentle shove towards a hatch, its open cover revealing a ladder descending into near darkness.