Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [104]
Mary smarted, but said nothing in reply. She would have washed everyone’s clothes anyway, but ordering her to do it was Will’s way of admonishing her.
She knew exactly what was wrong with him; he was losing his spirit. The men had stopped praising him for getting them away. Perhaps too he was dwelling on how if he hadn’t escaped, his sentence would have been up now. And of course he was worried about the boat’s ability to hold together long enough to get them to Kupang.
Mary thought he’d probably be relieved if someone was to suggest they stayed for the rest of the winter months in a bay like this one. But he wouldn’t suggest it himself for fear of looking cowardly. Also, he didn’t like the way the men acted towards his wife.
It had begun with James getting a splinter from an oar in his hand about a week into the voyage. Mary had dug it out and he kept calling her ‘Mother Mary’. Since then, every time someone had something wrong with them, they asked her opinion on it. To Mary, this was what anyone would expect – she was the only woman after all, and she’d picked up quite a lot of basic medical knowledge from Surgeon White, both on the Charlotte and in the settlement. But Will seemed to think it was because they had designs on her.
He had also made a fuss about how all of them, save William Moreton and himself, vied to be next to her in the boat, and took charge of Charlotte when she was feeding Emmanuel. Mary knew perfectly well that none of them did this as a prospective lover. It was just brotherly, and maybe sitting next to her as she nursed Emmanuel reminded them of how it had been with their own mothers. Perhaps, too, they were weary of acting tough the way Will did all the time. Talking to her, they could drop their guard for a while. She couldn’t understand why Will saw anything more sinister in it.
Bill had confided in her that he’d been a brute to women in the past, but perhaps that was because his father had always hit his mother. Nat had admitted that he had allowed some of the sailors to use him like a woman on his transport ship, for it was the only way of obtaining extra food and getting out of the holds. Sam Bird had told Mary he stole rations from other people’s huts when things were really bad, and now he felt terribly ashamed.
She didn’t think any the less of the men for telling her these things, even if they were ugly. She felt shared confidences bound them closer together.
Once they were ashore, a shelter erected and a fire lit, Mary put Emmanuel into his sling, tied it around her, and leaving Charlotte playing on the beach where the men were hauling in the boat, she went off to look for things to eat.
She found some more sweet tea leaves, and some of the acid berries Surgeon White had set so much store by, but having failed to find any of the leaves that were like cabbage, she turned back.
All at once she saw a group of natives watching her from beneath a tree. She was momentarily alarmed as she was some distance from the men, but she waved her hand, which the natives back in Sydney had seemed to understand as a friendly gesture, and smiled at them. She sensed they were just baffled by her, not hostile, so she walked back to the men on the beach.
The following day the natives came closer. They crouched further up the beach, watching intently as the men repaired the boat. Mary was doing the washing, and each time she got up to hang a garment over a bush to dry, she smiled at them.
‘What are you playing at?’ Will suddenly snapped at her. ‘Isn’t it enough having eight men around you? Or do you want a few of them too?’
‘Don’t be a fool, Will,’ she said wearily. ‘I’m only smiling to show we mean them no harm, as well you know.’
Will continued to be sullen with her for the rest of the day, even though they’d caught enough fish to eat well that night and have some over to salt some down for the future. After Mary had put the children down to sleep in the evening, she sat for a short while by the fire. The men were discussing once again how much farther