Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [119]
Mary’s heart skipped a beat. James was right, this was likely to be their undoing.
‘Have they come from Port Jackson?’ she asked.
‘No. From Tahiti in a ship called the Pandora. Captain Edwards, the master of the ship, had been out searching for the mutineers from the Bounty. He’s still got ten he captured. The rest went down with the Pandora.’
Mary gasped. They had all heard about the mutiny on the Bounty from Detmer Smith back in Sydney, and they were even more intrigued when they arrived here in Kupang to discover that coincidentally this was where Captain Bligh and eighteen of his men landed two years earlier, having been cast adrift in an open boat by the mutineers.
While Mary had no way of knowing whether Captain Bligh deserved his plight or not, one thing she did know was that if the English Navy had sent out another ship to bring the mutineers in, the captain wasn’t going to be a soft touch like Wanjon.
‘We’ll be called in for questioning,’ she said, her stomach turning over. ‘Oh God, James! What are we going to do? It’s easy enough to fool someone who doesn’t speak much English, but it won’t be so easy with an English sea captain.’
James half smiled. One of the things he liked most about Mary was how quick she was to grasp things. ‘If we just stick to our story, we might be all right. Four months is far too short a time for the news of our escape to have reached England, and I doubt this Captain Edwards could have heard it anywhere else.’
Mary thought for a moment. If James did the talking, she was pretty certain he could convince anyone they were the crew of a whaler. But an English captain would want to know where the ship came from, the name of its owner and a great deal more information than they could plausibly invent. Then there was Will!
‘What if Will gets drunk and starts bragging?’ she asked.
‘That’s what I really came to talk about,’ James said, putting his hand on her arm. ‘Mary, you’ve got to take him in hand, make him stay away from the bars, and the port too, until these men sail off.’
‘And how am I going to do that?’ she asked.
‘You’re a clever woman,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll find a way.’
After James had gone to round up the other men and warn them of the danger they were in, Mary called Charlotte, who had been playing with some other children, and put her to bed with Emmanuel.
It was growing dark now, and she sat with the children until Charlotte fell asleep. As she looked down at their peaceful little faces, tears trickled down her cheeks. She had put them through so much, taken them almost to the jaws of death, and now there was a further threat to their safety.
Was she jinxed? Had some evil spell been cast over her at birth that meant her whole life would be an endless round of suffering and anguish? She had reconciled herself to the fact that Will might leave her. She didn’t want him to, for despite his faults she cared deeply for him, but she knew she could cope with that. She had also realized that she was unlikely ever to get back to England, with or without Will. But that didn’t seem to matter either. The only really important thing to her was to keep her children safe, happy, healthy and well fed. Until now she had believed she could do that here, with or without Will, for she knew that the other men, particularly Sam Broome and James Martin, held her in high regard.
It was strange, considering she wasn’t a real beauty, that she had some kind of inexplicable power over men: Lieutenant Graham, Tench, Detmer Smith, and Will too, though he fought against it. Was it likely to work on this Captain Edwards, or even Wanjon?
She went outside later and sat down on a low stool by the door. It was dark now and very quiet, just a few people sitting by their fires,