Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [125]
‘My dear, this is beyond my jurisdiction,’ Wanjon said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Your English naval officer, Captain Edwards, is the only one with the authority to decide what is to be done with you.’
He opened the door and gave an order to the guard.
‘You will go back to your cell now,’ he said, turning back to Mary. ‘You will be brought food and water. I am not a cruel man, Mary. You and your children will be treated well during your stay here.’
Wanjon stared out of the window for some time after Mary had been led away and his heart felt heavy. He had accepted the men’s story about how they made it here after their ship was wrecked, purely because it was so similar to what had happened to Captain Bligh two years earlier. It didn’t even cross his mind that they might have escaped from the penal colony in New South Wales. Who would think a bunch of mere convicts could make a journey of some 3,000 miles in an open boat?
Even Captain Edwards, for all his seamanship, had come to grief in the Torres Straits, but then he was a bull-headed man who thought he knew enough to sail through such dangerous waters at night. The man clearly had no heart, for he had put his fourteen captured mutineers into a box-like structure on the deck, leaving them there in all winds and weathers, their legs and arms shackled. When his ship was going down he refused to let any of the crew unchain them, and it was only thanks to one of the men who ignored the order that ten of them survived.
Wanjon sighed deeply. It grieved him to hand Mary and her companions over to Edwards, for he knew they would suffer sorely at his hands. Mary was an exceptionally courageous woman, and whatever the crime that led her to be transported, she had already paid dearly for it. As for those innocent little children, they had been a hair’s-breadth from death when they arrived here in Kupang. What right had any government, be it English, Dutch or any other nationality, to send them somewhere where their early death could be the only outcome?
It was over a week before Mary got to see any of the men. She was told by one of the guards who spoke a little English that they were being kept in one cell, Will included.
Wanjon had been as good as his word to Mary. She’d received wholesome food for herself and the children and was even brought a sleeping mat, a blanket and water to wash with. Daily, she was taken down to the yard with the children so they could have some fresh air and exercise in the Castle courtyard. Sometimes she even allowed herself to believe the Dutch Governor would intervene and let her go free. For surely a man who could treat her and her children with such kindness would not send her away to be hanged, and leave Charlotte and Emmanuel orphaned?
So when the guard told her she might visit the men in their cell, she couldn’t help but think that this was the first step to being released. The English captain hadn’t come to see her, perhaps he’d even left Kupang.
The men’s cell was much lower down in the Castle than hers, a big, dark, dank room with its slit-like window too high up in the wall to see out. They crowded round her, kissing and hugging the children, asking how she had been treated, and it was a minute or two before she noticed Will had remained sitting on a stool, his back to her.
‘Don’t you want to see Emmanuel and Charlotte?’ she asked.
‘He doesn’t deserve to see them ever again,’ Bill growled. ‘He peached on us.’
Mary looked hard at her friends, pleased to see that they all still looked well and their clothes were clean. But their glances towards Will were malevolent. Even Jamie Cox and Samuel Bird, who had followed him blindly for so long, looked as though they hated him.
Mary had had time to consider what Will was supposed to have done, and she’d come to the conclusion that he was unlikely to have gone purposely to Wanjon to