Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [127]
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On 5 October, Mary, Charlotte and Emmanuel were brought out of their cell to sail with the men on the Dutch ship Rembang. Captain Edwards had chartered this ship to take them, his eighteen crew members from the Pandora and the ten remaining captured mutineers to Batavia. Mary had no real idea where this was, all she knew was that it was another island in the Dutch East Indies with a big port. It seemed Captain Edwards planned to get another ship from there to Cape Town, then on to England.
In the two months they had been gaoled in Kupang Castle, Mary had clung to the hope that Wanjon might let her and the children stay here. She knew she had his sympathy for he sometimes let her and the other men out of the prison, always just in pairs, but it meant Mary could go to the village, let the children play on the beach and talk freely with whoever accompanied her.
She was never allowed to go with Will, however, perhaps because Wanjon thought that was too much of a risk. The only time she saw Will was in the Castle yard, and his endless apologies only served to upset her further. He was not the man she’d known so well any more. Being ostracized by the other men, especially James Martin, Jamie Cox and Samuel Bird, once his closest friends, had made him withdrawn and inclined to emotional, often nonsensical outbursts. He would frighten the children by holding them too tightly, and when Charlotte ran away from him or Emmanuel hid behind Mary’s skirts, Will would cry like a child. He would tell Mary he had always loved her, and beg her to forgive him. Wearily she would say she had, but in her heart she felt she never could. Often she wished she was able to ignore him as the other men did, but pity for him got the better of her.
They were only told a few days before the Rembang was due to sail that they’d be on her. As Mary had found one or two people who spoke some English when she was let out of the Castle, she could only view this with further dismay.
She had learned about Captain Edwards’s fearsome reputation. The tale about the Pandora’s ‘box’ where the mutineers were held and four died was common knowledge. It seemed that the Rembang had an extra deck. It didn’t take much imagination to see that this structure, with no portholes or hatches in it, just small holes along the roof, was yet another ‘box’. And that was where Captain Edwards intended to hold her and the men.
She had also been told that Wanjon had asked Captain Edwards to honour the many bills for food, accommodation and clothing Will had signed for. Edwards had refused, and Wanjon told him that he would be given no provisions for the month-long voyage unless he paid up. Mary knew that meant Edwards would have a grudge against them right from the start.
All in all, Mary knew that the trip to Batavia was going to be just like being back on the prison hulk in England, with little food, in darkness, and in chains. She was right on all counts. The extra deck had been divided into three, the front for the escaped convicts, the middle for the crew of the Pandora, and the aft for the mutineers. Yet even more frightening than the dark was the ‘bilboes’, a long pole fixed to the floor, from which sliding shackles were attached to their ankles, rendering them unable to move at all.
Mary took one last look at the port before she was shoved into their new cell. It had rained during the night, and the whole town glistened in the sunshine. She saw women from the village with babies in their arms waving to her from the wharf where stalls were piled high with fruit and vegetables. Fishermen were carrying huge baskets of freshly caught fish, and the young boy she had so often tried to converse with, who trundled a small cart laden with coconuts, called out to her. The smell of sandalwood hung in the air like an aromatic, invisible cloud, and her eyes filled with tears at saying goodbye to the place which had become so precious to her.
‘Why is he doing that to you, Mumma?’ Charlotte asked as one of