Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [132]
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘It was the cruelty of that Captain Edwards, this stinking place, and bad luck.’
He opened his eyes wider and tears ran down his cheeks. ‘You can say that after the way I treated you?’
Mary didn’t trust herself to answer that question. ‘I’ll get some water,’ was all she said.
‘Charlotte! Where is she?’ he asked, looking stricken.
‘She’s fine. I told her to wait outside while I came to see you.’
‘Thank God for that,’ he said, crossing himself.
She got Will drinking water, helped him into a cleaner room, then washed him all over. It was horrifying to see his once big, strong body so emaciated, and she browbeat one of the nuns into giving her a clean shirt for him so that at least he still could have some dignity.
Mary knew he was going to die; since being in this place for three weeks she’d learned the signs. But she told him he would get better, stroked his forehead until he fell asleep and then crept away to get Charlotte.
As she went out into the backyard by the well, she paused for a moment, suddenly aware that this was a perfect time to escape, before Emmanuel’s death was reported and Captain Edwards sent guards for her. She could sell her good boots, buy some provisions, then take off into the jungle with Charlotte. She had made friends with the natives in Kupang, and she could do the same here. Maybe in a few months, with a false name and a plausible story, she could get on a ship out of here.
Mary took a few steps towards Charlotte who was sitting on the ground making mud pies in the damp earth around the well. She was dirty, thin and pale-faced and moved lethargically. She hadn’t been that way in Kupang, and it hurt Mary to see what the prison regime on the ship had done to her. It was another very good reason to run for it now while they still could.
‘Did you see the man?’ Charlotte asked, looking up.
That question caught Mary short. All she had said to the child when she told her to stay out here was that ‘she had to see a man’. If Charlotte had known who the man was, she would have wanted to see him too. She had been asking, sometimes several times each day, when they were going to see Dada again.
Will had always treated Charlotte as if she were his own daughter. When Emmanuel was born he’d made no distinction between the two children. Even when they had rows, he never once used Charlotte’s parentage as a weapon. Will loved Charlotte, and that was evident today when, sick as he was, he wanted to know she was safe.
So how could Mary run out on this man and leave him to die alone?
She lowered the bucket down into the well, filled it and pulled it back up.
‘Let me wash you,’ she said, pulling a rag out of her pocket. ‘We’re going to see Dada.’
The heat seemed to increase with every day, and Will became weaker and weaker. Mary sold her boots to buy food for the three of them, but he never managed more than a couple of spoonfuls before falling asleep again.
When he was awake he would lie there looking at Mary, just the way Emmanuel had. He found it too much of an effort to talk, but he would smile when Mary told him stories about her old neighbours in Fowey, of smuggling yarns she’d heard from her father, and described the harbour and the people who worked there.
Every day, at least two people in the room died, and their places were quickly filled again. When Will was asleep, Mary would wash the others and give them water. It made no difference to her whether they were natives, Chinese or Dutch, they all had that same pitiful, childlike expression in their eyes, and at least when they took their last breath they weren’t alone.
The nuns looked at Mary as if they thought her mad. Yet sometimes they brought Charlotte an egg or some fruit, which seemed to indicate they also had some sympathy for the English convict woman who was risking her own health staying in such a hell-hole to nurse her husband.
‘Is it Christmas yet?’ Will croaked out one evening