Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [146]
‘They’ve found out what we done,’ Sam said incredulously, holding on to Mary’s arm as if he thought she’d faint with shock. ‘God’s teeth! I never thought we’d be famous.’
Clearly fame didn’t preclude locking them up, for they weren’t given a chance to speak to anyone, ask how they knew about them, or anything else. The gaoler pushed them on up a couple of flights of winding stone stairs and into a cell, slamming and locking the door behind them.
Temporarily stunned by what they’d seen out in the yard, and the welcome they’d had from the other prisoners, no one spoke for some minutes. The five of them just stood there, speechless.
Mary pulled herself together first. The cell was very small, the straw was dirty, and the only light came from a small slit window, too high up to see out. But compared with the conditions on the Rembang and in the hospital in Batavia, it was quite decent. To Mary, the best thing of all was that they were all together, and they weren’t sharing it with anyone else.
‘This is better than I expected,’ she said, breaking the silence first. ‘But I’d like to know why those people in the yard aren’t chained.’
‘I can tell you that, me darlin’,’ James said with a grin. ‘It’s money. Didn’t you ever listen to any of those back in Port Jackson who’d been in here?’
‘I listened, but I couldn’t understand them,’ Mary said, recalling how the Londoners with their flash lingo had sounded as if they came from a foreign land. By the time she’d learned enough of it to understand, they had moved on from talking about their old prisons to their plight in the new one.
‘Well, they said you had to pay for what they call “easements”,’ James said with a shrug. ‘They had it in Dublin too. You slip the gaoler something and off come your chains. You can get food brought from outside too.’
Mary nodded. She remembered now that that had also been the case with food and drink back in Exeter.
‘I expect if you’ve got enough money, or at least something to sell, you can have a room on your own and a servant to bring you food and drink,’ James said with a hollow laugh. ‘But as we haven’t got anything, this is all we can expect.’
The men slumped dejectedly down on the floor. Nat fell asleep almost immediately, and Mary was reminded of the women on the Dunkirk. Some of them managed to sleep almost round the clock, it was their way of escaping from the cruel reality of prison.
Mary sat down, arranged her chains so they didn’t dig into her, and hunched her knees up under her dress. Leaning back against the wall, she considered her friends’ plight.
Her own meant nothing to her, she wanted death to rid herself of the mental torment she felt. She might have regained her physical health on the voyage home, but she couldn’t recover from the crushing guilt at taking her two children on such a hazardous journey and causing their deaths. Real hell to her was being sent back to New South Wales, and she would escape from it by jumping overboard at the first opportunity.
But the men hadn’t become reconciled to the certainty of hanging. James had some kind of blind faith he was safe, for his original sentence was up now. Sam believed that if he showed enough remorse they would let him off. Bill and Nat tried to blank out the possibility by sleeping or talking about something else.
Yet seeing London today had sparked something inside Mary. It hadn’t made her want to live again, or lessened her grief, but it had brought the men’s predicament sharply into focus for her.
None of them were bad men, and they’d already suffered so much. Mary couldn’t hope to save them from hanging, but if she could just think of some way to get those ‘easements’, that might make their last few weeks a great deal more bearable.
She thought about it for over an hour, and then smiled as she came up with a solution.
‘What’ve you got to smirk about?’ James asked curiously, moving nearer and squatting down