Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [148]
‘You are a wonder, Mary,’ Sam said a little later, as he licked his fingers clean of the meat pie. ‘None of us could have thought up such a cunning plan. When James got to that bit about you hitting one of the cannibals over the head with an oar, I almost believed you’d really done it. I reckon you’d think of something to save us even if they were just putting us in the cooking pot.’
Mary smiled. It was good to have the men’s admiration again. And even better to see them lifted out of their gloom. ‘We mustn’t go too far with the stories,’ she warned them. ‘We want sympathy, not people calling us liars.’
It was on the following day that they discovered how the other prisoners had found out about them. A forger by the name of Harry Hawkins came to see them. Like many others in Newgate, he expected to be transported. He was a slimy character, small and thin, with a beak-like nose and strangely unkempt long hair for a man who dressed well.
‘I read about you in the London Chronicle,’ he said, and proceeded to prove it by fishing a dog-eared cutting from his pocket.
All of them had assumed the news about them had merely passed by word of mouth, that was the usual way in prisons. It was a shock to find someone had written about them in a newspaper.
James read it aloud, then passed it back. ‘It’s not completely accurate. It was the Governor’s boat we stole, not Captain Smith’s,’ he said airily.
Mary was astounded that James could be so blasé about such a florid and admiring account of their escape.
‘Who wrote it?’ she asked. She hadn’t for one moment expected anyone in England to be sympathetic to them.
‘It don’t say,’ James replied, looking at it again. ‘But whoever it was, he knows a lot. He might have got it wrong about who owned the cutter. But everything else is right.’
The five friends had no further chance then to discuss where all this information came from, because Harry Hawkins wanted to talk about his plight. It was clear that what he wanted from them was inside information about officials in Botany Bay.
It amused Mary somewhat that this man, and everyone else waiting for transportation, still thought the settlement was in Botany Bay. Apparently no one here knew that place had been rejected by Captain Phillip. In fact it seemed that very little information had yet reached England about the colony. Mary suspected most of it had been withheld purposely as the government wouldn’t want to publicize their terrible mistakes. That made the situation even better for her and her friends.
‘It isn’t like this place,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘You can’t buy a better hut or bigger rations, the only way you can advance yourself is by having a skill they need.’
Hawkins looked disappointed. ‘But you must’ve had some inside help, or slipped someone a back-hander!’ he retorted.
‘We didn’t,’ James said indignantly. ‘It was all down to Mary charming the Dutch sea captain for the navigational instruments and charts.’
Hawkins gave her a disbelieving look and Mary blushed. She supposed he couldn’t imagine a plain and worn-looking woman being able to charm anyone.
‘The captain was lonely,’ she said by way of an explanation. ‘Me and my husband used to talk to him. He would come and have supper with us sometimes.’
‘So he’ll be the one who paid for you to have this cell?’ Hawkins asked with a touch of sarcasm.
Mary and her cellmates looked askance at each other.
‘Paid for this cell?’ James exclaimed. ‘No one paid for it.’
‘Someone did, before you even got here,’ Hawkins said, looking a bit uncomfortable. ‘You’d have been put on the common side otherwise.’
An hour later, when Hawkins left, Mary turned to her friends. ‘Who could have paid for it?’ she asked them.
Hawkins had been happy to explain the prison