Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [167]
He swallowed the last of his brandy and reached out for the decanter to pour himself some more. He couldn’t have picked a worse time to plead for Mary. For the past three years, the whole country had been in a state of unrest. The poor had good reason to feel bitter, the Enclosures Act forced many of them off the land into the cities, and craftsmen were finding that their skills were no longer needed as new manufacturing processes came in. They voiced their discontent in huge riots, and with men like Thomas Paine inciting rebellion with his belief that the monarchy should be abolished and the working classes rise to take control, the government was running scared.
Rioters were being arrested, charged and transported before they had a chance to infect others with their inflammatory views, and although Henry Dundas had originally agreed that the five returned transportees should be pardoned, quite recently, when James asked him to fulfil his promise, he had denied making it and accused him of having a vivid imagination.
Boswell had gone to Evan Nepean, the Under Secretary of State. This man had been responsible for organizing the First Fleet of transport ships, and it was said he had been appalled to hear so many convicts died on the ships of the Second Fleet. There was no doubt that Nepean did care in general about the welfare of convicts, but he took the view that the government had already been lenient in not hanging these five, and saw no reason why they should be pardoned.
James felt a little ashamed now that he’d allowed Mary to believe Henry Dundas was an old and close friend. Their only connection was that they’d been at school together but they hadn’t even liked each other. He would contact him yet again tomorrow, though, and write to Lord Falmouth too.
‘I cannot, will not give up,’ James muttered to himself. ‘Right must triumph if I remain persistent.’
As James dozed later that evening in front of his warm fire, Mary was lying awake in the dark, her face wet with tears. She was so cold she could no longer feel her toes or even shiver, and every bone in her body ached.
She could hear someone wailing in the distance. It was a cry not of pain but of sheer hopelessness, and the sound echoed her own feelings. She was so weary of fighting that once again death looked desirable. She could no longer remember why survival had once been so important to her. What was there to live for?
Chapter twenty
‘What’s the date today, James?’ Mary asked, turning on the crate she was standing on to see out of the cell window. She couldn’t see anything more than the roof of the part of the prison opposite and the sky beyond, but it was infinitely better to look at the clouds and birds than at the cell walls.
James was sitting on the floor writing. He stopped at her question and looked up. ‘The second of May,’ he replied. ‘Any special reason you want to know?’
It was mid-morning and they were all in the cell, Sam whittling an animal from a piece of wood. Nat busy sewing a patch on his breeches, Bill laboriously plaiting straw into fancy shapes. He called them ‘corn dollies’, and said that in the Berkshire village where he grew up they were considered fertility symbols. James had more than once joked that if there was a sudden increase in births in the prison, Bill would be responsible.
Since the attack on Mary in the tap-room, they all spent much less time there. Jack had survived his wound, but he was hanged for his crimes just a couple of weeks later. Since then Mary had found herself treated with extreme caution by the existing prisoners. But there were new arrivals every day, and many of them were even more dangerous than Jack, so the men had taken Mary’s advice and kept out of the way.
They had all become adept at finding ways to fill the daylight hours. Mary was knitting a shawl, they played cards, they visited other prisoners in their cells, on fine days they went out into the yard. They also reminisced a great deal about New South Wales and their escape, as James was finally writing his