Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [185]
Sam was so demoralized that he’d applied to enlist in the New South Wales Corps, a body of men who were to take over the role of the Marines and police the new colony. His reason for this change of heart was that he’d come to see England had nothing to offer men like him, and out in New South Wales as a free man he would be given a grant of land.
James was still working on his memoirs. He said Nat and Bill had a different idea every day for what they were going to do when they became free. Mary was terribly afraid that day would never come, but the men insisted it would, that they were happy enough, and that she must get on with her own life and not be held back by thoughts of them.
It was Sam who managed to convince her that she must separate her life from theirs. He walked her to the gates alone and talked to her.
‘We will be pardoned,’ he insisted. ‘But you must not wait for that, Mary. Us four won’t stay together when we are released, we’ve been held together this long by circumstance, not by choice. I want to go back to New South Wales, James talks of Ireland. Bill will go to Berkshire and Nat back home to Essex. We have shared the biggest adventure and the hardest times imaginable, but once free that will be just a memory, nothing more.’
Mary knew he was telling her that they’d only become so close because of adversity, and that was the only thing they had in common. She guessed too that he wanted to distance himself from the others because he was afraid they could become a liability. Deep down inside her she shared that fear, though she wouldn’t have voiced it.
‘You saved my life on the wharf in Port Jackson,’ he said, his voice growing thick with emotion. ‘I hope one day I’ll be telling my children about you. But go now, and don’t come back to visit again. You’ve done enough for all of us.’
Mary cupped her two hands round his bony face and kissed his lips lightly. ‘Good luck, Sam,’ she said tenderly, remembering how she’d once seen him as her safety net. She knew now that she didn’t need one.
Towards the end of September the glorious weather ended suddenly with a huge storm, uprooting trees in the parks and flooding the streets. It continued to rain even after the gales had abated, and all at once Mary saw for herself the conditions Boswell had described on her release from Newgate.
The streets were treacherous, cloying mud mixed with human and animal refuse, showering anyone rash enough to attempt walking anywhere. Fever sprang up in the poorest districts and Boswell told Mary that the pits where the dead were taken for mass burial were filling rapidly. An evil stench hung in the air constantly, along with a sulphurous fog that swept in each night.
Mary was virtually imprisoned in the house in Little Titchfield Street, and it came to her that unless she left for Cornwall soon, before winter set in, she would be here till the spring. Her parents were getting old, and she would never forgive herself if something happened to either of them before she got there. And then there was the call of Cornwall itself, a siren that sang its beguiling song each night when she closed her eyes, urging her to return to where she belonged.
She would imagine herself standing in the bows of a ship coming into Fowey harbour just as daylight was fading and the autumn sun like a huge fiery ball sinking slowly into the sea.
She could see the small town rising up the hill from the quay. Grey stone cottages clustered together, with glimpses of the cobbled streets between them, where children were hurrying home before dark.
Down on the quay the fishermen would be getting ready for the night’s fishing. The landlord of the