Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [39]
‘Of course I will,’ Sarah said quickly, perhaps remembering that birth too. ‘You’re strong and healthy, you’ll be all right.’
Mary lay awake all that night worrying. Not so much about the birth, but what Tench would think of her when he found out. She would never stand a chance with him now.
*
It was the start of May, just after Mary’s twenty-first birthday, when they finally heard they were to sail on Sunday the 13th to join the rest of the fleet. There would be eleven ships in all, four of them carrying nearly 600 convicts and a full company of Marines, some with their wives and children, and the rest carrying stores and provisions for the first two years.
During the long wait, most of the other prisoners had written home, or if they couldn’t write, had others write letters for them. One day back in April while Mary and the other women were allowed up on deck for exercise, Tench had suggested writing one for Mary, but she refused his offer.
‘It’s better they don’t know where I’m bound,’ she said, looking sadly towards Cornwall across the choppy sea. A green haze of spring had suddenly appeared on the land in the last few days, and she thought nostalgically of primroses on grassy banks, birds nesting, and newborn lambs out on the moors. It seemed unbelievable that she was to be torn away from the land she loved so well. ‘Better for them to think I don’t care about them any more than to imagine me in chains.’
Tench glanced down at her chains and sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right. But I think my mother would sooner know I was alive and thinking of her, even if I was on a prison ship.’
Mary felt even sadder at his words. Before long her belly would be swollen and he’d see she was having a baby. She doubted he would want to continue to be her friend then. She could just about cope with never seeing her family again, but she didn’t think she could stand to be rejected by Tench too.
As the Charlotte finally weighed anchor and slipped out of Plymouth Sound, many of the women were crying and saying their goodbyes to England forever.
‘I shall come back,’ Mary said firmly. ‘I swear it.’
While many of the women grumbled even more about sea sickness, the sound of the wind in the sails, and the cuts and bruises they got from falls in bad weather, Mary found herself exhilarated once the ship got underway. The sound of wind in canvas was like music to her and she delighted in watching the bows cleave through the clear water.
The captain of the ship, a Royal Naval officer called Gilbert, was a humane man and he ordered the prisoners’ chains to be removed, and only put back on as punishment for bad behaviour, or when they reached port. And as the ship sailed down the coast of France and the weather improved, the hatches were opened up again and the stink in the holds gradually dispersed.
Mary had always loved sailing, but she had never been in anything bigger than a fishing boat, and then only for a few hours at a time. It was very different on a big ship, for you could move about and even find quiet hideaways between coiled copes and lockers to get away from everyone else.
All at once she understood why her father had always eagerly anticipated his next voyage. It was exciting to feel the deck roll beneath her feet, and there was a kind of awe in seeing the wind harnessed to drive the ship along and the way everyone from the lowest sailor to the captain worked as one to maintain her speed and direction. The Charlotte was one of the slowest ships in the fleet, and the men had to work hard to keep up. Yet striving to hold their position was a challenge, and Mary could see the pride in their faces each time they managed to outrun the Scarborough or the Lady Penryn.
But it was the freedom to be up on deck for long periods which Mary appreciated above all else. She could cope with the hold at night, lying wrapped in a blanket between Bessie and Sarah; it wasn’t so terrible if she’d been outside nearly all day.
Up on deck she was free from the carping and