Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [59]
Chapter six
1789
Mary was standing waist-deep in the sea, holding tightly to the fishing net, looking as all the other helpers were towards Will in the small boat, waiting for his signal to pull the net tight.
She was very hungry, but hunger pains and the dizzy spells which went with them were just a fact of life now. After a whole year here at Port Jackson she couldn’t even remember what it was like to be without them.
She was much thinner than she’d been back on the Dunkirk, her skin leathery and brown from constant exposure to the sun and wind, her hands hardened like the women’s who gutted fish back in Fowey. But her looks weren’t something she ever thought about; just keeping herself and Charlotte alive was of far greater importance.
Will gave the signal and everyone holding the net began pulling and moving back to the shore. Mary’s heart leaped when she saw the abundance of fish squirming in the net. It wasn’t often they were that lucky.
The colony was close to dying of starvation. The rations had been cut again and again because no further supplies had arrived from England yet. A great many of the provisions brought out with them were spoiled, and the original hope that within a year they would be producing home-grown food was shattered. Had draught animals and ploughs been sent out, along with men from a farming background, maybe the ground could have been tilled and cultivated quickly. But all this had been overlooked. The weather and the lack of fodder for the animals soon decimated their numbers, cereals withered in the ground and vegetables didn’t thrive.
Building work had been the priority at the start, houses for the officers, Marines, and then the convicts. But along with the lack of carpenters, an outbreak of scurvy, together with dozens of other diseases, kept the men from work, and so the building was painfully slow.
As the rations were cut, more people risked stealing food. Flogging was the punishment for this crime, but 100 lashes failed to be a deterrent, and Captain Phillip increased it to 500, and eventually to 1,000. When that didn’t work either, he finally resorted to hanging. Just the previous week Mary and Will had watched as Thomas Barrett, who was only seventeen, was hanged from the newly erected gallows for stealing some butter, dried peas and salt pork from the stores. Mary couldn’t even weep for the boy, for he’d been imprisoned for theft at the age of eleven, and she thought that death was preferable to the kind of life he’d had.
‘Come on, Mary, put your back into it,’ Will yelled at her from the little boat.
Mary laughed, for Will didn’t really mean she wasn’t pulling her weight – that shout was their secret code for ‘We’ll be eating well tonight.’
‘I don’t know what you’ve got to laugh at,’ the woman next to her said sharply as they hauled the net back on to the shore. ‘If I was in your shoes I’d be crying.’
‘Why’s that?’ Mary asked.
She didn’t trust Sadie Green an inch. She knew the only reason the woman had come down to the nets to help was in the hope of stealing a couple of fish for herself. She was one of the Londoners, foul-mouthed, cunning and lazy. And she bitterly resented that Mary appeared to have a better time of it than her.
‘Will’s gonna leave you soon,’ Sadie said, her mud-coloured eyes sparkling with malice. ‘He keeps telling the other men he isn’t legally wed to you.’
‘Is that so?’ Mary retorted with heavy sarcasm. Will had told her he didn’t believe their marriage was valid, not like a church wedding at home, but all the same she was hurt he’d bandied it about among the other men to reach the ears of people like Sadie. She wasn’t going to show that hurt though.
‘Just don’t wait around for him, Sadie, you might be waiting a long time,’ she said with a forced chuckle.
She saw the woman’s face tighten with anger. Sadie could only attract the most desperate of the male convicts. Although only about twenty-four, she had the grey look of gone-off meat, and smelled much the same. She never combed her wispy straw-coloured