Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [8]
‘Shut yer mouths, you two,’ she snapped at them. ‘We’re all in this together now, whether we like it or not. There ain’t no sense in blaming Mary, you’d have been caught before long anyway. Besides, none of the rest of us wants to hear all that stuff.’
Mary was touched by Bessie’s intervention. She was an odd-looking woman, red-haired and fat, with a cast in one eye and several teeth missing, but the fact she’d been brave enough to speak out suggested she wasn’t as downtrodden as she looked.
There was an echo of agreement from the men sitting behind them, and perhaps that finally persuaded the two women to stop, for they lapsed into silence.
After a little while one of the men in the back prodded Mary. ‘Sweet-talk the guards into telling you where we’re heading,’ he whispered.
‘Why me?’ she whispered back.
‘You’re the bonniest,’ he replied.
Up until that moment Mary had fully believed she had absolutely no assets – no money or property she could bribe anyone with, no influential friends. All she had was the clothes she was wearing and they were worn and soiled. But as she glanced at the row of women, she saw she was younger, healthier and stronger than all of them.
Mary and Catherine had been living by theft for years before she met them. Back then she’d been fooled by their gaudy clothes into thinking they were superior to her in every way. But cheap silk didn’t wear well, not in prison, and their pinched features and grey skin, the hollow look in their eyes and their gutter language showed up what they really were. As for Bessie and Elizabeth, while she didn’t yet know what crimes they had committed, or anything of their family background, they both had that worn-out appearance she had observed so often among the very poorest back home in Fowey.
All at once she saw a chance for herself. She was young and strong, no man had spoiled her, she knew she had a quicker mind than most, and she had determination.
She waited until Bessie asked to relieve herself, and once all the women had climbed down from the cart, Mary positioned herself so that she shielded her squatting friend from the guard with her skirt, and smiled warmly at him.
‘Where are you taking us?’ she asked. ‘Is it back to the prison in Plymouth, or straight to a boat for the Americas?’
He was a hard-looking man, with brown, broken teeth and a battered hat pulled down over his slanty eyes.
‘You’re bound for the prison hulks at Devonport,’ he said with an evil grin. ‘Don’t reckon you’ll get much beyond there.’
Mary gasped involuntarily. She might not have seen a prison hulk but she knew their evil reputation. They were old warships, moored in estuaries and creeks, the government’s answer to overcrowding in prisons. The responsibility for running them was passed over to private individuals whose only interest was making as much money as possible from each prisoner. It was said that the unlucky felons who got sent to them would die either of starvation or of overwork within the first year. For the sideline of these notorious hell-holes was that the prisoners were forced to do slave labour on land, usually building ‘hards’ along the river bank.
‘I didn’t think they sent women there,’ she said, her voice trembling.
‘Times are a’changing,’ he grinned. ‘You’d better pretty yourself up if you want to make it off there alive.’
Mary gulped and looked him in the eye. She knew gaolers and guards were punished too harshly to dare let anyone escape, however ‘nice’ a prisoner was to them. But he probably thought she was stupid enough to be ignorant of this and hoped she might make up to him imagining he would help her in return.
‘But the judge said it was transportation.’ She forced herself to squeeze out a few tears.
‘They mean it to be,’ he said, his voice softening. ‘But they can’t send no one to the Americas since the war. They tried Africa, but that didn’t work. There’s talk of a place called Botany Bay, but that’s on the other side of the world.’
Mary vaguely remembered the sailors in the ale house she’d once