Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [94]
When Will got back to the hut with Charlotte much later, he found Mary had already heard the news. He expected her to rage at him, and was ready to give as good as he got, but to his irritation she seemed more concerned about Charlotte.
She took the child from his arms and wrapped her in a blanket. ‘There, there,’ she said as Charlotte began crying again. ‘You’ll be all right once you are warm again. I’ll have to teach you to swim, won’t I?’
‘That’s right! Comfort her,’ Will spat at her. ‘Don’t think about me! I could get flogged again. As for the hope of escape, that’s gone.’
Even as he said this, Will knew he was being completely unreasonable. But to have all his hopes dashed when they were so very close to leaving was too much.
His clothes had dried quickly in the wind but he felt chilled to the bone. He knew too that many of the people who resented his freedom would take great delight in his misfortune.
‘Don’t be such a fool,’ Mary retorted, giving him a contemptuous look. ‘Why should they flog you? It was an accident.’
Her sharp words seemed to suggest to Will that she wasn’t bothered about him in any way. All the resentment which had been building up in him for some time flared up and spilled over, and he lashed out, slapping her hard across the face, knocking both her and Charlotte, who was sitting on her lap, to the floor.
‘You cold-hearted bitch,’ he yelled at her. ‘You don’t care about anything but yourself.’
Charlotte was screaming, and Mary quickly picked her up again and got to her feet. She didn’t attempt to run out of the hut, but faced Will defiantly with Charlotte in her arms.
‘I’m going to put that slap down to shock,’ she said haughtily. ‘But should you think of hitting me ever again, don’t think I’ll be so understanding a second time.’
Will had never hit a woman before, and the moment he lashed out he felt ashamed. But he wasn’t going to apologize, not when she couldn’t behave like a real woman and cry. Instead he turned on his heels and walked out of the hut.
Will came back much later, so drunk that he lurched through the door and fell flat on the floor. Mary had been lying in the dark, awake, but she didn’t get up to help him. She suspected he hadn’t come back of his own free will, but because his body had a natural homing instinct. She wondered how he had got the drink, and what secrets he’d revealed under the influence of it.
She couldn’t sleep, she felt too wretched. Will didn’t seem to have considered that when she first heard the boat had capsized, she thought Charlotte had been drowned. She didn’t know John had grabbed her for at least an hour after the event. After going through that kind of agony, a foiled escape meant little.
Yet once she knew Charlotte was safe, the hideousness of this place seemed even more pronounced. While she was waiting up on the wharf, she’d looked around her and seen it for what it really was – a shanty town, built by the sweat of men who had been dehumanized. Everything about it was ugly, from the crudeness of the buildings, the flogging triangle, the bleak, already overcrowded cemetery, to the people trapped here. There was an all-pervading stench about it, a combination of bodily wastes and rotten food. An atmosphere of hopelessness and oppression.
She could not bring her children up here. How could she fight against the squalor, the degradation, the utter despair of it? How could she teach children it was wrong to steal, when it was the only way to survive here? Or that fornication was a sin, when for most of those here it was the only small comfort they had? Nearly all the children were bastards, many of the mothers couldn