The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [116]
9
Flames of Love
Sleeping Beauty
The year 1844 began like a fairy tale for the trio of convict maids. Their lives were woven together by the Fates, as they passed through Liverpool Street and slaved behind the cold stone walls at Cascades. Now they were free and ready to express themselves on a new canvas prepared for hope and promise. The future was surely about to call them in different directions. Though they might never meet again, the women who walked away from Cascades were to be steadfast mates for the rest of their lives.
Ludlow Tedder Chambers, the oldest and still vibrant at fifty-one, contentedly adapted to life around a rustic farm cottage outside Launceston and introduced Arabella to the country roots she’d known as a young lass in Southminster, England. Now freed from her sentence at the Female Factory, Janet Houston escaped her recent painful past in the company of a tall, handsome emancipist. And the spirited Agnes McMillan, the youngest of the three, had fallen madly in love with a mysteriously scarred renegade who caught her attention charging through Oatlands on a runaway horse.
Agnes, twenty-three at the time of her release, had certainly scoffed at rules before. She had no trouble dismissing what the Colonial Times considered the “Rules and Regulations for Young Ladies” contemplating matrimony:
At twenty.—Consider yourself in some danger of remaining single, and suit your conduct to your circumstances.
At twenty-one.—Be less particular than heretofore, for time begins to wane.
At twenty-two.—Think seriously of paying a visit to some friend at Madras or Calcutta.
At twenty-three.—Marry any body that is not downright intolerable.1
At the end of 1839, when Superintendent Hutchinson banished the grey-eyed rebel to the most remote outpost accepting convicts, he inadvertently arranged her introduction to William Watson Roberts. William was a scrappy lad from Manchester, with dark brown eyes and a bit of larceny in his soul. As a young man, he tried his hand at pickpocketing, but had little skill. In 1827, he was arrested for stealing one shilling and sixpence, and three halfpence. Because this was the twenty-two-year-old’s second offense, the judge imposed a sentence of fourteen years’ transportation to parts beyond the seas. While awaiting exile, William spent eight months aboard the Dolphin, a decommissioned warship turned floating prison hulk.
Stripped bare and scrubbed with a stiff brush, the male prisoners were outfitted in coarse grey shirts and breeches and shackled by heavy rings secured by a steel rivet around both ankles. The rings were joined together by heavy chains, making it virtually impossible for a man to run, flee, or swim. Four hundred men ploddingly marched ashore under the watch of guards armed with whips. Now called by their number at five A.M. muster, the convicts, dragging iron balls at their feet, cleaned sewers, dug ditches, and dredged the River Thames. Returned to the ship at dusk, they were fed gruel and meat, then ordered by their task-masters to clean the old decaying battleship that was their home. The ship slept four men to a bunk in a space seven feet square, and epidemics ravaged the hulks constantly and caused many a man’s bones to be dumped in the swampy marshland following a death during the night.
William Roberts managed to survive his stay on the Dolphin, but he wouldn’t escape unscathed. One of many rampant outbreaks of tuberculosis left a permanent mark. Bearing a bluish-purple mass under his chin, he suffered from scrofula, or “king’s evil,” a name tied to the medieval belief that a royal’s touch offered the cure. His clear complexion was further transformed by another plague common to life on the hulks. Hundreds of angry men in chains, packed together like animals, bred