For once, Grandpa wasn’t waiting at the door.
‘Grandpa,’ Fan called. ‘Teatime. If you can tell what Ma’s dished up this time you got better eyesight than me.’
He didn’t answer. She elbowed her way in. Grandpa sat in the armchair, snoring. The trunk was open and the room smelled of rum and camphor. Fan was sure she’d heard it wasn’t good to wake up an old man because the shock could kill him. She put his meal down on the table and peered inside the wooden trunk. A few more books. A pair of boots. That old leather bag all stuffed and bloated around the middle.
Grandpa coughed.
‘You awake?’ Fan asked. ‘Better eat your tea before it goes cold.’
Grandpa didn’t move.
Fan gently shook his arm. ‘Grandpa?’
His head fell back and his mouth dropped open.
‘Ma!’ Fan screamed.
Ma helped Dr Archer prop Grandpa up in bed and ordered Fan to fetch more blankets. By the time Fan returned, the doctor had taken a clear liquid out of his bag and was measuring it into a glass. He helped Grandpa to drink a few mouthfuls. Fan put one blanket over Grandpa’s knees and the other around his shoulders. She prodded him but he didn’t move. Was he dead? Ma just stood there saying ‘Right, right, what shall we do?’, her lips pressing together with worry. After a few minutes, Grandpa fell asleep.
‘Fan.’ Ma seemed to jolt like she’d just woken up. ‘You can go. Dr Archer and I will take it from here.’
‘But I can help with –’
‘I said now, Frances.’ Ma pointed at the door, her eyes stormy.
‘All right, all right,’ Fan shrugged.
She stood in the hall and left the door open, just a little. If Ma wanted to slam it in her face, well, she’d take her chances.
‘His heart is failing and that is probably affecting his breathing,’ Dr Archer said to Ma. ‘And his age … well, there could be … other problems associated with men of his … circumstances.’ He said ‘circumstances’ like it was an illness all its own. ‘Problems of the mind.’
Fan stood as still as she could manage.
‘I am supposing he is about eighty – some of the older men who travelled here from England never quite adjusted to the light or the heat. Their hearts fail them and their minds are sometimes weighed down with … thoughts of the past. Make sure he takes some air and some light exercise. Lift his spirits.’
‘I understand,’ Ma said, calmer now. ‘Thank you, doctor.’
Fan heard Dr Archer’s bag snap shut. Fan imagined herself as weightless and virtuous as a fairy and glided as fast as she could back to the kitchen. Problems of the mind. Thoughts of the past. If Ma only knew. The past was all Grandpa had talked to Fan about since he got here.
Whatever the doctor had given Grandpa had proper knocked him out. His snores were wet, nasal: uhh-ahh, uhh-ahh, uhh-ahh. The trunk was open and the leather bag was open on the table.
‘Grandpa?’
He didn’t answer. His chest rose and fell with his snoring.
Fan tiptoed in and picked up the bag. She opened it and quickly flicked through the bundle of letters. Her heart raced. Different handwriting: some with red stamps and some with blue.
Grandpa fidgeted and sniffed. Fan pushed the letters back. She felt some kind of cloth: a pouch. She took it out and opened it.
Inside the pouch was a lock of hair, the thickness of a finger, a few inches long and tied with string. It was dark yellow, like old straw. Not a colour she knew well. Not Ma’s or Tom’s or Ned’s or Dad’s. And from what Grandpa had said about Grandma, not Cath’s either. Fan carefully put it back and ran from Grandpa’s room, her cheeks burning.
‘Just down to High Street and back. It’ll do you good. Doctor’s orders.’ Ma used the same brisk tone she used when she was giving Ned a good telling off. Grandpa had put on his good jacket and his hat and his boots. He’d had a shave and his skin looked pink and fresh. Ma handed him his walking cane and he leaned on it heavily.
‘What do you think, Miss Johnson? Should your frail old grandfather risk a walk with your mother in the stinking sea air?’
‘Honest to God, I think you should always do what the doctor tells you,’ Fan said earnestly.
Ma hesitated before slipping her arm through his. He attempted to pull away.
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘Just ’til you’re steady on your feet. Then you can run Fremantle’s first marathon, for all I care.’
Fan was terrified they’d change their minds or have some embarrassing shouting match, so she waited until they’d turned the corner at the bottom of Ellen Street. Tom only had eyes for that pile of wood in the yard. Ned followed his brother around like a puppy, so Fan was sure she wouldn’t be disturbed.
She tried to be quiet as a mouse, or even quieter, like a young lady, as Florence would say, but the floor creaked, the door to Grandpa’s room squeaked on its hinges, the breeze rattled the window pane.
The sour smell of mould and sweat made Fan squirm as she opened the wooden trunk. This room really did need some air. She opened the window and Grandpa’s room flooded with cool breeze and bright sunlight. Fan felt like she was standing ankle-deep in the sea at Semaphore on one of those days when the sun blazed overhead but you knew the water would be so cold it’d thump the air out of you once you jumped in.
‘Here goes,’ she whispered to herself.
She took out the leather bag and opened it. This time she knew what would be waiting. Even in the bright light, the lock of hair was dull, like brass that needed a good polish, but it was beautiful. Fan held it and imagined it uncurling elegantly down the back of a fine lady after a day of sipping tea and ordering servants about.
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
Fan put the lock of hair to one side and took everything else out. There was the bundle of letters and a folded-up blue cloth, which she spread out on the floor. It was a sturdy cotton that had been embroidered with a picture of a church. Fan could tell the thread used to be white, but it was yellowed now. The church had three spires and underneath each, a single letter: A, E, M. Fan ran her hand over the stitching. Some had come loose, but it was precise and symmetrical and beautiful.
Some of the envelopes were from England – they had the old red stamps. The sender’s name was Miss E. Salt. Fan had to bite her lip to stop herself from shouting out loud. Grandpa’s sister Eliza in Lichfield. So that’s how you spell it, she thought.
Fan’s hands were stiff and she swore at herself to be careful. There was a letter from New South Wales, but this didn’t have a sender’s name on the envelope, just a few words scrawled on the back in an old-fashioned flourish.
The New South Wales letter was postmarked 1901: not long ago. She opened the letter and ran her finger underneath the stilted, badly written sentences.
Dear Da
I am grateful for your kindness with the land all those years ago or else I could not of bought my land were I now live. I hope my poor mam can rest in peace now. You will always have a place with us but if you cant beg my forgivness this is the last time you shall hear from me.
Your son.
Fan’s head hurt. None of it made sense. Grandpa and Ma both said Uncle Walter hadn’t been heard from for years. Fan thought about keeping the letter just long enough to copy it into her notebook. But the thought of him or Ma finding it – well, she couldn’t imagine how bad a punishment they’d think up.
Your son. Fan thought her heart would jump right out of her chest. Walter. She put the letter back in the envelope and put the letters, the hair pouch and the blue embroidered fabric back in the leather bag.
It was only after the commotion of Ma shouting through the front door, ‘Fan, come quick! I took a wrong turn and he wandered off somewhere. I can’t find your grandfather,’ only after Fan stared at Ma’s grey face and told her to calm down, only when Fan was running down High Street shouting ‘Grandpa, Grandpa!’ that she realised she’d left the door to his room open and the leather bag on the floor and her blue ribbon had fallen out of her hair and she’d forgotten to put the lid back on that stupid wooden trunk full of Grandpa’s secrets.
He hadn’t planned to escape from Agnes, but when the opportunity presented itself, he grabbed it. As soon as they’d got to the bottom of Ellen Street she’d unhooked her arm from his and walked a short distance in front, her spine rigid, her eyes focused ahead of her.
‘Embarrassed to be seen with your father?’ he called.
‘I won’t have Dr Archer blaming your poor health on me.’
His feet took some time to read the ground and he walked slowly behind her, leaning on his cane. She occasionally shouted ‘Hurry up’ and ‘Be careful!’ and ‘I haven’t got all day!’ in that clipped voice of hers. Was that who his daughter had become? No wonder Fan made jokes at her expense. Edwin had forgotten the starkness of the Fremantle sky and his eyes watered with the light. He avoided looking at the building on the hill and instead, took the rest of Fremantle in. It was a real town now, a place with meat on its bones; a town of grocers and bakers and tobacconists and a tramline.
He started to wheeze, so he slowed his pace a little. Agnes walked further and further away. It had been easy to slip into the shadows of the Commercial Hotel’s wide verandas.
Edwin inhaled the yeasty richness and followed the low rumble of voices inside.
The barmaid had bright red lips and a scowl that’d burn flesh. She looked him up and down. ‘You’ll find your sort down the back.’ She poured him a drink and held out her palm. ‘But your money’s as good as anybody else’s, thanks very much.’
It was gloomier inside and away from the street. Edwin propped his walking cane up against a table and sat down. Most of his fellow drinkers’ clothes had seen better days and some of them would do better to spend their few pennies on a square meal instead of grog. A couple of the men nodded, some tipped their invisible hats. There was a time a man could walk from his house in East Perth to the tailor shop on Barrack Street and back to any hotel in the town, and every single man he passed would have that familiar shadow about him: the wary eyes, the worn-out body.
‘Doctor’s orders.’ Edwin raised his glass to the man sitting nearby, who nodded. Then, as he always did, Edwin toasted Mary Ann and Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the two women who had made possible his magnificent life.
Dr Michael gently covered Mary Ann with a blanket and dimmed the lamp. ‘Do you know how your wife came upon these injuries?’
‘I don’t know what you mean. She was drunk. She’s probably passed out again.’
‘These injuries are significant,’ Dr Michael said. ‘Serious enough to kill her.’
‘What?’ Edwin peered at the doctor. Sanctimonious bloody Scotsman. ‘She was always drunk. You’ve seen her.’
‘Come along, Mr Salt,’ Dr Michael said. ‘Somebody is here to speak with you.’
In the other room, a woman he didn’t know bounced Edwin Stewart on her knee. Albert held the hand of Margaret Wallace, who nodded at Edwin as if it were any day in the gin shop. Little Matthew sat quietly in the corner.
Edwin recognised Constable Fry from Colinton village and Wallace’s, but the constable wasn’t smiling. He took out a notebook. Edwin’s mind clouded like a pond hit by a stone. The women exchanged a look and hurried the children into the yard.
The police wagon left Colinton for Edinburgh before sunrise. Constable Fry gave Edwin a sympathetic pat on the shoulder before slamming the door. The wagon was dark and stank of piss. He reckoned there must have been two or three others in there with him, all Scottish accents he couldn’t understand except for the profanity. Every time the tired old horse stumbled, the wagon lurched and Edwin’s head slammed against the roof. Rain thrashed the wagon and the wind wailed like grief.
If he could have seen out of the wagon, Edwin would have been unable to meet the clear-eyed gaze of Jane McKenzie, who had walked the two miles from Juniper Green to Colinton specially. She waited outside Colinton Church, where the smell of freshly dug soil was sweet and the rain stuck her hair to her cheeks. Jane watched until the prison wagon limped around the bend and was safely out of sight.
He awoke on the freezing stone floor of the cell shivering and sweating. Rats scratched at the high window. His head throbbed and his gullet burned when he swallowed.
Your wife is dead, Mr Salt.
Dead drunk, I’ll wager, Constable.
Do you know how your wife came upon these injuries?
Even through his whisky-fog he could still feel his hard boot connect with her body. A couple of little kicks, that’s all – just enough to get her up and about.
A child’s voice in the yard, getting louder, closer. As close as the door.
‘I said I need water!’ Edwin kicked the bucket that was there for him to piss in.
The hatch on the doorway opened.
‘Something bothering you, prisoner?’
‘A man could die of thirst in here.’
‘Thirst is the last thing you’re likely to die of if the charge sheet’s anything to go by.’
He’d been there about a week when an envelope appeared, along with the usual morning bowl of gluey porridge and a pannikin of water.
Edwin gulped water and read the letter.
Dear brother.
I have packed up your things at the house. The boys have been taken back to Lichfield.
Mary Ann was buried at Colinton this Tuesday past. We thought it best to spare the boys. What a terrible business.
Edwin had never been inside Colinton Church, but he imagined it looked the same as every other blasted church: a spire reaching heavenwards, a rainbow-coloured saint frozen in the window.
He thought of Mary Ann spending her eternal rest in a churchyard she didn’t know, surrounded by the rotting corpses of strangers.
Your wife is dead, Mr Salt.
Dead drunk, I’ll wager, Constable.
There he was, trapped in the sealed box of that moment, trying to grab at the instant her chest filled with air for the last time and somehow haul her back.
I am arresting you on suspicion of murder, Mr Salt.
Constable Fry’s voice had cracked when he spoke. ‘Murder,’ he stammered, fumbling with the handcuffs, as if he never thought in his entire policing career he’d be important enough to use that word.
Murder was what you read about in the paper. It didn’t barge in and put its feet up in the life of one of Her Majesty’s excise men, a tailor’s son made good, a man with a good head for arithmetic and a certain tenacity.
‘She died of drink, ask anybody!’ Edwin slammed the cell wall with his fist – his fighting fist.
Alastair Remy had the smoothest voice Edwin had ever heard, and the smoothest hair and smoothest skin he’d ever seen on a man, buffed pale and shiny, no doubt, by the icy wind Edinburgh was famous for. He explained that ‘when you boil it down, Salt’, in the end, justice was simply a matter of numbers. There would be fifteen men in the jury and any verdict need only be by a majority. Three verdicts were possible in a Scottish court: guilty, not guilty or not proven.
‘Not proven?’ Edwin asked.
‘Our country’s esteemed novelist, Sir Walter Scott, called it the bastard verdict.’ Remy fiddled with his shirtsleeve. ‘Not enough evidence to prove guilt but enough to taint you for life.’
‘A couple of kicks. That’s all.’ Edwin wiped his clammy forehead.
‘A verdict of not proven would save you from the gallows and, based on the witness statements, it seems unlikely that eight men will be convinced beyond doubt that you deserve to hang.’
Edwin loosened his collar. His face was sweaty.
Remy picked up a piece of paper. ‘You say in your declaration that your wife was insane enough to scream at the doctor in the street after her last confinement, and that you considered having her committed to a house of refuge.’
‘She said once, she wanted to die. She was a madwoman. Mad with drink. The children often went hungry.’ Edwin tried to speak with authority but the harder he tried, the smaller he felt.
‘Do you think your wife was insane enough to injure herself while under the influence of drink?’
‘I don’t know. She was always falling.’ Light tumbled from the high window, light the colour of straw.
‘A woman who could drink her life away, having such little regard for her husband and children, much less herself, would surely be capable of all kinds of evil.’ Mr Remy took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘Mr Salt, your wife is already dead. If I am to save you from the gallows, this is the most believable explanation.’
Remy checked his watch again. ‘May I suggest you consider what you might like your family to tell your sons, in the unlikely event that the numbers do not fall in your favour.’
That night in the cell, he could feel Mary Ann sitting next to him on the stone floor.
‘You knew how much I loved you, didn’t you, my mistress?’ Edwin asked.
Oh yes, my master. I couldn’t blame you for being angry with me. I were always in the grip of it, and you a man of such sober habits. How far away is Lichfield from here?
‘A day on the train. Perhaps longer.’ His mind blurred. It was the sort of fact he used to know.
Well, then, I bet my boys forgot about me already! How lucky they are to have a father like you.
He asked for paper and ink and wrote long into the night, even though there was no light except a weak glow from the moon through the high window. He never remembered falling asleep. He woke at daybreak, shivering on the floor, sheets of paper crushed under his arm. He stared at the words and searched for the floating memories he was sure he’d pinned down. But most of it didn’t make sense and what was left was crossed out. He screwed up the paper and threw it into the corner where it rested with the ruined corpses of yesterday’s efforts. There were no words for this.
Pigeons gathered on spires. A flower seller swigged cheap toddy from a pannikin. The remains of the weekend’s snowfall piled up in drifts all the way up to Parliament Square, and the newspapermen up from London wiped their runny noses with their gloved hands. Somebody led Edwin into the dock. The Lord Justice Clerk peered down from his high seat and asked him a question. Edwin became aware of a heavy silence.
‘I said, how do you plead?’ The Lord Justice Clerk’s voice echoed.
Edwin looked at Alastair Remy, who was almost unrecognisable in his gown and wig. Remy nodded to him.
‘Not guilty,’ Edwin said.
In his ear, a whisper made him wave his hand about so violently that some of the jurymen flinched.
Oh, Edwin. I know different, don’t I, my master?
In the public gallery a man whistled. Edwin looked up. He thought he recognised faces of people from Juniper Green, but he couldn’t be sure. A brown-haired woman in a dark coat leaned over the rail. It was Eliza.
The Crown tore Mary Ann’s skin off and laid her out, bloodied and bare. His defence held her mouth open and poured gin down her throat and chased her down the street until she screamed that she wished she were dead. Half of Juniper Green crowded in to watch Mary Ann lie drunk and senseless on the hillside behind Woodhall Mill. Margaret Wallace could vouch for how much Mary Ann had had to drink. In the end it was his own solicitor, Alastair Remy, who finished Mary Ann off. He noticed the poker by the grate. He pressed it into her hand and made her stab herself once, twice, thrice.
The women in the public gallery were herded out and with a clinical and detached precision, Remy detailed Mary Ann’s more serious injuries. The newspapermen whispered to each other and printed the words clearly in their notebooks.
Edwin covered his face with his hands.
Your life or mine, Edwin dear? If anyone deserves a bastard verdict, it’s you.
Mr Remy had stopped talking. Something was happening. The jury was leaving the court.
The public gallery seemed fuller and the chattering had subsided. Edwin searched the faces of the returning jurors. None of them would look at him. The Lord Justice Clerk asked one of the men in the jury for the verdict. The man passed a piece of paper to the Lord Justice Clerk. He read it and then turned to Edwin.
‘The jury finds this prisoner guilty by majority, but unanimously recommends him to mercy, in consequence of the great provocation he received.’
Edwin doubled over with relief. Guilty by majority but with a unanimous recommendation for mercy. Alastair Remy hadn’t talked about that. Maybe this was another kind of verdict. The jurors understood how difficult it had been for him living with a wife in the grip of drink. He could go home, after all.
‘You have been found guilty of the foul crime of murder,’ the Lord Justice Clerk continued. ‘Regardless of the recommendation to mercy, the court’s duty is to pronounce against you the last sentence of the law.’
The Lord Justice Clerk picked up the black cap. Something in Edwin’s mind seemed to come loose. He struggled to hear, to understand: ‘… place of execution … hanged by the neck … dead.’
Men hit the oak walls and shouted at the jury. Women nodded to each other so slightly that their husbands didn’t notice. A clerk called weakly for order.
Edwin leapt to his feet and looked to the public gallery. Eliza had gone.
A constable shoved him into a small room where a warder and a man wearing a suit waited. The suited man introduced himself as the prison doctor and peered at Edwin through small spectacles.
‘Clothes off,’ the doctor commanded. ‘Now.’
Edwin took off his clothes. The room was freezing. He shivered with shame. The warder smirked. The doctor looked into his ears and up his nose and ordered him to cough. He examined Edwin’s hair for lice and measured his girth and height. He prodded the scar above Edwin’s right eye.
The warder pointed to a tin bath full of water. ‘Get in.’ He handed Edwin a bar of soap that smelled of tar.
The water was icy, and he shrank from it.
‘I said, get in.’ The warder kneed Edwin in the back, shoved down hard on his shoulder and pushed him under.
News of the guilty verdict spread across the country and as far as Belfast. Petitions grew heavy with hundreds of signatures. Newspapers across England and Scotland filled columns to overflowing with Mary Ann’s ginsodden shortcomings, before declaring the long-suffering, unfortunate man’s life should be spared. A juror wrote to the Home Secretary that the verdict was only eleven to four, and if any man in the room had honestly thought the court would ignore their recommendation of mercy, they would ‘to a man, sir’, have decided upon the verdict of not proven.
Edwin lay on the floor of the cell and tried to bury himself under the freezing air.
I bet you got lots of wishes now, my master.
The smell of Mary Ann’s skin was all over him. She scrutinised him from every corner of the cell.
‘For Christ’s sake, woman, you were drunk. Dead drunk. What in God’s name was I supposed to do?’ Edwin shouted at the walls. They stared back, blank-faced.
You’re asking God? You should ask Dr Michael. He’ll tell you what they do to murderers, my master.
Edwin shivered. Was this it? Strung up until his limbs stopped twitching, then carted away for anatomists and surgeons to pick apart before they buried the scraps of him in the unconsecrated ground of Edinburgh’s gaol.
Go on. Throw your wishes in. Might as well. Nothing else to do.
As every day passed, Edwin’s wishes went ungranted. No visit from Alastair Remy, no visit from Eliza, no word from his father. No last chance to remind his children that their mother had brought it on herself. He shivered and wept. He curled his knees up to his chest and tried to remember the buttery scent of her skin, the sound of her raw laugh, her beautiful hair, his own undamaged self.
Three days before Edwin’s scheduled execution, a warder let the prison superintendent into the condemned cell.
‘It seems Her Majesty has judged your blameless life worthy of being spared.’ The superintendent dropped a letter on the floor. ‘I believe you can read.’
Edwin looked at it, uncomprehending. He was dizzy from hunger.
‘Did you hear me? The Queen has granted you mercy, Mr Salt.’
Edwin scrambled on the floor to grab the letter.
‘Your death sentence has been commuted to penal servitude for life,’ the superintendent announced. ‘The Scottish penal system congratulates such a fine, upstanding Englishman. Until we can make alternative arrangements, we look forward to funding your lengthy stay with us.’
In the distance, a steam train whistled. Edwin began to shake. He groped for the bucket and only just managed to pull it to his face before he vomited.
Agnes’s baby girl arrived late at night and much quicker than expected. Sarah fetched hot water and towels and looked after things. Florence dabbed cool water on Agnes’s twisted face and talked her through it. Her voice was like a distant lighthouse seeing Agnes through a storm.
Agnes kissed her daughter’s dark hair and counted ten fingers, ten toes.
They christened her Emily May. She was Em to Florence and Ernest and Sarah, ‘our bairn’ to George. At night they tucked her up in a pretty white blanket that Florence had sewn for Agnes’s firstborn. On Sundays they walked along the jetty and Agnes talked to Emily to help her get acquainted with the world she’d been born into. She pointed out the fat grey gulls and swift white gulls. She looked through the railings at shadows of fish darkening the seabed. George pulled faces and made rude noises and Emily gurgled with delight.
When the wind picked up, they sheltered underneath the jetty and George pulled at the collar of her coat and kissed her neck and sometimes she let him kiss her like he did at night in their bed.
‘I’d do anything for you and our bairn,’ George whispered.
‘You already did more than enough,’ Agnes said, tapping her belly, and the wind pulled joy out of their mouths.
It was a sunny, cloudless day. Nothing unusual for Adelaide. At the port, George was among the men lugging bulging sacks of coal, their hands blackening and the dust coating their throats. For fun, some of the neighbours’ children kicked around an old boot stuffed with newspaper. The worst of winter was well behind them and as far as Agnes knew, none of the children had so much as a sniffle.
Sarah insisted on staying with Agnes that night. She prepared cold compresses and said in her firmest matron’s voice, ‘It’s just a fever. Em will be perfectly well. I ought to know. Mothers always worry too much. Em is a tough little thing.’
Agnes and Sarah took turns throughout the night. Poor Emily shivered and screamed through the cold compresses. The heat from Emily’s blazing cheeks dried up the wet cloths. Agnes flung the useless compresses on the floor and hugged Emily tightly to her.
‘Put her down,’ Sarah instructed gently. ‘You won’t help her by making her too warm.’
By the first light of dawn, Emily’s cries had quietened to whimpers. Agnes ignored Sarah and held Emily close and whispered the few prayers she knew, every half-remembered hymn. She prayed to Mam, she prayed to Baby Cath, she prayed to all Mam’s saints.
Emily seemed to be calming down. Agnes asked forgiveness. Please, God, forgive me for being unable to let go of poor Emily, like Sarah says I should. Forgive me for taking money from Da’s pockets and Annie’s tin on the shelf. Forgive me for leaving Walter behind. Forgive me for being in the river while Mam fell asleep in the sun. Forgive me for giving Baby Cath to the nun. Please, God, forgive me for all the screaming and the leaving.
Agnes kneeled on the floor and sobbed into Emily May’s hair. Emily kept very still and quiet while Agnes held her and turned her face to God, who surely listened high above their street.
Sarah unfolded Agnes’s stiffened, stubborn body and gently eased Emily out of her arms. Then suddenly came the chill of the great gaping space left by her taken-away baby. Agnes had never imagined there could be a pain worse than bringing Emily May into the world, but oh God, here it was. Come back, come back, come back.
Agnes stayed in bed all day. She clung to Emily’s clothes and her daughter’s special blanket. When she woke up, for a moment she felt like Emily was still with her. But as soon as she opened her eyes, she could see it gathering strength at the edge of her vision. She buried herself under the bedclothes and submerged herself in the terrible waves of grief. She cried the sheets sodden and Florence made Agnes get up every day so she could change them. The sun baked the loss of Emily hard into the cotton. Every day Agnes asked Florence if there was a letter from home and every day Florence shook her head. The absence of a letter dug the grief in deeper.
Thank the Lord for the bell down at the port to signal the shift changes, to divide one day from the next, or else none of them would have known any time had passed. Agnes barely spoke to George, and he knew better than to push her. He reached his arm across at night sometimes, but she rolled away from him.
One night, something changed. She pulled him towards her without speaking or making any sound of pleasure. It was a hollow sort of wanting that gnawed at her insides. It was almost like being alive but with none of the joy. She wanted him like this night after night. George whispered about wanting to bring the old warm noises from her, but she pushed his hands away and lay there until his own agony took him over. Afterwards they slept as if alone, sheets wedged between them.
Before long, Agnes felt sour waves in her gut in the mornings. She had been hoping for it. Hoping that, if she tried hard enough, she could fill her empty body with Emily May all over again, somehow unlock that tiny wooden box and wash the soil from Emily’s blue little mouth and bring her home. But the morning sickness had a different character. Instead of relentless vomiting, this was a passing cloud of nausea that rarely came to much. Her body swelled and ached in different places. Even her dreams were new.
‘Another bairn.’ George rested his hand on her belly. ‘Now everything will be all right.’
Agnes curled up against her husband and sobbed. Something foreign now grew inside her. Emily May was never coming back.
The Portland dockside teemed with carpenters carrying beams up gangplanks. Rain thrashed and wind rattled the ropes on the waiting transport ship, Lincelles. The tops of its masts poked into the clouds. Three hundred pairs of wet trousers flapped against three hundred pairs of freezing legs. Someone called an order and the line of men started to sway. Edwin’s feet fell into rhythm with the lifer Mick McCarthy in front of him, the pimply youth Martin Smith in front of McCarthy, toothless stonemason Arthur Molloy in front of Smith and embezzler William Pullinger behind them all. The rain and wind got heavier. Three hundred identically dressed convicts trooped up the gangplank. Three hundred pairs of feet marching. It sounded like gunfire.
‘With this wind we’ll be in Trinidad by Thursday,’ one of the guards said. There was a darkness about his tone. Below deck, all light disappeared and the sounds above were muffled. The air was sticky and warm. Men lost their footing, stumbled, cursed. Somebody groaned and the stench of vomit filled the air.
Once below it was clear what the carpenters had been doing. Crossbeams and long beams divided the empty cargo space between the decks into sections. Men unrolled their hammocks and fixed them to the beams. The ship forced itself against the swell, rolling first to port then heaving back to starboard. The guards did their best to stay upright, in command, but they were no more accustomed to the undertow than the prisoners.
‘Reckon a few of us could take them on, for certain,’ McCarthy said.
‘Bloody Irish, always seeing an uprising everywhere you go,’ Edwin said. Smith and Molloy had to agree.
Five days later the Lincelles was still suspended in Portland harbour. Rain trickled down to the convict bunks. Rumours did the same. A convict heard from a guard who heard from the ship’s doctor that, even though the Lincelles was one of the biggest and sturdiest convict transports ever fitted, it would not be safe to leave until the weather calmed. A dozen or so Irishmen were already whispering, agitating, whipping up dissent, so the captain and the ship’s doctor implemented the shipboard routines immediately. Mick McCarthy was appointed a mess captain, along with half a dozen of the wide-eyed and terrified Newgate lads, a bit of responsibility to take their already fractured minds off what was ahead. School monitors were appointed from the best educated of the men. Edwin Salt for reading. William Pullinger for mathematics.
‘You heard about him?’ Smith whispered to Edwin. ‘A proper celebrity. A quarter of a million quid nicked from the bank, they reckon. No trace of it ever found.’
A quarter of a million. Mary Ann tickled the back of his neck. Her fingers scratched like hessian. Plenty there to set yourself up in the Swan River, Edwin dear.
In the warm stillness of confinement, stories spread as freely as crotch fungus. Smith had heard about natives who would spear a man and boil him until his skin peeled off his bones. Molloy had heard there was exotic fruit that grew bigger than a man’s head. One of the Newgate pickpockets said his uncle had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land and had escaped, never to be seen or heard from again. A spotty-faced youth, sent away for stealing, said he knew a couple from his church who’d gone to the Swan River as free settlers. Made good, he said. But he was howled down. Everyone agreed the gaol would surely be paradise compared to what probably lay beyond the gates.
One night without warning, the Lincelles lurched forward. The swell rose angrily against the bough. The masts creaked. Up on deck the crew shouted. Winches screeched. Edwin clutched at his throat. Molloy whispered a prayer.
‘Bon voyage, men,’ Mick McCarthy shouted. ‘May God bless the mighty Lincelles and all the righteous servants of the Lord who sail in her.’ The other Irish cheered and the Newgate lads looked worried.
Pullinger retched and groaned.
‘In the name of God, man, pipe down,’ Edwin said.
‘My apologies, good fellow. I think I am dying,’ Pullinger mouthed.
Is that poor man keeping you awake? Mary Ann sat on the end of his hammock and rubbed a low, gentle circle over her stomach. I know how he feels. I ache here also, my master. Mary Ann drew a line with her index finger from under her breastbone to below her belly button. Oh, how I ache.
Below decks it already stank enough to make the doctor gag and keep him busy with powders and tinctures. The space was cramped but the routine was more suffocating. Dr Crawford ran the ship with precision, but still all kinds of danger festered. Talk of taking the ship was everywhere but the only convicts taken seriously were the Irish, and the guards never took their eyes off them.
In the mornings Edwin read out loud from books to the illiterate Cockney lads who parroted back the words when he pointed to them. In the afternoons, Pullinger talked and wrote numbers, and everybody listened. Even some of the crew and the religious instructor sat in on Pullinger’s arithmetic lessons.
‘A quarter of a million,’ Mick McCarthy whispered as he slopped porridge in Edwin’s bowl one morning. ‘Where does a man hide that kind of money?’
It was almost a week before the weather calmed enough to allow the convicts up on deck for exercise. The air slapped their faces and sea spray burned their eyes. The blue-black sea rolled and lunged. Huge birds swooped and hung in the sky, and men who had killed other men crouched in fear.
The ship lurched and Pullinger fell heavily. The guards ordered the convicts to leave him be, let him find his sea legs. Edwin ignored them and helped Pullinger up. The guards scowled but did nothing.
‘Thank you.’ Pullinger shook Edwin’s hand. ‘Damned sea air. What a man needs is the stench of horse shit and burning coal.’
‘Oh, for a whiff of the Thames. God’s own personal privy behind the East India Company dock,’ Edwin said.
‘And to think my wife always complained I would never go so far as Brighton to take the waters,’ Pullinger croaked.
Next morning, Edwin opened a book and prepared to read to the Newgate lads. He stifled a gasp in case any of the others noticed his reaction. The colour. The insignia. It was a crisp Bank of England note.
Mary Ann prodded Edwin in the ribs. That’s the way, my master. He looks the sort who’d help his friends. You always were the charmer.
As a Cambridge-educated forger from London theorised one evening, William Pullinger might be guilty of little more than fiction: he’d told a wildly improbable tale of how much money his esteemed employer, the Union Bank, had deposited with the Bank of England. In truth, some of the cash may well have found its way into Pullinger’s possession, but if nobody at either bank bothered to check, who was Pullinger to blink first? Molloy said he’d heard Pullinger’s wife was now living comfortably in London. Perhaps Pullinger would send for her the moment he had his ticket-of-leave. ‘I’d send for my wife and she hasn’t got a penny,’ Molloy said. ‘You’d think Pullinger could have bought his way out of this rotten fate.’
In the weeks it took to battle towards the Cape, three hundred convicts prayed for calm weather. Edwin had personally begged God for it every night. Even the Irish talked less of how to take the ship and more about blessed mercy from the vagaries of wind and air pressure. When the sea stopped boiling, the crew cursed the convicts and changed sails and uttered old seafarers’ prayers. Only an idiot landlubber of a city man would be stupid enough to think that calm waters made for an easier passage. The Lincelles heaved and strained. Dr Crawford ordered the convicts up on deck in shifts, and they lugged the boards from underneath their hammocks and scrubbed them clean, over and over, to pass the time.
Edwin kept his eye on Pullinger, gave him extra food, helped him walk on deck, and in return, he sometimes found a banknote inside a book or in his pocket. Edwin slept with the fold of money up his sleeve and he believed it kept him warm. He loved it when the lump of money woke him in the night. He hated the routine, the unending sea. The fattening wad of money was the only way Edwin knew for certain that days were passing, that he was still alive.
‘Land!’
The cry pierced the monotony. Dr Crawford allowed the convicts on deck to look at the thin strip of land.
A single black bird materialised from the green water, its wingspan enormous. The men followed it with their gaze, watching how it chased the ship, drifting up and down on the same breezes caught by the sails.
‘It wants to feast on our piss and shit and vomit,’ Pullinger said airily. ‘See how it stares at me?’
‘Take it easy, old man,’ Edwin said. ‘They’ll lock you in the black box for talking like a lunatic.’
McCarthy scowled at Edwin. ‘What’s it to you if they lock him up in the black box?’
That night in Edwin’s dreams, Mary Ann sprouted wings and pecked his face, body, arms, then flew away, carrying parts of him in a tin bucket that rattled and glinted in the sun.
The next morning the land had disappeared. Air tickled the topsails and the mainsails hung flat. Riggers ran up and down the masts, letting out sails, pulling them in. The convicts grumbled that the island must have been a mirage, the weevils in the porridge causing hallucinations.
Pullinger hadn’t appeared on deck. Nobody had seen him. Edwin flicked from front to back of the book he was reading to the Newgate lads, but found nothing.
‘Damned wind,’ a rigger shouted. ‘Never known anything like it. Can’t make up its mind if it wants to hold us back or spew us straight into the mouth of the Devil.’
Below decks, Mick McCarthy cornered Edwin. ‘Pullinger’s been taken ill,’ he said. ‘Looks like your bank will be closed for a while.’
McCarthy took something from behind his ear. It was one of Pullinger’s banknotes. Edwin instinctively put his hand to the fold of notes hidden in his shirt pocket. From nowhere, two more Irish appeared. They each held one of Edwin’s arms and McCarthy thumped him square in the guts. He struggled and tried to elbow one of the Irish in the face, but both men were too strong for him. In the time it took for the guard to notice the scuffling and cursing, McCarthy had grabbed the fold of banknotes from Edwin’s pocket. The two Irish shoved Edwin to the deck and kicked him repeatedly in the back. Pain flamed through his middle.
See? It hurts, doesn’t it, Edwin dear? Mary Ann held a pannikin of best whisky just out of reach.
Pullinger’s condition worsened. Dr Crawford insisted it wasn’t contagious, but for every morning Pullinger didn’t appear on deck, half a dozen more men reported feeling ill. Dr Crawford swabbed ears and listened to chests. He ordered the mess captains and the school monitors to take shifts watching Pullinger. Edwin glared at McCarthy. McCarthy looked wary like a hungry dog.
Pullinger lay motionless in his hammock. His teeth chattered. The sores around his mouth were red and weepy.
‘Jesus Christ,’ McCarthy said. ‘I ain’t going near him.’
‘Too late now. You’ve had your hands all over his money. You may as well be dead,’ Edwin said.
‘See you in Hell then, Salt.’
‘I think we’re already there,’ Edwin said, and McCarthy grunted his agreement.
‘Happy New Year, Pullinger.’ Edwin shook his friend’s hand. It was cold and clammy.
‘Should old acquaintance be forgot.’ Pullinger clutched his stomach. The ship rolled. The rattle of timbers signalled thunder. Edwin and McCarthy took turns in helping Pullinger drink his lime juice. A couple of the Newgate lads brought extra blankets. Everybody wanted to help the man who might have a quarter of a million stashed away.
‘And what, sir, do you hope for in the year of our Lord eighteen – what year is it?’ Pullinger’s eyes were wide, confused.
‘Eighteen sixty-two, sir.’ Edwin put another spoon of lime juice to Pullinger’s mouth. ‘Since you ask, I first hope for good health.’
Pullinger winced and wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘I pray for underthings not rotten with sea water and in which lice have not made themselves at home. I pray for land under my rotten, stinking feet.’
‘Shut up and drink your juice,’ McCarthy said. ‘You’re no use to us dead.’
There was a loud crash and the ship rolled. Dozens of sleeping bodies fell from hammocks.
‘I pray for the stink of horse shit in my nostrils and the continued good health of the auditors of the Bank of England.’ Pullinger convulsed. McCarthy grabbed more blankets from other convicts and laid them over Pullinger.
You’d better pray for Pullinger, Edwin dear, because he doesn’t look too good from where I’m stood.
‘Shut up, woman!’ Edwin shouted at nothing.
‘Not you too, Salt.’ McCarthy said. ‘I’m buggered if I’m feeding lime juice to you.’
‘I’ll outlive you both,’ Edwin promised.
Pullinger smelled like rotting meat. The ship heaved and rolled and there was the now familiar thud of convicts being thrown to the floor. Edwin held onto the beam that supported Pullinger’s hammock. A rogue trickle of sea water lapped at his feet.
‘Keep it together, Pullinger.’ Edwin wiped the sick man’s forehead. ‘Talk is we’re not far from Fremantle.’
‘My ankles tingle in anticipation of the cool embrace of the irons,’ Pullinger wheezed.
The ship lurched. The force of it flung Edwin and McCarthy across the floor and hurled Pullinger from his hammock. Edwin’s head collided with a joist a few feet away. The puddle of sea water swilled around his face, his arse. Men cursed and swore, and somebody whispered about having a go at the guards before it was too late. McCarthy hissed that they might as well wait until they got to dry land and then make a run for it.
Edwin held tight and rested his throbbing head against the joist. Here he was, in the bowels of a sea monster. He was entrails, he was shit. He wasn’t even human. His limbs creaked. His own timbers shivered with damp. The crew said it was just the weather south of the Cape, but Edwin knew better. It was Mary Ann awakening on the seabed, puffing air into the ragged sails, Mary Ann who made the sea rise, Mary Ann who made his brow sweat, who made him feel he was permanently up to his neck in water, inches from drowning.
Sleep, my master, while you can. It’s blowing a gale up on deck.
By sunrise on the sixth of January 1862, William Pullinger was dead. At five o’clock that afternoon, Molloy, Smith, McCarthy and Edwin lifted his shrouded and stiffened body up to their shoulders. The weights that had been added to the shroud made it more difficult.
The religious instructor read a rudimentary funeral service. It was so windy on deck, his words had barely escaped his mouth before they too went overboard. The Newgate pickpockets snivelled, more for the looming fate of Pullinger’s body than for the death itself.
Dr Crawford gave the order and the men swung Pullinger up, up and over the side. His emaciated body bobbed up and down. The sea bashed against the side of the Lincelles. In less than a minute, Pullinger sank without trace.
Molloy gripped Edwin’s shoulder and he swung around. He was shocked to see Molloy’s eyes wide with fear.
‘I killed a man with my bare hands, but I never seen nothing like that,’ Molloy said.
‘Turn your back on it.’ Edwin offered Molloy some tobacco. ‘Same as we do with everything that got us here.’
First chance they got, Edwin and McCarthy went below to take Pullinger’s things apart. Some scavengers must have got there first because there was nothing left in his hammock, not even a blanket.
Not to worry, Edwin dear, Mary Ann said, squeezing his sleeve where the banknotes used to be. Isn’t money the root of all evil?
Mary Ann mopped Edwin’s forehead. She touched her icy lips to his flaming cheeks. Poor Edwin. The captain says it’s the toughest weather he’s ever sailed through. Edwin craved a whisky-blind sleep. Something kicked him in the guts. He bent his knees up to his chest and screamed at it to stop. It was faceless, cruel, it kicked without mercy.
The convicts, the crew, the guards, even the guards’ wives, all trooped up on deck. They squinted at the bleached and ragged coast. The water was green. No, it was blue. It was a colour yet to be named. The light hurt their eyes. Birds cooed in the sky. Convicts stretched their arms out to let the warm air dry four months of seawater from their bones.
‘That’s it?’ Mick McCarthy pointed at the view. ‘I reckon I’ll take my chances.’
Hundreds of legs. Hundreds of arms flailed in the water. Hundreds of mouths cursed. It was Edwin’s turn. He climbed into the water. Sea slapped his thighs. Convicts in front of him, convicts behind him. One foot in front of the other. They walked. Grit through the holes in his boots and a slimy weed that hindered his movement. He was part of the sea now, he was washed up, tidal, taking in air through his skin. Ceaseless light came off the water and the sky. Blinded and nauseated by the hot glare. They walked. Thigh deep, knee deep, ankle deep. One foot in the water, one foot at the end of the earth. He thrashed his arms at his feet and cut it all loose: Samuel Salt and Son, Saint Chad, Edinburgh, Sir Walter Bloody Scott.
A fumbling at his ankles, a burning pain and he was part of a ten-legged, iron-sinewed monster whose bones would one day be scrubbed clean and peered at behind glass. They crossed the white sand and lumbered up a track. Legs, flabby and unsteady, learning how to walk on this land.
Men in coats and hats, women – women for Christ’s sake. A small boy pointed and Edwin shouted and waved. Albert and Eliza, waiting for him! But the boy screamed and the woman dragged him away and disappeared into the shade of a building. The building looked familiar, its pillars and classical lines in the middle of a sandpit. Jesus Christ, a courthouse. He started to sink. Someone shouted, ‘Keep moving, keep moving,’ but there was another building up ahead, a high wall, and he was drowning in glare, in light.
Edwin rested his aching head against the cool stone of the cell. His new prison uniform was scratchy and ill-fitting. His pockets were empty.
There was a bucket and a hammock and a pannikin of water and wailing and cursing from other cells. Everything was the same, everything was different. He waited. He drank the cool water. He waited for her to appear, to snatch the pannikin from him, to kick him in the guts and split him open, but she was gone.
Agnes gave birth to a screaming baby girl in the middle of the night. Sarah cleaned the baby up and delivered her safely to the weeping mother. Agnes put her baby to her breast and held her very tightly while she fed. The child wriggled and kicked against the confines of Agnes’s arms. Florence brought in Emily’s old clothes. Agnes wrapped her new daughter in her lost daughter’s blanket and the smell of the newborn girl mingled with the smell of the lost girl and Agnes loved them both in the one body. The baby wriggled.
‘She’s in a mighty hurry,’ Florence said.
‘I promise I’ll never let you out of my sight.’ Agnes blew little raspberry kisses on her daughter’s pink cheeks.
Little Frances Johnson’s hair was as dark as Emily’s, but she had twice as much of it. It grew faster and curlier. Her eyes, pale like Emily’s, darkened and eventually settled into a deep blue.
Frances grew faster, ate faster, crawled and talked sooner than Ernest and Florence’s children had done. On the day Frances first walked, she stood up, wobbled, walked and then almost ran, before wobbling to the ground, picking herself up and walk-running again. It was a month after her first birthday, a windy afternoon on Semaphore Jetty.
‘Even her name’s too slow for her,’ Florence said. ‘We should call her something quicker to shout when she’s running away.’
‘Fan.’ Agnes scooped up her squealing, wriggling daughter. ‘Little Fan. You’ll run all the way to Brazil before the rest of us have put our shoes on.’
Ernest’s news about buying a house took them all by surprise. He grabbed Sarah’s hands and danced her around the table. It was a four-roomed cottage in Rosewater, a newly made suburb with streets that ran as straight as tracks for the railwaymen and their families who could now afford a place of their own. George found his little family a tin-roofed cottage a decent walk back from the beachfront and about halfway between Largs pier and Semaphore Jetty.
The morning after their first night in their new home, Agnes made George bring Fan down to the beach. The sky was streaked with cloud and the beach almost emptied of sea. The lowest tide in weeks, George said. Agnes pulled off her shoes, hitched up her skirt and waded into the sodden sand.
‘You’ll sink to the middle of the earth,’ George called, but Agnes was too far away to hear. She picked up a handful of shells. The sea looked shallow and benign and far away, but she aimed for it anyway.
One for Mam.
One for Baby Cath.
A heart-shaped pearl shell for her darling Emily May.
A handful of broken shells for Samuel the tailor, Sam Junior, James, Eliza and Mary with all her dreadful luck.
From this distance, Fan’s hair shimmered blue-black in the metallic light. Agnes ran through the weeds and shells that the tide had left behind, through the middle of the earth and back to Fan, George, her very own family.