On a damp November morning, in mizzling rain, a force of constables formed up on either side of a line of dilapidated hackney coaches – to leave Newgate Gaol and rattle down to Ludgate Hill, then south to the River Thames. On Blackfriars bridge the procession halted; and ironed in pairs like three-legged runners at a fair, their occupants descended. Several slipped and stumbled on the steps. One would certainly have fallen, if his companion hadn’t caught him by the arm to help him down into the waiting lighter – a strangely ill-matched couple, as several watchers on the bridge observed; the one a tattered starveling quite clearly from the Common Side; the other a State Side scholar of the most affluent sort, turned out in laundered stock and well cut greatcoat.
After a time in close confinement, few ‘pensioners of the Crown’ embarked upon their journey to the transport ships in anything but a demoralized condition. They stared dully at the water, at the river barges, the towering masts, the warehouses and boatyards which lined the river banks; huddling in the rain to seek comfort, as they had in prison, from each other’s scrawny bodies. ‘Two-legged cattle’; that’s how their warders saw them; kine to be driven and shipped and treated as a herd – with one remarkable exception.
Aaron from the first had set himself apart. At Horsham and the convicts’ clearing-house that was Newgate Gaol, he’d paid in gold for separate cells – bought fresh food for himself, clean linen and private access to the yards, in the knowledge that his chances of surviving the sea voyage depended on his physical condition. Now on the river, while the others shrank and huddled, he could lift his head to feel the rain upon his face; still free where it counted..
Sometimes at Horsham in his cell, in the darkness of the night or early dawn, he’d suffered the cold pangs of fear that any man must feel in the shadow of the gallows. Aaron had seen a light-built fellow dance out his life that way. He knew how long it took to die at a rope’s end. Yet always with the sunrise his natural confidence returned. They’d marked him for abroading after all; he had his life, and with it a new chance to set his wits against the worst they could devise, to prove himself the better man. ‘Aye, better than you, Brother Ray,’ he thought. ‘For I’m to play the man’s part, while you must languish back at home with your books and potions and your big empty bed.
‘Survival, Ray. You’ll see, I’m made for it - with God’s help or the other fellow’s!’
At Woolwich, the lightermen turned their boats into a narrow reach between the shipyards, close by the rotting carcases of the once proud warships, Prudentia and Stanisklaus– both now converted to prison hulks, with ramshackle deckhouses, chimney-pots sprouting from their bulwarks and sodden washing strung between their masts. Beside these fallen giants and dwarfed beneath their hulls, lay the ship that was to carry the Newgate men a distance of sixteen thousand miles across the ocean to the penal settlement of New South Wales; an ugly little blunt-nosed barque scarce larger than a river boat.
As the first of the prisoners were disembarked, a working party of hulk convicts on the wharves sent up a loud derisive cheer; followed by another, as the new arrivals shuffled aboard the transport, driven two-and-two like Noah’s beasts up its sloping gangplank.
‘Dear oh dear! Can’t ’e keep ’is yards square without yer Lordship’s stays to brace ’em, then?’ a sailor called out rudely from the rat-lines, at the sight of the red-haired young felon helping his companion through the gun deck port – a remark that for good reasons of his own, Aaron smilingly let pass.
Up on the gun deck where the space beneath the beams forced most of them to stoop, the fifty Newgate convicts were mustered with their bundles and their boxes for an address by the ship’s surgeon, who spoke from the companion ladder to the deck above.
‘Men – for be assured I judge you men no less that I am, in spite of your offences and the unhappy situation they have brought you to. To introduce myself, my name is Surgeon Mascall, and my duty is to ensure the health of all abroad this vessel during the voyage to New South Wales, which under providence she is to undertake.’
To most of his audience, the surgeon on his ladder was visible only from the waist downwards. But in the moment that he ducked below the level of the deck to check that all were present and attending, Aaron glimpsed a shock of pale hair above a face that showed little of intelligence, he thought, and even less of resolution – the very sort, in fact, for what he had in mind.
‘My object in addressing you, is to call attention to certain regulations which Captain Collins has permitted me to offer for the guidance of all convict passengers aboard this ship,’ the man announced, producing from his tailcoat a number of printed sheets which fluttered in the breeze. ‘REGULATIONS,’ he read portentously. ‘Item One: You are on no account to fight, to quarrel or to steal from one another, or use obscene or blasphemous conversation.’
‘Bleedin’ arse’oles!’ a dismal voice exclaimed from somewhere down below.
‘Item Two: You are at all times to be polite and obedient toward the officers and guards set over you,’ Surgeon Jeremy Mascall hastily continued. ‘A faithful report will be made of each man’s conduct in this respect; and those who behave well – although they may have joined us with the worst of reputations – will be favourably represented on arrival in the colony.
‘Item Three: A standard of personal cleanliness being essential to the continued health and comfort of all on board, the strictest attention will be paid to such on all occasions. At the considerable expense of His Majesty’s Government, each convict is to be provided with a suit of clothes and a change of linen and stockings; besides a pillow, a blanket and a sanitary bucket. One bucket between four persons.
‘Item Four: The prisoner who dares defy or break through any of the aforesaid items, is not only to be severely punished as an example to his fellows, but must never expect to be recommended to the notice of the Governor of New South Wales.’
On this dire note of warning, the paper rustled back into the surgeon’s coat. ‘You will find that copies of these Regulations have been placed in conspicuous positions in your prison quarters below,’ their author concluded proudly. ‘And men, I’d recommend them most seriously to your attention, for I apprehend that your future condition may well depend on them to a greater degree than any of you can presently conceive.’ (Which proved to be a fact for those attentive to his rules for cleanliness, who’d found the surgeon’s flimsy sheets of Regulations a very useful adjunct to the sanitary buckets he provided.)
The overlap, or orlop deck, to which the Newgate men were now consigned, took up the full width and a great part of the length of the vessel, below the waterline and underneath the gun deck. Without benefit of portholes; lime-washed against the worm and lit by nothing brighter than tallow glims, it looked more like a cellar rather than a deck – a basement store, with narrow wooden racks on either side more suitable for kegs than living men. To the amusement of their guards, several pairs of shackled convicts knocked heads or scraped their spines on their way to the berths; for the beams afforded clearance of no more than five feet at the most.
‘There lads, enjoy the space while ye still may,’ a marine guard advised as he prepared to douse the glims. ‘If ye think ye’r tight with fifty, wait until ye’r two ’ undred an’ fifty, with another fifty of yer Newgate whores above ye, to piddle on yer ’eads. Then we’ll see ’ow brave ye feel!’
He climbed the ladder, taunting still. ‘Three ’undred; there’s what she’s booked for – three ’undred of the scum o’ the earth packed in like ’errings in a barrel!’ He slammed the after-hatch behind him, to leave the orlop and its human freight in almost total darkness.
Aaron stared sightlessly ahead. The deal boards of his berth were rough as rock; his ankles pained him where the basils of his iron cuffs chafed them. But he knew that there was worse to follow. There was more than one old lag in Newgate, who’d made the trip out to the Cape or Botany Bay and back – and Aaron had made it his business to discover all he could of the overcrowding and epidemics, the extremes of heat and cold, that were to be expected of the voyage. Above him, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he could make out the upper berth; beyond it, the deeper blackness of the deckhead. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, the Newgate women would be dropped down with the tide from Blackfriars and crowded into the small prison on the gun deck; among them the girl who, one way or another, had brought him to this pass.
‘Ellin is to join your ship – d’ye hear me, Brother?’ Rafe speaking in the State Side common room at Newgate. Aaron pressed one hand to his forehead and closed his eyes, the better to recall his brother’s voice. ‘Listen to me, Aaron. The Duke of Portland has this day replied to my petition – and Brother, they’ve agreed. With months to go before the next women’s transport is to sail, they’ve fixed on sending some of them ahead – on your ship, Aaron. Do you hear what I am saying? Ellin is to be amongst them; they have agreed that you’re to sail together on the Lady Augusta!’
‘Really now, is that a fact?’ The old compulsion to barricade himself with flippancy against his brother’s lectures.
‘You’ve just heard me say so, Sir.’
‘Well how very kind and civil of them, Ray. Is that what you wish to hear? And have you a picture in your mind of me and Ellin strolling at our leisure on the quarter-deck, to view the wonders of the deep whilst marvelling to one another at the clemency of British justice?’
‘Brother, I’ll allow that you are bitter, and maybe with good reason. But I know that there’s sufficient good in you to do the best you can for her, when she and I most need your help.’
‘From where I’m sitting, Ray, it would appear you have no choice.’
He could still see his brother’s tortured face. The man in the berth beside him moved restlessly, rattling the chain that joined them against the memory of Rafe’s insistent voice.
‘Listen to me, listen… You know our mother charged me to see after you and shield you from the dangers of the world. Well now I’m charging you with the protection of the person dearest to my heart – to succeed, Aaron, where I’ve failed. She is already listed in the Indent as Ellin Corbyn; and I have paid them to amend the register to show her as your wife.’
Lying in the darkness, Aaron felt the pressure of Rafe’s hand. ‘Do you understand me, Brother? As your wife instead of mine. It is the only way we have of guaranteeing Ellin your protection when you reach the colony of New South Wales.’ Their eyes met for the final time; brown eyes reflecting brown. ‘Aaron, I’m trusting you to see her safe; if not for her sake then for mine.’
If the male convicts had been for the most part sullen and subdued on their arrival at the ship, the women were another case. Unhampered by shackles, they climbed aboard like monkeys by the permanent sea-gangway fixed to the vessel’s sloping side; making use of the occasion to shout obscenities at the sailors in the rigging and hoist their tattered skirts above their knees.
If she’d not sat amongst them in closed carriages and open lighters, and listened to the way the women spoke when they could not be overheard, Ellin might well have judged them as Rafe did at Newgate Gaol; as creatures lost to every female virtue. As it was, she saw them rather as they saw themselves, as victims in a world of ruthless men – men who seduced them and set them on their course of theft and prostitution – men who arraigned and judged, and sentenced them to cross the world in servitude for other men to use.
In the lighters, the convict woman hugged their children and their bundles of possessions to them, staring at each other with round and fearful eyes. But on the ladder to the ship they’d winked and laughed and flashed their grimy thighs; reaching pathetically for the weapons in their female arsenal which had proved and proved again to work with men. Ellin in the second boat held back until the last, climbing with the barest economy of motion, with her eyes fixed to the batons; each baton as she gripped it. On the prison Ordinary’s advice, she’d travelled in her oldest weather cloak; bareheaded, with her short hair blowing round her face. And if the men above had whistled all the same and shouted down to her to show a leg, she gave no sign of hearing.
She could still feel for the other women; crude and strident as they were in their necessity for male support. But for herself – for Ellin Corbyn, formerly of Chalkdean, now to be transported as a convict to the penal colony of New South Wales – for herself and her own desperate situation she felt nothing. She left the Newgate lighter without looking back.
In December, four days before Christmas when the Yule log was brought in to be kindled on the eve of St.Thomas, Rafe Corbyn stood like a martyr behind the draped pine table of his Chalkdean kitchen. At Thomas-tide, it was his duty as Squire to distribute gifts and ginger wine to the poor women of the district, who came ‘a-goodening’ to his door – his duty on the death of his grandfather, Godfrey Heathcote, and one he had performed each year since then. At first he’d had his aunt to help him with the gifts and exact her toll of gratitude from the receivers; then Ellin and Drusilla, one on either side of him, competing for the role of Lady Bountiful. This year he stood alone.
‘Good afternoon, Sarah. What is it that you’d like? What can I give you, Mrs Armiger? Mrs Pyecroft, have you chosen?’ – repeating the worn formula that they expected.
‘Art’noon Sir. One of they ’ot mince tarts if ye please, Sir.’
‘A candle Sir, an’ thankee.’
‘Thankee Sir, a bobbin ’ud come in ’an’some Sir, I’m sure.’
Each woman smiled and dropped a curtsey, took the gift and then moved along the line to where Cook stood at the dresser with the ginger wine; and Rafe smiled back at them as if he couldn’t feel their curiosity – whilst at his feet and underneath the cloth, Ellin’s little terrier sat watching; sniffing at each passing petticoat, each pair of boots, for one that never came.
Of course the women knew how things stood at the Manor. For months Chalkdean affairs had topped Nan Ashby’s bastard and the parson’s accidental death – even run close to Nelson’s victory of the Nile as the favoured conversation piece in the taverns and churchyards, the threshing barns and cottage parlours of the downland. And if through all their speculations, the village women retained their good opinion of the doctor, they still came to his kitchen door on Goodening Day, as Rafe himself was well aware, less for his gifts than for the sight of his sad face. He knew and understood. The poor things were attracted to the drama of it all in contrast to the drabness of their daily lives.
So why deny them? Why not stumble out to them appearing as he felt – as haggard, physically sick, red-eyed, unshaven? What object in pretending, when they knew as well as he did that his dreams and fine ideals were crashing round his ears like toppled castles?
‘Because you have no choice,’ he told himself as he reached for a beeswax candle. ‘Because control and occupation are all you have to hold your life together.’
Sickness was rife still in the downland with more patients than ever needful of attention. In the Chalkdean barns there was corn yet to be threshed, milled and sent out to the needy. There was a large estate and household to be managed, a child to comfort and distract - and letters, vital letters to be written and received. So much around him still demanding his attention.
Since his wife’s and brother’s embarkation, Rafe had paid agents to report on their ship’s slow progress down the Thames and round the Channel coast – agents in the Transport Offices at Deptford, at Woolwich, in Deal and finally at Portsmouth. For four days, he was informed, the Lady Augusta had been storm-bound in the Downs harbour near Deal; and by the time word reached him that she’d sailed again in company with a naval convoy, Rafe knew she must already be at anchorage somewhere off the Isle of Wight. The last news of her had come from Portsmouth. She’d lain nearby at Mother Bank for a full three weeks, it was reported, to make up her numbers from the local convict hulks there, and to await a second convoy to protect her from French privateers to the latitude of Gibraltar. A number of sick convicts had been sent ashore at this her final English port of call, according to the agent’s letter. All men, and not one of them a Corbyn.
But still the village women smiled and bobbed, held out their calloused working hands.
‘Well now, Mercy?’ he heard himself enquire with a solicitous concern. ‘So how are the rheumatics treating you this season?’
‘No more’n middling, Doctor, ye know me. But I’m scratchin’ along somehow – an’ none the worse for askin’, Sir, that’s sure.’
‘So what is it to be then? A silk bobbin, or a candle?’
‘A candle if ye will, Sir.’
With something hot and raw behind his eyes as if his brain was bleeding.
‘And Mrs Copper, what for you?’
‘Aye the same; a candle if ye please, Sir.’
With their eyes constantly upon him, watching for the outward signs of his despair.
And all the time her ship was sailing southward, taking Ellin from him; churning his hopes behind it in its wake.