And so Katie-May was gone. I expected to feel sadder than ever before, but I was just empty inside, like maybe my heart’d give up and faded away without even going and breaking proper first.
We was getting closer all the time now to Parts Beyond the Sea, but things was going on just the same on that ship. Now we was sailing through the Southern Oceans. Things was right enough the first few weeks after we’d left Cape Town – back when Katie-May’d still been with us – but we come to the gales eventually, and as soon as we did, I saw why they’d kept us so busy with sewing a new set of sails for the poor Marquis of Hastings. I wasn’t sure how just one spare set was gonna be half enough to get us to where we was heading.
It was cold now. That was the first thing. The cold come in on the air and it come in on the water, too, because once the gales started up, the sea didn’t stay where it was meant to be no more, and giant waves come bursting over the sides and into the ship’s belly faster than crew men and convicts together could pump it out. The noise that sea made when it got caught in the decks was just about the scariest noise I’d ever heard – a wave’d go rolling down one end of the ship to the next, loud as thunder as it come past, then it’d disappear off before rolling back again, and it wasn’t no easy thing on the nerves of a girl.
So with all the wind outside and all the water inside, us convicts was a wet, freezing, miserable bunch. Even them coarse and vulgar folk what was normally always shouting come to be silent as the dead, and pretty well all you could hear was the chattering of teeth and the groaning of the ship as it lurched forwards on waves what was mountains high and no less rocky, neither.
That old sea was still pouring over the ship and down through the floors, even though the top deck was full up of crew men trying hard as they could to pump it away. Not even a crowd of twenty or thirty shouting men was enough to fight a sea what’d got itself worked up into something as fierce as all this.
So there wasn’t no stopping the water, and there wasn’t no way of us keeping ourselves dry, so my clothes was wet and stuck to me. Then the sea found its way into all the cooking stoves, so there wasn’t no hot dinners to be had, neither. It was a miserable sorta time we spent in them Southern Oceans.
*
The storm blew itself out after a week or so. The sea calmed down and for a while things got better, though no one wasn’t never much happy on board The Marquis of Hastings, because it was no happy place to be. But misery was an easier sorta thing to live with when it wasn’t cold and wet.
I never much saw Katie-May’s sailor man after Katie-May’d jumped off, except for once, when I was on breakfast-making duties in the kitchen, and he walked past me on his way to somewhere else. As he did, his arm brushed mine, but he didn’t look at me or do nothing. I wasn’t even sure if he knew it was me, but then I reckoned he must of done, and he just knew better than to speak, because he was the sorta man what’d only speak to a girl if he had favours to ask her and he wasn’t gonna be getting none of em from me.
I wondered if he was feeling sad or guilty inside about Katie-May going off and dying like that, but then I s’posed he probably wasn’t. All the crew men on this ship seemed to reckon a girl what ended up in a difficult way was a girl what needed beating, and any other bad things what happened as a result was a punishment off the Lord.
So the rest of the journey got itself a pattern, what was two weeks of calm seas and then a storm, and that pattern went on and on repeating till everyone’s nerves was broke and we was starting to get sick in our spirits. Then, right as I was thinking to myself how I wasn’t gonna be able to make it through the next storm, the air started getting warmer again. The sun was back and there come to be a sight of land ahead of us. One of the sailors told us it was an island – just a small one without no name – and it was quite near to Van Diemen’s Land.
Well, at that, a whole lot of cheering and happy went up among the convict folk, because we’d all come to thinking we wasn’t never gonna get off this ship. We went sailing on by that island in calm seas, and there was a hot sun shining, and all the sailors and crew men on board started behaving like their spirits was light and their burdens’d got lifted.
And so we went on sailing, though it was another week or more before the land appeared again, and we could all of us see how we was heading straight towards it: a wide, sandy bay cut in the middle of the rocks, and all over them rocks looked wild and green.
‘Sullivan’s Cove,’ an officer told us.