Molly died in 1835 at Greta, Anvil Creek, aged 74.
William Morgan died about 1828.
Their son James became a Chelsea Pensioner and lived in Northumberland.
Donald Traill was privately prosecuted for murder, but acquitted.
John Macarthur was declared insane in 1832 and died two years later. He, and more importantly, his wife Elizabeth, started and promoted the Australian woollen industry.
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Molly existed, and many details of her life can be verified by searching original sources. Parish Registers give certain dates and names, and so on, but even these can be not entirely accurate. They do not, for example, specify to which families with the same names people belong, so I have had to make a 'best guess' based on probability and incomplete information.
Bare facts are like a skeleton, there is no flesh to portray the real body, but from the bones some things can be deduced, such as the height, age, former injuries. From the facts we can verify we can make some assumptions, but the rest must be fiction, guesses and conjectures.
Inevitably there are gaps in the story, and the bare details give little indication of character or emotions. The basic facts can be interpreted in different ways. Was Molly an unregenerate, promiscuous and bigamous thief who deserved transportation, or was she innocent and wrongly accused?
The first interpretation is supported by her subsequent second conviction and transportation for theft, the 'marriage' to Thomas Mare when William Morgan was, for all she knew, still alive, and her later acquisition of government cattle when she had become a landowner herself.
She could equally have been innocent, perhaps only of the first charge of theft, and afterwards taken to a life of crime in order to survive in a difficult world. She was clearly attractive to men, and in those days and with the atrocious conditions on board selling their bodies was often the only way women convicts could survive. Women on the Neptune were treated as concubines for the crew. Her actions in giving money and helping other convicts and settlers, and her final reputation as the Queen of Hunter Valley tend to indicate some innocence, or a belated conversion to honesty.
I am indebted greatly to Frank Mitchell, headmaster of Diddlebury School, who wrote about her history. His account was the first I read, and as he had access to many of the original documentary sources, and those I have checked have almost all been accurate, I trust his version rather more than some of the fanciful 'biographies' to be found on the Internet.
He says her sister Ann died aged six, but I found no register entry to support this. There was an Ann Jones who died aged sixteen, so this could be a misprint.
He did not know where Molly had been put on the Neptune, suggesting Portsmouth or Plymouth. According to the records (which are admittedly not accurate as several women were listed on more than one ship) most of the women were embarked in the Thames, some from Newgate, the rest from county gaols. The places where they were convicted were mainly in South Wales, the Midlands and the North. Roads from these places would be better to London than to Portsmouth, and Plymouth would have involved a much longer journey. That so few of the female convicts on the Neptune came from the southern counties inclines me to believe they were embarked in London. It suits my plot to have this so, as so many things happened between this embarkation on November 11th and the start of the journey on Jan 19th.
While incorporating much I have been able to discover of the facts, the interpretation is my own, and the gaps have been filled by invention. I have tried to imagine how Molly would have felt, and what her reactions would have been in the early years, given what we know of her actions in later life.
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Marina Oliver has written over 75 novels, all are now available as Ebooks.
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Bella is forced, by her illegitimate half brother Henry, to marry the abusive Edward who is emigrating to the new settlement in Virginia.
After a brutal wedding night she escapes, but Henry finds her and forces her to sail on the next ship.
While caring for her sick baby brother Toby and his nurse Alice, she is helped by Adam, a wealthy settler already established on a James River plantation, and they fall in love.
In Jamestown, however, Edward, by threatening Toby, forces Bella to go with him to his own recently acquired plantation.
Can she ever escape from his cruel domination?
*
Catriona's father is lost at sea, and her mother loses the will to live, leaving her with her Uncle, who wants to marry her to a much older, stern newcomer.
Cat is determined to escape, and does so with the help of her cousin. But she needs to hide from them all, until she can go to her father's Dutch family in Amsterdam.
Expert in fabric printing and making her own dyes, she persuades Rory Napier, struggling to manage his uncle's linen manufacturing in Glasgow, to employ her to supervise the new processes.
Though she is successful, their relationship is stormy. Can they succeed despite the problems and the rivalries?
*
When the Marquess of Stafford wants to clear his land of crofters to make way for sheep, Jamie and Flora Lennox, with their baby daughter, decide to go to Nova Scotia to start a new life.
As tacksman, Jamie feels responsible for the people of his glen, and helps those who wish to go to Glasgow, either to seek work there or emigrate.
The leaving of the glen is heart-rending, and soon more disasters strike.
Can they survive in this new, raw land? Will they find happiness in their new lives?
*
Life is grim in the Staffordshire colliery town for Marigold Smith and her sisters, and when she has the chance to go into service in Oxford, she welcomes it.
There she meets and falls in love with the wealthy Richard Endersby, but their happiness is destroyed when the Great War separates them. Her family's problems force Marigold into making heartrending choices, but she fights to help them survive, and to keep her hope alive.
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