Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

On learning that Richard’s first cousin (once removed) was the rector of St. James’s, Bristol, and discovering that Morgan was an educated, courteous and apparently sincere fellow, Mr. Johnson gave him his pass and provisionally arranged that Richard should marry Elizabeth Lock during next Sunday’s service, when all the convicts could see how successful his policy was.

As soon as the sun went down Richard walked from his bark shelter to the women’s camp, presented his pass to the sentry and asked whereabouts lay Elizabeth Lock. The sentry had no idea, but a woman hefting a bucket of water overheard and pointed to a tent. How did one knock on a tent? He compromised by scratching at the flap, which was closed.

“Come in if ye’re good-looking!” cried a female voice.

Richard pushed the flap aside and entered a canvas dormitory which would have held ten women comfortably, but instead had been made to house twenty. Ten narrow stretcher beds were jammed cheek by jowl down either long wall, and the space between was littered with impedimenta varying from a hat box to a mother cat nursing six kittens. The inhabitants, having eaten at the communal cooking fire outside, were disposed upon their beds in various stages of undress. Thin, frail and indomitable, all of them. Lizzie was on the bed owned the hat box. Of course.

An absolute silence had fallen; nineteen pairs of round eyes surveyed him with keen appreciation as he threaded his way between the impedimenta to the hat box and the dozing Lizzie Lock.

“Asleep already, Lizzie?” he asked, a smile in his voice.

Her eyes flew open, stared up incredulously at the beloved face. “ Richard! Oh, Richard my love!” She launched herself off the bed and clung to him in a frenzy of weeping.

“No tears, Lizzie,” he said gently when she quietened. “Come and talk to me.”

He guided her out, an arm about her waist, all eyes following.

“Half your luck, Lizzie,” said one woman, not young anymore.

“A quarter of it would do,” said her companion, very pregnant.

They walked down to the water of the cove near the temporary bake-house, Lizzie hanging on to his hand for dear life, and found a pile of quarried sandstone blocks to sit on.

“How was it after we left?” he asked.

“I stayed on in Gloucester for a long time, then was sent to the London Newgate,” she said, shivering. It was beginning to be cool, and she was wearing a skimpy, tattered slops dress.

Richard took off his canvas jacket and draped it around her emaciated shoulders, studying her closely. What was she now, two years past thirty? She looked two years past forty, but the beady black eyes had still not given up on life. When she threw her arms around him he had waited for a surge of love or even of desire, but felt neither. He cared for her, pitied her. No more than those. “Tell me all of it,” he said. “I want to know.”

“I am very glad I did not stay long in London-the prison is a hell-hole. We were sent on board Lady Penrhyn, which carried no male convicts and no marines worth speaking of. The ship was much as it is in the tent-shoved together. Some women had children. Some were heavy and bore their babes at sea. The babes and children mostly died-their mothers could not give them suck. My friend Ann’s boy died. Some fell on the voyage and are heavy now.”

She clutched his arm, shook it angrily. “Can you imagine, Richard? They gave us no rags for our bleeding courses, so we had to start tearing up our own clothes-slops like this. Whatever we wore when we came on board went into the hold for here. In Rio de Janeiro the Governor sent us a hundred hempen bread sacks to wear because no women’s clothing reached Portsmouth before the fleet sailed. He would have done us a better turn to send us some bolts of the cheapest cloth, needles and thread and scissors,” she said bitterly. “The sacks could not be used for rags. When we stole the sailors’ shirts to use as rags they flogged us, or cut off our hair and shaved our heads. Those who gave them cheek were gagged. The worst punishment was to be stripped naked and put inside a barrel with our heads, arms and legs poking out. We kept washing the rags as long as we could, but sea-water sets the blood. I was able to make a few pence by sewing and mending for the surgeon and the officers, but many of the girls were so poor that they had nothing, so we shared what we had.”

She shivered despite the coat. “That was not the worst of it!” she said through shut teeth. “Every man on Lady Penrhyn looked at us and spoke to us as if we were whores-whether we were whores or not, and most of us were not. As if to them, we had no other thing to offer than our cunts.”

“That is what many men think,” said Richard, throat tight.

“They took away our pride. When we arrived here, we were given a slops dress and our own clothes out of the hold if we had any-my hat box came, is that not wondrous?” she asked, eyes shining. “When came Ann Smith’s turn, Miller of the Commissary looked her up and down and said nothing could improve her slovenly appearance-she had naught, being very poor. And she threw the slops on the deck, wiped her feet on them and said he could keep his fucken clothes, she would wear what she had with pride.”

“Ann Smith,” said Richard, in agonies of anger, grief, shame. “She absconded soon after.”

“Aye, and has not been seen since. She swore she would go-the fiercest monsters and Indians held no terrors for her after Lady Penrhyn and Englishmen, she said. No matter what they did to her, she would not truckle. There were others who would not truckle and were sad abused. When Captain Sever threatened to flog Mary Gamble-that was just after we boarded-she told him to kiss her cunt because he wanted to fuck her, not flog her.” She sighed, snuggled. “So we had our few victories, and they kept us going. Samsons that we are, it was always the women who broke through the bulkhead to get in among the sailors, lusting after men! Never the men doing the lusting or the breaking in, saints that they are. Still, never mind, never mind. It is over and I am on dry land and you are here, Richard my love. I have prayed for nothing more.”

“Did the men come after you, Lizzie?”

“Nay! I am not pretty enough or young enough, and the first place I lose weight is where I never had any to begin with-in the tits. The men were after the big girls, and there were not a lot of men-just the sailors and six marines. I kept to myself except for Ann.”

“Ann Smith?”

“No, Ann Colpitts. She is in the next bed to me. The one who lost her baby boy at sea.”

Darkness was falling. Time to go. Why did this happen? What under the sun could these poor creatures have done to deserve such contempt? Such humiliation? Such misery, beggared even of their pride? Given sacks to wear, reducing themselves to rags to get rags. How could the contractors have forgotten that women bleed and must have rags? I want to crawl away and die…

Poor wretch, not young enough or pretty enough to attract a satiated eye-what a time of it the sailors must have had! And what kind of fate does Lizzie face here, where nothing is different from Lady Penrhyn save that the land does not move? I do not love her and God knows she does not stir me, but it is in my power to give her a little status among old friends. Stephen might say that I am playing God or even condescending, but I do not mean it thus. I mean it for the best, though whether it is for the best I do not know. All I do know is that I owe her a debt. She cared for me.

“Lizzie,” he said, “would ye be willing to take up the same sort of arrangement with me that we had in Gloucester? Protection in return for your looking after me and my men.”