The Potato Factory (46 page)

It took several hours before Tiberias Potbottom regained consciousness. In truth he had been conscious a full hour before he allowed that this be known. By which time he was aware both from the pain and from the talk about him, of the mutilated condition of his back.

Joshua Smiles, more pale than usual and in a state of considerable distress, sat beside him praying, imploring the Lord Jesus to save his precious and diligent servant. By the time Potbottom was prepared to squeeze the hand of his mentor, to indicate his return to life, he had well grasped the nature of his own dilemma, and had concocted a story which explained his situation in the dispensary. This took several hours to emerge and came out in half-coherent snatches, whether due to his latent condition or a deliberate ploy is not known. By the end of that day he told a story of having been given some strange draught. 'In one o' them
bodegas
what they's got and where I stopped to partake o' a bowl o' the strong black coffee what they serves with the juice o' the cane plant.'

'Mescaline!' Joshua Smiles announced triumphantly. 'The juice from cacti, a most stupefying narcotic. They put mescaline in your coffee!'

'That be dead right, Mr Smiles, sir!' Potbottom exclaimed, delighted to have a name to add to his plot. 'Mescaleen eh? That be for sure as I were not aware o' what befell me after, save to know that me purse be stolen and a valuable gold chain and medal were taken from about me neck. Though how this came about I truly cannot say, I awoke in me own cabin in the early part o' the mornin' not knowing how I got to the ship and with me head poundin' something horrible and feelin' in every part a great discomfort.'

'And the lacerations to your back, can you perchance venture as to how they happened?' the surgeon asked.

'That I can't, sir. How it come about I haven't the slightest knowledge of,' Potbottom replied and then continued where he'd left off. 'But I looks at me watch what I had the good sense to leave aboard and sees it be time for me to attend dispensary.' Potbottom looked up beguilingly. 'As is o' course me daily duty and one which I takes most conscientiously.'

'Indeed, we are all most grateful for your diligence, Mr Potbottom,' Mrs Barnett said.

Potbottom ignored her remark and continued. 'I makes me way to the hospital when I perceived me back were hurtin' somethin' horrible, so I goes to make a physic of anodyne for the pain, like.' He looked soulful. 'That be all I remembers, nothin' more till I feels your blessed hand in mine,' Potbottom choked back a tear, 'and hears your generous prayers to the Almighty for me safe recovery, sir.'

'God has been good, Mr Potbottom. He has restored you to us to continue your good works among the heathen and the rapscallions.' Joshua Smiles paused and slowly shook his head and a small smile played upon his lips. 'We are all mightily blessed by His glory and compassion.'

He clasped his hands together and, looking up at the bulkhead as though the Almighty could be clearly seen seated upon its heavy cross beam, commenced to pray loudly and fervently, giving thanks for the recovery of God's most precious child, Tiberias Potbottom.

Mary's luck had held. Potbottom, whatever he thought, could make no open enquiries as to his misadventure for fear that his addiction to opium be discovered. While he subjected Mary to a great deal more persecution, confiscating her twice weekly ration of port and sending her back to work in the prison closets and to scrubbing and holystoning the interior of the prison and the decks, he could find no way of proving that she was the one who had brought about his undoing.

At each subsequent bloody pusover he had subjected Mary to the indignity of a front and rear inspection, though he was unable to discover the whereabouts of the chain and medallion. Once, when he had undertaken a surprise medical inspection, he had found her prisoner's purse and confiscated it only to find it disappointingly empty.

In fact, Mary had removed the sole of her boot, hollowed it out and placed her precious luck within it. She wore her boots all day and at night, as was the habit of the prisoners, she tied them about her neck so that they would not be stolen.

*

Weeks of great tedium passed as the
Destiny II
neared her destination, the tiny ship often climbing to the crest of waves that saw it half a hundred feet above the level of the ocean, and then sinking into the trough of a great wave where the ocean rose to the height of the topmast. The great swells of the Indian Ocean caused many to return to their previous sea sickness, but they were fortunate that they did not encounter a great storm at sea. Of the trip, it can be said that it was not remarkable but typical of any other transport carrying female convicts. Two prisoners had died, an aged woman who was said to have a condition of the heart and an infant only just weaned, who had come aboard with bronchial pneumonia. They were most ceremoniously buried at sea with a consideration they had not known in their mortal lives.

Perhaps the one thing that might be said to have been remarkable about the voyage was the schooling Mary had given during the hot afternoons. Though schooling was encouraged on convict ships, it was usually conducted by an educated free passenger or the surgeon-superintendent. It achieved good, though often somewhat dubious, results, for the art of reading was often construed as having been achieved when a prisoner could recite a psalm while holding the Bible and appearing to be reading from it.

Mary's teaching was different, for she taught the rudiments of writing as well as reading, insisting on phonetics until her pupils could identify each letter with a sound and connect them with another to make a word. By the time they had reached their destination, fifty-five of the one hundred and twenty-six female prisoners who had come on board without a knowledge of reading would disembark with an ability to read individual words from a page and connect them aloud and continuously to make sense. Though this was done slowly and often with great movement of their lips and expostulations of breath, it was nevertheless the precious gift of the printed word.

Thus Mary, though the surgeon's report would place her in a most reprehensible light, was regarded by the female prisoners as a person of goodness, the best most of them had encountered in all of their unfortunate lives, while the children openly loved her. She was not the sort of pious personage they had been accustomed to regard as a saint, some creature whom they might have seen within the configurations of a stained glass window, with an aura about her head, clad in a diaphanous gown with her feet floating above the ground. Or some curate's daughter who saw her cunny only as an affliction and a shame and not as a delight. Nor did she resemble, in the least, the Quakers of the Ladies' Committee.

Mary was like themselves, hardened by the vicissitudes of a poverty-stricken life, though unlike themselves, not beaten by it. She was a woman who spoke her mind, had a tongue as harsh and foul as many, but who could not be easily led and who intuitively knew her own mind at all times. She could laugh and cry with the best of them and, most importantly of all, she showed that she believed in them.

Mary had demanded their attention at learning and had done so with a mixture of patience, encouragement, mockery, harsh words and foul language. The stories she read to them over the long, hot afternoons had opened their minds. And her great spoken story of their own voyage across the seas to the furthest ends of the earth had given them hope for the future. The women would be eternally grateful to Mary for bringing light into their lives where before there was only ignorance and darkness.

On their last night at sea Ann Gower called all to attention in the prison. 'We 'as one last duty to perform afore we goes ashore termorra, ladies!' Ann Gower shouted. 'Would ya be kind enough to be upstandin', then!' The women climbed from their berths and stood jam packed within the corridor, smiling and nudging each other for what they knew was about to happen.

'Afore we goes to Gawd knows where in the mornin' we 'as a crownin' to do!' Ann Gower then produced a crown made from paper mashed with flour, covered most decorously in cloth sewn about with small, diamond-shaped patches for the rich jewels. It was embroidered with tiny flowers, bluebells and crocus, daisy and honeysuckle, garlands of cottage roses and all the flowers of England. Many loving hands had worked on the crown in secrecy and with great skill to fashion it quite perfectly.

Ann Gower held the beautiful crown high above her head for all to see and they sighed with the pleasure of their own creation.

'Mary Abacus, we crowns ya 'er Royal 'Ighness, Queen Mary, Queen o' Van Diemen's Land!'

There was much clapping and laughter as Ann Gower placed the crown upon Mary's head. 'Blimey, it don't 'arf grow fast do it?' she said, pointing to Mary's scraggy fair hair, now two inches grown about her head and a most unsightly thing to behold. 'Soon be able to braid that ya will, honest!'

She looked about her and shouted once again, 'Never were a crown what was better deserved to an 'ead!' There was a roar of approval from the prisoners and Ann Gower waited for it to die down before addressing Mary.

'One question please, yer most gracious majesty! 'Ow come Potbottom got twenty-five beautiful, deep an' permanent stripes upon 'is back? Be it a coincidence that it be the same number as there is whores on board plus countin' yer good self?'

There was a loud gasp from the surrounding women, and then an excited murmur.

'Shush!' Ann Gower called and waited for the excitement of this new speculation to die down. 'Be it also a coincidence that you was called from the prison to do duty in the 'ospital that very night and that we knows about yer talons o' brass?'

There was a hush as everyone waited for Mary to answer. She was silent for a good while, the beautiful crown resting on her head. Then she looked up and her lovely green eyes seemed to dance with the mischief of her thoughts. 'I can't say as I knows and I can't say as I doesn't know, it be a secret, Ann Gower.' She paused and then gave a little laugh. 'A royal secret what's treason to tell about!'

There was much laughter and banter at this reply and Mary had never felt as loved or wanted. She knew herself to be a leader and now she also knew she had the courage to demand from life more than she had hitherto been given. She looked at the women surrounding her; like them, she was going into a new life and fate would play its hand, but she was different from them too. She would make her own luck, for she had seen the distant shore not as a place of servitude, but as a conquest, a place to be taken with a full heart, where the shadows of the past were leached out by a brighter sun. She would live under a higher sky washed a more brilliant blue, a heaven against which green parrots flashed like emeralds. She could make something of this place. Tomorrow, when the
Destiny II
sailed the last leg of the voyage up the Derwent River and she went ashore in irons with Ann Gower, she would wear Ikey's Waterloo medallion about her neck. For she knew, whatever happened to her, she would survive, the words
'I shall never surrender'
inscribed not only on Ikey's medal, but forever on her heart. They would bring Mary Abacus to a new and astonishing beginning upon the Fatal Shore.

Van Diemen's Land

The
Destiny II
lay at anchor in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel waiting for the morning tide to take it up river to Hobart Town. They had lain at anchor during the night, for the often shallow and treacherous channel waters, even though they appeared calm under the bright moon, were not to be embarked upon beyond sunset.

The morning was a smoky colour with a thin mist shrouding the surface of the water, and the prisoners, gathered on deck for muster, clasped their arms about their chests against the cold. They had been roused at dawn with the familiar 'Rouse out there! Turn out! Turn out! Huzza huzza!' and the words new to their ears resounded through the boat: 'Goin' ashore, huzza for the shore!' This was the last muster of the voyage and the cold could do nothing to conceal their excitement.

On the starboard side the Black Rocks and the cliffs of Bruny Island appeared most forbidding and their uninviting nature seemed to pervade the leaden-coloured landscape on either side of the ship. But when the sun came up not much past the hour of six, the sky was soon a clean high blue, somewhat darker than the tropical skies they'd grown accustomed to, and colder, a touch of ice in its high dome. The incoming tide was beginning to slap at the stern of the
Destiny II
when Joshua Smiles, with the ever-present Potbottom at his side, stood to address the female prisoners.

Smiles constantly rubbed his palms down the front of his frock coat, avoiding direct eye contact with any of the prisoners. From his coat he produced a tiny square of paper folded many times upon itself, which he commenced to unfold in a slow and tentative manner, each corner lifted as if he expected the words to leap off the paper and harm him. The women in the front row observing him at this silly task began to giggle. Finally, with the page fully opened, he began to read in a most lugubrious voice.

'I, Joshua Templeton Smiles, surgeon-superintendent of the prisoner ship
Destiny II,
do on this 18th day of October in the year of our Lord 1827 declare...' He glanced up from the page, his height enabling him to look over the heads of the assembled convicts towards an unseen Hobart thirty miles away. Then he slowly brought his eyes back to the pages held in his fist. '... that with the notable exception of a handful of refractory and turbulent spirits you have behaved well and I have marked your reports accordingly.' He paused again and cleared his throat. 'But for two prisoners who have shown themselves to be profligate wretches and designing blasphemous whores throughout this voyage.' Pleased to have surmounted this last statement he continued more slowly. 'I have therefore made recommendation to His Excellency Colonel Arthur, lieutenant governor of Van Diemen's Land, that with the exception of these two prisoners, you all be placed into service with the families of settlers as soon as this may be conveniently arranged.'