Wattle Circus: Chapter Sixteen
Almost six months later, Abigail’s ship was finally set to sail. Her experience while waiting in Newgate was something she would wish to forget as soon as she could, but she was unsure that was ever going to happen. The memories of those dark, closed cells, the mass of weak, hungry inmates, being given endless, pointless tasks and arbitrary punishments would be hard enough to expunge, but the thing that stayed with her most vividly was the ever-present stench.
Her initial fear as to what may await in Van Diemen’s Land – she, a girl who had never set a foot outside London – diminished in proportion to her growing desperation to escape Newgate.
September 17, 1846 was an unseasonably cold day. The summer months had been unbearable in the closeness of the prison, but it was as though such stifling days had never been. Fog rolled in off the gently lapping water and shrouded the port, bearing the sickly sweet smell of rotting garbage and seaweed. Its ghostly whiteness enveloped the milling humanity and obscured all but the bulkiest shapes – the warehouses behind them and the hulking ship towering above. Abigail overheard somebody murmur that it didn’t appear at all fit to sail, but another voice answered that this floating wooden prison, the Elizabeth & Henry, had already journeyed to their far-flung destination once before.
What had it seen, Abigail wondered. This mysterious place about which she still knew so little. She had only ever heard mention of Van Diemen’s Land once or twice back at Horlicks, when Mrs Broadstock had been at her angriest and threatening girls with banishment there – the worst fate she could conjure. But in her long wait at Newgate, Abigail heard all sorts of terrifying tales about this strange land.
She learnt of the sun that could cook your skin and flesh right off you in a day and the snakes that grabbed their tales in their mouths and rolled around like hoops, stopping only to bite people along the way. She heard of ‘kangaroos’; twice the height of the tallest man alive and wielding claws as long and sharp as cooking knives. Then – perhaps most terrifying of all – the black savages who painted themselves in the blood of young children they put into giant pots and ate for dinner.
A maudlin snaking of prisoners had begun boarding the long gangplank to the creaking barque tied to the dock, pushed along by a surly handful of guards bearing heavy sticks. Abigail was near the end of the line, having been one of the last to arrive at the port. She was experiencing a strange admixture of relief at being free from Newgate and trepidation at what was to eventuate. Since the morning she had left on her errand she had never again seen anybody from Horlicks, nor – to her gut-wrenching despair – her kindly aunt.
Abigail had no idea if anybody even knew where she was, whether she was still alive, was aware that she hadn’t simply run away of her own accord. She could not believe the severity of her sentence, but there were many girls and women she had met in Newgate who were off to Van Diemen’s Land having committed little more offence than that for which she was being sent, be it the theft of a handkerchief, a teaspoon or some bread cooling on a sill. Many of them did, it was true, proclaim their innocence, just as Carringford had mentioned. Abigail knew this couldn’t be the case in absolutely every situation and therefore had no idea who to believe.
This didn’t mean she felt they deserved such a heavy form of punishment for their indiscretions. She was shocked to find that many of them were mothers who were being taken away from their families. She knew all too well the pain of the child who was unable to be with their parents.
Abigail had formed only one relationship she could really call a friendship in Newgate, with a young boy name Finn. Finn had only just turned 10 and was awaiting transport for having stolen some bread. He had at first told her a story about picking up a loaf just as a loud bang went off nearby and been so scared that he had started running without thinking about it, only realising when it was too late that he had absconded with the bread.
But after they had spent more time together, Abigail telling Finn about what had happened with her and the boy – a face she would never forgot until the end of time – who had framed her. Finn had eventually admitted that he had known he was taking the bread, but remained unapologetic.
“My sister, she was so sick,” he said. “None of us had any food, which was all right for me, but I couldn’t see her like that. Just a baby, crying her poor little soul out. She was so hungry she wouldn’t have lasted the night. As it was, she never made it, but I know I at least tried.” At that stage Finn had six younger siblings, all sisters. There had been two older brothers before he was born, but both had been taken, one with cholera the other tuberculosis. The last he heard, passed on to him from another prisoner who had been visited in Newgate by a man who lived in the same tenement as his family, there were only two sisters left. Neither was given any real chance of being in this world much longer.
