The Penny Heart Read Online Free PDF

Still, it had been as good as a church-gathering, to get a good eyeful of all the other lags.
    As yet, Mary had scant interest in the other women; she wanted no pals. They were either rivals to be battled with or trulls to be elbowed aside. She stood alone and watchful, the habitual stance of a fly-girl like her. It wasn’t women who would keep her alive but men – or to begin with, a strong, obedient, hard-knuckled man. She was still well togged in her striped taffety, and she kept her white skin clean. Already some of the flightier young girls had paired off with the crew, but she reckoned a sailor a poor investment, no sooner bedded than he’d abandon her and sail back to Blighty.
    The topmost lags swaggered by the rail, hard-bitten mobsmen scarred by murder and villainy. Their molls would be slaveys, cursed and beaten, and shared between mates. She would have to wager on a fellow from the lower orders.
    For sure she could always do worse than Jack Pierce. When he had given her the odd hopeful smile she had returned it sweetly. At first she’d thought him nothing but a flat – a sailor transported for claiming a mate’s prize money. But he was bonny, with his long fair locks and china-blue eyes. And he had a lucky shine to him; some Church Society had picked him off the streets and paid to have him trained up as a seaman. Though he was no more than twenty, he was well-liked by the crew and the redcoats. As for the navigation and such-like he had learned, she’d already calculated how useful that might prove. Within the day she had him snared. When he kissed her and told her she was his girl, she wondered if he was that square he thought her an innocent. Day by day she wound him in as tightly as she could, turning herself into a prim girl, in need of a sweetheart’s protection. Whatever it takes, she told herself, you’ve got to clamber to the top of this stinking heap.
    Then the wild South Seas had destroyed such pleasure-trip fancies and gawping at the men. For four months they were soaked in stinking green slime, while the vessel was shaken like a rat. ‘Damn you God, let me die,’ Ma Watson had groaned like a litany, and a chorus agreed. The drinking water swarmed with worms, the biscuits with weevils, the bilges stank with rancid rations and dead rats. Rumours raged that the Navy Office had given orders they all must be drowned on a certain day, so long as it was far from England. Battened down in a waterlogged rolling coffin, they would believe anything. Almost eight months from England, an island was sighted with a name that sounded like Demon’s Land, but a black squall hit them like a battering ram and there was no safe landing. To a chorus of miserable wailing, a young wife gave birth to a baby girl, as dead as a doorpost, which was cast overboard the following day. Next, a feeble-minded pedlar woman managed to bang her head and drown herself in the filthy swill. She lay dead for three days in chains before the stink of her persuaded them to report it, so fierce was the clamour for her ration. The food had dwindled to a cup of gruel each day, with a speck of fish swimming in it. That was their lot, all they had to keep body and soul together.
    It could have been day or night in the pitch-black hold, when old Ma Watson started up her wailing. ‘Is that all there is? How’m I to live on that slip-slop? I’d give me two eyes for a slice of apple pie.’ She was brain-cracked, but spoke for them all.
    Then Tabby Jones joined in, holding forth on the making of the best apple pie: the particular apples, whether reinettes or pippins, the bettermost flavourings: cinnamon, cloves, or a syrup made from the peelings. Slowly, groans of vexation turned to appreciative mumblings. Someone else favoured quince, another lemon. Apples, they all agreed, though the most commonplace of fruit, did produce an uncommon variety of delights: pies and puddings, creams and custards, jellies and junkets, ciders and syllabubs.