Your thoughts are interrupted by the strangest feeling that someone is staring at you. You turn around, and you are right – a sailor is looking at you. He has the brownest skin you’ve ever seen, and his eyes are black and shiny as river stones. He wears a cap and has a long, wiry beard. He nods and smiles, showing broken teeth, and you can’t help but smile back.
‘Tsk!’ a woman says bossily into your ear. ‘Don’t look at the lascars!’
You turn to see a woman, in convict dress as you are, pursing her lips as haughtily as a queen.
‘What’s a lascar?’ you ask.
‘That man is one! Sailors from foreign lands. They’re here to do the cooking and cleaning, tend the animals and so on.’
‘Animals?’ you ask eagerly. ‘What kinds of animals?’
The bossy lady rolls her eyes, as if she’s been at sea for years and can barely bother to inform a simpleton like you of the facts. Then she says: ‘Haven’t you heard them from time to time? The free settlers on our ship are bringing them out to the colonies. There are a few dozen chickens, and even a horse, I believe.’
A horse! You resolve to search out the lascar and make him your friend. You catch his eye and wave. He cheerfully waves back.
‘Stop that!’ snaps the woman. ‘There’s no point in talking to them – they speak some other language, and what’s more’ – she drops her voice, scandalised – ‘they pray to a different god. Imagine it! If I were captain of this ship, I certainly wouldn’t let any heathens aboard.’
‘Well, it’s lucky you’re just convict scum like the rest of us then, isn’t it,’ you retort. The woman’s face turns red as a beetroot. But you’re not finished yet. ‘I’d much rather talk to that lascar than you – even if he doesn’t speak English, I’ve a feeling he’d make more sense than you.’
The woman gives an outraged ‘harrumph!’ and storms away.
You catch the lascar’s eye again, and impulsively you make a neighing sound, pointing at him and nodding.
At first, he looks utterly perplexed. Then he breaks into a grin and starts nodding too. He gestures to the hold of the ship, below deck at the front, and makes the neighing sound back to you. Then he chuckles.
You can’t stop smiling.
YOU AND THE rest of the convicts are put to work in shifts every day, scrubbing decks. It’s tough labour – but no tougher than other work you’ve done before.
One part of your day that you look forward to is the school lessons. Some of the convicts who can read and write are appointed as teachers to the ones, like you, who can’t. You never had a chance to go to school, and you’re pleased that you’ll arrive in Australia knowing your letters and numbers.
A few days into your journey, the lascar picks you out of your working group.
‘Need work … animals,’ he tells your overseer, and he leads you across the deck. ‘You like horse?’ he asks you.
‘Oh yes!’
‘Horse poo?’
‘Oh! Well …’
He laughs. ‘My name Amal. You help with animals. Yes?’
‘All right,’ you agree. You climb through a trapdoor in the deck, down some steep stairs, into the animals’ enclosure. The stale air reeks of manure and animal sweat. You see chickens in cages against one wall, and in the back pen, a lovely female palomino horse. You gasp.
You and Amal get to work mucking manure out of her pen and grooming her. Although the horse stands on the ground, a kind of hammock goes around her body to cradle her and help her keep balanced as the ship rises and falls. As you look at the hammock, you can’t help but notice her huge round belly.
You ask Amal: ‘Is there …’ – you think of how to phrase it in simple English – ‘a baby in there?’
He grins. ‘Yes! She is mother. Baby coming in two month.’
AFTER A FEW weeks of this work, the horse, who you’ve named Betty, has bonded with you: she whinnies happily even just hearing your footsteps and voice coming down the stairs with Amal.
‘When baby horse comes,’ says Amal, ‘very dangerous. Mother, baby, maybe die. You can help?’
Oh Lord, you think. You don’t know the first thing about birth or foals. You can’t believe Amal would trust a convict girl to help in a life-and-death situation – but he knows and trusts you now, and so does Betty. There’s no way you’ll let either of them down.
‘I’ll be there,’ you say.
FIVE WEEKS LATER, a storm is tossing the boat about like a rabbit in a dog’s mouth. Women are holding on to their narrow bunks and moaning. No one is sleeping tonight.
The hatch that leads up to deck is firmly padlocked shut from the outside. It’s almost pitch-black down here, but it’s noisy: as well as the moans, there is thunder, sailors shouting, timbers groaning and waves slapping the hull. But there’s something else, too: an inhuman screaming that makes the hairs on your neck stand on end. There’s a distant clattering of hooves, then another drawn-out scream, which you realise must be Betty – and that she must be in the throes of giving birth!
You can’t bear to think of Betty going through this without you, but the only way out of here would be to break open the trapdoor and make your way across the stormy deck above to the hold.
‘Sarah,’ you exclaim, leaning up to the bunk above you, ‘would you help me to break out of here, if I asked? I told Amal that I’d help him with Betty when she gave birth, and just listen.’
Sarah reaches down and grips your hand. ‘Amal will come and get you if he needs
