After her flogging and the week spent in isolation, Mary became the subject of great admiration among the convict women. They had greatly missed Mary reading to them in the hot afternoons and the wry and cryptic comments she made about many of the morally uplifting books the Quakers had so generously supplied. Mary's readings of faraway places and of great journeys undertaken allowed for pictures to grow in their minds. And when she read of the lives of great men, for there were no biographies of women, the prisoners felt as though they too were a part of the grand story of the human race and not merely the scum and sweepings of a society which had rejected them. The children on board would clamour around her the moment she was free from her work, plucking at her skirt. 'Please, Mistress Mary, a story!' they would beg, pestering her until she would relent and gather them around her in a corner of the deck and read to them from Gulliver's Travels or from the books left for children by the Quakers.
Mary would also sometimes talk of the great journey they were themselves making. She would recount it, not as though it were themselves taking part, but as if it had happened to a group of intrepid adventurers cast adrift and sailing at the merciless whim of the winds to the outer reaches of the universe. Mary's story filled them with pride and hope at their own resolve, and told how the women in this strange and magnificent adventure would one day tame a wild land. Their eyes would shine as she envisaged how they would make this wild frontier a safe place for their sons and daughters, who would be free men and women possessed of handsome looks, sturdy of body and mind, prosperous in every circumstance.
Mary had also taken on the task of running the school for those who wished to learn to read and write, and her pupils, including the eleven children on board, had missed her greatly. For while Mary was a strict task mistress, they had almost all progressed and took great confidence from the new light which was beginning to shine within their minds.
Potbottom insisted that Mary still be allocated the most menial of tasks for her morning duties. She persuaded the matron of the prison hospital to allow her to be a cleaner, this being in return for reading religious tracts to the patients for half an hour each day. The matron, Mrs Barnett, readily agreed, as Mary had been prepared to accept the most onerous of tasks, to clean out the water closets and to act as the laundry maid.
Mrs Barnett had no cause to be suspicious as Mary's request was a common one, given that rations for the sick were greatly superior to the food served to the other prisoners and included preserved tinned vegetables and rice. Those prisoners who were fortunate enough to work in the prison hospital would sometimes benefit from the scraps and scrapings left in the pots or on the plates. Or, on a propitious day they might come upon half a mug of beefy broth with golden gobbets of fat swimming on its surface, or a portion of food left by a patient who was too poorly disposed to eat. In contrast to their usual fare, which consisted of salted beef or pork, or a helping of plum pudding, all of which was served with a portion of weevily ship's biscuit, the heavenly taste of an ounce of tender preserved beef, a mouthful of peas or a spoonful of rice gathered a few grains at a time from several plates, was well worth the lowliest task required in the hospital.
Mary soon ingratiated herself with Mrs Barnett, who mistook her beautiful readings of the religious tracts to mean that Mary had seen the light and had herself embraced the Lord. Such was the tenderness of her rendering of the gospel that often those who lay sick in the hospital would weep openly for their sins and beg to be granted God's forgiveness. Mary, who could see no harm in it, would happily grant salvation to those who so earnestly sought it. But when one of her redeemed souls passed away from bronchial pneumonia she worried that her credentials as a Salvationist might not be acceptable at the heavenly portals, and that the poor woman might be sent elsewhere.
Matron Barnett, impressed with Mary's sanctity and often enough herself brought to tears by the readings, soon came to see her in an entirely new light. Mary was taken off cleaning the hospital closets, excused from laundry duties and made a convict assistant to the matron. It required only one small step for Mary to be allowed to be the convict assistant who slept in the prison hospital at night, and this privilege was soon enough granted her by the redoubtable Mrs Barnett. Mary had managed, in the space of four weeks and on the eve of the ship's arrival at the port of Rio, to find herself exactly where she needed to be when Potbottom entered the prison hospital each morning. All she now needed was a few moments access to the dispensary.
The ship lay anchored at sea and then sailed into Rio harbour with the evening tide as the sun set over the magnificent mountains that rose above the bay. The prisoners were allowed a brief glimpse of this paradise before they were sent below, the hatches closed while the jack tars stood with the hawsers and the capstans.
They would stay a week to make repairs and take fresh supplies on board. Of this land of church bells and beautiful dark-skinned people, of bright parrots and macaws and baskets laden with exotic fruit, the hapless convict women would see nothing. They would spend the entire time in the convict prison with the hatches closed.
Fortunately they benefited from excellent beef and fresh vegetables and fruit, in fact all the fruit they could eat, so that Rio became for them a place of fruit. They tasted the exotic mango and the pink-fleshed guava, supped on melons with tiny jet-black pips set into blood-red meat and gorged on papaya, a fruit with a soft, sweet orange flesh that proved most calming and efficacious to constipation and agreeable to the digestion.
At night, across the water, they could hear the drums beating out a rhythm that sent the blood racing and sometimes, if they lay awake late at night, a lone troubadour would come to the dockside and with an instrument resembling a mandolin play love songs in the strange, haunting language of the Portuguese. Playing to the silent ship, his brown naked chest, dark hair and seductive smile, all glimpsed in the moonlight by those who were fortunate enough to have a porthole facing the dockside above their berth, invited them to indulge with him in hot, tropical lovemaking. The convict women allowed that Mary should take her position at the porthole closest to the singer so that she might tell of him in future days, and weave his songs, laughter and the soft, sensuous swinging of his hips into her stories as they journeyed onwards to the hell of Van Diemen's Land. Rio would always remain in Mary's mind as a place of exotic fruit, love songs and of a young man of giant stature and ebony beauty.
On the evening of the final night in Rio, for the Destiny II would sail on the morning tide, the captain and surgeon-superintendent were dining ashore with the British consul when the police brought to the ship a cartload of seven sailors who had been gathered from the premises of a notorious brothel on the Rua do Ouvidor. They had been in a fight and from all appearances had received the worst part of it. Their blouses were red with blood from multiple lacerations to their bodies. Potbottom had also gone ashore, ostensibly to sell the prisoners' quilts and handiwork, and was not yet returned to the ship. The only medical authority on board was Mrs Barnett, who was summoned by the officer of the watch and instructed to make the hospital ready. Mrs Barnett called at once for all assistance, which included the convicts who worked in the hospital, and so Mary was called to duty.
The men were in an advanced state of drunkenness having consumed greatly of the local firewater, the deadly aguardiente, and had not yet come to their senses or seen how badly lacerated and beaten they were. Great confusion reigned in the hospital as the matron tried to clean away the blood and stitch and dress the stab wounds. Mary too was kept busy as several of the jack tars started to vomit. She was on her hands and knees cleaning up beside the dispensary door when she observed it to be open. Mrs Barnett had rushed in to fetch medication, and in her haste to get back to the injured sailors had left the door ajar.
Mary glanced quickly around to see the whereabouts of the matron and her assistants and, observing that they all had their backs to her, she hurriedly entered the dispensary. The candle the matron had earlier lit was still glowing so she lifted it and quickly found what she wanted, the blue bottle she'd seen Potbottom use. She sniffed it and established immediately that it was laudanum. Mary soon found the pewter box from which the surgeon's assistant had obtained the opium, and she transferred a sufficient quantity into the bottle of laudanum to make a most powerful mixture, in fact twice the strength she'd observed Potbottom make for himself. No more than a minute had elapsed before she was back on her knees cleaning the hospital decking some distance from the dispensary door, only to see Mrs Barnett enter the dispensary, blow out the candle and lock the door. Should the matron's life depend on it, she would have sworn that no person but herself had entered the dispensary.
It took several hours to attend to the wounded men before they were dispatched back to their own apartments on the ship. Mrs Barnett and her hospital assistants were in a state of extreme fatigue and when Mary had made them a cup of tea she bade them goodnight and returned to the prison. The hospital contained no prisoners at that time, as none had been poorly disposed with the ship's arrival in Rio. This meant Mary could not sleep in the hospital, and she dared not ask Mrs Barnett for fear that she might refuse or, worse still, agree and then
