Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  And so, six deaths when two would have done. Six deaths which more deck time and more air, and even the company of men, might have reduced. In the tropics, let me assure you, he did not want any of the women brought up to sleep on deck, to relieve the temperature below! Better to have the girls in one hundred and five degrees below than the chance of a sailor distracted in the top-gallants by a sleeping thigh.

  You’ll see the damn fool’s log, and it will read sweetly and plausibly, I know. But I urge that the idiot should never be allowed to board a transport again. I don’t know what he thought he was preventing, after all. For the women, so rigidly impeded on deck, about the galley and elsewhere, sought unnatural solace from each other.

  This reference to ‘unnatural solace’ was probably jaundiced, Dimp decided the tone of the letter was that of a choleric old bugger! It was clear though, from reading the letters of Sarah Bernard, that women enduring profound misery had been driven into fierce sisterly loyalties. It was there in the potent friendship between Sarah Bernard and a convict named Alice Aldread, twenty-three years, described by Bugle as ‘fair’ who had been judged guilty of murder and her sentence altered to transportation for life.

  Dimp found this fierce friendship compelling, and Bernard’s letters indicated that she was an ardent but not a flippant woman, the opposite of the bawdy Cockney trollops of convict mythology. Already Dimp wanted to use their rawness and eloquence to fuel the texture of the Bettany story. She foresaw herself handing them to an actress – ‘This is background reading for your character.’ On a set somewhere in the bush, in a clearing beneath hard ridges, with curlews calling. She foresaw herself writing to Prim about them too. ‘This also is a third world woman, because the past is the third world.’

  Letter No 1, SARAH BERNARD

  Alice

  My God that I should find myself lacking your company and surrounded by these people here! Cramps in my belly and behind a wall nine feet high. They have put us for protection in a place which is called a shelter but has features of a gaol or a madhouse and is known as the Female Factory. It has taken two days coming up the river from Sydney to be locked up here on the charge of being defenceless. The chief of the constables on the boat which brought me here is a fellow named Long who told me: It’s to save you from the world, which is a worse world here than anywhere else.

  Coming here Long knew the camp spots though – the little beaches and the rivulets that come down the face of the rocks. He had a large fire made and we who were women from both a Sheerness and a Dublin ship slept to the left – the constables to the right – on soft ground in gentle air at the start of what here is named winter. I slept well under the government of Long with barely a sway of the earth beneath a head grown accustomed to the sea and its movements. But ever missing Alice your friendly caress.

  The Female Factory of Parramatta. A name which may be taken either way. The place where women are crafted. The place where women craft themselves awaiting liberty. I believed myself safer in Long’s boat than in this loud bedlam of Irish women – they hoot at a person in their tongue and call out all the time to Jesus and Mary when they speak English. Constable Long did not permit rum in his long boat. But there are some who have it here, brought in by some garrison soldier of the 40th Regiment or some constable.

  Of this place I can tell you – Alice Aldread – that your supposed madness – which is solely grief – would go unnoticed in a general babble. And I do not remember the face of my husband McWhirter the soldier, nor the face of Mr Duncannon my esteemed former employer nor the face of Surgeon Bugle. I remember Alice Aldread whole – every margin of skin and every little blemish of purple under the pale. You who have murdered a husband and must be separated out by Bugle into your own class of one to eat different rations – cornmeal instead of wheat – no tea – no comfort of tea – in some hut for lunatics! You who would guard me here so easily under the weight and authority of your murder! Having your prettiness and bright eye and your youth which saved you from the more awful but quicker punishment. The short jump as against the long sea.

  If here you would be separate from the mass of us for having given Prussian Blue to your awful old husband. You would be a special category 3 and in your own cell. But I know I could get to see you here. For we women of highest category are permitted much movement and live in large downstairs rooms with broken windows. The Irish women who are the majority here drop off half the word and call them the Tories. We are crowded in the east Tory and I have talked of noise already. But you would not believe the noise. You would make it all less loud – less howling – less laughter and acid glaring. You have done Alice Aldread what these little chemise thieves and bacon stealers have not done! They are peasants who will make up some fable about me I can tell. And you could stop them – these loud women young and aged who walk in the aisle between the beds like women born and grown and come to womanhood here. The air they have is that they have inherited hell and are sure of their title to it.

  A watchful little red-complexioned woman and prisoner who has a girl child of nearly two still at breast has the cot on one side of mine. This in the corner of an islet of cots jammed up solid by the wall across from broken window panes. Mrs Pallmire our Matron has us arrange and spread them either side of the Tory for the visit of Surgeon Strope on Thursday each second week. Surgeon Strope is on the look out in God’s crow’s nest. But not the same high crow’s nest Surgeon Bugle was in. Surgeon Strope does not exhort us to cast our souls upon the Saviour as bread upon water. He thinks the worst of us straight off and says to us: Do not be mistaken that congress between women makes those who practise it mad.

  That is his story. I think congress with men is an equal especial cause of lunatics and all the women know this but say nothing. He does not bother noticing the broken windows. They have been broken in some rage by this or that woman. They will be broken again thinks he.

  So on one side of me a large woman with a reddish weathered face and on the other side this reddish little one with the child. They look at each other – the little reddish one wanting the larger one’s protection and the larger one in envy of the watchful nature and the good cheer of the little one. For the little one with the child is not unkind nor kind. Holding her child she is looking for a sign – I think – which will be given neither by hand nor tongue but will be seen at once by all. A sign that it is at last the right thing for her to speak to me at length. I swear she is looking in my direction with a kindly ghost of a smile but when I return the gaze she is all at once looking at the ceiling. She smokes very daintily a little clay pipe which she holds like a flute between her tiny brown fingers. The memory of some summer’s evening when she was in the open smoking and watchful – the memory of smoking between dances – it’s still there in her fingers.

  The larger woman speaks to me in a spirit of instruction – thus:

  Aren’t you an unlucky little woman to be here?

  She says little though I’m as tall as she.

  The way she speaks says more that they are unlucky to have me than I am to have them. She says:

  There are no more women sent to New South Wales now. They send all the English whores they need these days to Hobart.

  This is not meant as a joke. She and her little red friend then start talking about me in their language with much movement of their eyes. It is a language in which no Bible or book or scholarship has ever been written and it defeats me. And they swing back into the mother tongue now and then without thinking.

  Will she keep us awake with the colic again? the big red woman asks of the gazing infant of the little one. There is a musical lilt there – in her talking to the child – which I find pleasing. The big red one notices that.

  You’re looking at a woman who has been here some six or seven years, she tells me.

  I turn my eyes to the little mother with pipe and infant and half a smile but she of course looks away on the instant:

  The big creature says: Not my friend. I
mean myself. Returned to the Factory when my master gave me rum at Christmas. He is at large but here I am held safe from the evil influence of a kind of fellow I wouldn’t mind running into again some day. As soon as I can manage it.

  She is not telling me all this for some idle purpose. She is telling me that I might know she is a serious woman with her own notable history. She says: You are looking at a woman bidden to the needlework class of Her Ladyship the Mrs Governor. Did you ever know that of Her Ladyship? That she gave out needlework classes to such as me?

  As expected I say No. The big woman nods as if she knows that much about me – that my ignorance can’t be helped.

  The big red one says: Then before your dear woman Mrs Governor went off to die she had thirty of us better reputed over into the parlour to learn the needlework. I was one. I have been at this place longer than Mrs Governor’s been a ghost. You might see her coming up to the window to look for girls for the sewing.

  I wait for laughter or a big red-eyed wink. But none comes nor does the little woman titter. So perhaps they believe it and have seen the spirit there at the broken windows. But again it all goes to prove the standing of the big red one.

  She says: I been here as long as that. Eternal rest give unto her. I still do the sewing. On the other hand, you’ll be one of them laundry.

  Indeed I have already been placed to work in the laundry.

  But I tell her I have needlework.

  The big one says: But not Mrs Governors needlework. That means you are one of them laundry.

  So she goes on instructing me on how she stands at the peak of the Factory and I somewhere far down its slope. In this Hades of women and against the face of the big one red as a tyrant I hanker for your softer face and surer speech. How I wish I could face her off with you, for needlework cannot stand up against murder – against lovely fair unblemished killing of husbands.

  On Saturday Parramatta’s dirty linen comes here in baskets on the back of a wagon. Shirts – shifts – chemises – all worn close to the bodies and soiled by the bodies of the lambs who live beyond the walls. Linen from the bed of the visiting surgeon and from the solitary bedroom of His Excellency – he thinks it is improving and a good example to have us do his laundry. Shirts from his bowed neck. Heaps of linen from others too. Linen grey not from bad laundering but from sweat and journeys. Table linen which has been wiped across lips and here gravy darker than blood and there some sauce of berries purpler than a king.

  On the floor below the Tory – in a cellar reached by steps from the outside of the building – we boil the colony linen in copper tubs. The women around me are all turned pink and the linen a dead lolling sopping white. Under our caps our hair hangs limp across our view and we flat-iron for days upon days. Perhaps a day and a half of boiling and four days at the flat-iron – that is my labour Alice. Women who have been longest in the Factory or have influence are set to fold and pack the hampers.

  Yesterday evening the big red one comes and sits on my cot uninvited. I was flushed and ugly from ironing:

  If in your buckled shoes – says she – if in your buckled shoes, I wouldn’t comb my hair again little chicken. Let it hang is what we say. Rub starch into your cheeks or dirt. It is best. Mrs Matron Pallmire has an eye on you.

  Why should I let my hair hang? I ask her but she does not tell me. I am full of fear and need your counsel my Alice. It is useless but I cry anyhow: Can you not come?

  One of the great lumps of constables comes to the laundry now and tells me I have a guest in the garden. I ask who it is and he says just one of those Sydney constables. It seems that to him they are an inferior kind of constable altogether.

  I go and find the yard wide and empty at this hour. It was once gardened by an earlier Matron but is now unloved. By a plain wooden table where women sometimes gather sits Constable Long in blue jacket and canvas boots. I am happy to see him for he helps my hopes by treating me carefully – this very leathered man. The sun of this place has worked on a complexion which had once been faint and fair. There are a few scars of salt sores on his lips. For when not bringing women upriver in open boats he has laboured in the great harbour at Sydney Cove.

  He says I look flushed and I agree I pretty well am flushed. He has an easy smile. He tells me he has a letter from my friend. I ask him, Friend? Since I did not know I had mentioned your name Alice.

  He tells me: But yes the murderess. She is they reckon insolent and thus they have put her in the asylum for now. My own patrol took her up the river to the madhouse, and I told the warden that she was calm in the boat. And she was exactly calm. It is loss of hope I believe.

  But I knew they had put her amongst the lunatics, I told him. It happened as we parted at the Dock Yard. They called it hysterics and all the knowing women about the place said she’s for Tarban Creek.

  Long nods and says he was there again lately and looked in at her hut and let her write a note for me. He says: She is apart from the murder a better class of woman.

  I ask him how he remembered who I was.

  He says: Oh I remember you. You said to me as we loaded you – you said you were a very dangerous woman. You see you thought I might do you harm and wanted to frighten me.

  I say: I do not remember saying dangerous. It was a foolish thing to say.

  He says: In my own way I am dangerous myself. Though innocent too if judged by the court of heaven.

  He hands me your letter then. The letter of my Alice. It is written on medical orderly book paper. You tell me in it you do not know why you so acted up – a sort of rage – you looked at the strange place and felt that rage. You do me the honour to say I was the last certain thing you had and were being taken off you. You say: Have no doubt you are much thought of by this girl. Not everyone wants to know a Prussick Acid poisoner reprieved from hanging but you never held back from being my dear friend.

  I look up aching from your good letter. Constable Long tries not to look keenly at me but is looking so.

  I ask him: When she comes here will they let me see her? I ask him though I know he has no power.

  He tells me: The rule says no – they want to save you from the influence of bad women.

  So I argue: Her husband rushed to poison her too. He took arsenic for his health. He was a being of poison. He was embalmed in his own poison. And – and on top – he fed her on nothing and upbraided her like a child and flaunted his ratty old will at her to show how he would forget her in death.

  Long says in conviction: It is always like that in murder. The world just does not know how it is.

  It seems he had once thought of murder. He looks away.

  If I murdered someone – I tell him – they’d surely hang me. I look capable of it – though I’ve never had occasion. But they could not hang a sweet thing like Alice.

  That’s right he said and with a slight smile. They could not hang her.

  And what about you then? I ask him growing bold. Your soul? How does it stand with what you did?

  Oh I sit pretty quiet on what I did. Threatening notice against some hound of a landlord. Hammered it to a door. Life sentence. And now I’m seven years in and have a ticket to seek employment.

  I tell him: How I desire a ticket of leave. But tell me! Threatening notice does not sound like a life sentence.

  Oh it might be in Ireland. If you put the notice on the door post and broke the door in.

  Whose door then?

  The Marquis of Sligo! But not in that county. At his door in Westport Mayo.

  His air of freedom shines for a second in his eyes. I want that thing – to catch it as a person catches a disease. To be scratched on the arm with it and a sore to grow. A scar to form over this part of me named the Female Factory.

  He tells me: You are a decent woman. I intend to press on any master of mine your merits as a housekeeper. For I am sure you possess them. I will if adequate be overseer at a homestead. But you could be its mistress of management.

  He did not dare lo
ok at me and was half-ashamed of drawing up his simple plans so boldly in the Factory yard. But it was no place for them. They hung above the weeds like redeemed Christ and his saints in glass hanging above our heads at Saint Anne in Manchester. There I first began at the urging of my father my inspections of religions and I think that he and I both wanted Christ to see me as a true English girl and not a girl of the shul and synagogue. Yet though I loved the Church – people whispered but they did not sniffle and rage at God as if he was a customer in some little shop – though I loved St Anne I saw the eye of Christ had an absent look. I was not in his schemes. He was concerned with bigger fish. And the plans of Long had the sniff of plans meant for bigger fish too. A sprat such as me would not be dragged up in that net of glory!

  Says I: I wish to breathe any air but this. I wish Alice to breathe too.

  Oh may that day come for you Alice and for your true friend

  Sarah

  Letter No 2, SARAH BERNARD

  Marked by her: A LETTER NOT TO BE SENT

  My dearest Alice

  I write to you but also do not write to you. For this is not a letter I wish you to read, but I cannot prevent writing it or thinking of you as the being I would best like to receive this catalogue of miseries. As his last act before he goes to the west and over the mountains – lucky fellow – to what must be better country Long the convict constable has said he will see you get a scribble from me. But not this scribble.

  The little red mother Carty gives me more time of day than previous. She tells me something of the time when the Visiting Justice had the Pallmires thrown out of this post and pious people named Mr and Mrs Chapman from London put in their place. But the Irish women – the big red woman and the little one and all the rest – did not like the pious people since they tried to wean them of their superstitions such as Rosary beads and all that magic. Those women – including my little mother who sleeps at my side and whose baby girl I sometimes comfort at night – would rather have their superstitions than fair and just treatments. Or else they simply do not believe anyone can give them fair treatment and prefer the devil they know. Many of these women find it easy to be loud and to profane and utter divine names raucously. Even now I hear them yell Thundering Jaysus, Jaysus Mary and All the Saints. They put the Chapmans to flight with such roaring of the name of the Christian Messiah. And whether or not they had a beloved sister amongst their fellows they played nonetheless at prison caresses and flash speech just to scare the Chapmans off. The pious two told the Governor that the women of the Tories were depraved beyond uttering and unredeemed. The Governor sent them away to find work in a better place if such exists here or anywhere else. And Mr and Mrs Matron Pallmire – being at the least used to the Factory – were put back in the post. When I observed her upon coming here Mrs Pallmire looked as if she had been here forever since Pharaoh’s days. She carries the air as she enters – a plump and pretty woman though nearly fifty years – that she knows every twitch of this place.