by Meg Keneally
‘She’s hardly likely to have confessed to a murder she hadn’t yet committed,’ said Eveleigh. ‘And your work is complete, Monsarrat. You have her statement. Send it to Daly and we’ll be done.’
‘Yes, but it simply occurs to me, sir, that her correspondence might touch on other abuses going on at the Factory, which might in turn lead to other lines of enquiry. We want to make sure the right person pays for the crime, as you said.’
Eveleigh sighed. ‘You know, I always complain about time-serving clerks. Those who simply do what I ask of them and not one iota more. Those who never show any initiative. Oh, how I wished for somebody with a bit of spark, a bit of willingness to look further, do more.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘It is not a compliment, Monsarrat. Now that I have you, I’ll take the time servers back any day. Very well then, might as well see what you can find. But please don’t act on the information without telling me first. We don’t want to embarrass the management committee. At least not without a plan.’
‘Ah. Speaking of the management committee – there was a man at the Factory, sir. The guard on the gate told me he was on the committee, but he didn’t introduce himself and I got the strong impression he would have been offended if I’d asked who he was.’
‘Describe him, if you please.’
So Monsarrat did – the flamboyant clothes, the crenellated hair. He left out the poetic mouth and cruel eyes.
Eveleigh said something under his breath. It sounded like a more extreme version of the curse used earlier by the penitentiary guard.
‘You, Monsarrat, have had the honour of making the acquaintance of Socrates McAllister. Not a man whose attention you want to attract.’
Something in Monsarrat’s stomach decided, then, to slither and turn. McAllister he had heard of. McAllister was dangerous. McAllister was a magistrate. But he wielded more than judicial influence. His uncle, Philip, was the most powerful landowner in the district, a grazier whose profitability dwarfed that of surrounding farms.
Philip McAllister, not one given to sparing the feelings of others, made no secret of his disappointment in his nephew’s business skills, and Socrates, who had once had a place reserved for him at the centre of the growing McAllister empire, was now relegated to managing one of his uncle’s smaller farms. The McAllister name was sufficiently respected to procure him not only a seat on the bench but also on the boards of various civic institutions, including the gaol across the street and the Factory. So while Socrates was the least of satellites to his uncle, he still wielded considerable power. And in the absence of the governor, all of those with at least some power were stretching and flexing, testing to see how much influence they could appropriate before the new man arrived.
Respectable though McAllister looked, there were rumours, if one cared to listen – and Monsarrat always did, prided himself on being a silent receiver of information – of under-the-table deals involving rum, fabric, wool. Suggestions of usury. Rumours too of threats, and beatings administered at arm’s length – in this place where the majority of the free folk used to be otherwise, it was not hard to convince a man to accept a monetary inducement for bringing street justice to another.
There was even talk that a particular man known to be late in his payments to his creditors – and whether those creditors included McAllister could only be guessed at – had returned home one evening and found the structure which had housed him until that morning had been pulled to the ground.
‘Well, I shall make sure I stay out of his way then, sir,’ said Monsarrat.
‘You might not be able to. If he takes an interest in you, you will suddenly find him around every corner. Let us hope he’s decided you’re not important enough to be bothered with. Especially since he’s become an ally to the good reverend now.’
Monsarrat had heard that the Reverend Horace Bulmer had achieved his long-held ambition of a seat on the Parramatta bench. An alliance between him and McAllister, especially one directed at Monsarrat, was not one he wanted to contemplate.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Eveleigh, ‘if you can stay out of his way, it will be all to the good. There have been … consequences … in the past for those who haven’t.’
Monsarrat wanted to ask what those consequences were, and on whom they had fallen. But Eveleigh held up his hand. ‘Enough of that for now. You have my permission to spend one hour in the cellar – God rot you and your cursed luck, getting out of this heat – however, if you’re unable to find anything in that time, that will be an end to the matter.’
Riffling through the papers down there, Monsarrat tried to find Grace’s transportation records and any letters she might have written to the governor. He didn’t know when Grace would have written the letters, which was just as well as the documents weren’t organised chronologically. Nor by surname, he discovered when he went to look for Os and found them scattered between Ws, Qs and Bs.
After a while a rudimentary system of organisation began to emerge. The documents relating to the Female Factory appeared to have been jumbled together on one section of the shelves. He got them down, one by one. The ledger which listed women transferred to the Factory had Grace’s crime as ‘stealing cloth’. Hardly surprising when the overwhelming majority of the Factory’s residents were transported for crimes committed in the name of survival: a great many women had stolen at the behest of an unforgiving hunger, particularly in the summer grain-for-cash season, only to find that hunger had followed them here.
The records shed no light on the details of Grace’s crime, but they did note that she was 5 feet 6 inches – tall, very tall – with brown hair and blue eyes. That her occupation was seamstress. That she was tried at the Galway assizes and was sentenced to transportation for seven years. And that when she was transported, she was 27 years of age, unmarried and childless.
Monsarrat ignored the rest of the ledgers and concentrated on the loose documents, looking for her name. When he saw it, he stopped. Flipped through the pages, seeing how much was there.
There was letter upon letter. Ten, twelve, fifteen pages’ worth. All addressed to his Excellency the Governor. And no note had been made on them as to whether His Excellency had replied. Monsarrat thought it unlikely.
‘I was transported for a crime I did not own,’ Grace wrote. Of course you were, thought Monsarrat. Weren’t we all.
And since arriving here, many other women and I have been punished twice – once in being transported, and a second time by being assigned to the Female Factory, where our rations are kept so short that one of our sisters has recently expired.
The superintendent, meanwhile, visits the most degrading and depraved abuses on the women, particularly the younger ones. I have attempted to prevent this on numerous occasions and have paid by being beaten, deprived of food, and with other punishments.
If women are to help build this colony then I despair, for they will be in no fit state to do so with the current hard treatment they receive.
I beg Your Excellency to intervene, to turn out the corrupt and brutal administration of the Factory so that those of us who wish to make honest lives here once our sentence expires can do so unimpeded.
Grace had been protecting the younger women, then. Or trying to. Had been punished for it, and kept doing it. Monsarrat couldn’t help but admire her. He asked himself whether he would have the courage to do the same in her position but decided he did not wish to know the answer.
She was more, though, than an instigator, a stirrer of pots. She had used the language of her rulers in that letter. To be able to do so, after a relatively short time in the ranks of writers, showed a nimble mind. It was possibly a symptom of her Irishness, as he knew from Mrs Mulrooney that the Irish could show an eloquence more marked than their education might warrant. It was also, he thought, evidence of a finely honed protective instinct. She, like he, was prey adopting the coloration of the predator.
Judging by the date on the letter, it was sent befor
e Eveleigh took up his post. And in any case the documents dated after Eveleigh had arrived were in meticulous order. He wondered if his employer would know whether the letter had been replied to. There were more, too, detailing beatings and head shavings and rapes and starvation punishments – a parade of horrors. Whether or not Grace had received a reply from the government, through her letters she posed a question for Monsarrat. Had she, in her attempts to protect the women, taken subsequent steps to ensure they would never be molested again?
Chapter 8
Sophia Stark had remained lodged as a hazy though promising presence in Monsarrat’s mind during his time in Port Macquarie. It was the sort of remembrance that took grace and beauty for granted, in a way which might not be credible in a relationship with a real woman daily encountered. Sophia radiated even more lustre when compared with Port Macquarie’s prostitute Daisy Mactier, whose ageless and flat face had defined Monsarrat’s dull existence while Sophia decorated his dreams.
He had called on Sophia a week after his return to Parramatta. The shrubs which guarded the small pathway leading to the front door of her guesthouse were as neat as he remembered them. He had chosen a mild evening. The unnatural daylight which persisted beyond the dinner hour was beginning to fade, and flights of white cockatoos were trailing the tips of their wings across the sky and rousing the bats. It would probably have been more convenient for Sophia had he knocked at the door of the Prancing Stag during the day, when the majority of her guests could be relied on to be out. He couldn’t countenance it though. Midday’s enveloping heat would have called forth a slick of sweat he did not want her to see. He feared it would remind her he was a beast of burden, even if his tool was a pen rather than a hammer.
He had been imagining her reaction when she set eyes on him. A gasp, colour rising at her throat. Perhaps a tear. Most certainly an embrace.
‘Oh,’ she said when she opened her door to him. ‘I thought you had another year.’
‘Yes,’ he said, trying to keep any peevishness out of his voice. ‘I thought it might be longer, in point of fact. I had made myself rather indispensable. But I did a service to the commandant, who procured me a ticket of leave. I am now as free as you.’
She was looking at him oddly, her head slightly to the side as though she was trying to see whether he was in fact there and not a shimmering falsehood. She seemed, after a few moments, to have satisfied herself of his solidity, and she opened the door wider and gestured him inside.
They went into the parlour, passing a small sitting room swamped in opulent swagged curtains, with fussy, flocked wall-paper and inexpertly stuffed with cheap furniture modelled on what Sophia believed one would find in a country house. A neatly dressed man sat there with a copy of the Sydney Chronicle on the table in front of him.
Sophia’s private parlour was small and tidy like everything else associated with her, though slightly cramped. They sat on opposite sides of the table at which they had once drawn the chairs close together, shoulders and elbows touching.
‘Have you employment? Now that His Majesty has ceased feeding you?’
‘Well, His Majesty has contented himself with paying me rather than feeding me. I am clerk to the governor’s private secretary.’
Both of Sophia’s eyebrows shot up, but her mouth did not share their surprise, her lips pinching into a sceptical moue. There was a sharpness to her that he didn’t recall, a jagged quality which she had tried and almost – almost – succeeded in sanding away.
‘The governor’s secretary,’ she said. ‘But we’ve no governor, do we?’
‘We do, in point of fact. He just happens not to have arrived here yet. He will, however.’
‘And when he does, you’ll be working for him?’
‘Well, for his man, yes.’
‘And do you intend to make yourself as indispensable to him as you did to the commandant of that place they sent you to?’
‘Certainly. It is the only path to safety.’
Her mouth relaxed, and she attempted a ladylike smile which hid her teeth. She rose, then, as did Monsarrat, unfolding his long legs from the small ornate chair he had been sitting on, unwilling to stay seated while she was on her feet.
She walked over to him and slowly, as though performing a ritual which depended on absolute precision for a successful outcome, reached up her arms and put them around his neck, drawing his head down towards her.
‘Welcome back, governor’s man,’ she said.
The luminous Sophia who had lived in Monsarrat’s thoughts in Port Macquarie could not, however, coexist with the hard-edged, pinched woman whose eyes constantly slid to the side. He tried, with increasing desperation, to call the angel back. She must surely have existed. He would not have risked his freedom for her otherwise. And if she was there once, she might be again. A few nights a week he tried – arriving after dark and leaving before dawn to avoid Bulmer’s maniacal surveillance – to excavate her, visiting the bedroom which had once sent him into a fever but now had little more allure than Eveleigh’s office.
While the night-time visits were only just beginning to feel like a dry duty, Monsarrat would have done almost anything to avoid Sunday mornings.
The stroll with Sophia down Church Street was pleasant enough, as one was never frustrated by unmet expectations of transcendence on a stroll to the Sunday service. The church was a serviceable building, the genteel sandstone of the main building flanked by two towers made of bricks shaped by convict hands. There had been no attempt to make the spires on these towers conical, and certainly they lacked the flourish of the stone spires of his boyhood, rising in unapologetically flat, triangular planes to meet at the crosses that topped each one. Even the church had its guards, its overseers.
Monsarrat’s freedom brought with it the right to occupy one of the pews to the rear of the church, looking over devout heads towards the box pews reserved for Parramatta’s first families. He would have been happy, actually, not to occupy any part of the church but he was still a man on the margins, and chipping away at the walls that separated him from the Eveleighs and McAllisters required visible attendance. He told himself it was necessary to give him access to the people and places he needed to reach to carry out his duties, on which his continued freedom depended. He did not like to stand directly in front of another possibility – that he hungered for the approval of those who would never give it, who viewed him as irredeemably corrupted.
The walk to church with Sophia had, however, become less agreeable over the past few weeks, it had to be said. Sophia’s conversation had previously ranged over a wide landscape, from politics to art to the doings of the local worthies. But now her focus was becoming increasingly restricted. She wished to know when they would marry.
Monsarrat had no objection to the idea of marriage. The respectability he had hungered for since his days posing as a lawyer in Exeter was very possibly closer than it had been since his arrival in the colony, and a wife would do no end of good in enhancing it. But, he told himself, he wanted to be more settled, more assured, before he married. He ignored, when it insisted on presenting itself, the image of him and Sophia in her cramped parlour, silent, joined by God but separated by a slab of polished mahogany and a wall of mutual disappointment.
In Port Macquarie, he had mapped the invisible traps, the people who could be engaged and those best avoided; he had constructed a barricade of words and become adept at changing his form to meet each circumstance. That place, hemmed by mountains and sea and river and containing 1500 souls – and only a few dozen who had any power over him – had been easy to negotiate once the pitfalls had been identified.
Parramatta was a different proposition. An outpost, certainly, but one with far more people, and closer to the seat of power. And the greater the proximity to power, he had learned, the greater the danger. Six weeks had been barely enough time to identify the most obvious of pitfalls, let alone to intuit the hidden traps and construct a way to bypass them. Then, of course,
there were the traps laid by those who saw no benefit in approaching things obliquely, the people whose antipathy was easily won, and worn like a cloak. And chief among them, alongside Socrates McAllister, was the Reverend Horace Bulmer.
Bulmer had very firm views about the nature of convicts, their character and whether it could be improved. He was of the belief that a criminal gene existed, and those unlucky enough to receive it from their parents were irredeemable, doomed to bring to life the criminal acts which were already engraved on their souls.
Monsarrat would very much like to ask the reverend one day how this belief sat beside the assertion that God gave man free will. That would have to wait, though, until his position was unassailable. Bulmer, like the superintendent of police, felt that those who had had the benefit of education should know better, and that someone who could take their advantages and turn them to evil ends was dangerous enough to deserve the noose.
Monsarrat was exceptionally grateful that Bulmer was not in charge of convict punishment. But he was in charge of St John’s Church, and he used that position to ensure Monsarrat got at least a little of what the clergyman felt he deserved: the clerk had been the framework upon which the reverend had laid the fabric of a great many of his homilies. There had been two alone since Monsarrat’s return, since his presence in the church, seated and free, had caught Bulmer’s attention and inflamed his indignation, never far from the surface at the best of times.
Monsarrat saw no sign that the reverend was tiring of his subject.
‘Much will be expected from those to whom much is given,’ Bulmer had screeched last Sunday. ‘But what can be said for those who take those gifts and instead of dedicating them to the Redeemer and to the service of man, dedicate them to sin and Satan? Are they not more culpable than those who were given no gifts to begin with?’
