Mrs. M

by Luke Slattery

  I retired to a first-floor room I shared with Margaret, and when I opened the curtains to the night sky I saw Macquarie standing outside on the lawns. He, too, was gazing at the heavens. This romantic gesture endeared him to me immensely; he seemed, despite the difference in our age, a man after my own heart. I would have dashed outdoors to join him if Mother had not been so keen-eyed and Father so easily provoked.

  As the week rolled on after the funeral the gathered clan seemed to thin — even though this was not the case — and in the last few days it felt as if there were none in the world but us. We read: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson for me; Walton’s Angler for him. We walked, fished and, on a cool morning, we rowed together across Loch Crinan through a light mist. It was very still on the water, hushed and soft and grey. I would not say that we were lovers; the love would come slowly. But it felt as if the match had been made, even that it was meant to be.

  That day he was dressed rather handsomely in tan breeches, a waistcoat the colour of strong tobacco and a black velvet jacket; I should have known that this fine, manly garb betokened something of import. I sat on the bench before him and he rowed out. I asked if I could take the oars for a time and he, a little nonplussed, indicated that we should change places.

  ‘You know, you are quite the heroine, Elizabeth,’ he said as I pulled on the oars. ‘You more than hold your own in conversation, you delight us with your playing, your skill with a fishing rod surpasses my own, and I see now that you can row after a fashion.’

  I returned the oars to him. He held them at his side and let us glide on across the water.

  ‘You know you would make an excellent sailor’s wife,’ he said with a nervous catch in his throat. He swallowed, paused and went on thickly. ‘But I am convinced it is a soldier you shall marry.’

  The smile that greeted me after the words were out was like a break in the clouds after weeks of rain. But instead of cheering me, it provoked a rush of worry: if I failed to bring things to a head this moment he might leave for another war, I thought. We would write; years would pass, and it would die.

  ‘Is that a proposal of marriage?’ I asked boldly.

  ‘If you would like it to be, well — it shall be.’

  ‘But do you intend it?’ I pressed.

  ‘I confess that I do.’

  My nights from that moment were filled with dreams of places he would take me. I was readying myself for flight.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lachlan returned to India without his fiancée, distinguishing himself in several actions that he never mentioned by name. Nor did he speak of them in detail, except to say that he had seen six Indian mutineers blown apart by cannon, their heads flying into the air, the arms spinning away, the legs dropping to the ground in pools of viscera below the muzzle. On his return he recounted this dreadful story over lunch — we had the light-filled western wing at the Airds estate to ourselves — without seeming to realise that a tale of this kind should be withheld at such a moment.

  India had hardened him. At the same time it had softened — perhaps the better word is sensitised — him. He had endured the loss of Jane Jarvis, had taken life, and seen life taken. He was in his forty-fourth year. He wanted to make his mark with something other than a sabre or a musket.

  And then one morning, over a breakfast of perplexing silences a month after our marriage, he told me he had been offered the post — not exactly a coveted one after the rebellion against William Bligh — of Governor of New South Wales.

  ‘A penitentiary!’ I swallowed, aghast, reaching for the teacup.

  My first thought was a practical one: how was I to break the news to my brother John, who was hoping to accompany us to India? And then there was the shame of it. I, who had seemed destined for Bombay, was now bound, along with a cargo of criminals, for Botany Bay.

  Lachlan came to my aid, recalling New Holland’s fame among botanical adventurers. ‘It is reputed to be another Eden,’ he said with an air of conviction. ‘Nature at her purest. Here, then, is your adventure!’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘The world has been swept up by revolution,’ he went on in rolling phrases that seemed to have been well prepared. His arms extended before him, elbows stiffly locked. Those large hands of his were firmly placed on the embroidered tablecloth in the manner of a man leaning on a lectern. He wore a white shirt and an oyster-grey waistcoat and looked, for some reason, like a block of marble. ‘The American and French. And who knows what next. India, I believe, will cast off her yoke.’ He paused and shifted forward in his seat. His voice had lost none of its masculine brass, but the cadence had changed. ‘There is a great cause underway at Sydney Cove. You consider it a jail; I say it is an experiment, perhaps the greatest endeavour of our age. If criminals can be made into good citizens, why, society itself can be reinvented!’

  It was a speech, a piece of intimate oratory (‘Pass the toast and jam and may I tell you how things are with the world’) designed to sway me to the fitness of the cause. On first hearing the news I was shocked; I admit that. But I required no soapbox sophistry to convince me. A deft reminder of who I was and what I most wanted from life and I would have followed him anyway. It was a measure of how little we understood one another that he was not to know.

  I was desperate for adventure. And my new husband — was he not an adventurer? He had indeed seen Cairo; Bombay and Boston, too. He had fought against the French in America and helped to drive Napoleon from Abukir. He could describe to me the white cities of Arabia, the antiquities of India and Ceylon, the great pagoda of Canton. Where other men left these shores with a thirst for the fight, his passion was, as he put it, ‘the great world and the works of men’.

  That morning his grey eyes shone like metal. There was charisma in that fiery conviction; perhaps a touch of madness, too. But then we follow the mad. Follow them to war. Follow them to victory or defeat. Follow them to new lives in strange worlds.

  ‘At Port Jackson His Majesty has deposited the land’s poorest seed — felons and ruffians and rebels — in rich virgin soil,’ he said, staring around me as if his sights were set on a receding landscape, not a woman barely six feet away, warm flesh and warm blood. His gaze was not so much directed as diffused.

  I set my knife and fork on the china plate and pushed it forward over the embroidered tablecloth, somewhat ashamed of my appetite.

  Silence.

  ‘Already the convicts show signs of reform,’ he continued in the same distant tone as if he were already there, in the Antipodes, the journey behind him. ‘A highwayman marries a prostitute; he is possessed of daring, she of some allure. The past is never mentioned to their children. They acquire the parents’ better attributes — his boldness and her … her charms.’

  ‘Might not the offspring inherit the worst of the parents’ qualities?’ I asked. ‘Lawlessness on the one hand, wantonness on the other?’ Desiring to question, yet careful not to oppose, I coated my phrases with a cordial smile.

  ‘My Elizabeth,’ he beamed warmly, his full attention upon me now, ‘you have struck with that true aim of yours at the great question. Did the flaws of the parents issue from their nature, or from the desperate circumstances in which they have lived — that we have created? I am for creating another world.’

  It was bold talk and I loved him then as much as I ever did. Although the thought did occur to me that he might have a tendency to bore.

  ‘No more uprisings then,’ I said as I pushed back the chair and went to join him at the other end of the table. ‘But a rising up!’

  ‘You mock?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘No my love, you misunderstand. I applaud you. We will be allies in this cause. If depraved convicts can become good citizens in that world, what might the deserving poor — given half a chance — become in this?’

  I stood behind him and placed both hands upon his shoulders, which seemed to loosen at the first touch. I have no idea when the letter offering the commission arrived from the Co
lonial Office, but I suspect it was a week old and had been pondered deeply. He had prepared this oration in the belief that I would offer more resistance. But I was, I decided there and then, all for Sydney Cove. Remaining seated, and still a little distant, my husband drew me to him — a dutiful wife almost two decades his junior.

  CHAPTER SIX

  We left Portsmouth on a cool May morning. Men of the 73rd Regiment of Foot hoisted our trunks atop hard shoulders while I carried my viola in its case, not trusting them with such a fragile and precious possession. A drummer and a fifer led the way and our own servants followed behind. The Dromedary and her escort HMS Hindostan were docked somewhat apart from the other ships, beyond a dog leg of the wharf and a barrier of market carts heaped with hay. Upon this makeshift palisade lay several soldiers, tousled heads bare and muskets trained on the busy crowd. As I passed by I looked up at one of the young men. He shot me a game wink in return. Such boldness! I cannot pretend I was not, at the same time, a little thrilled. Macquarie walked a good stride ahead of me, oblivious, with the prideful air of a Lieutenant Colonel, permitting himself no distractions. I, in stark contrast, was hungry for sensation, even if a goodly portion of me wished contradictorily to shrink from the clamour, the filth, the heady odour. I was young. I had lived a spirited though small life.

  At the taffrail of the Dromedary, Macquarie beside me, I took in the forest of masts and fixed rigging, so dense they crowded the sky; the clutter of sea craft large and small; the wharves and walkways all tightly packed together. You could chase a thief from one end of the docks to the other and never wet your feet.

  A bow-legged man with a thin, lined face and a balding pate came for Macquarie, introducing himself as the ship’s master, Samuel Pritchard. His voice was husky and exotically accented: the inflection might have been American or Caribbean, or more likely a stew of many ports and places. He drew himself towards Macquarie, placed a hand upon his sleeve, and spoke with him most conspiratorially. I took little from the overheard conversation save for the words ‘desperately’ and ‘provisions’. My husband excused himself. I was left alone.

  Seagulls shrieked. The light breeze murmured among the lines. The boatswains barked their orders. Hawkers on the docks released their beseeching cries onto the green ocean air: Today’s bread! Sweet lavender! Pretty boxes for every need! The freshest farm milk! Pictures of remarkable places! The news, the news, all the news! And from every corner of this boisterous theatre boomed a chorus of cursing and banter and song.

  Above it all I caught the stuttering cry of cormorants in flight, familiar to me from hours spent along the rocky shores of my homeland. A flock of these plain black seabirds, perhaps a dozen in all, skimmed low across a flat plate of water in perfect formation. Such odd creatures when spied on land, hanging their tattered feathers out to dry, but in flight — quite majestic. They flashed brilliantly overhead, like beams from a black sun.

  A crack of rifle fire — just the one shot — and a lone shag twisted limply away from its fellows, falling gracefully through the leaden sky. A triumphant cry went up. A soldier — the one who had cut me that game wink — leapt to his feet, his rifle raised in one hand and his black shako in the other. There had been no real marksmanship in the matter, and no endeavour at all: he had merely aimed into the flock as it streaked over the masts and the rigging.

  I looked down at my pale hands. How fiercely they grasped the rail. That poor shag was not the only thing felled by the soldier’s triumph.

  As the flock of long-necked cormorants swept in it had seemed, for a moment, as if the Hebrides were calling to me. Calling me home? Or urging me on? I could not tell, for the memory came to me as a puzzle not a sign. In a flash I pictured a bed of tawny matted seaweed strewn across rock, beside it the grey ocean stirred by a high wind, and a squall brewing in the hills beyond.

  A tall, thin soldier with black eyebrows a good finger thick bellowed in my ear that we would soon be underway. I asked him to direct me to the Lieutenant Colonel’s chambers. I was alone, sick at heart, when finally we weighed anchor. I dozed. And when I woke we were at sea.

  *

  Macquarie was delighted when Sam Pritchard, later that night, reported the results of the first muster aboard.

  ‘You will be pleased to know,’ Pritchard said in a satisfied tone as he spread a ledger over a table freshly painted in our quarters, ‘that along with the usual complement of Londoners tempted by the sight of a bolt of cloth or a silver teapot there are enough carpenters, masons, smiths, tailors and cobblers to build and serve a city. And you shall have the services of an architect.’ He broke off with a hollow laugh, as if he thought some show of contempt was expected of him. ‘An architect — and a forger.’

  There was a pause as Pritchard laid the lamp on the white table. Its surface had been notched and indented in its time with some heavy blows from objects both sharp and blunt, and these had been painted over in recent weeks, in readiness for our arrival. He reached for a plain pewter tankard embossed with his initials and drained the contents. Macquarie fussed around in a crate packed with straw, the necks of several black bottles of port wine protruding like tubers sprouting from the earth. Stooping, he took a bottle, uncorked it, and poured for Pritchard. My husband hesitated, then poured for himself as well. Pritchard took another deep draught. ‘This architect has been seen sketching from time to time in a tunnel of light from a starboard porthole, the only one on the lower deck,’ he said, leaning forward into the glare of the lamp. ‘It is said that a cloaked stranger purchased this indulgence on his behalf. It had naught to do with me! The hole in the hull is not much bigger than grapeshot, but it seems to suit his purposes. The talk is that he has a powerful patron. Some say the Duke of Norfolk; others Arthur Phillip himself. In any event he spends his days and nights filling a book of rough sketching paper with renderings of views.’

  ‘You say he draws views?’ Macquarie raised a tendrilled eyebrow. ‘But there are none to be had from the lower decks.’

  ‘Imaginary panoramas — antiquarian in flavour. For the most part he sketches some mighty buildings that are now little more than ruins but were glorious in their day. His name is marked on the muster.’ Pritchard set down the tankard, ran a finger along the ledger. It came to rest two-thirds of the way down. ‘Here. But to the prisoners he is known simply as the Architect. Rather grand, don’t you think, for a convict?’ Again there was that queer, hollow laugh from Pritchard, followed by a pleading look to Macquarie. When he failed to respond the laugh collapsed into a cough.

  Macquarie muttered his agreement distractedly. ‘For a convict — yes, I suppose.’ Though I could tell he was not at all piqued. He was, in fact, delighted. The broad blocks of his handsome face arranged themselves into a barely suppressed smile. ‘But then if he is indeed an architect’ — he leant forward heavily in the chair and hammered his fist onto the table — ‘then let him sketch!’ he boomed. ‘Give him paints if he asks for them. Procure them at the next port of call. No harm in that. No telling what he might devise on the long voyage.’

  ‘This is a stroke of immense good fortune, Elizabeth,’ Macquarie glowed when we were alone together that night in a ship twisting across the sea. ‘I had requested a civil architect and the petition was denied. In time, I was told. Priorities.’ He shook his head. ‘Well now, a convict architect will do just as well, as long as the man has talent. It is providential, don’t you see?’

  He was eager for attention that night. And as he slept a satisfied sleep I went to the porthole. I was bored and restless and felt quite lost but the ship — how it moaned and hummed and trilled as it sliced across the swell! The moon had silvered a skein of sea foam on the crest of the nearest wave. It rose hugely towards the moon and the stars, seemed to roll beneath us as we, in turn, climbed the night sky. It was very beautiful. And very powerful.

  A boat had gone down in the channel between Mull and Iona when I was young, and many lives were lost. Macquarie knew the story well; he had be
en called upon to comb the shore for corpses. But I was not particularly concerned for my own safety on the Dromedary. That strikes me now as a doughty attitude for a young woman on her first sea voyage, but I could not afford the luxury of fear; there would be many more nights such as this.

  I sometimes wonder what would have transpired if Macquarie had at that moment caught a presentiment of the perils ahead. Would he have made the forger filling his sketchpad the ally of his dreams for the betterment of that lonely colony of criminals? I fancy he might have contrived to tip him overboard, for the moment the Architect’s fortunes became our own, all things changed. For better, and for worse.

  I had to that point never so much as sighted a felon; none, in any event, that had been apprehended. And during the first few weeks at sea my aversion to the grey mass below decks — more than 300 convicts in all — usurped my natural sympathy.

  Father had warned me to expect the worst. On the last night but one before my departure from Airds, he tried to extinguish his fears and his sorrows with drink. ‘Expect the kind of man who would draw a dagger on the streets of Glasgow if his nimble hands returned empty from a stranger’s pocket,’ he said with a raised and reproving finger after dinner. ‘The type of woman who would sell her body for a tot of whisky.’ It was the last thing I really needed so close to my leaving. I picked up a vinegar bottle, held it high, and told him most emphatically that the cast of his mind was as narrow as its neck. He reddened deeply, and I thought for a wee moment that he might erupt into a fit of apoplexy. But then he spluttered with relieving laughter.