The Soldier's Curse

by Meg Keneally

  Both men were right. Monsarrat was charged with forgery and fraud. The statement of facts said Monsarrat had wilfully passed himself off as an officer of the court, had knowingly received fees under false pretences, had been guilty of forging a document. With all the fees he had falsely claimed, he had exceeded by far the amount required for a capital sentence. Combined with the forgery, they meant that he could be found hangable on two counts.

  Monsarrat was put down to be judged at the summer assizes. He could just manage until then to rent a modest room from the warder.

  The assizes, as Monsarrat knew, were presided over by two judges of the High Court. These were men of eminence from the outside world, who were met at the borders of the county by the best people in their carriages and by the sheriff and his bailiffs, and the mayor and his liverymen.

  As the assizes judges neared Exeter city, the church bells tolled, and trumpeters began to accompany the procession. Monsarrat could hear all this as the judges’ carriage approached the Crown Court. He knew that these men would be appalled when a fraudulent barrister appeared before them. He anticipated the sentence they would hand down would be all the harsher for the fact of Monsarrat’s education. A man of his intellect and knowledge, they would say, would be fully aware of the laws he was breaking, making his crime one of moral depravity. He was in a different universe, they would say, from the uneducated man who stole to survive. Monsarrat knew, however, that when such an uneducated man inevitably appeared before them at the same assizes, they would not let his lack of learning ameliorate the sentence they handed down.

  Monsarrat lay on his bed the night before the trial was to start, in a room comfortable only by the standards of Exeter County Gaol. He looked at the stone walls. From the damp walls of my London lodgings to the mahogany panelling of the lawyers’ chambers at Lincoln’s Inn, and now to this, he thought. These will be the last walls I have the opportunity to stare at. And stare at them he did, through the night, training his ear on the smaller sounds, particularly natural ones – the call of an owl, hoof beats in the yard. The sounds he had taken for granted, but feared he might never hear again. In the early hours, he began howling and crying into the cell’s stones with no one to hear, or care. The next morning when constables escorted him across a yard into the court itself, he believed he was no longer breathing, and if he’d expired in the dock, that would have suited him greatly.

  A large part of the day had been taken up with choosing members of a grand jury, made up of mayors and other officials and county worthies.

  Monsarrat had pleaded not guilty, as all those accused of capital crimes were advised to do – entering a guilty plea would mean the certainty, rather than the probability, of execution.

  When he stood in the dock he saw that the public gallery was full of nearly every lawyer in the town, except the one acting as Crown prosecutor, his own barrister, and Samuel Smythe, who was no doubt still feeling humiliated. There too was Johnathan Ham, the wool merchant. The eyes which had once looked on Monsarrat as an ally now blazed at him with impotent fury.

  The prosecution had an easy time making Monsarrat look abominable, a man who had undermined the dignity of the court, a man who had used a forgery to deny his clients their right to genuine legal representation. Many of those clients had received excellent representation anyway, better in fact than that provided by real lawyers. But none of them came forward on Monsarrat’s behalf. They, like Smythe, felt embarrassed to have been duped, and the sting of it overrode any impulse they may have had to support the young man who had worked so hard on their behalf – and, it must be said, taken a handsome fee for doing so.

  Matthew Telford, in opening remarks, argued that his client was a man who had found himself in the position of many well-educated but unprivileged men now. They saw men of inferior sensibility raised to eminences of which they could be considered unworthy – it was money and time that the poor lacked, and in society as it now existed, money and time were given too much value. None of Mr Monsarrat’s clients, though fraudulently represented, had suffered before the courts as a result. Though he was not a barrister, and nothing could make him a barrister, he had been in his way a competent advocate. And not only that, he had been able to discourse with fellow lawyers in social and indeed in trial conditions without their feeling that in any way were they speaking to a man of inferior intelligence, and without in any way suspecting he was guilty of deception.

  ‘While we can deplore the crime,’ said Telford, ‘we must feel some sympathy for this young man of notable talent whose limited resources condemned him to clerkhood, but whose intellect made him desire a profession. Surely we are poorer, as a society, when men like Mr Monsarrat have no legitimate way of pursuing careers for which their intelligence fits them.’

  Monsarrat could see that these arguments were not resonating well with the judge, who was probably not an enthusiast for reform and French-style equality. He started to wonder whether Telford was in fact undermining him.

  But Telford was not in the business of securing an acquittal, not today. The lawyer’s aim, and his only realistic prospect, was to save Monsarrat from the death sentence.

  Various of his clients were called – they were embarrassed to have been fooled, but the judge would lean forward like a kindly uncle and tell them not to be because this man before the court was obviously the deepest-dyed and most skilful imposter. In the judge’s eyes, the fact that he had done well by the clients made his crime graver. For he had thereby stood in the place of better men, men who had earned the right honestly to wear the gown and the wig.

  When the trial was nearly concluded, Telford turned to Monsarrat with eyes full of pity and gave a little shrug in which the whole tragedy of Monsarrat’s human existence was summed up. There was nothing that could be done. Iron-bound laws were about to descend like an axe.

  By now Monsarrat felt surprisingly little. He saw the judge put a black patch of cloth over his wig and he felt as though he was watching a play which he had seen several times in dress rehearsal. He knew, of course, what the black cloth signified. In it, he saw a future measured in days.

  As the judge was pronouncing a sentence of death by hanging, Monsarrat’s thoughts turned to how he could make a respectable end. He had expended his emotion in his private cell the night before. Now he approached the business of his death as though it were a legal problem. How to make sure he didn’t mewl or snivel when mounting the gallows. Perhaps he would need one more purging, one more hour raging at fate, weeping for the years lost to him, and shuddering with fear. Other felons would see him, of course, as he was unlikely to get a private cell again. But he didn’t care for their good opinion. He would be remembered for the wrong reasons by his friends, colleagues and clients. But when they gave future accounts of him, he wanted them to say, ‘He made a good end, though, I’ll give him that.’ If it wasn’t too much to hope for, he might wish them to add: ‘And he was a good advocate, if a false one.’

  Planning one’s death tends to absorb a man, so Monsarrat almost missed the judge removing the black cloth and recommending him to the King’s mercy.

  He knew what that meant. If mercy were indeed to be granted by the King, he would be following Dodds to a place no man here had seen, a place wreathed in misty tales of murderous natives and rampaging monsters. A place which, if half the tales were true, might make him wish the black square had stayed resting on the judge’s wig.

  His initial, reflexive relief at not dying soon fell away to dread of a land as unmapped as the one which lay beyond this life.

  As Monsarrat had expected, there was now no possibility of a private cell. He was put into the condemned cell, which gradually filled up that day with half-a-dozen other men. There, he awaited word on whether the King would follow the recommendation of one of his subjects, and spare the life of another.

  He was in there for two months, until the sheriff appeared at the grille one breathless summer day and informed those within that the King h
ad extended his mercy to five of the prisoners, and that their sentence had been commuted to transportation for life.

  Monsarrat’s spirit until then had not been too dismal. One of his few negotiable assets was his ability to convey a sense of threat and a certain dignity, despite the mockery of common criminals who declared him a fantailer and a nob. So he was left alone by the others in his cell. He had found himself moping very little and was entertained by the frequent fashionable visitors who came to look at the condemned men as some people would go to an art gallery to look at paintings, paying the gaoler for the privilege. Young men would bring pretty women, who would exclaim over the evil aspect and obvious moral degradation of the men there, and move closer to their escorts for protection (this making the place one of the chief attractions for young couples). Monsarrat, though, was a particular favourite. He had the advantage of being able to converse with gentlemen who visited the prison as a spectator sport. His accent, his sensibilities, so like their own, leavened their visit with a delicious tickle of fear that they could easily, if rash, become him. Some of his regular visitors had kept him well primed with liquor, passing tankards from the inn through the bars. And since the warder was running such an interesting zoo, he protected his own reputation by ensuring his charges had fresh straw weekly and clean blankets on which to lie.

  But sometimes the full weight of knowing he must endure a lifetime of penal suffering descended on Monsarrat and sank him into a deep despair. There were times when the noose seemed to him a lost opportunity for escape. The warder could see this and made sure that all sharp tools and implements were kept far from Monsarrat – even a spoon could be honed on stone to make a blade with which a man might cut his veins.

  The next day, chained at wrist and ankle to each other, the transportees rode by cart into Plymouth, where people hooted at them in the streets, and at last down to the dock, where they were rowed out to the prison hulks moored in the Tamar River, and given suits of wool and canvas marked with black arrows.

  The hulk in which Monsarrat and the others were placed to await their transportation to Australia was a dismasted asylum of a place. Its prisoners, most of whom would work building docks and harbour fortifications while they waited for their ship to leave for the south, were locked down at night into a Hades where young boys were taught every criminal skill known to the combined faculty of felonry that presided over the dimness. The new men were threatened and pawed, and Monsarrat was driven to think only of his own flesh and its integrity.

  Each morning he was taken ashore in a rowboat and guarded heavily at his work, although he was not chained. He was of course unused to the work with stone. He wished he’d bent his skill to being a mason, because they toiled much less harshly than the mere haulage animals he and most of his fraternity now became.

  But a few weeks later, someone on the hospital ship scanned the record for a clerk, and he was called out of the work gang and, grateful once again for his education, he became a clerk on a hospital ship, the Charon.

  Relieved to be spared the work gang, Monsarrat did such a good job that he was held back and missed the next ship sailing for Australia, into which were absorbed his four former cellmates from the Exeter assizes. Instead, he found himself taken aboard the Morley, a small ship barely more than four hundred tons, but fast sailing, and not badly run, with a good surgeon who had made a number of journeys to Australia and knew how to deal with prisoners in the early stormy days through the Channel, the Bay of Biscay, and into the Atlantic past the Azores, the terrible belt of heat and slack winds off West Africa, and the roaring gales then encountered to the south.

  The ship itself, as Monsarrat would discover, had already made the journey to Australia, either to Port Jackson or to Hobart, a number of times. Whether the caulking between the planks of decking turned liquid in the tropical sun or collected a gloss of ice much further south, the ship’s timbers seemed to Monsarrat to be accustomed to those stresses, and to be able to accommodate them. With time Monsarrat could not help thinking of the ship not perhaps as an alma mater, a sweet motherly floating institution, but at least as a mater, the mother who gave birth to his Australian existence.

  The journey into the penal netherworld was made less painful for him by the fact that the surgeon, after a suitable period of probation, had him up to the ship’s hospital to write his correspondence and the details of his medical log.

  In calmer weather he copied out sections of a book the surgeon was writing on the motions of the earth and heavenly bodies as explainable by electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, and on the impact of this magnetism on the health, growth and decay of man. The surgeon also had various notes for a tract on irrigation of land, based on what he had seen of Egypt, Syria and South America.

  It was from offhand remarks by the surgeon that Monsarrat got a picture of New South Wales, this colony now half-free and half-convict; of its systems of discipline and the various steps a man or woman could take towards freedom: an absolute pardon, which would enable a person to return to Britain if he had the means to do so, or a conditional one, which made him an Australian for life, and the steps in between – the ticket of leave and so on. From the surgeon he learned that at the end of seven years, a life-serving convict could get his ticket of leave, which allowed him to work for himself, and at the end of fourteen, a condition of freedom within the colony.

  More than a decade later, thanks to Monsarrat’s second, colonial conviction, that condition now appeared almost unreachable, receding further with every passing day, and seemingly quickening its retreat under the glare of Captain Diamond.

  Chapter 13

  Monsarrat needed to walk through the long room of the hospital, with the beds on either side of one central alley, to get to Dr Gonville’s office behind its partition at the back. And so he could hardly have missed Dory’s prone frame.

  Dory was lying on his stomach. Now that most of the blood had been sopped up, the wound that took up the entirety of his back looked far more gruesome, more jagged, the exposed bone more visible. Some parts of it had also taken on a disturbing purple or grey puffiness at the edges. Most of it had been smeared with hog’s fat, in a bid to provide a barrier between the wound and the outside world and thus prevent infection. But Monsarrat feared this measure might have sealed the infection in, especially if Diamond’s saliva was as poisonous as his character.

  Dory had his head to the side. His eyes were slightly open, only small white slivers visible. His lips were parted, and his breathing ragged. Despite the cold – not a cold any self-respecting winter in England would have produced, but cold just the same – Dory’s forehead had a slick of sweat on it. This was being mopped up, at intervals, by the rotund Father Hanley.

  Dory didn’t respond as Monsarrat neared his bed, save for a grunt which told of the pain he felt even as his mind struggled to protect him from it by shutting down. He was beyond response, perhaps permanently. Hanley, however, looked up. His face was drawn in a way that Monsarrat wouldn’t have thought possible for a corpulent man, and his greeting lacked the self-conscious formality to which he had subjected Monsarrat in the kitchen the other day.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Monsarrat,’ he said. ‘I understand you witnessed these wounds being inflicted.’

  ‘I did, Father. And I hope never to witness anything like it again.’ Not wanting to be reported for gossiping about the captain, Monsarrat lowered his voice. ‘You’ve heard, Father, of the captain’s unusual intervention?’

  ‘I have. May God forgive him. An excess in brutality when delivering a punishment is a sure sign of a compromised soul. I’d go to the man now offering spiritual guidance, but he wouldn’t take it, and I might find myself here in a similar situation.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ asked Monsarrat.

  ‘All night. I heard of Fergal’s incarceration, came to find him. The soldier on guard is a good son of the church, now, and he let me in. I know Fergal doesn’t like me. He wants a warrior priest
, not a corpulent cleric. But he told me about this young fellow, what he had been through. Asked me to be with him, in case the fellow passed away and needed shriving. I have no idea whether he is a follower of the one true faith, but the Reverend is in Sydney, and surely even a Protestant would take a Catholic rite over no rite at all.’

  Monsarrat, having heard Diamond and many others rail against Catholicism, wasn’t certain.

  Father Hanley reached over again towards Dory, and Monsarrat noticed the sweat on the boy’s forehead had been replenished. Gently, and with a small smile as though Dory could see him, the priest dabbed at the boy’s face. It’s just possible I might have misjudged Hanley, thought Monsarrat.

  ‘Has he been in this condition the whole time?’

  ‘Much like it, although his fever seems to be getting worse. Dr Gonville, not a bad man when all’s said and done, has looked in a few times. But apart from the hog’s fat he hasn’t done much. He says we must allow the healing to take its course, although I can see precious little evidence of healing on this bed in front of me.

  ‘The soldiers pride themselves on having seen more death than anyone else, as though it were a matter for boasting. But I tell you, Mr Monsarrat, a priest sees death too, and in all its forms, not just the glorious blood of the battlefield. And there’s an air to them all, man or woman, when they’re about to leave, when their heart is counting out its last beats. To my mind Dory has that air to him now. I don’t believe he will be with us for long.’

  ‘Do you think, Father, that Dr Gonville might be persuaded to give him something to help with the pain? Or I could try to find some poteen – a few drops on the lips might do some good.’