She took Jane under her wing. Jane was too young and too good for them to be friends, but they worked together in the kitchen and then she took Jane shopping and bought her some pretty clothes. Then she took her to a tea house and bought them each a cup of tea and a cake.
‘We’ll be moving up to the Provincial in a month or two,’ she said to Jane, ‘and I was wondering if you’d thought of finding yourself another situation.’
‘Can I not stay with you? Is my work not satisfactory?’
‘It is most satisfactory,’ said Bridget. ‘But there is an excellent position going in a big house out near Buninyong with the Frasers, who are a fine family. A hotel is not the right place for a young girl. There’s rather too many men, and rather too many of them with a skinful, that might try to take advantage of a girl like yourself. And even though you’re the best of girls, people may talk.’
Jane’s eyes filled with tears and Bridget felt sympathy for her.
‘You can come to us on your days off. We’ll always look after you. It’s hard, I know, but in a few years you’ll be wanting to marry, and you don’t want to be marrying some fellow that’s hanging round a hotel. A girl like you needs to set her sights high. You don’t want to be out in a draughty cottage on the edge of Ballarat. A girl like you should marry a fine young man who will provide properly for you, not someone who just fancies you for a moment.’
Jane looked doubtful.
‘At home, your people would see to such things. But here it is harder, because we don’t know everybody. And with the Frasers, you would see some of the refinements of life.’
Jane had no option but to agree, so persuasive and concerned was Bridget. Bridget arranged the job and took care that Jane was settled and not badly used, for she knew Mrs Fraser treated her servants well, although she would have been shocked at the notions of marriage Bridget had planted in Jane’s head.
‘Why did you send her away?’ Billy asked her. ‘She worked hard. She was such a good girl.’
‘You most probably think I sent her off being afraid she’d show me at a disadvantage,’ Bridget said. ‘Billy, she was longing to go. The noise in the street here at night was hard for her, not that she’d say a word of complaint to you.’
But she had the feeling that Billy missed Jane, and also that he had in some way understood why she was sent away. It felt a little uncomfortable.
* * *
The opening of the Provincial was a grand affair. The building itself, although only a single storey, boasted four flag poles at the front, and a finely painted board, proclaiming in a handsome dark red paint, ‘William Irwin’s Family and Commercial Provincial Hotel’. The stables were, William thought, the best in Ballarat. The floors did not squeak and quality Turkey carpets were laid along all the halls. William invited all the dignitaries he knew to come and toast the new hotel. He had told Bridget to buy herself something new and she looked extraordinarily beautiful in a claret-coloured dress in the latest fashion. An upsurge in gold production and the prosperity that it brought had overtaken the Humffray affair, so when Humffray came, his presence was neither more nor less noted than that of other eminent men.
The guests came finely dressed, some with their wives, staying for a grand dinner in the new dining room. The sideboard and the chairs from the Main Street brothel were much admired, although their origin was not explained.
William’s guests, many of them fellow Freemasons, congratulated him on his achievement, so he had the sense that he had moved forward in life, and his place in this new world was secure.
‘I never seen such a washed and scrubbed lot,’ said Danny Phelan after the guests had gone. ‘Down Main Street, we were always neater and cleaner than our drinkers, but here, the guests outshone us.’
‘I don’t think we’ll be overstraining ourselves every night,’ said William. But the Provincial was different. It was nothing like Bath’s Hotel, which had fine carpets, oil paintings on all the walls, and servants in uniforms, but it was more genteel and more refined than the Star had ever been.
‘It’s a wonderful hotel,’ said Bridget as they undressed that night. ‘I think we’ll do very well here, once we get used to the noise of the railway, although little Willy thinks it’s very fine to hear a steam train blow its whistle.’
‘I was talking to one of the drivers. He showed me how the thing runs and how hard they work to keep up the speed.’
‘You poke your nose into everything, Billy.’
‘We’re living in a wondrous age, Bridget. The world has never seen the likes of it. And in this city we have the best of everything.’
The Provincial was a success from the start, and William felt a great satisfaction in providing good rooms, substantial meals and various small comforts for his guests at a fair price. He worked long hours, since he was determined to pay off his loan to Henry Cuthbert as soon as he could. He remembered his father’s debt to McCrea and he did not want the same thing in his own life. He calculated that if he paid off the mortgage and built up the business, he would have enough income to allow him to go back to Ireland for a visit, and perhaps to visit some other parts of the world.
The Star had been mainly an Irish hotel, but the Provincial was not. Some of his patrons followed him from Main Street, but his bar trade came mainly from the railway workers, tradesmen and other locals, while the parlours, the meeting rooms and the accommodation were taken up by more prosperous locals, commercial travellers and families. But he still felt a great pride in being Irish, for he felt the Irish had qualities of being hard working and cheerful, which he valued along with the strong feelings and passions of the race that were so sadly lacking in many English. But he was glad not to be in Ireland, for there was always trouble in the governance of the place and its poverty seemed endless. He did not wonder at so many leaving.
He felt his place was here in Ballarat, and in his fine hotel in this progressive, modern part of the city, at the hub of commercial and civic life. And while Eureka was little talked of now, and some even felt ashamed of it, he did not, for he felt that the self-reliance and spirit of democracy in the city owed much to what had happened that December morning in 1854, however far they had come since. There was now a great passion for self-improvement, which permeated the civic institutions. Every month, on the nearest Wednesday to the full moon, William came together with his brothers of the Yarrowee Lodge, who met at Bath’s Hotel, all wearing their Masonic robes and decorations. While working through the degrees of Masonry, he learned many things, for the Masons were concerned with philosophy, with morals, with public life, with accountability and with friendship. Through the lodge, William was involved with some of the leading men of the town in many of the charitable and public improvements. There were many with the same ambitions and desires as his own.
There used to be both Protestants and Catholics in the lodge, but the Pope had told the Catholics that none of that faith could be Freemasons, even though the spirit of Freemasonry was tolerant and not attached to any faith in particular. The lodge inevitably became a Protestant institution, so now he heard things amongst the brothers that made it clear that the tolerant spirit of Freemasonry was not always extended to the Catholics. He felt regret at this, for all were helping to build this city, which was being built by the common man achieving uncommon things. The fine new bluestone buildings, the public institutions, the wide streets, the railway, the schools, the churches, the foundries, the hansom cabs and the lake and gardens were the proud expression of this communal consciousness.
There was the Mechanics Institute, which was concerned with education, providing classes for both men and women in arithmetic, grammar, French language, music and other worthy areas. William attended many of the public lectures and improved himself by learning about electricity, magnetism, the human skeleton, the history of classical times and the great explorer Doctor Livingstone, and more about his beloved fossils.
There were other organisations to which he was attached, such a
s the Licensed Victuallers Association and St Andrews Kirk. There were some conflicts between such bodies, which he straddled lightly. Some of the Irish and Scots at the kirk were harder Protestants, some members of the Orange Lodge, which was founded on a fierce bitterness towards the Catholics, whom they saw as immoral, priest-ridden and disloyal to the Queen. Such men carried their bitterness not only in their religion, but in politics too. By contrast, many members of the Licensed Victuallers Association, in which William played an active part, were Irish Catholics.
The Orange Lodge men were frequently members of the temperance movement, and as the fiercer Presbyterians took over, the temperance movement became less temperate in its aims, advocating complete abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, and making much of the evils of such substances.
Amongst the Licensed Victuallers there was frank talk and bawdy jokes about the miserable pursed up mouths of penny-pinching temperance men who eschewed any sort of pleasure. Yet those whom William joked about were the same he might acknowledge with a friendly nod at the kirk or the lodge. The men who espoused temperance often saw lack of it as a more Catholic vice. William knew that a drunk was a drunk, Catholic or Protestant, and in the end, a most troublesome customer for a publican.
He heard that the priests told their flock that their Pope forbade Catholics to mix with Protestants in schools and business and friendship, although this injunction seemed to have no effect on Robert’s family’s liking for a fine Sunday roast at the Provincial, for it was not just his wife and children who accompanied him, but often Birdie’s parents and sisters.
‘I believe it was a Papal Bull,’ Danny Phelan explained as they were preparing to open the bar one morning. ‘The priest told us of it, but I cannot see how the thing can work. I cannot see the point of me working only for a man of my own religion. As for serving drinks, we are mixed in together, and after a certain number of drinks there is little difference.’
‘I cannot understand why there would be such a thing at all,’ said William.
‘’Tis not the fault of the Catholic religion,’ said Danny. ‘The Holy Father only wishes to protect us from the Protestants.’ But at this point in the conversation, both decided to busy themselves in separate tasks, William checking the spirits and Danny bringing up a keg from the cellar. The question of being Catholic or Protestant was a delicate one, yet the one which most defined a man. It was a difference that ran not only through worship, but also politics, education, social life and work.
William juggled all these parts of his life. For the main, they stuck together, despite the many fault lines and jagged pieces. But it was a more complicated communal solidarity than in the days of the rush.
Bridget saw all this catching Billy, but for her it felt a lesser thing than the early glories of Ballarat, when women were less bound by their sex. Politicians now complained of barmaids as an immoral class of person, which meant fewer women worked in bars. She herself had enjoyed working as a barmaid and had little time for tedious social calls or tea parties, for she had served her time selling tea and scones. There was now a good deal of civic hubris and pomp, which was considerably less entertaining than the old days of the theatre and the bar.
She became pregnant again, and lost the child at five months, which distressed her greatly – for it was more than an early loss, but not quite a child, so it stayed in her head between those places, haunting her. She longed for another child, but felt the chill fear of another loss. The miscarriage had left her physically weaker, so she had much time for reading in bed, which was one of her chief pleasures. She read many books about the world, but also novels by Dickens, Thackeray and Walter Scott, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, whose desert island she imagined herself into very powerfully. She read the poetry of Byron and Keats and the beloved Robbie Burns.
Her life was now more separate from William’s, for she did little in the hotel and he did not have time to read.
‘You’re in love with this hotel,’ she said. ‘You have time for nothing else. Maybe we should have a smaller and easier place, like Robert has.’
‘Robert has no ambition,’ he said. ‘Just to be here, at this place in Lydiard Street, and conduct a house like this is a grand thing. And I carry the debt still. It cannot be compared with what Robert does.’
‘It cannot,’ she said. She liked his passions, but this one seemed to separate them from each other. She could not care about it the way he did, and she still shopped down in Main Street, where the life of the street was rowdy and busy, and a person did not mind who they spoke to and who they did not, and the sights and smells of the street were all closer and more mingled together.
She and Billy still lay together and talked of things. They talked of politics, agreed on the disgrace of the 1864 election where Humffray was thrown out, his treachery on the land question still remembered, and the notorious rabble-rouser Charles Edwin Jones, who railed against the Catholics, publicans and barmaids, was voted in. They laughed about it, and Billy seemed resigned that democracy, while the best system and the only moral form of government, would often appeal to the worst instincts of men. So while they were agreed on that, and enjoyed the excesses of the political rants, Bridget could not shake off a certain feeling that was often with her, which was wistful and a little fearful. She could not talk to him about her deep doubts about religion or the way the world worked. It seemed that in the busyness of his life there was no time for it, and in any case he was much more part of the world than she was.
Some nights she tried to read out loud to Billy, to bring them together. One cold winter’s night, when the hotel was quiet and she thought they could read half the night, she started on Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
‘A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, deteriorated by confinement . . .’ It was just the first page, but Bridget saw Billy was already asleep, and she wondered how such things impressed her and made her feel so much while they left him cold. She thought of the prison taint. This place, this city, where she had felt so free and at ease when she first came, was a different place now. There was, perhaps, a prison taint in its respectability and prejudices. She felt a longing for their youth and freedom as she snuggled down with Billy.
He drew her close. ‘Oh Bridget,’ he said, half asleep. ‘How I love you.’
She felt his love, but she felt that prison taint, and could not quite shake it off.
CHAPTER 13
15th Dec 1864
Knockaleery
My Dear Robert,
Having sent a few lines to your brother William, with the intention of not writing you this time, I have been prevailed upon to send you and Mrs these few lines, for your dear Mother is constantly dreaming about you. And myself has been also dreaming about you and we are afraid that something has happened you which we hope not. James is well and at school and we all in tolerable health excepting your Dear Mother who is sometimes better and sometimes worse. But what can be expected? We are both far advanced in years and in the down hill of life.
I Remain, My Dear Robert,
Your ever loving Father
Joseph Irwin
Dear Brother Wm,
I am very sorry about poor Robert. Please say what he asked about what I wrote to Jane Norris – that I would rather Robert had come home and left such Hindus as he fell in with, as I call such false teachers or worshipers of the Beast – nothing else. When he was so unfortunate, why did not start for home or some other Country? You did not say anything about him in your last letter.
I remain, your loving brother,
Joseph Irwin
* * *
‘Well, brother,’ said Robert, leaning back in his chair, ‘a mighty fine leg of mutton your cook does. And potatoes, and parsnips, the greens and all. My compliments indeed.’
‘Mine too,’ said Joe Brown, who was in Ballarat on police business. ‘It is fine dining here at the new hotel, William
.’ And he gave his small, nervous laugh and then smiled at Bridget.
‘William keeps his cooks up to the mark,’ said Bridget. She was tired and pale, and William noticed how little she ate, despite the baby she was carrying. She was now past six months, and he was glad of it, for her health worried him considerably. Bridget turned to little William Joseph and Robert and Birdie’s Mary Jane, who were playing together on the floor. ‘You two littlies, go out and see if Cook has a flummery left. I asked her to save it for you.’ As the children ran out, Mary Jane ran to Bridget and snuggled momentarily into her lap. She loved Bridget, who always made a great fuss of her and had special treats. Bridget whispered in her ear. ‘You ask Cook for a bone to give to Charity, for she gets lonesome most nights, since my poor Faith has died.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Birdie, who was nursing her new baby. ‘I wish this one would eat flummery or anything at all. She’s such a sickly thing.’
The men took this as an invitation for them to move off for a smoke. William stoked the fire in the men’s smoking room, and then poured out a glass of his best port for the three of them.
Robert gulped his and sat down next to the fire. ‘We’ll be seeing more of you, brother,’ he said. ‘I’ve sold the hotel and we’re moving into town.’
‘You sold it?’ said William. Some time ago he had seen the impossibility of Robert ever paying him what he owed on the little public house, and he’d made a gift of it to him. Nevertheless, he thought Robert should have consulted him about the sale. ‘Why did you sell it?’ he asked sharply.
‘I made a fine profit and now I’m free as any man,’ said Robert. ‘I paid my debts and have nothing left but my freedom.’ The port made him expansive. ‘My trouble running a pub, especially that one, was there was money going out for food and drink and a man for the bar, and I could never keep track of it all. It beats me how you make a profit, brother, since I had trouble making even a wage for meself. Although this is a better class of establishment.’
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