The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  The two sitting men heard this impassively, but the absconder showed a shade of some expression, not quite irony, not quite a smile, and too exactly controlled to be challengeable. Clunie thought such control remarkable in a man who looked as starved and exhausted as a wandering dog. He was a man with a sunken face, a long turned-up nose with flaring nostrils, and a low seamed forehead between his dirty flaxen hair and his dirty flaxen brows. His eyes, of a light hazel, were bold and quick in spite of being so bloodshot that their restoration was hardly imaginable. Clunie saw humour in the face, and good-humour, but it was a tense face in spite of it, with jumping muscles. In his mixture of comedy and strain, of strength and dilapidation, he reminded Clunie of an ageing fairground tumbler or acrobat. He caught Clunie’s eye, and with deliberation twisted his head and one shoulder towards the wall, making visible part of his back. By a forward jerk of his arm he pulled the shirt taut across it; in a second it was covered by stripes of blood. ‘Speared, flogged, and ironed,’ thought Clunie. He was impressed by the man’s spirit. ‘He is showing you,’ said the commandant with lofty amusement.

  He was already turning to go. Clunie walked with him out of the smithy into the yard. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Lazarus One.’

  ‘There are two?’

  ‘There are. Both named Lewis Lazarus.’

  ‘Related?’

  ‘They said not.’

  ‘Curious.’

  ‘Ah, man, everything is curious down there where they spring from. They could have the same mother, and not know it, Lewis perhaps being the lady’s favourite name. Or one could have stolen the other’s name, not wishing to be sentenced in his own. Why ask? It’s not to our purpose. Lazarus Two served his sentence and was shipped back to Sydney. This one will never go back. A lifer. Sentenced at home for robbery. Ticket of leave in Sydney. Robbery again, and sentenced to do the rest of his imperial sentence here. And here the man will die, though he swears he won’t.’

  ‘No chance of remission?’

  ‘None in this world. He has run too often. From Port Macquarie and from here. Out for nine months in ’twenty-six. A good bushman. And with the bullocks, the best man on the settlement. You would wonder how he took to the work, a city man like that, born in Hull and taken in London.’

  ‘Are lifers allowed to work with the bullocks?’

  ‘Not according to the regulations, but exceptions are made for skilled men, and skill is judged by me. I could have used that fellow, both here and on my journeys inland. But no, he wanted none of it.’

  ‘What does he want? To be flogged and ironed?’

  ‘Ah, that’s irrelevant to the man. He wants to beat the thing, and the thing’s the law, and in this place the law is me. He wants to beat me.’ Logan’s voice was both laconic and morose. ‘The devil gets into some of them, and in certain ways they go mad.’

  ‘I am interested in their looks,’ said Clunie. ‘So many lack stature—’

  ‘The type, the type.’

  ‘—and so many are most vilely wrinkled. Not as you and I might wrinkle, but without logic, if I may put it like that. One seeks a cause.’

  But now Logan seemed bored. ‘Then seek it with Cowper or Murray. They’re our men of science.’

  They had reached the big gates of the lumber yard, which at their approach were opened by Private Collison and the sentry. The gates faced the river. Broad and shining, brown and silver, it moved with the strength of deep water on an outgoing tide. It was an exquisite day, cold and sunny, and Clunie could not repress a moment of sickish regret for what lay at their backs. But in this long peace, an officer without a private fortune must reconcile himself to such tasks, and alleviate them by the best means at hand. He said, ‘Edwards tells me there’s good fowling up the river.’

  ‘There is. Teal, wild duck, swamp pheasant. But go prepared to use your arms. Blacks killed three of a boat’s crew up there lately.’

  He signalled to Collison and they moved off, the soldier following at a distance that put him out of earshot. ‘Will you be using Bainbrigge’s servants?’ asked Logan.

  ‘If I may.’

  Clunie almost smiled at the satisfaction with which the commandant heard that Clunie was willing to be assigned only the number of servants accorded a lieutenant. It was his second marked diplomatic success of the day. The first had been in the office, when he had broken blandly into Logan’s maze of angry surmise to say, ‘I expect they couldn’t think of anything else to do with me. And as for the lack of a letter from Macleay, I’ll give you my guess about that. Muddle. Simple muddle.’ The word had worked a miracle. Logan had actually laughed. ‘My dear fellow, you can’t tell us at Moreton Bay anything about muddle. We know it all.’

  And now he was saying, ‘Good. Very good. Bainbrigge’s personal servant is a prisoner. You’ve no objection to that?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Very good. We need all the ranks for guard duty. The personal servant I had before Collison was a prisoner. Bishop. A man once of my own regiment. A lifer. Highway robbery. A great strong fellow, oh, he stood out among them like a giant. Scourger, too. Went out with a party of soldiers, and drowned while getting water. Bishop! I’ve not found another like him, nor ever will.’

  The memory of Bishop had quite expunged the commandant’s good humour; he sounded morose and bitter. ‘And of course, there was great rejoicing, and they said they saw his ghost. They’re great ghost seers, you will find. And they tried to claim the credit. Yes, credit is how they saw it, and credit was the word they used. They said he was ambushed and murdered by runaways. I should like to see the two or three runaways that could have held Bishop under water, or the four or five either. It needed two men at the triangles to take his place until one grew practised enough to take the task alone. That’s Gilligan. He’s my chief gardener too. He’s well enough, but there will never be another Bishop.’

  ‘Was it Bishop who is said to have killed the man Swann?’

  ‘I am said to have killed the man Swann. Bishop was scourger at that time, but according to the Monitor, was only the instrument of my murderous rage.’

  ‘I don’t read the Monitor.’

  ‘Nor I. It was sent me from Sydney with the suggestion that I prosecute. I didn’t need the suggestion. I should have done so in any case. It’s a question of my good name. Its precious editor got his information from a former prisoner at this place. Lorry, Lawrie, some such name, I don’t even recall the fellow. Smith Hall must be a great fool to put his trust in a convict, former or not. By far the larger part of them are liars and curs, and the man’s a fool that thinks otherwise.’

  They had turned their backs on the river and were picking their way up the rutted street past the military barracks, a two-storeyed brick building, not yet finished, with corner stones of the local pinkish stone. As they paused to watch the work, Logan whistled softly through his teeth, and after a while gave a nod of satisfaction. Clunie also approved the building, finding it solid and decent and suitable to its purpose. ‘It’s too bad,’ he said, as they walked on, ‘that the governor has no power to deal with fellows like Smith Hall.’

  ‘He is stopped by the chief justice. As sure as he devises a method to put the radical editors down, the chief justice rules it repugnant to the laws of England. It’s evident he doesn’t consider anarchy repugnant to the laws of England. I am sorry for the governor, though to me the Hall matter is of little consequence.’

  ‘It will mean a journey to Sydney.’

  ‘D’you think I object to that?’

  ‘No indeed.’ Clunie was startled by the commandant’s testy response. ‘I meant that you would welcome it.’

  ‘Why should I not? And my wife is delighted.’

  But there was still a touch of defiance in his tone. Clunie, who had heard rumours of Logan’s debts, wondered now if they were gam
bling debts to fellow officers in Sydney. It did not take much imagination to see him at the tables, high-strung yet stoney-faced, unable to leave, and nor was it hard to realise how galling such debts would be to his touchy pride. ‘The ladies,’ he was saying now, ‘are always wild to get to Sydney. They miss the pic-nics, and the balls.’

  ‘I hope my wife shall have landed by then, so that she and Mrs Logan may meet.’ Clunie spoke with a warmth that was in part an apology for his suspicions. ‘And as for Smith Hall, may he be confounded! As will certainly happen. Public opinion has quite turned against him.’

  ‘I know it. His only support is from the eccentric and the low.’

  Clunie thought suddenly of Frances O’Beirne. He did not like the girl, having been affronted first by what seemed to him a clumsy flirtatiousness, and then by the crude sincerity of her cry: ‘Is Mr Smith Hall such a monster?’ But last night at the commandant’s table he had detected something else in her, a sort of pitiable heat and confusion. ‘Well,’ he replied to Logan, ‘let us say of the unformed and the undisciplined.’

  Logan accepted the amendment with a good-humoured laugh. He was obviously pleased, even excited, by Clunie’s expressions of support. ‘I wish I could take you out to the Eagle Farm, my dear fellow, but we are damnably short of horses. Two died this year, and for the loss of a third I hold myself responsible. On my expedition in May he broke away from our encampment and was not recovered. So now, except for my grey—and she is my own good beast, I bought her in Sydney—there’s only the nag Murray uses. I asked for six. Two were sent, but the voyage was rough and both were injured. I asked again. The result was silence. Oh, you are right when you speak of muddle. The governor is the best of men and the best of soldiers, it’s an honour to serve him. But he’s as bedevilled by his officials as I am by my overseers. Well, who knows? The next ship may bring horses, and in the meantime you may borrow my mount and ride out with Murray. A thousand acres under cultivation at the Eagle Farm, the whole establishment under Parker, dispensary every day, Murray rides out in the mornings. Oh, sometimes I think I’ve not done too badly. I’ll take you to Spicer now. I’ve some business with Cowper at the hospital. Spicer’s my superintendent of convicts. He’ll show you the labour returns, and there are a thousand new regulations. Paperwork is not in my line, I’ll leave you to him. But wait, wait, first let me show you something.’

  The commandant leading, they veered to the left and crossed obliquely a large paddock. On the other side stood the prisoners’ barracks. Clunie supposed this to be their destination, but the commandant halted just inside the gate set in the high surrounding wall.

  Here stood a row of slab huts. He set a hand on the nearest. ‘A few slab huts,’ he said. ‘When I came, these were all I had to use. At night I used to hear them trying to get out and run.’ He held one foot parallel to the wall, a few inches above the ground. ‘Scratching just there, between the slab and the earth, trying to get out and run.’

  Clunie nodded, looking only at the commandant’s boot. He could not look at his face. The boot seemed poised to stamp on fingers. A fine war, he thought, for a Peninsula veteran.

  Logan straightened his figure and folded his arms. ‘They questioned my punishments. Too severe. I pointed out that I had no means of solitary confinement. So they let me put the slab on stone foundations.’

  He walked past three huts, followed by Clunie, and stopped at the fourth. ‘Like this.’ He set the tip of a dusty boot on the stone. ‘I had this quarried across the river. I found good clay and set up a kiln. I sent men upriver and set up the Limestone Station. Oh, and of course there were letters to write. Letters! But in the end I had my way, I built in brick and stone. These are overseers’ huts now.’

  He turned and walked into the centre of the large compound, followed again by Clunie, who obediently stopped when he did. Collison had remained at the gate. The commandant, looking up at the barracks, lifted and settled his heels. He did not speak, but Clunie understood him to be saying, in effect, ‘And now, look at that!’

  The barracks, quite empty at this time of day, seemed spread out for scrutiny and comment. It was by far the biggest building on the settlement, with extreme wings on one storey, and a two-storeyed main block intersected by a central tower of three storeys. On the Regent Bird Amelia Bulwer had told Clunie that the two top storeys of the tower were occupied by the chapel, and on the same voyage Henry Cowper had told him that at the ground level of the tower the triangles were set up and the men flogged. Like Louisa Harbin, Clunie had been ‘reached by the new ideas’, and was aware of what capital, especially journalistic capital, could be made of such a juxtaposition, but his very awareness of this, and his distrust of the kind of person who would make it, helped him to disregard all such influences in judging the building. He saw that it was a stout and well-proportioned building, and in spite of certain crudities of construction he thought it very creditable to Logan—very creditable indeed if one took into account the shortage of skilled labour, the lack of enthusiasm in Sydney, and the smallness (after all) and unimportance of the place itself. It was, in fact, a fine building for the place. Clunie, understanding at that moment how life in such an isolated place could warp the judgement and disrupt the sense of proportion, determined on steadiness from the start. He would not overpraise the building. But here was the commandant, with folded arms and teetering heels, his face worshipfully raised, clearly expecting it to be praised according to his own inflated estimate.

  ‘It is of credit to you,’ said Clunie, ‘in the circumstances.’

  Logan’s heels settled; his arms tightened across his chest; he turned his head and regarded Clunie along his shoulder, without expression. Then his eyes took on a distant look, and he nodded in gentle, regretful agreement. It gave Clunie the impulse to retreat, to contradict himself in some way or to add some stronger praise; but the commandant might have forgotten him, so completely had he withdrawn his attention.

  He had raised his eyes to the windmill. ‘The settlement,’ Cowper had told Clunie on the Isabella, ‘is mostly on one point of land. Penis-shaped, we shall say, backed by a high ridge we shall call the Line of Bollocks.’ Coarse but accurate, thought Clunie now. The windmill was on that ridge. Logan had spent fifteen minutes that morning explaining to Clunie why the sails had never rotated. The building housed a treadmill.

  Logan’s silence continued as they returned to the gate, were joined by Collison, and crossed the broad paddock again. Clunie felt it as a silence, not of offence, but of deep thought, and indeed, when the commandant spoke at last, it was in the slow, impersonal tone of self-absorption.

  ‘I think, when you have learned the ways of the place, I shall take a journey inland. My map is not complete.’

  ‘One hears of your explorations in Sydney,’ gratefully murmured Clunie.

  The commandant looked neither pleased nor displeased, but said in the same abstracted way, ‘There’s a stream striking out of the river at the foot of the Brisbane Mountain. It runs north-east through the ranges, in my opinion, and reaches the sea. In my opinion it augments itself from the mountains and flows as a fine river to the sea.’

  He needs that fine river to the sea, thought Clunie. ‘If by being your deputy,’ he said, ‘I can help in such important work—’

  But Logan cut in, alert and wary again. ‘After the letter, man. We will wait for Macleay’s letter.’

  The office of the superintendent of convicts was in a long low building of slab and stone. Clunie was relieved to be delivered to Peter Spicer and left alone with him. While Logan’s departing footsteps could still be heard, this plump and jaunty young man was congratulating Clunie on having inherited Bainbrigge’s personal servant, a clever fellow who wove his own crab baskets and slung them across the mouths of creeks.

  ‘But not too often in the same place, captain, because the crabs are cunning. Bainbrigge—obliging fellow—always let
me have one or two.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘But how did you become learned?’ asked Letty.

  ‘I am not learned,’ said Frances, laughing.

  ‘Louisa Harbin says you are.’

  ‘She is mistaken, Letty. Mama taught me to read and write, just as she taught you and Cass, and beyond that I know only what I learned from reading her books.’

  ‘Then you can’t do awithmetic?’

  ‘Yes. Our Uncle Fitz taught me when he broke his leg at our house, and was bored.’

  ‘Even long division?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you are learned.’

  Frances laughed again, watching Letty in the mirror. They were in Frances’s room. Letty had secured the front of her sister’s hair with combs and was now standing behind her chair loosely plaiting the long tresses at the back. Several times it had occurred to Frances to tell Letty that the young gardener had spoken to Robert, but each time she had postponed this duty because she was reluctant to mar the pleasure of the occasion. She knew that the exaggerated respect with which Letty spoke of her learning was in part a humorous pose, but it was exactly the kind of half serious and half mocking game played by herself and her little sisters at home, and it made her feel happier and more at ease than she had believed possible. Laughing, and watching Letty in the mirror, she was waiting for her to laugh in response, but Letty, though smiling with her eyes, pursed her lips solemnly and drew Frances’s braided hair into a knot at the back of her head. ‘Do you like it like that?’

  ‘It’s very nice.’

  ‘Tell me the twuth.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  Letty released the hair and it dropped like a shot bird down Frances’s back. ‘You see?’ cried Frances. ‘That’s all it wants to do.’

  ‘It can’t be let.’

  ‘I could have a fringe. I could curl it in papers.’