The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  Frances shook her head. ‘My letter estranged them.’

  ‘Perhaps it is just as well.’

  ‘Yes.’ Frances got to her feet. ‘Let me clean your things.’

  She tied a painting apron over her dress, assembled Louisa’s brushes and water and china palettes on a tray and carried them to the scullery. Louisa’s cook was plucking a chicken. Frances refused her offer of help and went herself to fetch water from the cask in the kitchen porch.

  Each married officer was allowed two outside servants—always convicts of the first class—to grow vegetables and raise chickens and pigs for his household. While Frances was drawing the water she could hear Victor Harbin’s two men talking at a short distance from the porch. Of all the members of the officers’ households she was the only one who went into places where she was not expected to go. In the matter of the privy she had been obedient until the warm weather had made evident, at certain turnings of a corridor or during certain shifts of a breeze, a faint stench in Letty’s pretty house. Then she had taken to using the outside privy when the commandant was out and Letty was resting, and even after becoming used to the stench, the habit of running out of the house remained. If the servants saw her coming and going, they turned their backs, but sometimes, because she went softly so that she should be undetected from the house, so was she undetected by them. She ranged wider. She ran to the stable to see Fatima, and to the yard to watch a litter of pigs. She went to the orchard for a shaddock or lemon, she drew her own water from the casks. And in this way she had seen things she called inexplicable. Gilligan and the groom, lying in a dark corner of the stable, she could have almost believed to be fighting. Big Annie and Madge Noakes, upright and entwined in the scullery, seemed closer to static play. She called such sights inexplicable, yet knowledge was somewhere in her, for they jolted and frightened her. She could not speak of them without disclosing her own disobedience; she thrust them away from her and seemed to have forgotten them. This was the easier to do because such events were rare. More often, she overheard conversations, and these she had no impulse to reject. Many concerned food, some were vulgar chaffing, but a surprising number were similar to that which reached her now. Victor Harbin’s men were discussing the social standing of the various officers they had known. She did not pay much attention until they began to speak of the commandant.

  ‘And ’im,’ said one. ‘What’s ee, after all?’

  ‘You’re right, cock. What?’

  ‘Nothin’ but a marchin’ captain in a foot regiment.’

  ‘Nothin’ but that.’

  ‘Now if it was the ’Orse Guards. Or another of the bang-up ones . . .’

  Frances bore her water into the kitchen. She was the daughter of a major, accustomed from childhood to hearing such distinctions made, but to hear the prisoners making them puzzled and disconcerted her. She had heard enough to know that they made these distinctions among themselves as well as among the military and civilian officers; and that they should care about such details, that they should care whether one was allowed to wear a straw hat and another was not, that one received one and threepence a week and another tenpence, or whether one’s master was this or that in the military scale, altered and confused her first conception of them to such a degree that she no longer knew what to make of them at all. In their concern with such petty matters she felt they betrayed the tragedy of their fate. The only ones she still thought of with her former intensity were the truly ungovernable ones: Lazarus, Bulbridge and Fagan, and others of whom she had heard. Bulbridge and Fagan, instead of two little men scrimmaging in a wheatfield, now appeared in her inner vision, with Lazarus and the others (whom she had never seen in life), as dark, wild, crazed, almost wolfish creatures. She would not have walked past them to the privy, or gone among them to pick fruit or to rest her cheek on the neck of a grey mare, but she could not help hoping that they would win the contest into which they had thrown themselves against such odds. The indignation she had shared with Edmund Joyce and the Hall girls was now absorbed in the hope that Lewis Lazarus would get clear away at his next attempt, that Bulbridge and Fagan would never be taken, and that Boylan (whose name she had overheard several times) was not dead, but was indeed with the blacks in the bush. Guilty about the secrecy and fervency of this hope, she told herself for consolation that Lazarus, or Bulbridge and Fagan, or Boylan, could not be a danger to ‘us’ (in which category she did include herself) if they were living deep in the bush with the blacks. Standing at the scullery bench and washing Louisa’s brushes, she said idly to the cook, ‘Do many blacks come about the settlement?’

  ‘A few, miss.’

  ‘I have not seen even one.’

  ‘They come about the outskirts, miss. But not inside. Not now.’

  ‘And on the outskirts, do they speak to the men in the gangs?’

  But now the cook spoke with stony reproach. ‘I am sure I don’t know what they do, miss.’

  Louisa’s housemaid ran into the kitchen. ‘A ship!’ she cried. She was sixteen. She twirled about with her arms held horizontally. ‘A ship at Dunwich!’

  The cook went on plucking the chicken. ‘It will bring me nothink, Jenny.’

  ‘Which one is it?’ asked Frances.

  The girl came to a standstill. ‘I don’t know, miss. The men just come down from Signals Hill.’

  ‘It will bring you nothink, neither, Jenny,’ said the cook.

  ‘It might,’ said Jenny, on a rising note.

  Frances cleaned the rest of Louisa’s painting things and carried the tray back to the sitting room. Amelia Bulwer had just arrived.

  ‘Frances, my love! A ship!’

  ‘The Phillip,’ said Louisa.

  ‘Then the prisoners will get fresh meat,’ said Frances. For weeks the prisoners in the gangs had had no fresh meat, but the Governor Phillip, the largest of the ships that served the settlement, was the one on which stock was most likely to be carried. ‘And surely there will be horses,’ she said.

  ‘And perhaps a home mail at last,’ said Amelia. ‘To say nothing of the mailbag from Sydney. Louisa, look at Frances. She knows there will be a letter from her beau.’

  ‘I hope there is one from my sisters.’ Frances was learning to protect her privacy. She set down the tray and untied her apron. ‘I have not had one yet.’

  ‘It takes so long,’ said Louisa, ‘from over there.’

  ‘And the post is so expensive,’ said Amelia. ‘It is one of our many, many benefits that ours is carried free.’ She rushed at Frances, took the apron from her and folded it. ‘Not that a certain person in Sydney counts the cost!’

  She was twitching and tweaking at Frances’s clothes as if arranging her for a bridal appearance. Frances found it hard to stand patiently under this behaviour: it gave her the old unbearable feeling that she had been trapped into falsely representing herself; it made her wish scrupulously to explain that there were times when all she could remember of Edmund Joyce was a long pale chin, and that at other times she thought of him as light and affected, though not in the most common way. In fact it brought out in her character an austerity and stiffness that was quite unnoticed by Amelia (now re-tying her sash) but not by Louisa, who was rolling at Frances her pale amused sardonic eyes. Frances recalled her advice—‘Strive to be quite composed’—and stood composedly enough until Amelia finished with her clothes and gave her a little push.

  ‘You will want to run home at once. Here is your bonnet. I will lend you my Maria if Louisa can’t spare her Mary.’

  ‘Amelia,’ said Louisa in her slow voice, ‘the Phillip must first be discharged. No mail will arrive until tomorrow. I am sure Frances is quite content to wait for Madge.’

  Madge Noakes arriving at that moment, however, Frances did put on her bonnet and leave. Not only was she impelled by the excitement generated by the arrival of a ship, but sh
e was drawn home by anxiety for Letty. She knew the mails were of great importance to Letty; she knew that official papers of some sort were awaited, and had felt a sort of offence when Letty had deflected her questions about them. As she left the room with Madge Noakes she heard Amelia say to Louisa, ‘Well, with the commandant at the Limestone Station it will fall to Captain Clunie to discharge the Phillip.’ And for a moment the answer to those deflected questions curled like a wisp of smoke in her mind, then as quickly as a wisp of smoke disappeared.

  The Harbin and Bulwer cottages were set lower in the bank than the others. Instead of taking the winding steps to the road, Frances and the servant scrambled up the rough bank, Madge going in advance and turning now and again to help Frances, who needed one hand to keep her flounced hems clear of the dirt. ‘Let us hope the Phillip brings beasts,’ remarked Frances on one of these occasions.

  ‘Yes, miss, or what a cry will go up.’ They were scrambling on again. ‘Fresh meat every Sunday they must have now, or they think they is dying.’

  ‘It’s little enough,’ said Frances.

  ‘More than what we had in the old days.’

  Frances had become used to Madge’s deep cracked voice, but not to the dragging delivery that made her sound so strangely complacent. She reached the road and turned to pull Frances up the last and steepest part of the bank. The movement dislodged her neckerchief. ‘Secure your kerchief, Madge,’ Letty was constantly saying. But Madge would not or could not keep her scars quite covered. Frances lowered her eyes as if in concentration on the release of her skirt. Elizabeth Robertson had told her how Madge had come by her scars, but because of the casual disjointedness of the telling—as if only referring to something already well known—or because Frances’s understanding had veered away, she was still uncertain whether Madge’s crazed disfiguring struggle had been against the wooden collar attached to her on the ship, or the pillory in which they had later sought to subdue her in Sydney Town. What chiefly remained with Frances was that they had done more than subdue her, and this impressed her afresh as she shook out her skirt and heard Madge say, with contempt and yet with pride, ‘They would have thought theirselves lucky to get a few ounces of salt beef in the old days. Us who was about in those days know what is what!’

  Frances raised her eyes. ‘What do you mean by the old days?’

  When directly addressed, Madge always shifted those sluggish brown eyes aside. ‘I come in seventeen ninety-six.’

  ‘Thirty-four years ago. You must have been only a child.’

  Madge’s slight smile, like her gaze, seemed directed elsewhere. ‘Sixteen, miss. Old enough to know right from wrong. I doesn’t complain.’

  ‘It is as well to be content,’ said Frances curtly.

  ‘We has made our beds, miss.’

  The wrinkles covering her face were like cracks in a glass pane shattered all over by explosion but still hanging in the frame. Frances gave a shrug, and they set off down the road, Madge ostentatiously adjusting her kerchief. ‘I knows I ought to put a bit of a pin in it.’

  There was cajolery in the cracked voice. Frances set her lips and turned her head away. On the other side of the river she saw Patrick Logan, mounted on Fatima, approaching the landing stage. From the near shore, the barge was already putting into the stream.

  ‘I always loses the pins,’ said Madge Noakes.

  ‘I will give you more,’ said Frances, watching Fatima come to a halt with a few, prettily curbed steps.

  But now Madge Noakes was also looking across the river. ‘Back from the Limestone. And he has rode away again, from Collison and the rest.’

  The commandant dismounted, leaving clear to view the lovely arch of Fatima’s neck. ‘There will be horses on the Phillip,’ said Frances in a sweetened, hollow voice.

  ‘Horses!’ repeated Madge with her cracked laugh.

  Fatima dropped her head and stood still and wearily, but the commandant fidgeted, taking a few steps to the left and then to the right, and jerking his head as if irked by pain or discomfort at the back of his neck. Frances guessed that Letty would also be watching him, standing at some window or door of the house she so seldom left. Perhaps she would have risen from the blue sofa to watch, for James Murray, puzzled by her slow recovery, insisted that she still rest twice a day. Frances imagined her hand hovering about the ribbons at her collar, saw the worry gathering in her eyes. ‘Only muddle, Fwances,’ she had said in reply to Frances’s questions. ‘All our lives are bound by muddle and mails.’ She fragmented the worry with her laugh, and waved it away with her hands, but it always seemed to reassemble, out there in the air, and float back to resettle on her. They were near the house now. Frances could hear the children shouting, almost shrieking, with excitement. And then she saw them. They were rolling down the long incline in the field beyond the house, where recent rain had made the grass so soft and green. Elizabeth stood at the bottom of the slope, and nearby, a gardener raised his head from his work to watch them. She saw that it was Martin, and felt a sharp anger, as if he had come back of his own volition, to dog her with his pitiful presence. But conscious of the injustice of this feeling, she controlled it at once. ‘Strive for perfect composure.’ He would be a test of her composure. She turned to ask Madge Noakes when he had come back to work at the house, and for how long, but Madge was still looking across the river at the commandant, with eyes that looked black and enlarged, and did not hear her question.

  It was astonishing to Frances how quickly his mood could change. In the man who strode into the drawing room there was no trace of the restlessness and discomposure he had shown thirty minutes ago while awaiting the barge. Smiling and enlivened, he crossed the drawing room. Letty, watching his face, rose from her seat on the sofa beside Frances, at the same time putting her sewing into Frances’s lap. She hurried to meet him. They came together, clasped hands, hardly kissed. ‘The Phillip,’ he said.

  She bent backwards so that she could examine his face. ‘I know.’

  He turned to Frances with a brief bow. ‘Miss Reform! She will bring you the radical journals.’

  Letty, to insure against possible outbursts on Frances’s part, had revealed her sister’s sympathies but had exaggerated them to the point of caricature and had omitted mention of the Hall girls. All the same, with a hand on Logan’s sleeve, she now gave Frances an anxious look. Frances put Letty’s sewing from her lap and picked up her own. ‘I should prefer a letter from Ireland,’ she said.

  ‘And another from Sydney,’ said Letty. For Logan had been much impressed by the attentions paid Frances by Anning’s nephew. That, more than anything else, had made him tolerate her. He laughed now, and agreed that Frances would certainly receive one from her beau. ‘And for you, my love,’ he said to Letty, ‘one from Cassandra.’

  His ebullience brought an anxious note to Letty’s voice. ‘The poor old Phillip. You make her sound like a tweasure ship. We must wait and see.’ She stroked his sleeve. ‘You are covered with dust.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. There has been no rain out there. Oh, we saw the black prisoner near the Limestone Station. Fat and well. Yes, I am dusty. I leave at once for Dunwich. Well, not at once, but in thirty minutes. The Regent Bird is being made ready. Ring for Elizabeth, my dear.’

  ‘The hot water is alweady on the wash stand.’

  As she followed her husband out of the room, Letty sent her sister a smile that was almost timid, as if begging for her understanding, but Frances did not raise her head from her sewing. As soon as they stood in the passage, and he had shut the door behind them, Letty blocked his path and grasped him by both arms. ‘Where is Collison?’ she whispered fiercely.

  ‘Oh, back there.’

  He released himself as he spoke and walked down the passage so fast that she had to trot to keep up with him. In the bedroom she grasped him by the arms again. ‘You came in alone. I saw you.’

/>   ‘I can’t go at that snail’s pace.’

  She followed him across the room. ‘Blacks!’ she said.

  He sat down and took off a shoe. ‘They wouldn’t dare.’

  But she thrust her face at him again. ‘Absconders! They would dare if goaded by absconders. You have said so yourself.’

  But he only smiled, shaking his head.

  ‘You mean you have not said so?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, pleasant and indifferent. ‘I may have.’

  She sat suddenly on the footstool by the bed. ‘Oh, why are you either so melancholy that all is black, or in such high sp’wits that all is golden?’

  Walking about the room and undressing, he only laughed. She leapt to her feet and extended both hands. ‘Now, see? All is golden. A tweasure ship has sailed into our bay. A letter from Mr Macleay is on her, and so is one from Colonel Allen.’

  ‘Don’t forget the one from the agricultural company, since you insist it must come.’

  ‘That too. And all will say pwecisely what you want them to.’

  ‘You have forgotten the horses, the beasts, and a keepsake annual for yourself.’

  ‘And you, Patwick, have forgotten the pwisoners. Pway, how many does she bwing?’

  ‘No more than we can accommodate and control.’

  ‘Lord! All is indeed golden!’ When she was really angry, she tended to make a pantomime of it, so that she should not appear stark and ugly. ‘Oh,’ she said, wailing, ‘where is the man of sober good sense? This one—’ she extended a graceful arm to point at him—‘believes that Captain Clunie’s appointment will be explained by the posting of the wegiment, and yet that we shan’t be forced to take the childwen to an unhealthy India station, or else part with them to Scotland. He believes that he will be offered a post at two thousand a year—’

  ‘It is you, my love, who believe that the agricultural company—’