Beyond the Blue Mountains

by Jean Plaidy

  Margery, who liked to talk of her own life, had a curiosity about the lives of others.

  “What brought you here?” she demanded of Carolan and Esther.

  Carolan told her.

  “H’m!” said Margery.

  “I don’t know as I like thieves in me kitchen.”

  “We were wrongly accused,” protested Carolan.

  “We are not thieves!”

  Margery and Jin, the parlourmaid, rocked with laughter.

  “All convicts are accused wrong … according to them,” explained Margery.

  “I can’t think what Mr. Masterman can be thinking of to bring thieves into me kitchen!”

  “Look here!” Carolan said hotly.

  “I never stole anything. If you think I did, if you think I’m not good enough to mix with you… I… I… I’ll ask to be moved right away.”

  Margery put her hands on fat hips and rolled about in delight.

  “Hark to her! Hark to her! Now who do you think you are, my dear? The Queen of England? The Princess of Wales? Just hark at her. She will ask to be moved. And listen to her, Jin; just listen, girl! The way she talks… all haughty, eh?” She turned to Esther.

  “And what about you?”

  “I know it is of no use to say so,” said Esther, ‘but I am innocent too.”

  Margery seemed overcome with merriment and at length gasped out: “I ain’t laughed so much since my curate put his I spectacles on his nose and said “Well, if you really think I ought to come in with you … I will. Perhaps if we pray for great strength of mind…” No, I ain’t laughed so much since then!”

  It was Carolan she liked though. Not Esther. Mealy mouthed, that was Esther. Carolan, she fondly supposed, was something of what she herself had been at that age.

  “Thieving was something I never could abide,” she said.

  “I

  wouldn’t have thought you would have been sent out for thieving; you don’t look the kind. Still, you are here now and I don’t mind telling you you are the dead spit of what I was at your age. I was married then though; we had our little shop. There I was. ladling out the sugar; we used to make love behind the sacks of flour. Funny it was when customers come in. I can laugh at it now. Look here, you see that whip hanging over the mantel? That’s for them that can’t do as I say, do you see? Do you see?” she asked Esther.

  She looked with disfavour on Esther. Thin! Lovely hair though. Not one for the men. and the men wouldn’t be for her either, because men were for those who liked them, and she didn’t blame them for that!

  Jin, the parlourmaid, was a good-looking girl of the gipsy type. She had flashing black eyes and vital, black, curling hair; in her ears she wore brass earrings, and she had tied a piece of string about the waist of her yellow frock to accentuate the smallness of her waist and the line of the bosom above.

  “Now Jin here,” said Margery, and her voice took on a note almost of reverence as she spoke, “Jin was transported for attempted murder. She stabbed her lover. Mind you, I wouldn’t say but what he deserved it; he was carrying on with somebody else right under her very nose, so she stabbed him. Now I was never a one for violence myself and a good deal I had to put up with particularly from my pedlar! He would go take his pack into a house, and, given half a chance, he’d take advantage of the lady of the house in the twinkling of an eye and scarce say thank you. There was a man to take up with, and mad he could make me, but I trust I’m a woman who can control herself. Still. I understand Jin.”

  Jin eyed both Carolan and Esther from under lowered brows. She was sullen, not inclined to be friendly.

  “Jin’s got a mighty temper, she has!” chuckled Margery.

  “Show ‘em what you carries around with you, Jin!”

  Jin did not answer, and Margery pulled at her skirt and chuckled throatily.

  “Where do you keep it today, Jin? In your pocket, eh? There it is; take a look at it. She carries that knife around with her. and she’d as like bring it out as look at you. That’s what gipsy blood does for you. I know. I knew a gipsy once; he come to out door, a fine-looking man, flash as they made “em. Baskets he had for sale, and he asked me to cross his hand with silver.

  “Lady,” he says, “there’s a dark man coming into your life. You are going to be glad of this dark man, lady!” And believe me, I was … curate’s being a bit tame now and then. Talk about temper, he’d got one. They was encamped near the cottage for days. I saw a lot of him. And his wife carried a knife around, just like Jin. You’ve got to keep clear of people what carries knives. I’m not so sure of what Mr. Masterman mightn’t say if he was to know you carried that knife around.”

  “I ain’t hurting no one,” muttered Jin.

  “It’s my knife, ain’t it?”

  “No!” said Margery.

  “It ain’t. It’s Mr. Masterman’s. Everything here is Mr. Masterman’s. You and Poll and these two here. Why, if he liked…”

  “I did not know,” said Carolan, ‘that he had bought us body and soul.”

  Margery rocked backwards and forwards, laughing.

  “Don’t it make you laugh, Jin? The way she talks, eh? Body and soul! Tell you who she reminds me of? The mistress. Talks just like that, the mistress does. And every time I looks at the -poor lady I says to myself: “Poor Mr. Masterman!” You would think … but there you are, men is funny creatures, no mistake. Well Miss, do you think we’re going to suit your ladyship here? Speak up, lady. We’ve got to suit you, haven’t we; now whether you was to suit us, that ain’t no importance at all, it ain’t!”

  “Well,” said Carolan, ‘you asked for my opinion; I have given it.”

  “I say, Jin, I do like to hear her talk. You’d think she was out for politics, not thieving. Here, you! Why don’t you say something?”

  “What do you want me to say?” asked Esther.

  “How do you like us?”

  “I… I think I am going to like it here.”

  “This is good, this is! A pair of “em! Now my curate, he spoke soft and gentle just like her… but soft and gentle, rough as you like, they’re all the same between the sheets. That’s men for you! Women’s the same, I bet! Where’s Poll? Poll! Polly! Come here and meet your new friends.”

  Poll came from the sink, wiping her hands. She was very thin and pale and ugly; her nose was large, her eyes small, and her mouth was crooked; her teeth were uneven and brown.

  “Poor Poll,” said Margery.

  “She come from the workhouse and was took advantage of. She murdered her baby; that’s why she’s here.”

  Poll started to cry.

  “Now, don’t snivel, Poll,” said Margery sharply.

  “And it was your own fault for getting took advantage of. Come here and meet her ladyship. What do we call your ladyship, eh?”

  “My name is Carolan Haredon.”

  “Really now! Are you sure it ain’t Lady Carolan Haredon?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “A pity. I’d have liked to have a ladyship in my kitchen.”

  When Margery heard Esther’s story, she was a little more pleased with her.

  “But you shouldn’t have been cruel to the young gent, my love! That’s why you got to Newgate … being cruel. Why, if you’d done what the young man wanted, you might have been ladying it in London Town instead of working in a Sydney basement.”

  So much for life in the basement. It was not so easy to know what went on in the upper part of the house. Mr. Masterman was engaged in much business. He owned several stations, but that strip of country shut in on one side by the Blue Mountains and on the other by a great ocean had not proved such rich and fertile land as the first settlers had hoped it would. While the mountains remained an impenetrable barrier, the activities of pioneers on land must necessarily be restricted, and Mr. Masterman was not the sort to endure restrictions. At one time he had taken a schooner to the Bass Strait Islands and done very well out of the venture, returning with many sealskins and tons of oil; bu
t these did not attract him as the land did. He kept an interest in the sealing business, but did not himself go again to sea. He arranged for the putting up of houses and other buildings; he dabbled in the politics of the town, and was a friend and supporter of the influential John MacArthur. though he managed to keep clear of the man’s quarrels with Governor King. He was clever and alert, a pioneer who had come to this country, not in the grip of the law, but in that of his own relentless and dynamic ambition. A new country had been discovered; he wanted to write his name boldly at the head of its history, side by side with that of Phillip, that man of genius and such patience who was the real founder of the colony and had brought out the first fleet; he wanted to write it beside that of MacArthur, him whom they called Kingmaker. There was little cruelty in his house; the lash was hardly ever used. But to him, Carolan was sure, the convicts were not people; they were merely a cheap and convenient form of getting labour. He had convicts on his sheep farms, convicts building roads and houses. Cheap convict labour was one of those stepping stones which were helping Gunnar Masterman to glory. But much of this was conjecture on Carolan’s part, built up from scraps of conversation chiefly with Margery, the talkative, who saw all men through amorous eyes.

  “Poor man,” said Margery, ‘with that sickly wife of his! And not a son, nor yet a daughter to call his own. And him not the man to go around whoring. And her. with her room all to herself … Poor Mr. Masterman!”

  “I do not believe he minds that she has a room to herself,” said Carolan.

  “He does not mind that he has no son or daughter. He is cold as ice. You feel it.”

  “So your ladyship feels it, does she! So your ladyship has been looking at Mr. Masterman, eh? Now Tom and Harry, riding in from the stations with the smell of cattle in their clothes, now they wouldn’t be the ones to attract your lovely ladyship! Of course not! Why, your ladyship’s eyes are all for Mr. Masterman!”

  “How dare you!” cried Carolan. I… hate the man!”

  “Hate your master, eh? Don’t forget the whip over the mantel.

  “Margery,” he says to me.

  “I trust you to use it judicial.”

  “You can trust me, Mr. Masterman,” I says. And so he can. And listen, my lady, if I hear another word against your master, I uses it. It’s mutiny, nothing less!”

  Margery would never use the whip, though she talked so often of doing so. Carolan laughed at her.

  “Suppose I tell you about my lover how would that be?”

  There now. me love, I knew you’d got one. You tell Margery. I understand. You don’t want this other scum to hear.”

  It was so easy to please Margery; she loved the story of the squire.

  “His rage, me love, when he found the bird flown! You was a sly one!” Carolan told of Everard.

  “Parsons, me lovely, they’re men too. I can tell that. I said to him: “Now there ain’t no sense in staying out there shivering. There’s room in here for the both.” And what if he does mutter a prayer afore he gets in! Why, bless us all, it makes a change, now don’t it?”

  But Carolan never said a word about Marcus; yet she thought of him often.

  Esther was almost happy. Each night she knelt by her bed to say her prayers. Margery chuckled at the proceedings; Jin looked on with cold distaste, and Poll watched with vacant eyes; but none molested her.

  “If only,” said Esther, ‘we could hear news of Marcus, how happy we could be!”

  “You might be,” said Carolan.

  “I could never be happy again.. You forget I have lost Everard, and my mother is dead.”

  Esther was full of contrition.

  “I am selfish! I think only of myself. Poor, poor Carolan!”

  Carolan spent a lot of time talking to Margery, who loved to hear her talk. She told of the passion of the squire, who was not really her father; she told of Charles who had been cruel and had tried to kiss her; she told the story of how she had been locked in the tomb. “Ah!” sighed Margery, rocking with glee.

  “You and me, me love, is as like as peas in a pod. You’ll be the spit of me when you grows up to be my age. And one word in your ear, lovely keep clear of pedlars!”

  Carolan thought, Shall I be like her?

  Her hands were rough with housework. She was an indifferent worker, and but for the fact that she was a favourite with Margery, the woman might have been tempted to get down the whip from above the mantel. Crockery seemed to slip out of Carolan’s hands.” Tis a mighty good thing that poor lady’s so sickly. Now if it was some ladies who took a pride in their homes, it would be the triangle for you, lovey, and the lash about your white skin.” Margery liked to pull the yellow dress off Carolan’s shoulder and stroke her.

  “Lovely white skin it is, lovey. Dead spit of what mine was when I was twenty, and it ain’t so long ago neither.”

  Carolan, restive in the basement, hating the dirty water into which it was necessary to plunge her hands, washing dishes, peeling potatoes, hating the smell of cooking, was bored. She longed for the fields and lanes round Haredon, and the feel of a horse beneath her. She asked a good many questions about what went on above stairs.

  “There used to be a good deal of entertaining,” Margery told her, ‘but the mistress don’t often feel up to it nowadays. Her health’s bad, and getting worse. I can’t think that it’s what you might call a happy marriage. There she is, spending half of her time on the bed in her room with one of her headaches. Now if I had a nice upstanding man like Mr. Masterman for me husband …”

  “Do you think she is really ill?” asked Carolan.

  “Illness is a funny thing. There’s people who thinks they has it, and if they thinks hard enough they’ve got it. That’s illness just as the smallpox or anything else is. Well, that’s the sort of illness she’s got. Why, I remember a year or so back there was an epidemic of fever and people was afraid of its spreading; bless me. if she didn’t take to her bed and was burning hot, and the doctor coming. It wasn’t fever she’d got, but it was something well nigh as bad, and if it hadn’t been for Doctor Martin …” Margery smiled affectionately as she said the doctor’s name’… if it hadn’t been for him, she’d have had fever all right. That’s her for you.”

  They sat round the table, Esther, Jin, Polly. Margery, James and Carolan. eating supper of bread and cheese, which they washed down with ale. It was lax in Margery’s kitchen. It might have been a servants’ hall back in England. Where else in Sydney were convict servants treated like this! Margery was responsible of course. She sat at the head of the table with James on her right hand and Carolan on hex left. She was well pleased, for the presence of James meant that she was still attractive enough to bring him round to the basement every night, though he had his own quarters with the other men in some outbuildings near the house. And there was Carolan, with her smouldering eyes and her lovely budding body to remind Margery of what she was a mere twenty years ago.

  There was a dinner-party going on above stairs, and Jin wore a white apron over her yellow dress; she looked attractive in the lamplight.

  Carolan said: Tell us what the table looked like, Jin.”

  “It looked all right,” said Jin.

  Margery said: “The table looked beautiful. I done it meself. The linen! And the glasses! I took in the pudding meself, pretending it was to see all was well, but really to have a look at them. Now he was at the head of the table, and a handsome man he is, and mighty pleased with himself he was looking too, and do you wonder! Quite some of the best people in Sydney was at his dinner table. And her… well, there she was at the other end of the table… in blue. Her fair hair’s getting thin, I noticed, and she was too pale. Too much lying a-bed, my lady, I says to meself.”

  “Lazy old woman!” said Jin.

  “Why should we slave like we do ..:

  Margery’s eyes flashed.

  “Now that’s enough of that. I’ll tell you why. Because you’re nothing more nor less than a murderess, and she… she�
�s a lady of the land. Another word from you and I ask James to get down the whip for me … aye, and to lay it about you for me. It’s mutiny, that’s what it is!”