by Lena Dowling
Without her husband there to curb her enthusiasm, Lady Hunter had tried to convince Samuel once again of the merits of taking a wife to fetch his meals from the cookhouse, wash and mend his clothes, and clean the cabin. When he politely refused, Lady Hunter had insisted that he accompany her to pick out an additional maidservant. The extra domestic work that his presence created was apparently so weighty it warranted the appointment of another maid. In the interests of peace he had agreed.
Less than an hour later, the scullery-come-supply room that lay between his cabin and the single cookhouse that served both residences had been transformed into an additional bedroom. The room had been stripped of its former contents, a few preserves, root vegetables and cooking pots, all of which had been shifted out to the cookhouse, and in its place Lady Hunter had Tom, one of the farm labourers, move in a pallet for a bed and a crude washstand fashioned from wooden crates. There was no room in the main house to accommodate the new maid apparently — this, despite the fact the Hunter dwelling had an unoccupied scullery of its own.
All of which suggested Lady Hunter was plotting to establish conditions whereby his maid could move out from the scullery and into to his own bed at the earliest opportunity.
In that regard, however, she was bound to be disappointed. So long as there was a servant available to tend to his practical domestic needs, he had no need of, or more importantly, no desire for a wife.
Samuel hurried after her ladyship who was now disappearing through the prison doors.
Lady Hunter directed him towards a room off to the side of the prison where half a dozen women sat on a bench at one end of the room. A group of reasonably well-dressed men huddled at the other, ostensibly talking, but all the while making glances towards the women.
Lady Hunter looked approvingly down the line while Samuel’s heart sank at the sight of them. They were all pretty. Two were spectacularly so. He smiled at them and they smiled back. Goddamn it. All he needed was a maid to do his washing and his cleaning, fetch his meals and repair his work clothes, not a live-in temptation.
‘Lady Hunter.’ An older woman, plump and dressed in black, with a heavily wrinkled face, bustled towards them. A nondescript and capable looking woman who, in Samuel’s opinion, would have made a far more suitable candidate for his domestic servant than any of the attractive young women that had been assembled.
‘Mrs Watts,’ Lady Hunter replied, ‘May I introduce you to Mr Biggs, our new overseer who is interested in taking out a maid on a Ticket of Leave.’
The woman smiled at him exposing a mouth of cracked and blackened teeth.
Samuel clenched his hands into fists at his sides.
Perfect.
Mrs Watts would have been perfect as his housekeeper.
‘As you requested, m’lady, we’ve put together the very cream of the crop, and invited only an equal number of men for viewing. Your friend here is sure to find a maid that meets his requirements. Although, perhaps now that he has seen them, he may be tempted to something more?’
In London, Lady Dorothea Willers, as she was then, had been infamous for her cunning. As the daughter of an extremely wealthy earl and an ambitious mother, she had been one of the most eligible women of the ton. But Lady Dorothea Willers had somehow managed to avoid a society marriage, conspiring to elope with James, a gentleman of no particular rank, and an ex-convict to boot.
Now, for reasons that were beyond him, Samuel had managed to find himself at the centre of one Lady Hunter’s schemes. In urgent need of a way out of the snare he was poised to fall into, he remembered the woman who had clutched him by the arm in the yard. ‘I’ll have Colleen,’ Samuel blurted, his face burning red hot as if a blacksmith had applied a poker to each cheek.
The most beautiful of the half dozen or so women assembled, a woman with bright green eyes and Titian red hair leapt up, beaming. ‘Oh, yes, sir, I would be much obliged to attend to your needs, much obliged.’
The other women giggled, jostling each other down the line while the tall redhead fluttered her eyelashes at him.
Samuel’s mouth ran dry. Swallowing hard in a bid to release some modicum of saliva he pulled roughly at the coarse linen cravat gazing his neck. All of a sudden the room was oppressively close and he looked up, wishing one of the small high windows just below the ceiling were capable of being thrown open.
‘Colleen. Oh yes, what an excellent choice, Samuel.’ Lady Hunter said breathlessly, breaking into a broad smile.
Dear Lord.
‘No, not that Colleen. The one out there.’
Samuel pointed a finger in the direction of the exterior of the building in an effort to avoid any further confusion as to which Colleen he meant.
‘The third-classer? The one who manhandled you outside?’ asked Lady Hunter.
‘If it’s Malone you mean, she’s not eligible for a Ticket of Leave. She’s come back to us from O’Shane’s Boarding House for ineptitude and slovenliness,’ added the matron.
‘But there must be some way. She is the only one I have any interest in. None of these others will do,’ Samuel said betting that if it was the only way to dispense with an additional mouth to feed and a body to clothe, the matron might be persuaded.
‘I’m sorry, but rules are rules.’ Lady Hunter said before the matron could answer.
Unless…’ The old crone’s face contracted, gathering up her wrinkles as if considering an alternative.
‘Unless what?’ Samuel asked quickly.
‘Unless you wanted to marry her, then I might be able to do something. I can’t make any promises, but if Lady Hunter were prepared to have a word with the Governor’s wife, then it might be possible to gain a special dispensation. A dispensation for marriage you understand, but not a Ticket of Leave — that is impossible. It would set a precedent. A prisoner out on a ticket running amok, that is the Governor’s problem, but a wife, well, she would be your problem, sir.’ The woman crackled out a dry chortle from the back of her throat, suddenly her own favourite humourist.
Marrying a woman he had no affection for, for the sole purpose of securing domestic assistance and a peaceful life free from further meddling by her ladyship seemed unfair to the lady concerned, and yet the woman outside had not so much as grasped his wrist as clung to it, and he not so much heard the fear in her voice as felt it. The woman’s entreaty dragged him back through time to the moment he had been separated from his mother after his father died. He saw it all again — his mother’s wild eyes, her mouth split in a gash of blood after taking a backhander to the face, fighting to keep him.
Colleen’s soft brown eyes had borne the same look of desperation as she begged for his help, as if she were clinging to a cliff face, only determination and fingernails holding her there. Surely there could be nothing inherently wrong in releasing her from her hideous toil in return for safe lodgings and light domestic duties?
‘I’ll marry her then — Colleen from outside,’ Samuel added hastily, lest there be any renewed confusion.
‘You do realise O’Shane’s is probably a brothel? Are you sure about this? No one will confirm it to me, but I can imagine…’ Lady Hunter didn’t finish, the sentiment hanging in the air like an insalubrious odour that no one wished to mention.
‘No I didn’t m’lady,’ he replied to her first question, ‘and yes, m’lady I am sure,’ to her second.
While it was true that not many men would have been prepared to take on a whore for a wife, she wouldn’t be his wife, not in the true sense as God intended, so her past was neither here nor there to him. Marrying her was only a means to an end: gaining a live-in maid he could trust himself to live with, while ensuring Lady Hunter had no further cause to make him the subject of her scheming.
He would never take another wife. Not a real one, to replace Amelia. A beloved companion was an attachment. Attachments were all very well and good, until they were broken and then the price for that attachment had to be paid. He had known too much loss in his life already
; both his parents, babies named and unnamed who had passed over to the other side before they could so much as utter their first cry and now Amelia. He would not suffer paying the price again.
‘Well, that’s settled. I believe Reverend Walters is due here the day after next. He can perform the ceremony then.’ Lady Hunter said.
‘The day after next?’
The room tilted at an odd angle and Samuel concentrated hard on staying on his feet. The last thing he needed now was to keel over like an overwrought wench. Since when was an engagement of barely two days duration? Three weeks for the reading of the banns, surely?
‘But what about the banns?’
‘Usually they would be read of course, but if we’re to approach the Governor for a special dispensation for marriage we might as well ask to be relieved of the requirement for banns as well.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh, yes, that’s how it works here, Samuel. Everything is different in the colony,’ Lady Hunter said cheerily.
He expected things to be different in Australia, but just how different was coming as something of a revelation.
Chapter 4
‘I beg you — I can’t stay here. Please, sir I’ll do anything, sir, anything at all, sir. I’ll lie on me back for you, coz I’m good at that, so I am, sir.’ The high-pitched falsetto of the guards’ taunts bounced around the prison walls of the empty punishment cell.
‘You’re not at O’Shane’s now. You can’t go laying hands on any man who takes your fancy,’ said the bigger one of the two guards, who had hauled her away from the stone breaking.
She was in a fine fix, about to be shorn like a sheep. The guard brandished a pair of scissors, snipping the blades together. Colleen half expected a slop of drool to fall out of the side of his mouth.
‘I was thinking of something better, weren’t you, Ethan? I thought Colleen Malone were meant to be the comeliest whore in the whole colony.’
‘That’s, me cousin, Nellie. She’s the prettier one,’ Colleen said, her voice shaking only slightly less than her legs as she struggled to stay on her feet.
‘Who said you could speak?’ the one called Ethan said, pushing her down on a wooden stool they had dragged along with them, planning to shackle her to it while they cut off her locks. ‘We’ll just have to make do with the second comeliest then won’t we?’
‘Gag her yer reckon, Walt?’
‘Aye, unless she’s willing to co-operate. Want to keep that hair of yours, Malone?’
Colleen nodded quickly.
Anything to keep her hair. She might not have been quite as stunning a beauty as Nellie, but her corkscrew locks far thicker and more luxurious than her cousin’s.
‘Then how about you show us one of the tricks they taught you at O’Shane’s?’ Walt straddled her, grabbing the back of her head, pushing her into the front of his trousers fumbling to undo the flap.
Anything but that.
His hard cock came at her full in the face. She smelt the hot stink of his arousal. Gagging, she opened her mouth to retch and then without stopping to think, bit down as hard as she could.
Walt let out a satisfying wail, releasing the squeal of a stuck pig until something heavy connected with the side of Colleen’s head.
There were rainbows — beautiful colours streaming out from the sides of her eyes — then everything went dark.
When she came to she was shivering, the raised edges of the flagstones digging into her hips, her back, her shoulders. Walt, Ethan and The Factory warden peered over her.
‘You alright?’
Colleen’s head throbbed.
She wanted to clutch for her baby, but remembering Maggie’s advice, she kept her hands down at her sides, wiggling her middle a bit.
Thankfully only her head hurt.
‘You idiots.’ The woman cuffed Walt. ‘This one’s spoken for. Missy Malone here is one of Dorothea’s princesses now. You can move her in with the first-classers till the day after tomorrow, then she’s getting wed.’
What? The wallop she had taken to the side of her noggin had evidently sent her brain flying into a muddle, whereupon the fairies had gathered up her senses and made off with them.
‘Getting wed? To who?’
‘To whom are you getting wed you mean, and don’t come over all innocent, Miss Malone. You know exactly what I’m talking about — that Mr Biggs, the one you apparently threw yourself at outside.’
The man with the glittery blue eyes who had shown her how to use the mallet had a name.
‘Mr Biggs,’ Colleen repeated.
It suited him. He was hefty; his bulk knotted with muscle as if it had been put to good use. It was a blessing that he had thought to stop and show her how to angle the hammer because her hand was so cut up, without his advice she didn’t know if she would have been able to carry on.
‘Yes, Biggs, that’s his name. No need to wear it out. As long as Lady Hunter can square it with the Governor you’ll be using it yourself soon enough. Not that there’s much doubt that she won’t. I can’t imagine there is anything that woman couldn’t inveigle if she set her mind to it. Though why a man like Mr Biggs would bother himself with the likes of you, I don’t know.’
Colleen’s eyes narrowed to slits, and not just because the blow she had taken to her head had made everything unnaturally bright. Between that conniving shrew Lady Mellwood and Danny O’Shane, she had lost almost everything. Everything except her pride.
As her da had always said: ‘Your dignity ain’t somethin’ that can be stolen, only given away.’
For seven long years she had clung to the knowledge that she was blameless. She was the one who had been wronged, shut up in a bawdy house she didn’t belong in, and she didn’t take kindly to people casting aspersions on her character.
‘I’m innocent. I was forced into whorin’ against me will.’
‘That’s what they all say, missy.’
It was everything Colleen could do not to pull herself up and give the old witch a thick ear. It would have been almost worth losing her hair over and having to eat bread and water for a few of days, but as she clenched her hands into fists ready to propel herself up off the flagstones, she heard Nellie’s warning to lay off with the answering back and think of the babe ringing in her ears. She groaned as the effort required to make the slightest movement sent a stabbing pain to her skull, and then she went and made it even worse wrinkling up the corners of her mouth, trying to smile.
‘Still, by the looks, there would be enough of him to satisfy even the loosest of women.’
Colleen pushed through the pain to smirk. She reckoned on that point the matron was probably right.
Married? It hardly seemed real.
‘And you needn’t be looking so pleased with yourself, neither.’ The woman said poking the toe of her shoe into Colleen’s shoulder. ‘You’ve got a couple of days here yet and don’t you forget it.’
‘Biggs. Biggs, man. I am damnably sorry. It’s not too late to back out now, you know. When Thea gets an idea in her head, she’s more lethal than Napoleon on a beeline for Waterloo, but if you wish, I’ll put a stop to this marriage,’ James said, as they prepared to ride out to reconnoitre the Hunter lands that Samuel would soon be taking charge of.
‘You needn’t do that, James. I appreciate that I require domestic help and that adding me to Liza’s workload would have been too much for her.’ And possibly too much for him, Samuel thought, recalling how Liza had shown no shame in her positive assessment of his physical attributes in front of her employer. ‘The woman I judged most suitable was not eligible for the position unless we are wed, and so I will marry her and that is that.’
James pulled on his rein, encouraging his horse to inch closer to the mount Samuel had been supplied with to carry out his duties as the new overseer at Hunter Downs.
‘Thea can be quite the strategist. I don’t mind admitting it’s a challenge staying one step ahead of her, but you mustn’t feel cornered into do
ing anything you will live to regret. I’m far too indulgent with her, I know, but in this matter you only have to say the word, and I shall put my foot down.’
Samuel twisted around in his saddle. He wasn’t at all certain about having a woman living at such close quarters, especially since all the women had been eager in their attentions, but at least Colleen’s case her forwardness could be explained by necessity.
Since arriving in Australia he was more determined than ever that nothing should be allowed to confound the simple life he had planned, as uncomplicated and stark in its natural beauty as the countryside now lying all about him.
James followed Samuel’s gaze for a moment before continuing, ‘Shall we ride out? It’s high time I provided you with an orientation,’ James said, allowing his horse to walk on a few paces.
‘After you, James.’
Samuel nudged his horse forwards.
Circumnavigating the Hunter lands would have the advantage of putting a good thousand acres between him and the nearest meddling female.
The news that a third-classer had managed to secure a marriage to a respectable gentleman did the rounds of The Factory within hours. Even though they couldn’t see each other now that Colleen had been moved into the first-classers’ section, Maggie managed to get a message through, whispered from prisoner to prisoner.
The Factory system of communications between convicts usually changed the message some with every retelling, but in this case Colleen suspected the message arrived exactly as Maggie had told it to the first woman in the chain.
‘Congratulations, ya canny wench. You’ve bagged yourself a braw one.’
Her only fear now was that Mr Biggs might change his mind.
At O’Shane’s the days had mostly passed quickly. ‘Danny’s girls’, as they were known, worked from late afternoon until early morning and apart from being allowed out to accompany Danny on the occasional errand, they mostly spent the rest of their time, gossiping, playing cards, or sleeping, gathering their energy for the night’s entertainments ahead.
