3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  ‘You’ve not opened it?’

  ‘Oh no, it is addressed to you, and my reading’s no better than my writing.’

  ‘Well, then. Shall we brew some tea and sit at the table in the kitchen. It seems cruel, I know, to make you wait just a little longer, but I think it wise that we are composed and have a tonic at hand.’

  Juliette hurried away to put the kettle on the range, unable to stand still a moment longer. It had been Mrs Blake’s idea, that they – she – write to the Quakers in Sydney, to ask after the situation of her mother, Eliza Green. If Eliza had survived, she would by now be a free woman for five years since serving her seven year sentence.

  When they were both seated in Beth’s gleaming kitchen, and Beth had left to sweep out the larder, Juliette laid the letter on the table. They both looked at it nervously. It lay innocently on the smooth pine, but its contents might, at any moment, be deeply affecting. Mrs Blake had been so kind, and was so concerned, that Juliette felt almost as afraid for her disappointment as for her own. She put her hands up to her cheeks as the seal was broken and a plain, yellowish page removed.

  Friends Meeting House,

  Sydney Town

  4 July 1840

  My dear Mrs Blake,

  Pertaining to thy letter, written on behalf of thy domestic servant Juliette Green, we have, these past months, made certain advancements into discovering the whereabouts of her mother Eliza Green.

  Eliza Green was assigned to private service after passing four years at the House of Correction for Females in Parramatta. Whilst there she worked in the laundry, cleaning linen for the hospital and orphan school. As far as we can ascertain, Eliza Green remains unmarried, is healthful, and is now engaged by a squatter with a sheep station at Rose Hill, some miles west from Sydney.

  Upon hearing that her beloved daughter, Juliette, was enquiring after her, the lady was overcome by emotion and told our Quaker sister (who visited the station) that she was hopeful to return to mother England but could not find the means for her passage. This is a sad truth which strikes many of those who have served their sentence here and in Van Diemen’s Land, and is more common to the women, for the men can often work the passage home.

  She bade us send to her daughter the most heartfelt love and blessings, and her ardent wish that they shall see each other again in this life. She promises that never a day passes that she does not think of her and offer a prayer. She was most comforted to hear that her daughter is no longer in the workhouse but has found a position in a respectable household.

  The Friends here are wholly at thy service to convey any further correspondence to those who have need of comfort.

  Thy interested Friend,

  Mary Warburton

  Juliette laughed and then cried and then she seemed to be doing both at once and couldn’t stop. She clasped both hands over her mouth, worried that Mrs Blake would think her hysterical. Mrs Blake only handed her a pristine white cambric square and, serenely, poured tea into each of their cups.

  ‘There, there. It is perfectly reasonable to feel overwhelmed, after all. Your poor mother. It is wonderful news, and a relief, yet at the same frustrating and terribly sad. You must not feel that you are in any way responsible for her situation, I hope that you do not? Juliette?’

  But Juliette knew that she was responsible. Eliza had only been thieving so that her daughter would not go hungry. She was less certain, though, if she was also accountable for her father’s death. It was the memory of that evil day that finally overcame her, and, in spite of wanting to appear sensible, she put her head in her hands and wailed.

  Merino

  The ale house was as rowdy as ever and the Lafferty boys had the corner table. Their fiddle and tin whistle were out already. Every face was familiar. Many were assigned, like Michael; beholden to wait out the last years or months of their sentence in private service. They would be sheering merino, or working in a quarry or boot factory or, like he, as a carpenter on one of the many new public buildings on Macquarie Street. There were many here who would never go home, even in the unlikely event that they could pay for their passage. Once you had a ticket of leave, wages were better than in Ireland or England and a redeemed convict with a trade or even just an able body, was assured a good living.

  Michael had never once considered staying on. Mostly because of Annie. He’d been living like a free man for almost two years, assigned to the governor’s building agent, and it was not a bad life. The harshest sentence had always been being away from his wife and son. Annie’s hair might be grey now, like his own. And Thomas, who was little more than a lad when Michael was arrested, now a man. His son, a man.

  The letters from Thomas came every few weeks with news of Annie, Greystones and the Mahoneys, and were Michael’s most treasured articles. Thomas never wrote plainly of the activities of his men, it was too risky, but he managed to convey whether they were safe and had been successful. Most of the underground news from Ireland came from the steady stream of new arrivals, and this fed Michael Kelly’s small, secret press in the form of a monthly pamphlet.

  The dark brown bitter that they called porter tasted more like charred malt, but at least at the Harp and Shamrock you could be certain to never encounter a colonist. Here all Irishmen, be they free settlers, prisoners or pardoned, were treated as equals. The bar was lined with the men without a choice; the survivors of ’98, the biggest uprising Ireland had ever known. They were all old men now, and their exile was political and unrepealable. They lived to tell anyone who would listen of the way things had been for them when they arrived. Michael had listened a good many times, at first out of interest and then out of sympathy. Now he just pretended he was listening. He had a good picture of the barren shanty town Sydney had been, once, where the prisoners were always hungry and where people were either killing or being killed by the natives. Michael had heard, more times than he cared to mention, of subterranean isolation cells, and water pits where a prisoner was unable to sleep for fear of drowning; of leg irons and lashes and the godawful loneliness. It was the loneliness, they all agreed, that was the worst.

  Many of the political exiles were educated men and they had put their idle wits to use making life difficult for the governor’s military and constabulary. It was from their solidarity and rebellion that Michael had the idea for the basement press, and the veterans of the Harp and Shamrock were his most faithful readers.

  Oscar was behind the bar with a jug at the ready for refills. His round face shone with good humour and perspiration. He nodded as Michael approached. ‘A pint is it, Mick?’

  ‘Aye. The black stuff. It’s what I look forward to all day and when it touches my lips I always wonder why.’

  ‘The water,’ said someone.

  ‘Aye. Too much lime,’ someone else chimed.

  ‘Lucky to have the bloody water. We didn’t have fresh water in the early days.’

  ‘Well it’s not as if it’s a good supply even now, is it, Sean? Not with the bore about to run dry and the piping gone to rust.’

  The conversation was always the same. No one really minded that the stout wasn’t as sweet as it was ‘back home’, since it did the same job, but it was necessary to remark upon it. It united them. It also saved thinking of some topic for conversation whilst the drink was being poured. At the end of the long, labouring day, no one really felt like talking. At least not until they’d emptied a pint or two, so it was better that way.

  Michael took his jar to one of the upended barrels that served as tables, and lit his pipe. The Laffertys had struck up a reel and he tapped his boot absently on the straw that covered the wood floor. His never-idle mind moved towards the evening ahead, but before he could assemble his thoughts, Will O’Shea shuffled over.

  Even when he was pickled, which was most of the time, Will was good for a yarn. He had been a razor-witted Dublin journalist in his youth, until he wrote one too many scathing commentaries on the British in Ireland and was summarily picked up and d
umped in New South Wales.

  ‘On your way down the Rocks, Mick?’ Will had his eye on Michael’s tobacco tin, so he pushed it towards him.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Awful quiet down there.’ Will took a pinch of tobacco and pressed it into his pipe.

  ‘Aye.’ Michael nodded thoughtfully. He’d noticed it too. If there was a job on, he was bloody well going to get to the bottom of it. He was no whistle-blower, but if the orders were coming from London, then he’d make it his business. ‘Let us know if you hear of anything, won’t you, Will?’

  Will chuckled and puffed on his pipe. ‘Nothing else to do.’ They assessed the new builds on Macquarie Street, and agreed that the timber from the cedar logs being floated down the Hawkesbury were magnificent. When Michael had drained his glass and Will had packed his pipe again, he left and headed for the Rocks.

  The Rocks, the slum area at the bottom end of George Street, was overlooked by the homes of merchants and entrepreneurs. These honey coloured villas were perched right up on the tops of the ridge and as far away from the slums below as was physically possible. From their roost, Michael Kelly imagined that it was simply a matter of keeping one’s eyes directed out to sea, rather than to the rookeries below. Then a wealthy man might conveniently forget that his citadel rose up, both metaphorically and literally, from the tenements of the poor.

  As Michael passed by the huddled, flimsy hovels loosely defined as ‘cottages’ in the lower Rocks area, he felt the same vague uneasiness he’d felt for the last week. These huts were a patchwork of rough-hewn timber, roofing iron, sea chests and canvas. They had no guttering or sewage and they opened onto alleys which were unpaved and undrained, and where all manner of filth collected. In this neighbourhood many cottage industries thrived in amongst the homes of the Irish and English poor. Michael knew exactly where one might find coiners, unlicensed pawnbrokers and ‘financiers’. Sydney was a competitive market for forgers and tricksters, and for thieves of varying skill and audacity.

  All was still suspiciously quiet in the Rocks; the characters who were usually seen sauntering up towards George and Elizabeth Streets at night, looking for an unsecured fob watch or a carelessly tied reticule, were either staying in or, more likely, were otherwise engaged. A big job meant someone was in from London or Calcutta; the cities between which most of the empire’s silver was shipped. If it was a big job, then someone who would never, ever, let their identity be known was running it. Someone who would think nothing of having nosy bastards like Michael silenced. He’d have to be careful not to let his interest show. It offended him that so many traditions and trades were being laid to waste. The suffering and degradation made him sick, and when he saw the clippers and barques of the East India Company or Jardine Matheson docked in Sydney harbour, he wanted to hang them all from the jib by their prissy white cravats.

  Michael arrived at a row of slightly better class housing – whose windows had shutters that could be fastened by a bolt and whose walls were wide planks of native hardwood. When freshly hewn, it gave off the faint scent of eucalypt, which was a welcome respite from the rotting funk of the Rocks neighbourhood. These dwellings had underground rooms, originally excavated to keep food from spoiling so quickly. It was in one of these cellars that Michael spent his evenings.

  The cottage in question belonged to Maggie, his oldest friend in the colony, and someone he didn’t ever expect to see again when he left. The fact that she was also the madam of a well-run brothel was of no consequence. One had to make a living. Since the upstairs trade was profitable, Michael’s rent was low; and Maggie no more cared what he got up to, than he did she. There were so few women in the settlement that purchasing the company of one of them was perfectly sensible, being as it provided everyone involved with a reward of some kind.

  Michael knew as soon as he took the latch from the gate that something was amiss, because the windows were shuttered and bolted. The gas lantern that normally flickered on the verandah, informing punters that all was well, was not lit. His guess was that the law had been to visit. It almost certainly wasn’t a small-time brothel they were after, so what did they want? Information, perhaps. Maggie was doyenne of the street-walkers, and the street was the conduit of the Sydney underworld, a criminal network that had imported its highly skilled practitioners from the most infamous of London’s prisons. Something was definitely up.

  Paisley

  The stair timbers creaked. Rhia put the pen down silently, hardly breathing. Its silver shank rolled across the table, then rolled back towards her, coming to rest at her fingertips. The fountain pen was a gift from Mamo, but until now, Rhia had been too afraid to use it. She had thought it foolish to imagine that using a gift from her grandmother might call her from the grave. The pen was graceful and decorative, and the knot-work of its engravings glowed like illuminations. Even perhaps a little brighter than they should by candlelight.

  The stair creaked again. Mab was fat enough to make the stairs groan, but Mab wouldn’t move from the stones by the hearth until there was cream in her dish. It could only be Mamo again, moving through the house, doing whatever ghosts did in the faraway hours. The faraway hours. Strange that she should remember. It had been their secret name, long ago, for the time when the household was sleeping. Mamo had told her stories to help her sleep, which kept her awake. Mamo had also taught her a little rhyme to keep ghosts away, but Rhia couldn’t remember it now.

  The shadows scattered as the door creaked open. Mamo’s spindly legs were clad, as before, in her husband’s too-big long johns. She’d worn them to bed from the time that he died until her own death, and had insisted on being buried in them. The underclothes of a dead man might seem unconventional nightwear to some, but to Mamo it was perfectly sensible. She was from the hills and had always complained that the cold sea mist coiled around her bones. Her husband had been from the sea, being Black Irish and, supposedly, descended from the wrecks of the Spanish Armada. Mamo had liked to think him silkie. The silver braid of her hair was draped across her bony shoulder and half-hidden by her old paisley shawl. Her feet were, as usual, bare.

  Mamo stood for a minute looking at Rhia’s drawing book open on the table. ‘You’re expecting a visitor?’ Her grandmother could never simply say ‘are you drawing?’ Any artistry must be a visitation from Cerridwen, muse of the bards.

  ‘Not tonight. I thought I’d write. Say goodbye to Thomas.’

  Mamo looked at the page. ‘You’ve not much to say.’ She couldn’t read, but anyone could see that the parchment was unmarked. ‘Don’t be a milksop, Rhiannon. Say goodbye to his face.’

  Rhia sighed. She knew that she should.

  Mamo was still looking at the page. Her neat little walnut face was smoother, as though she’d grown younger in death. She traced a crooked finger over the knot-work on the pen, as if it were a pattern in cloth. It was a simple triple knot; the oldest of designs; the sign of the goddess. Mamo turned away and knelt by the wood basket, looking for faggots. ‘Write to me,’ she said.

  Rhia laughed. ‘But you can’t read! And besides you’re—’ Should she state the obvious? Better not. Mamo was easily offended.

  Mamo clicked her tongue in annoyance. ‘Keep what you write. You can read to me when you come home.’

  ‘I could.’ Rhia knew that she probably wouldn’t, and besides, she didn’t want her grandmother, or any ghost for that matter, waiting for her when she came home. She was finished with ghosts. Or so she had thought.

  ‘Good.’ Mamo sat down. ‘Now, I’ve a story.’

  Mamo’s stories were drawn from some boundless ancestral hoard; tales that had been told and retold by generations of bards. Some had never even been written down; others weren’t entirely Irish and weren’t entirely Welsh, like Mamo herself. She professed to be descended from the Tuatha de Danaan, the tribe of the great goddess Anu and the preservers of her stories. Connor Mahoney had always left the room when Mamo talked about the Tuatha; whenever she did, her grey eyes turned dar
k as granite.

  ‘There is a story about Rhiannon I haven’t told you; from after she fell in love with Pwyll and brought him to the Otherworld and after she was wrongly accused. After these things happened, she became the wife of Manannán, god of the sea.’

  Rhia thought she knew all the stories of Rhiannon, her namesake who travelled between the world of the Others and the world of men. She knew that she rode a white mare and wore a purple cloak and that three magical birds always accompanied her. She knew that Rhiannon was, mysteriously, separate from but also part of Anu, and that her life was beset by troubles and betrayals because she had to become strong to do the work of the goddess.

  She listened to Mamo’s story, but it was long and complicated and full of Gaelic names, and Rhia’s mind wandered. In only a few hours she would be leaving for London. Mamo had visited only once before, on the first night. She insisted Rhia go, and Rhia, just as adamantly, insisted that she would not. They had argued about it half the night. In the end Mamo said that it was her house and that she didn’t want Rhia in it. If Rhia didn’t go, she said, she, Mamo, would stay. That did it. It was time, her grandmother said, for Rhia to undertake the night sea journey.

  Brigit had been stunned by Rhia’s announcement that she would go to London after all, but she didn’t ask what had made her change her mind. Perhaps she didn’t want to know.

  ‘At least your mother agreed with me about your naming,’ Mamo was saying. Her father had wanted to name her Mary. ‘Goodness knows, she needs to stand up to him more,’ Mamo shook her head. ‘I didn’t raise her to be stupid.’

  ‘She isn’t stupid. She only thinks it’s respectful.’

  ‘Respectful!’ Mamo spat. ‘It is not respect to surrender, it is respectful to respect oneself and one’s spouse equally.’