The Governor's House

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘Is it not a lovely day?’ she said and swept past them into the low-roofed building. A half-naked slut gaped from the open doorway of a cave-like cubicle.

  ‘Mrs Young,’ Catherine ordered.

  The brothel madam was little and fussily dressed and tougher than her two doorkeepers put together.

  ‘Such an honour, m’lady.’

  Her curtsey reminded Catherine of Mrs Morgan’s funeral when she had similarly mocked snooty Mrs Byfield.

  ‘I wish to make a proposition to you,’ Catherine said. ‘In private.’

  The gimlet eyes switched to Janis. ‘Off with you, dear. Tell Mrs Huggs I said to give you one of her Seaman’s Specials with a shot of rum in it. And close the door,’ she shrieked with sudden violence as Janis went out. ‘Some of these girls would listen in if it was the Last Trump,’ she said to Catherine.

  ‘I daresay we would all do that,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Anything to drink?’ Mrs Young asked.

  ‘Thank you, no. I want to buy Janis from you,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Buy her?’ Mock surprise from Mrs Young. ‘You make her sound like a slave, ma’am.’

  ‘You have invested money in the child,’ Catherine said. ‘And I understand have expectations of future financial benefit from her services. So I am offering to compensate you for any loss you may suffer were I to remove her from your care.’

  ‘And do what with her? Because if you’re thinking of setting up in competition…’

  ‘Nothing of the sort. I shall have her educated. Brought up as a lady. Give her the prospect of a better future.’

  Steel crept into Mrs Young’s face and voice at what she sensed was criticism. ‘I reckon she’s happy with the prospects she got here,’ she said.

  ‘There is also a baby,’ Catherine said.

  ‘That’s right. Poor young thing, that she was.’ Mrs Young with a pious look, as genuine as a tin sixpence. ‘You’re welcome to the baby, m’lady. But Janis is another story.’

  ‘I’ll give you twenty pounds,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Not for fifty,’ Mrs Young said. ‘Not a hundred. I can see you don’t understand the trade, ma’am. If I may say so. That girl’s got a big future here.’

  ‘Talk sense,’ Catherine said impatiently. ‘How many times can you sell her virginity?’

  ‘There’s ways and means, ma’am.’ Mrs Young smiled confidingly: two experienced women exchanging notes. ‘Most men are easy to fool. Ain’t that so?’

  ‘Why don’t we ask her?’

  ‘Tell you what I’ll do. Make it a hundred and we’ll see what she got to say.’

  ‘Twenty-five. My last word.’

  Mrs Young smiled, shaking her head.

  ‘You think I don’t have the influence to get this house closed down?’ Catherine said.

  Mrs Young’s smile did not crack. ‘Fact is, ma’am, I don’ think you do, no. Bearing in mind some of the gents what honours us of a night-time. In the church too, some of them. But I don’t want to quarrel with a lady. You want to ask her, I’m game.’

  Catherine was confident of the outcome. What intelligent girl would refuse the option she was offering? But when it came to the point Janis did refuse.

  ‘Reckon I’d rather stay ’ere, ma’am.’

  ‘You needn’t be afraid. Mrs Young has agreed to release you if you wish.’

  Janis was close to tears. ‘This ’ere’s my ’ome now, ma’am.’

  ‘Sleeping with men.’

  ‘You’re a married woman. You does the same. Beggin your pardon, ma’am.’

  ‘Surely you can see it is entirely different?’

  Janis was shaking her head even as Catherine was speaking. ‘I’d better rather stay where I am.’

  Catherine saw that she meant it. She was not a woman for lost causes so she gave up.

  ‘The baby? Little Philip?’

  ‘You’re welcome to ’im. My sister would be that proud…’

  ‘But you prefer to stay here?’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. You have the right to choose.’

  She gave Janis a guinea and Mrs Young five. ‘For your trouble, Mrs Young.’

  ‘Very generous of you, m’lady, I’m sure.’

  ‘Treat her properly.’

  ‘We treats all the girls well.’ She smiled. ‘Them’s what you might call our stock in trade. Ain’t that so?’

  Catherine drove home with the baby wrapped in a shawl beside her. It wasn’t often she had the worst of an argument so she was not well pleased but cheered up as they neared Cat’s Kingdom. Win one, lose one. The way of the world, after all.

  Mrs Amos admired baby Philip, as was expected of her.

  ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘She will stay where she is,’ Catherine said.

  ‘Thank the good Lord,’ said Mrs Amos. ‘If you’d brought her back I reckon we’d have had to scrub her down with a broom.’

  She asked Mrs Amos to find Edmund and bring him to see her. It took a while but he turned up eventually.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wanted you to meet your son.’

  He looked at the baby with indifferent eyes. ‘Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.’

  Catherine saw he could not have cared less.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Catherine was fifty. She had filled out but her flesh remained hard. She was known as the woman with the Midas touch. In a time of economic depression for Tasmania, every business she owned was doing well.

  People were careful around her because she was a woman who paid her debts. Tradesmen regarded her as their most reliable customer, each account settled when due, but she also settled accounts with those who had fallen out with her.

  Mr Byfield died, leaving significant debts. Catherine bought his paper and pursued his widow until she was forced to sell her famous silver in order to pay what was owing.

  ‘I believe in balancing the books,’ Catherine said.

  She had heard sermons preached about forgiving transgressors and there were occasions when her mouth tasted mercy, but not often.

  She went to church every week and sang the hymns with a strong if unmelodious voice. She had never been what she would have called a true believer and at first went only because as a pillar of the community she believed she should. However, with the passing years she became more aware of God, especially the God of the Old Testament who had brought his people out of the wilderness and established them in a new land.

  The adamantine cliffs about her home were sacred as were the waves hurling themselves to destruction out of the Southern Ocean. This colony was beautiful in spring, with all the flowers. The trumpets of the daffodils rang triumphantly every September; polyanthus hung in metal baskets like heaps of jewels and a rose bush by the door put out blossoms that shone like golden coins in the sunlight.

  Yet by evening her breasts weighed heavily while even the loveliest years contained periods of doubt. She took solitary walks along the cliffs, hearing the gulls cry in the wind. Nowadays it was seldom the barefoot child who accompanied her but the ragged woman standing beneath the open hatch of the transport, the black shape of the mountain overhead and the air bitingly cold as she swore to build a new life and permit no one to stop her.

  She was aware that many would have said she had done that but there were days when she unsure of it. She had lived through exciting times. She had acted outrageously, had loved and been loved. She was vastly rich. She had won the respect she had longed for and even if it were tinged with fear that was surely something, was it not? All these things she had done, but if they meant anything she did not know what it was. She lived, she worked, because without work what was she? At least I am a woman like any other, she thought, bound by the limitations of age and sex and gravity. She watched the gulls riding the updraught of cliff air and wondered what it must be like to live in a three-dimensional world. To be apart from the restrictions of the familiar.

  Roger was part of t
he pattern, always where she expected him to be. He had been tall and slender; now, approaching seventy, he had become long and thin. You could count his ribs. Back in Porlock Mrs Wheeler would have called him a fistful of runner beans. He was kind, intelligent, interested in the world and what went on in it. He read a lot, had even started to write a book about the Roman state and the significance of the man who had renamed himself Augustus and declared himself a god. Yet who, ultimately, had died as everyone died.

  The baby cheered her up. Not that everyone was as enthusiastic as she was. Mrs Amos had cooed over Philip when he first arrived but Catherine was not deceived; the cook thought she had done a foolish thing taking on a brat about whom she knew nothing. She overheard her talking to Mr Moffatt about it.

  ‘She says it’s her grandson but how is she to know, eh? Mother like that? It could be anyone’s.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Mrs A.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He’s not mine.’

  ‘And so I should hope! My goodness, Mr Moffatt, sometimes I asks myself what smart remark you’ll come up with next.’

  ‘Plenty more where that came from, Mrs A.’

  ‘That right? Well, I’ll tell you something and all, Mr Moffatt. I’m thinking maybe you should keep them to yourself.’

  Edmund refused to have anything to do with the baby. ‘You chose to take him on, Mother. What you do with him now is up to you. Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘There are times when I find you despicable,’ she said.

  She might as well as have shot peas at the Vestnick, the Russian warship that had paid a courtesy visit earlier in the year. When it came to criticism from his mother, Edmund Mortimer was bullet proof.

  ‘Do you think I was foolish?’ she asked Roger.

  What Roger thought was that Edmund had better watch his step. He might find himself supplanted by the new arrival, if Philip grew up halfway decent. But he said nothing of that.

  ‘If you’re happy, I’m happy,’ he said.

  Catherine was certainly happy. If his father wanted nothing to do with him, she was more than willing to bring baby Philip up as her own. ‘Which makes him a sort of brother to Sarah,’ she said to Roger.

  ‘And brother to his own father,’ said Roger, who had little admiration for Catherine’s son.

  As for her other child, Catherine had half-expected there might be problems. Sarah was thirteen when Philip arrived and, with all the insecurities of adolescence, might very well have taken offence at the arrival of what in practice became her baby brother.

  She did not. Catherine watched in bemused silence as Sarah and the baby formed a bond that she would never have expected. She talked to him, pushed him around in his pram, played with him in the bath. She even changed his nappies for him.

  ‘Quite the little mother,’ Roger said.

  ‘I would never have believed it,’ Catherine said. ‘I had her down as a certain old maid but now…’

  ‘Won’t be long before she’s wanting a child of her own,’ Roger said.

  ‘Lord’s sake! She’s only thirteen.’

  ‘But the years pass very quickly.’

  ‘I suspicion you’re right,’ she said. ‘There are days I feel quite old myself.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. As she had hoped he would.

  In fact Philip produced quite the opposite effect. Catherine discovered that having a young child about the house kept her young.

  Roger was quiet, honourable, well liked by those who met him. She liked him too. They had made babies together, there was not an inch of his skin she had not seen and touched a thousand times, yet she did not know him. Did anyone truly know another person? She was familiar with the surface of people as she was with the flowers and trees, but the reality beneath the skin she did not know. Yet once she had believed it possible, had known what it was to have her soul touch and be touched.

  Why did she work every day to build an empire? It had brought prosperity to many and huge wealth to her, yet that, she discovered, was not enough. After Edmund’s birth she had hoped to establish a dynasty, but her vision of a shining future had grown tarnished long ago because her son had failed her.

  There was no smoothness between them; when she reached out to him she touched only rough edges. She had known it from the first and had it confirmed when the headmaster of the Hutchins school had written to say that Edmund had been expelled after being caught stealing money from the school office. That was the letter she had been reading the day Alicia Dunstable had come to her about her own son. Catherine believed in the power of the Fates – why not, when all the gypsy’s prophecies had come true? – and had taken pity on Alicia in part because she hoped they might reward her by being kind to her son.

  Perhaps they had, but the difficult child had become a difficult man and the gulf between them remained. The year before Edmund had gone away for six months to the mainland. He had not written but came home when he ran out of money. She had no idea where he had been or how he had lived and when she had asked his only response had been a sullen face and silence.

  She had intended to train him to take over the business but she no longer thought about that; she would not see him destroy everything she had worked to achieve and she believed that would be inevitable if he ever had authority.

  It created another problem. She had planned to tell him about the crown she had hidden in what she now knew were the Whitsunday Islands but had long ago decided she would be a fool to do so. The crown was not only valuable but of historical significance; she would not see it broken down and the individual gems sold off, which she was sure was what Edmund would do with it. Yet she hated to think of it in its rocky crevice forever. Such a beautiful thing demanded the light.

  She had considered Sarah as an alternative but that would never work, either. Fourteen-year-old Sarah was a lovely girl but home-loving, not notable for her initiative. She was definitely not the sort to go treasure hunting in the tropical north.

  For the moment Catherine could see no way around the problem. Therefore, pragmatic as ever, she put the matter aside for the present.

  Roger, at sixty-eight, had developed a new interest.

  ‘This island is one of the wonders of the world,’ he said. ‘I believe areas of it should be preserved for posterity.’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘Interest the governor in establishing national parks, like the one they set up in New South Wales.’

  In pursuit of this objective, and despite recurrent trouble from his damaged leg, he went off hiking in various parts of the island. Catherine remembered fighting her way through the forest when she and Theophilus Jones had found the tin deposits of what had later become the Mount Haggard mine. She would have liked to accompany her husband into some of these remote areas but could not; already there were not enough hours in the day for all she had to do. Also she thought that searching for her vanished youth made no sense.

  ‘Hurry back, dear. And keep safe.’

  There would be no question of hurrying; she understood that but saying these things made them both feel good. Over the years they had drawn closer although there were nights even now when she found herself missing the lost passions of the past.

  When Roger got home from his latest trip he was running a temperature and complaining of a headache.

  ‘You’ve overtired yourself,’ Catherine scolded him. ‘Have a good night’s sleep and you’ll feel better in the morning.’

  He did not; he was worse, with the headache persisting and now a cough. Catherine sent for Dr Hobbs. He inspected Roger and looked grave.

  ‘Well?’ Catherine said.

  ‘It may be typhoid fever,’ he said. ‘There is a lot of it in the town.’

  ‘He hasn’t been in the town,’ said Catherine, battling a sense of dread that she was not yet ready to acknowledge.

  ‘It depends on the water he’s been drinking. We believe that typhoid is a water-borne disease.’

&
nbsp; ‘He’s been up on the Central Plateau.’

  ‘If the water there has been polluted…’ the doctor said.

  That evening Roger’s temperature was sky-high and the following morning there were rose-coloured spots on his chest.

  ‘It is definitely typhoid fever,’ Dr Hobbs said.

  Catherine sat by Roger as over the following days he rallied only to sink lower still. It was hard to take: to hope, again and again, only to face the relapse and an increasing sense of dread as the days passed. Sometimes he knew her; more often he did not.

  She watched his fingers plucking feverishly at the bed coverings. ‘Is there nothing we can do?’

  Dr Hobbs shook his head. ‘It is in the hands of God.’

  She had seldom prayed in her life. It seemed an impertinence to trouble Him now she faced a problem she could not resolve but she did so anyway, asking that her husband be spared, that she too might be spared what would otherwise be a lonely future.

  ‘If I have no one to celebrate my successes with,’ she explained, ‘what is the point of having them?’

  But knew the answer even as she pleaded for mercy. She would continue on the road of her life because there was no other.

  She sat at Roger’s bedside. She reproached herself for not loving him enough and told both God and Roger how much more loving she would be if only –

  She was willing to do anything but there was nothing for it. He sank steadily for two days and nights. He was unconscious all the time. Eventually, at three o’clock on the third morning, Roger Mortimer died with his wife holding his hand.

  They buried him two days later. The governor came and the governor’s lady. People Catherine knew from business also came and they were many. Others who had known Roger from his days in the Governor’s House and since; Mr Moffatt and Mrs Amos; Luke who drove the carriage and looked after the horses; the editor of the Gazette. Even, amazingly, Mrs Young the brothel owner and Janis, dressed up to the nines and saying yes, she was doing very well and wasn’t it a pity and yes, she was very happy and –