Mary did not yearn for home as I did, but she must have been as lonely for female company, and could put God aside now and then to indulge a little nostalgia for the sound of sheep’s bells on a winter’s morning.
LETTERS
I wrote to my mother and to Bridie. Here are the copies in front of me now, and oh, what dull things they are. Full of fancy phrases but empty of content. At length I sit down to assure my dearest Mother that I am in perfect health, and to add to the pleasure of this circumstance both Mr Macarthur and my little Edward are in the full enjoyment of this blessing, and we only want, to complete the measure of it, to hear that you are equally happy and well. They are like sentences out of a primer of elegant variations, or the circumlocutions of someone being paid by the yard.
Which, in a way, I was. It was proper for me to write to my mother and my dear childhood friend in a way that would show me to be perfectly content, and our situation to be splendidly promising. My letters would be shared with the neighbourhood. All the callers to my mother’s house, and to the vicarage, would be entertained with Elizabeth’s account of the extraordinary place she was now in. I wished no one to be anxious for me. What would be the good of that?
There was also the small matter of my pride. I would not have them pitying me.
At times, reading over what I had written and admiring the fiction of all that pious good cheer, I longed for a cipher known only to myself and Bridie. On the whole vast extent of the globe, she was the one person I would have liked to tell how things really stood, behind the bland words. But there was no way to say anything of the truth.
Mr Macarthur read the letters I wrote to Bridie and my mother. Knowing that, I took particular care to include nothing with which he might find fault. He showed me his letters, too, to his brother and his father. Like mine, they shone only the most golden light on everything. He never commented on how much more sanguine mine were than our reality, and I never voiced any doubt about his. In fact, more than once I copied verbatim some of his effusions, since that pleased him, and Mr Macarthur pleased was very much more agreeable company than Mr Macarthur displeased.
As I copied out his words I noticed that the word we never appeared. In Mr Macarthur’s lonely cosmology, there was no such pronoun. Only me, myself, I.
VIGILANCE
Each morning, waking to the barbaric cackling of the laughing jackasses, I tried not to wonder when we would leave. The tour of duty of the marines was three years, of which half was already done, but the New South Wales Corps had been raised to replace them on a permanent basis. The length of our time here—our sentence, you might say—was a matter of how quickly Mr Macarthur could advance. Pay off the debt, put money aside and return home.
I had to accept the possibility that it might never happen. True, he was clever and ambitious. But he was also erratic, provocative, pugnacious, irrational. He could not be trusted not to destroy our hopes.
Lying beside him each morning, hoping not to wake him, I had time to think. My position—woman, wife—gave me no power, yet somehow I had to take charge of our destinies. The only way was to enter his needs and desires, the way I had watched him studying the needs and desires of the men he wanted to bend to his will.
What might he want, or be persuaded to want? What he always wanted, insatiably, was…I was going to write praise, flattery, but it was more delicate than that. He needed to be seen and heard. He needed attention paid: attention and respect. The son of the draper, the ensign on half-pay, had for so long been small in the eyes of others that he needed to be made big in his own. That was why he was willing to throw away any advantage in a frenzy of defending his honour.
It was up to me to be the cool one, the steady one. For our time here—for the rest of our lives, in fact—I would have to head Mr Macarthur off from the kind of destruction he had brought down on us, on board the Neptune. To do that I would have to learn how to match his cunning with my own. How to outwit him, how to outwait him. Judge when to disagree, but cleverly letting him think my argument was his own, and when to say Oh yes, Mr Macarthur, what a capital plan, and wait for his enthusiasm to burn itself out.
If I could learn those arts, there was some hope—something between zero and infinity—that we would be able to return home. If I failed, we might spend the rest of our lives in this exile.
From Mrs Borthwick I borrowed that little uptweaking of the corners of the mouth into a serene half-smile, conscious at first and then a habit. Only when alone could I relax, and at those unguarded times I knew the look on my face was a stern patience.
A HOUSEHOLD
It was one of the perquisites of this place that an officer might be assigned convicts as servants clothed and fed by His Majesty, and once we had a bigger house, Mr Macarthur took full advantage of this privilege.
On our arrival we had been assigned a grizzler called Sullivan. He was a young man but wore on his body the marks of a hard life, his face worn like an old shoe and his mouth full of gaps. Mr Macarthur told me he had been caught with the candlesticks poking out of his pocket while he stood there denying all knowledge of any such thing as a candlestick.
Some woman had given birth to him and had chosen what he should be called, but the only forename he would admit to was Smasher. He never met your eye. It was a habit they got in the way of, the felons, not to meet your eye. If you met the eye of your master, it could be that you considered yourself as good as he, and that would be insolence, and insolence was worth a dozen lashes. Sullivan always called Mr Macarthur squire, grinning a nasty knowing grin.
But when the Atlantic arrived with a fresh load of felons, Mr Macarthur was Johnny-on-the-spot down at the dock. An officer who cherished his position would not make do with one worthless idler.
William Hannaford was a big fair man with a frank open face. You could see the farmer in him even after the months in the hold of the Atlantic. Could see, too, that he was a cheerful person who would not go under, no matter what life threw at him.
– A sheepstealer, Mr Macarthur told me. But avoided the noose, God only knows how.
That first day, Hannaford was standing with Sullivan, talking away, and I heard the shape of words I knew to be my own. It was easy to picture him leaning on a stile in Devon with his neighbour, talking on and on, up and down the hills and dales of a conversation, the way Grandfather had loved to do. Sullivan looked around at me, and that made Hannaford look too, and get a fright when he saw me listening, Mrs John Macarthur in her good bonnet.
– I think you are from Devon, I said, trying to find the right tone to take with a servant who was also a felon. But the sound of those familiar vowels woke a longing in me to speak of the place we shared.
– Now which part, exactly?
This emerged somewhat more inquisitorial than I intended, and he looked wary. When I smiled—not too much!—I saw him ease.
– Well, Mrs Macarthur, he said, my farm was out of Bradworthy a piece. But an out-of-the-way place, you may not have heard the name.
– Is it over Milton Damerel way? I said. Or more towards Kilkhampton?
Seeing it all in the eye of my memory, the high-hedged lanes.
– More the direction of Sutcombe, Mrs Macarthur, he said. Solden Cross, then Honeycroft, and then my place in the elbow of Beckett’s Hill.
A silence fell then, as we each saw those places in our mind’s eye. He pressed his lips together and I could imagine the pain of regret. He would have lost whatever few fields he might have had, and perhaps a wife and children, and all the future that he would have planned, when he had put his hand to the horn of a sheep that was not his own, and been caught in the doing of it.
I saw too late that it was no kindness to exchange the names of places that had been his home, and bring to his mind the picture of them. With time and good fortune, Mrs Macarthur would return to those places. William Hannaford, transported for the term of his natural life, would not.
What was it like to make the decision that changed
your life? To lead that sheep out of its fold, knowing that in the moment you put your hand to its horn you were a dead man? Was it despair, or a gleeful throw of the dice? To end here, standing on foreign dust, avoiding the eye of a woman who had the power, if she chose, to send you to the chain gang?
I might as well have asked aloud, for he launched into his story. I felt he had already told it many times, to anyone who would listen, as if telling it often enough might make it end differently.
– I had need of a ram, you see, Mrs Macarthur, he said. My sad little flock. I could see how to go forward, if only I had a good ram. Just the one.
He gave a rueful laugh.
– Other men had rams they wasted, rams they did not deserve. In my view.
He glanced again, as if to be sure I would not turn into someone who would have him whipped for taking liberties, but he saw that I had no wish to be that person.
– I’d learned from my father, you see, he said. What to look for. Got my eye on a fine ram at Crawley Fair. Far enough from home, and I had a cart and a thing on the back of it to keep him hidden on the road, had a story for the neighbours, a sad story about a fellow selling it off cheap, his wife had died. Oh, I had it all laid out. Have you ever, Mrs Macarthur, seen a thing in your mind so clear and strong you believe you have the right to it?
He did not want or wait for me to say if I knew that sense of right, but I did. It was that short time behind the hedge when I thought I had a right I did not turn out to have.
– How could I have been such a fool, he said in soft wonder. No matter how many times he had told the story, it still sat in him undigested.
– But lucky, more lucky than a fool deserved, he said. To have in my hand the beast that belonged to General Watson, and him a good-hearted gentleman, he came to the judge, told him he forgave me and would not for the world see a man hang for the sake of one sad sorry foolish mistake.
See a man hang. His story made me see New South Wales in a new way. William Hannaford should be dead, and yet he was alive. But only here. The innocent body of England would not allow the canker of a sheepstealer to go on living in it, and without the fact of transportation, General Watson’s pleas would have fallen on deaf ears. New South Wales was a prison from which William Hannaford would never return. But the very distance of this place, its very strangeness, even its unpromising aspects, might reveal itself as a door rather than a wall, and offer Hannaford a future.
HE HAS OFFERED
Anne came to me one afternoon a few months after our arrival, looking grave.
– Why so down in the mouth, Anne, I asked, thinking she was going to tell me that she was unhappy working beside Sullivan. I had seen the way he looked at her, leering from his broken mouth. I would happily send him back to government service if that were the case, hoped that was what she had come to say.
– I am ever so sorry, madam, she said.
– Sorry, I said. What is it, Anne, are you unhappy?
– Oh no, madam, she said, but sorry to be leaving you in the lurch.
Now she was blushing.
– He has offered, you see, she said. Private Ennis. And I have said yes.
Anne and I had gone through a great deal together, and I had come to rely on her, one dependable thread among so many that could not be trusted. And as Mrs Kingdon had promised, she was a morsel of home in this alien place. For a second the stuffing fell out of me. Imagine it, stoic Mrs Macarthur crying out, Do not leave me!
– Why Anne, I am delighted for you, I said. And what a dark horse you are, that I noticed nothing!
But I knew that I had noticed nothing because I had not been looking. Like another person in our household, I had never seen further than me, myself, I. Anne was not abandoning me. She was making the best of what fate had flung at her, turning a corner when it came towards her. She had been with me for exactly two years, for I had left Bridgerule in October and it was October once again. I looked at her now and saw what I had not bothered to notice before: she was no longer a gawky girl, but had become a young woman, her freckles and red hair maturing into beauty, with an air of calm cheerful competence. Private Ennis, that good-hearted young fellow, had done well.
– Dear Anne, I said, I could not be more delighted for you.
We embraced as we had done once before, but when we separated and she looked at me, I knew she could see through my delight to what lay behind it.
– I am sorry, madam, she said again, and hesitated.
I saw that she was trying to find words to tell me that she had seen at close quarters what my marriage was, and wanted to offer comfort. But there were no words, there could be no comfort, and all she could do was take my hand for a moment and press it between both of her own.
With Anne gone I was in something of a pickle, for I had no idea how to begin finding a woman I would want to have close by me, and I did not like the thought of some rough convict lass dealing with Edward.
Mary Johnson was like a great ear to all that went on in our little world, and within an hour of my conversation with Anne she sent word that I should call in. She ushered me into her cottage where her husband was in the front room, crouched over the table preparing his sermon, his Bible in front of him, a man in the ecstasies of composition. She and I went out into the second room, where a fire smoked on the hearth. Another woman sat there sewing, from her garments clearly a prisoner. When I came in she got awkwardly half to her feet and clutched the sewing to herself.
– Have you nearly finished, Agnes? Mrs Johnson said. Make haste there, finish up quickly.
– Yes, Mrs Johnson, the woman said, meeting no one’s eye, and sat down again to her stitching.
She was not in her first youth, her cheeks were wan, her figure what you could only call skinny. In a word she was no beauty, and that had turned out to be the best for her, because Mary Johnson would not have shared her roof and the care of her husband and babe with a pretty prisoner. She was not too pious to be shrewd.
– She had a most frightful time on the voyage out, Mrs Johnson said in a whisper that would have been audible in every corner of the room. Most sadly lost a baby on the passage.
I kept my eyes turned away from the woman, who was bending over her sewing as if to disappear into it. Mrs Johnson marched on.
– I told her, Mrs Macarthur, and I am sure you would agree, that God has gathered up her little one into his bosom, and that she should not mourn but rejoice that her infant is gone before.
A sound came from Agnes, some small wordless utterance of protest or recoil. On her face was a depth of bleakness that it was an intrusion to witness. Like her, I knew how it was to lose a babe on board a prison ship. But I did not have to live with Mrs Johnson’s conviction that the loss was a blessing.
– I could spare her, Mrs Macarthur, she said. There is a deserving woman come to my notice who could replace her. If you would like her.
I could already foresee how the debt of this woman’s services would have to be paid in grateful warmth towards Mary Johnson. But it was a solution to my problem.
And she had made up her mind.
– Mr Johnson made enquiries as to her character, she said, and she has proved quite satisfactory. She is a thief of course, but not the worst kind, and clean in her person.
Agnes was keeping her head down.
– So I will send her to you on Saturday, Mrs Johnson announced. In the afternoon, will that suit, Mrs Macarthur?
MRS BROWN
There was a weightiness of spirit about Agnes Brown that made me unwilling to call her Agnes, so I found myself always addressing her as Mrs Brown, although to give a prisoner woman the courtesy of a Mrs was eccentric. Was she really a Mrs? Was she really a Brown? Neither, perhaps. It did not matter.
She did not speak more than she had to, though when she did I could hear, as I did with Hannaford, the sound of the west country. She seldom smiled, going about her duties with her outer self but as if the inner part of her were elsewhere. Her expr
ession was always entirely neutral. Something must have taken place in Agnes Brown, in the getting of her baby, and the losing of it, and the crime that had brought her here, and her life as a prisoner, that had burned all distractions out of her. Life now flowed over and around her like a body of water.
In another world, Mrs Brown and myself would have been not mistress and servant but equals: she was clearly no cheeky trollop. I was curious about the crime that had brought her here, and could have found it out easily enough. I told myself I did not because it was of no importance to me, but the real reason was shame at the power I had to know her story, when she could not demand to know mine.
She had been with us only a few weeks when I surprised her with Mr Macarthur’s Horace—left on the mantelpiece more for show than that Mr Macarthur ever read it—open in her hand. She put it down with a fluster.
– I beg your pardon, Mrs Macarthur, she said. It being so long since I looked into a book, that was all. But now I see it is not English, I beg your pardon, Mrs Macarthur.
Her fluster might have been the confusion of innocence, or the proof of guilt. I asked her could she read, then? And when she said yes, I took one of my own books and opened it at random.
– Would you be so good as to read a sentence or two, Mrs Brown? I asked.
– In philosophy, she read, where truth seems double-faced, there is no man more paradoxical than myself.
Yes, she could read, and I was ashamed.
A SAD BEAK
Never beyond the settlement, Mr Macarthur had said, but I was tired of that dull round of trodden earth between the dank huts. Once Anne was gone I allowed myself to redefine what might be meant by the settlement. Mrs Brown now came with me on the daily walks, and we were accompanied by Hannaford, Mr Macarthur having decided an armed guard was no longer necessary. Neither of them knew the bounds Mr Macarthur had set.
A Room Made of Leaves Page 10
