A Room Made of Leaves

by Kate Grenville

  Major Grose was a big flaccid thin-lipped gentleman with a faraway look in his eyes. At first I assumed that look might be the wise caution of a person lately arrived in a new place, but I came to see that he was listening to the various aches and pains of his body, damaged in the American war and still not properly mended. He was an affable fellow, but my judgment was that under his splendid expanse of chest he was a small irresolute soul, easily persuaded by whoever spoke to him last. He seemed to me to be the perfect product of the great chain of military rankings, obedient to those above, overbearing to those below, a man born for mediocrity and well suited to it.

  He accepted with alacrity the chair Mr Macarthur offered, and did not budge from it the whole afternoon.

  – I suffer from want of vigour, Mrs Macarthur, he said. To tell the truth, at any time of the day I would be happy to assume a horizontal dimension.

  As commander of the Corps, Major Grose was deputy to the governor, and would step into his shoes should Arthur Phillip be unable to fulfil his duties. I watched Mr Macarthur exerting all his charm that afternoon, and when I bade Major Grose goodbye—he made a to-do of taking my hand and bringing it to his lips like some old-time gallant—I congratulated myself. So far, so good.

  – My word, Mr Macarthur said, when the door closed on our last guest. Oh my very word, I have got him eating out of my hand!

  – But kissing mine, I said, meaning that I had played a part in our success, but Mr Macarthur was deaf to that. I did not insist. The more he thought Grose’s compliance was due to his own cleverness, the better he would like him.

  – He was most struck with your clear-sighted view of things, I said, thinking of a useful phrase Mr Worgan had taught me: ad libitum.

  – He told me most particularly how relieved he is, I went on. That he has at least one officer with such energy and knowledge of the place.

  The major had not quite said that. Not in so many words. Not in any words, as a matter of fact. But there are times when to speak a thing is to make it come to pass, and I hoped this would be one of them.

  Mr Macarthur laid himself out to offer every assistance to the major, who was soon announcing to all who would listen what a steady, hardworking and loyal officer my husband was. Oh, an old head on young shoulders! The major’s right-hand man! In short order, Mr Macarthur was made captain, and paymaster to the regiment.

  Promotion, in Mr Macarthur’s view, was well and truly overdue: welcome but unremarkable. But paymaster was a coveted position, offering its holder many opportunities for lining his own pockets. For the first time since we had arrived in New South Wales, I began to believe that the move might, after all, have been for the best. If Mr Macarthur’s erratic temper could be kept in check, there was a chance that we could make enough in a few years to return to England with a modest sufficiency of wealth.

  Mr Macarthur’s thanks to the major was to privately christen him the Dear Dunce. In public he referred to him as the DD, and if asked what it meant, explained that it meant the Dynamic Deputy.

  A SPREAD OF ACRES

  Land was the one commodity in which New South Wales was rich. This was a whole continent of it, and every acre without sign of ownership, like a flock of sheep on a moor with no markings on them. The governor, and behind him the thrifty gentlemen of Whitehall, was intent on the colony producing its own food. Crops were growing on a few of those infinite acres, but in amounts as yet too small and unreliable to compensate for the irregular supplies from England. Famine was never far away.

  The governor had it in his power to grant land, and had made a few modest gifts of acres to such ex-convicts as held out hope of becoming productive farmers, to any marines who wished to settle, even to a few soldiers who preferred farming to soldiering. Anne had told me that she and Ennis had hopes of a little land out towards the Kangaroo Ground. Reverend Johnson had had land from the time of his first arrival. Tench reported that the reverend was the best farmer in the colony—had mistaken his vocation, in fact, since his potatoes were so much better than his sermons.

  The one class of person barred from being granted land were the officers of the New South Wales Corps, for it was the view of the governor that the duties of those men lay in keeping order rather than farming. To Mr Macarthur this was a travesty. To give land—for nothing!—to men who were common thieves and withhold it from His Majesty’s officers! It was tyrannical! It was—that dangerous word—an insult!

  He ranted all one evening as we sat by the fire, treading around and around the same outrage while I bent over my needlework. Finally I tried to turn the mood.

  – So do you plan to become a farmer, Mr Macarthur? Go up against the reverend to see who can grow the biggest potato?

  – Do not mock me, wife, he said. I would not expect you to have a grasp of the situation, but pray do me the honour of trusting that I do!

  Any sentence beginning with but would send the evening over an edge from which I would eventually have to retreat, and since only sentences beginning with but occurred to me, I said nothing.

  – At home, for even the worst estate, I would be paying not less than ten pounds an acre, he said. Here the price is much more favourable, being nothing more than a little fawning on the governor.

  The worst estate. Now I understood. Mr Macarthur’s father had paid for a gentleman’s education, and paid or borrowed again for the officer’s rank that allowed his son to insist on being Esquire. But only in New South Wales could Mr Macarthur hope to have the true, undeniable proof of the gentleman: a spread of acres, an estate.

  – A thinking man, he said—ah, he liked that phrase of Tench’s!—can take a long view, in the light of which the land of New South Wales, no matter how worthless now, is a species of currency, and might be exchanged in the future for the actual pounds, shillings and pence that will help us return to England.

  Mr Macarthur had gone so far as to pick out the place he wanted, which was at Parramatta. He had previously despised it. Now he was full of reasons why Parramatta was a canny choice. The better soil meant it would soon become the centre of the settlement, Sydney Cove simply its port. The governor could see that: it was why he had a second Government House there. A shrewd judge—such as he himself—could see that this was the moment to seize the opportunity, quietly and without fanfare, before others got the same idea.

  – I have paced out the spot for us, he said. Superior even to the Auld Salt’s. A perfect aspect, with an eminence ready for a splendid house. Imagine it, my dear: yourself at Parramatta, the lady of the best farm in the colony!

  And quicker than a mouse across a room, the picture came to me, of escape. It was that word farm. I could see it clear: a comfortable cottage, a garden full of flowers, the sun streaming into quiet rooms. A run full of hens, perhaps a milk cow, my own peas and beans off my own vines. And slow-moving quiet country days.

  Quiet, yes—because I knew that I would have the place to myself from time to time. Land, though the sine qua non of a gentleman, and irresistible when it could be got for nothing, would always be secondary to Mr Macarthur’s real passions. He would soon tire of a farm. His nature needed a density of other men to work on, like yeast on sugar. He would always be drawn to the centre. Sydney, that bustle of intrigue and scheming, was where he could use what he knew about his companions to get what he wanted. He had barely finished saying Parramatta before I had decided this might be the way to find a little daylight in the closed box I had been in since my marriage.

  But I dared not urge. Urge Mr Macarthur and he would go backwards.

  Parramatta! I exclaimed, allowing a note of incredulity into my tone. Are you serious, Mr Macarthur? Have you considered how far it is? How isolated ? The lack of female company?

  He glanced at me and I feared I might have gone too far.

  – I have not, my dearest wife, noticed any great yearning on your part for female company, he said. I am sorry, my dear, to take you away from your society here, but we must keep our eye on the targ
et.

  Ah! Society: was there another motive? It was a mark of how contagious his way of thinking was, that a new thought flickered through my mind: my husband might be pleased to have his wife far from the town. No woman, no matter how lively, could maintain a salon in the country wastes of Parramatta. He had not caught any whiff of my thoughts about Captain Tench. I was sure of that. But it was his nature to dart ahead to future possibilities. One woman surrounded by men vying to divert her was a circumstance he might come to mistrust.

  From that thought another blossomed. My husband was one of the few officers in the place who did not have a pretty young convict doxy. Might he not feel that he was entitled to that pleasure too? To have a lady-wife, safely tucked away at Parramatta to breed his dynasty, but also to enjoy the pleasures of more frivolous company in the town?

  It was a welcome thought.

  I pretended to sigh, a sigh that I pretended to stifle. Took a few stitches at my needlework, gave the angle of my neck a victim’s humility. Allowed myself a little moue of displeasure.

  – I am surprised, Mr Macarthur, I said. But I see you have your reasons. Of course I bow to your judgment.

  – Oh my dear wife, do not be down in the mouth about it, he said. Picture us there, taking our ease before a splendid marble fireplace! Perhaps blue wool for the livery, do you agree? Brass buttons with a crest—what would you say, my dear, to an olive wreath, plain but distinguished?

  – Oh, not a made-up crest, for heaven’s sake, Mr Macarthur, I said. I am not ashamed to be a farmer’s daughter.

  – My dear wife, he said. I watched him casting about for a final persuasion.

  – I will name the place Elizabeth Farm, my dear, in recognition of your perfection as a wife.

  I smiled as if I was tempted by this bauble.

  – I am sure it will work out for the best, Mr Macarthur.

  Mr Macarthur was not planning to do anything as straightforward as simply to ask for land. Oh no. This would require what Mr Macarthur so enjoyed, the long game. Piece by piece, he would put his troops in place for a subtle flanking movement that, when it closed, could not be resisted.

  The first, innocuous, move was for him to be appointed commander of the Parramatta garrison. A word in the DD’s ear would achieve that. The commander would be obliged to live at Parramatta, naturally, and at this point Edward and I would be brought up from the rear and pressed into service. An officer could live in the rough quarters at the Parramatta barracks, but a lady such as Mrs John Macarthur, with a young child, could not be expected to do so. Nor could she be left alone and unprotected in Sydney. The only way out of this dilemma would be to provide the Macarthurs with an establishment appropriate to a family, close to Parramatta. The government had too many demands on its resources to do this, but should Mr Macarthur be granted a parcel of land, he would do the rest.

  I was divided in my sentiments between scorn, that he would use myself and Edward so ruthlessly, and satisfaction, that the escape I hoped for might come to pass.

  At no point did my husband imagine that the governor would refuse him. It was only a question of whether he should settle for fifty acres or hold out for a hundred. His ambition, like a fine hunter with a pink-coated gentleman on his back, sailed untroubled over any obstacle in the present, landing lightly on some sweet pasture in the future.

  I was not so sure. The governor had right on his side. Why should men who were paid to do government service be given land in order to farm on their own account?

  The first part of the plan went off without a hitch: the DD named Mr Macarthur as commander at Parramatta, to take up his duties when circumstances permitted. But the Auld Salt was not such an easy mark. He let it be known that, while Major Grose could make such arrangements of his officers as he thought best, permission to grant land was in his own hands, and on that matter he would not be budged.

  I expected the familiar rage, or its polar opposite, black gloom, from my husband, but he brushed the subject aside when I questioned him, as if nothing could matter less. To have his will denied by another threatened to damage the very deepest, most brittle part of his sense of who he was. Rather than feel the pain of failure, he grew a crust over it.

  – Oh, trust me, I have it in hand, was all he would say. The Parramatta estate will be ours, have no fear.

  Still, there was a pulled-tight feeling about him, and that night in the darkness he came at me with an extra edge of force that was not quite the right side of painful.

  BRITANNIA

  One evening a short time later Mr Macarthur joined me in the parlour, perching on the front of his chair to lean forward persuasively.

  – Now tell me, Mrs Macarthur, he said pleasantly, what is there that folk here would give any money for?

  There was a trick in the question, I knew, and would not please him by giving an answer that would be wrong. But the evening would not progress until I obliged.

  – Well, flour and axes, I said. Shoes. Pots. Tobacco, nails, rope.

  I thought of my own particular needs.

  – Tea and sugar. Anything and everything, in fact.

  – Exactly! He sat back, electric with excitement, his fingers drumming on the arm of the chair.

  – Word has got around among those villainous greedy captains. Go to New South Wales with a hold full of—as you put it—anything, and you may charge what you please.

  That was true. On the few occasions when a ship came into the cove there was an undignified rush for its goods, and those with money—the officers and a few others—were prepared to pay the scandalous prices demanded. Who knew when the next ship might call in? But the generality of the people—the ticket-of-leave men, the emancipists, the small farmers—continued to go without.

  He leapt up and began pacing. His steps were crisp, then muffled, as he walked from rug to boards and back again.

  – What is needed is for us, the officers, to charter a ship ourselves and send it to the Cape, he said. Take the selling of the goods into our own hands. Break the monopoly of those rogues.

  I took a breath to say, You would simply be replacing one monopoly with another! But he was forging on.

  – With a boatload of goods to sell we cannot fail to do well.

  The ghost of five hundred pounds floated in the air between us.

  Mr Macarthur himself proposed—using the regimental purse—to make the largest subscription. He would keep the records, oversee the selling of the goods, allot all of the subscribers their returns. And in there, you could be sure, he would have a finger in every part of the pie, underneath where no one could see. Mr Macarthur might be the grandson of the Laird of Argyle, but when you stripped away his haughtiness he was the son of a shopkeeper, and it was profit and loss he understood.

  There was only one problem. Like everything else in the colony, the scheme would require the governor’s permission, and the terms of his appointment prevented him giving it. Whitehall’s instructions were that the governor was not to engage in any trade, or permit others so to do, within the area of influence of the East India Company.

  But Mr Macarthur was confident. With due modesty, he explained the true genius of his plan: that it exploited the governor’s own goodness of heart. Hunger and want still haunted the settlement, men and women falling down in the street from lack of nourishment. A man such as the governor would not refuse the offer of a boatload of supplies.

  – Mark my words, he will yield, my husband said. And, once having gone against his instructions, he will be…vulnerable.

  He savoured the word like something delicious. In the fire’s glow his face was light and dark by turns, shadows moving across it as he paced, and the spit glistening as he smiled a wolf’s smile.

  – I will have him on a plate, he said. He will find himself in no position to refuse us any reasonable request.

  – Such as fifty acres at Parramatta, I said.

  He shot me a look: part surprise, part contempt.

  – My dearest
wife, he said. Indeed you would make a poor villain. Fifty acres! A hundred at the least.

  He showed his very eye-teeth in his pleasure.

  – Why not two hundred?

  THE FRUITS OF VILLAINY

  When, in due course, the Britannia returned from the Cape, there were casks of flour and rice on board. There were axes and cooking-pots, hoop-iron and paper. But the bulk of its cargo was barrel after barrel of that most profitable commodity, rum. Five or six hundred per cent was the premium the officers asked, and in a place where none but the officers’ consortium had the capital to import, that was the price people would pay. Profit flowed in on every hand. Mr Macarthur already planned another charter, and his fellow officers were happy to go along behind him filling their pockets. He made sure that they were all involved in the great volumes of liquor pouring off the ships into the gullets of the people. All were equally implicated, should anyone ever make any trouble about it.

  In among the casks of rum on the Britannia, space had been made for a few comforts that found their way to the Macarthur household. Oh, that first, exquisite cup of Ceylon after a time without! I drank the tea, I closed my eyes in pleasure at the sweetness of the sugar. I will not try, in this account, to make myself look better than I was. If I had to suffer the fact of being married to this man, I was craven enough to enjoy the fruits of his villainy.

  Mr Macarthur leaned hard on the Dear Dunce to lean on the governor on the matter of that piece of land at Parramatta. The DD was willing enough, but the governor continued to hold out. That good man could be seen every week to be more harassed, more beset by problems of which the demanding Mr Macarthur was only one. The pain in his side never left him, and his honourable nature was being flayed by the malice all around him. He did not seem to mind hunger, but his footing on the world was undermined by ill will.

  It was a matter of general knowledge that he had requested permission to return to England. Had in fact done so more than once, with increasing urgency. Sooner or later that permission would be given, and he would sail away. At that point the colony would be left in the hands of his dynamic deputy until a new governor arrived.