Bettany's Book (24 page)

I pick myself up as the bile surges up my burnt throat onto my tongue. I say something within my narrow power to Mr Pallmire’s sleeping form. I cry: Next time do not make me drink fire! But the Steward Pallmire has the appalling hide not to notice but to sleep on. So I gather myself. I do not wish to return to the Tory but I do not wish to stay here. At least in the Tory I could read the outline of what I’ve been through in the way other women will look at me in jealousy and spite. But then they could not know that I have yielded in awe of what was happening and that to yield in awe is the most awful laziness of spirit. I stand a time in the Pallmire’s kitchen. Will I wait here – good servant forever –
for Mrs Pallmire? But then I start to move and a big night constable I meet on the bridgeway moves to open a door and let me back into the Tory where women are stirring for the day. I tell you before the God both of Jews and Christians that I would have pitched frenzied head first off that bridge to lumpy paving beneath it but for one thought which is the thought of you Alice in your deeper peril. And once inside I am helped by the kind presence of the little freckled mother Carty. For I find my cot with its two slices of blanket and there is the little mother sitting up on her cot in the dawn holding her baby and without the big red creature to overshadow her – Connolly is perhaps at the jakes at the end of the Tory. Carty stares at me with just one speck of sister mercy in her weary eye. She says: That Mrs Matron likes to pick the ones who will not give Mr Matron the pox. What a thumping great blackguard that fellow is! She is reaching out a little red hand but then sneezes and her baby daughter cries. And to her that is as large a matter as a woman – myself – who has been used evilly and consents as a coward to evil usage in this world of the Pallmire Factory.

But I now too feel I have the knot on the forehead and a pale look. In one I am ice and I am fire. I near despair of the ambition to get you to this place since I have until now thought it the lesser Sheol – the gentler Hell. But now though yearning I do not want to see you here for this is the madhouse worse than Tarban Creek.

But the thought comes: If next time I determine not to be rendered so drunk then I can be gritty and watchful. Or at the least your faithful

Sarah

Dimp kept working energetically through the record of Bettany’s early Nugan Ganway career, which she determined Prim would receive and respond to. With this history calling to her, Prim was surely less likely to remain in Sudan. For Prim’s choice of life there was, Dimp believed, what ninteenth-century people called a ‘notion’, a conceit of which she could be cured by a wholesome genealogical interest. Dimp had a poor understanding of how profoundly placed her sister was in Africa. As much as Prim tried to convince her, Dimp seemed never to believe that the Sudan was more than a random, self-punishing fancy of her sister.

W
E STOCK
N
UGAN
G
ANWAY

I made excellent time to the orderly little town of Liverpool by harrying Hobbes along so fast that I needed to leave him in Narellan to graze in the care of a ticket-of-leave man, and hire a mare to get me the rest of the way. I took the road north then for the saleyards. I would happily have camped by them, wishing to temper my body for its years of joyous hardship, but a letter from my father, which I had collected in Goulburn, mentioned that his old friend, a surgeon named Dr Peter Strope, presently stationed at Parramatta, had been a little aggrieved that I had not visited him on my way inland. Strope had helped my father on his ship and, upon arrival, extricated him quickly from the convict depot, sending him to join the household of the Batchelors. Clearly he should not have to tolerate this offence.

So instead of a quick transit to the saleyards, I called into the Strope household, a little stone cottage which lay nearly in the shadow of the men’s gaol in Parramatta. Dr Strope’s stone house came to him as part of his post as Visiting Surgeon to the Parramatta orphanages and to the Female Factory. Small in the body and narrow in the shoulders, with a pinched little face, he struck me as a very plain saviour.

Looked at in himself Strope was the kind of man not uncommon in the penal colonies. His eyes had grown hooded, his mouth a thin gash. It was as if he knew one or two things more than were comfortable. A man of middling talent, a farmer by disposition, he had a few hundred acres a little to the west.

‘Mrs Strope does not like it here,’ he confessed to me early in the evening. ‘In a town half free and half bond, who can really be called free?’

But chiefly – over the lamb, that antipodean staple – he was interested in what my plans were. ‘This is not a time to delay. In fact even in the outer regions some of the best country is already taken.’ He forced the corners of his mouth back into a grimace of approval. ‘These Limits of Location, these Nineteen Counties beyond which no man is meant by government to tread … your generation has too much spirit
not
to violate them. But the further you go, the more you will need a splendid overseer.’

I thought of Goldspink, Mr Treloar’s canny but un-admirable overseer. I wanted someone better. I wanted a fellow pilgrim.

‘Yes,’ I confessed, ‘I mean to speak to the magistrate here about that.’

‘But I know the fellow you want. It’s a former convict constable named
Long who goes to the magistrate every morning to inquire whether he has been applied for. In a place of abysmal servants, he would make an excellent one. We will see him in the morning, if you like.’

I said I would like it very much, and the topic turned to his work. It weighed on him, he said, the demands government made of him. ‘Once a week I need to ride to Blacktown to inspect the sable brethren there.’ Tuesday it is the Catholic orphanage, the next day the State orphanage. On Thursdays I am permitted to receive polite patients, and on Fridays I visit the Female Factory. Whenever I make an inspection of the general arrangements of that place, I seem to cause amusement amongst the Irish women who make extensive commentaries on my behaviour in what I can only call their ungainly language. I am often sorry that I ever left Van Diemen’s Land where, despite everything, I think society has achieved a higher average urbanity than in New South Wales.’

I uttered the customary condolences, but reflected that I would be far from corruption and
urbanity
in my deep wing of the bush.

Strope lowered his voice, to a level at which I had to lean forward. ‘The problem as in all these systems is that the women are not the greatest criminals, as repulsive as many of them might be. The Factory Steward and his wife the Matron are amongst the two most abominable people I know, and in New South Wales this is a description indeed. The Matron and her husband, you see, know the system and run the Factory in a manner which presents an undisturbed surface to the public eye. It is the habit of higher officials than myself to overlook the sins of Matron and Steward, and so I must overlook them too. Thus the Steward has begun to be emboldened. He now takes convict women to the inns in town, and drinks with them. I shudder to speculate what happens thereafter, what his pleasure might be. I know that should I report him he would have an explanation which would suit the Colonial Secretary, who prefers not to think about the Factory. And so, what am I to do?’

I was appalled that this was what had happened to a kindly man who considered himself virtuous – that New South Wales had reduced him to this moral inertia. I was pleased that my only contact with the official side of New South Wales would be to employ shepherds and stockmen.

Rested the next morning, I felt more kindly towards the doctor as he rode with me to a large brick inn named the George, and led me to a stable at the back, where in a series of stalls a number of apparently newly released felons were lolling amongst straw. Strope called for Long, and he came forward, tall, lean-faced, wearing a blue coat, canvas pants
and big boots which he probably retained, as a favour of government, from his career as a constable. His manner was restrained and wary yet correct.

Strope said, ‘This is Mr Bettany. He is starting a new pastoral run in the interior, and is looking for an overseer. As a start, stock must be purchased.’

Long fixed me with a melancholy but, I thought, generous eye. ‘Ah well, stock!’ he intoned in a rhythmic, Celtic voice which gratefully did not have any tone of blather. ‘There I think Mr Bettany could do all right altogether. We’ve barely had a proper rain the past eight months around Parramatta, and the cattle are slipping a little in condition. If you could get yourself some thin darlings, Mr Bettany, and rest them on good pasture on your way inland …’

‘It is Merino and Leicester sheep above all though, Long,’ I told him. ‘I shall let the cattle have the run of the hills. But fine wool, that is the game. Do you think you might be up to the task of overseer?’

‘Well, I suppose I have had management of men as constable.’

Strope said, ‘Long had management of the boats which brought the women to the Factory and behaved well in keeping them orderly. Indeed, how can he be replaced?’

‘But do you have any experience in livestock?’

‘I have worked in fine wool, Your Honour. With Leicesters, in another place.’ He meant, I think, the place he’d been transported from. ‘They’re a fine mix of talents, those boys! But everyone tells me the Saxon Merino, though shorter in staple, has a great amount of crimp and is the sheep for the further country.’

I smiled to think that the convict shared the same high opinion on the virtues of the Leicester as exclusive Mr Finlay.

‘I suggest, Mr Bettany,’ said the doctor, ‘that you take Long with you to the stockyards, and thus assess his strengths.’

Dr Strope indeed had his official calls to make, and so I rented Long a horse. If he proved his mettle I would soon need to buy him one.

As we rode past the end of Church Street, we saw the great structure of the Female Factory beyond the river.

‘There it is,’ I told Long. ‘The house of unruly women.’

Long murmured, ‘Oh, it is not as bottomless a hell as they say, Mr Bettany.’

‘Oh no? Why do you say so?’

‘I was constable bringing the women upriver to here. You would find
women of lesser crimes and honest backgrounds there lately.’

We rode a little further, looking at the high walls of the place, perhaps ten feet, I think. Though of course I said nothing of Surgeon Strope’s confidences of the night before, Long seemed willing to address the very views Strope had uttered. ‘You see, they are loud girls in there, but loud is not the same thing as vile. If ever you got as far as needing a housekeeper, I know at least one good woman who inhabits that place.’

‘Well, we are years from that, I’d say.’

‘Yes. And the woman herself is likewise years from being one.’

Arriving at the saleyards and tethering the horses, Long moved with me in the dust very companionably, amongst yards of shorthorn cattle. A stock agent came forth from a hut with his dusty cravat and descended upon us, full of advice we didn’t need, as we climbed from yard to yard choosing our bulls, our steers and heifers, and watched the stockmen run them down races to holding pens. There were no choices I made that Long took issue with, no choice he suggested which was not worth making. The agent stood by bawling out his professional incantation, hammering the palm of his left hand with his right fist. ‘All calves under six months given in with the lot.’ And Long murmured quite properly, ‘I should bloody well expect it.’

We had worked with great and impeccable urgency, the best way to do things. Long and I next inspected some Saxon Merinos at pasture beyond the yards. Into pens made of split saplings, with much hallooing and waving of arms, we drove rams; two, four and six-tooth ewes; and wethers and weaners of both sexes. Then we looked at some Leicesters for Mr Finlay’s share. I was once more impressed by Long’s competence, so much so that, leaving him to finish the task, I rode into town to draw Mr Finlay’s and Charlie Batchelor’s money from the bank. And so the purchase of livestock was completed in hours! We left our selected livestock overnight, and went back to town where we finalised the purchase of a wagon, bullocks, three dogs and a string of six horses. In Goulburn we would still need to buy supplies, tar, shears, soap, woolsacks. But the pace at which two men, co-operating together, being of one mind, could put together flocks, mobs and necessaries excited me.

At the inn from whose stables he had emerged, Long would introduce me later in the day to a ticket-of-leave man named Clancy. ‘He is not, mind you,’ Long warned me beforehand, ‘a perfect fellow, but I can gouge work from him. He is a sailor, and so not without some order to his mind.’

Clancy proved a stocky, dark man, an American. I found by questioning that he claimed to be a half-Cherokee Indian, and the other half Irish. He had been tried in Liverpool, the original Liverpool on the Mersey, for assault. He was experienced at driving bullocks and carts. I took both him and Long to the magistrate, signed two papers, and suddenly they were mine in earnest.