The Soldier's Curse (11 page)

But then, if Slattery was careful, and didn't make the kind of poison which could sometimes do such damage to the unwary drinker, why not? Monsarrat was certainly no supporter of Diamond's pedantic rules, and would not begrudge his friend the opportunity to make a few extra coins, especially in a place where the scope for profit was so limited.

‘Of course I'm not, you fool,' he said, smiling to telegraph the fact that the words were meant in the way of playful banter. Usually no such signal was needed. But in this fraught situation, Monsarrat didn't want to take any chances.

‘Just as well – I would hate to have to take you in.' Slattery stood and walked around the pot, rubbing his hands together
over it to extract such warmth as he could. ‘Well now, how shall I express myself? You've stumbled upon my secret brew. Surely not the greatest of sins, nothing like the one that sent you here, but still … Just as well you're a felon. You have your secrets, and I have mine. Could we respect each other's secrets, do you think?'

‘Slattery, I don't know who you think you're talking to. I have no intention of revealing the existence of this place. And if you want to brew poteen, good luck to you. I'm no great respecter of the laws, as you point out.'

Slattery smiled again, and Monsarrat wondered whether it was just his recent thoughts of snakes which made the smile look reptilian.

‘Grand then,' said Slattery, clapping his hands. ‘It would break Mrs Mulrooney's heart to see you flogged for absconding.'

‘And her heart would be equally broken were you to be killed by one of those snakes,' said Monsarrat. ‘I don't suppose Goliath has been about today?'

‘Goliath?' said Slattery, looking momentarily distracted. ‘No, no, I seem to be the only living thing here.'

‘I suppose the snakes don't like the smell of poteen,' Monsarrat said.

‘No,' said Slattery. ‘I don't suppose they do.'

Next morning Slattery was already at the kitchen table, drinking tea, when Monsarrat arrived. A knowing nod and smile passed between them.

‘So these winnings of yours,' Monsarrat said now by way of distraction from accusations of shortbread theft. ‘What would you classify as a decent amount?'

‘Thirteen shillings. And easy to earn. None of them can keep still, none of them can clear their faces. They always twitch or turn or fiddle. Dray, he twitches the corner of his mouth if he thinks he has a good hand. Cooper rubs his thumb and finger if he thinks he has a bad one. Not one of them can stop things seeping through.'

‘But you can?'

‘Better than they can, yes. It's why I don't play cards as often as I'd like – they're leery of playing with me because I generally win. The angels could be smiling on my cards and you'd never know it from my face.'

The gentle knocking which announced the arrival of the plastering crew always surprised Monsarrat, as he knew the soft tapping came from knuckles which had once connected with the face of a bailiff.

‘In with you,' Slattery yelled. ‘Down to three now – they'll all have to work harder,' he told Monsarrat.

But only two figures – those of Frogett and Daines – entered the kitchen.

‘Where's Dory?' asked Slattery, getting shrugs in reply.

‘The eejit,' Slattery muttered. ‘I'll have to go and fetch him. He's lucky it's me and not Diamond. You two! We'll get you back to the barracks, can't leave you here. But you'll be working twice as hard when you get back.'

Monsarrat took his leave at the same time as Slattery, treading the well-worn path to the office, grateful for once to be leaving the kitchen and Slattery's problems for the quiet order of the workroom.

As he sat at his desk, his eye caught on the red wax sealing Dr Gonville's report on Mrs Shelborne. This, he thought, could satisfy Diamond, could make him free Monsarrat from further obligation. And it would remove the need to extract information from Mrs Mulrooney. He felt exceptionally uncomfortable when she praised him for being kind enough to ask after the young woman's health.

He also remembered his promise to Edward Donald – that the report would find its way into the major's hands with the seal unbroken. Well, he thought, I can read the letter and still keep that promise. I have the conviction to prove it.

Thankfully, the wax imprint was that of a cross – easy enough for Monsarrat to whittle a forgery that night, and have the paper sealed again well before the major's return. And as a clerk, access to wax would not be an impediment.

Breaking open the seal, he saw that the document was headed ‘Port Macquarie Penal Station Medical Department', and addressed to Major Shelborne, Commandant.

‘Sir,' wrote Gonville (or more accurately Donald, in what Monsarrat felt was a serviceable but unimaginative hand):

So more reports will be arriving via Edward Donald, thought Monsarrat. He decided to refasten the ribbon around the document and lay it facedown, so the tampering with the seal
wouldn't be immediately obvious should Donald come by that day. He might even seek Donald out, under the guise of saving the orderly a trip to Government House.

While the letter was still in his hand, the door was shoved open. In the rarified atmosphere, it was unused to such rough treatment, and complained loudly.

Slattery stood in the doorway, which had rarely framed so large a specimen. The young soldier's pupils were dilated, and sweat gave him a gleam which, in winter, usually spoke of a fever.

Monsarrat forced himself to lay the document aside slowly, as though he had been perusing it with a legitimate objective.

‘He's a fool, he's a fooking simpleton,' said Slattery. ‘You know what he's done, Monsarrat? Dory? He's only gone and absconded. He was seen crossing the bridge at Shoal Arm Creek. Only one reason to do that, Monsarrat. He's heading to Sydney. By land.'

Monsarrat felt a stab of vicarious panic. Dory's chances of a successful escape were slim. And if he were to make it to Sydney, he'd have to subsist as an anonymous labourer, with no hope of a baker's licence and the respectability it conferred.

Slattery let loose a torrent of Irish invective. Monsarrat didn't understand the tortured syllables, but their delivery left no doubt as to their general meaning.

‘What will you do?' asked Monsarrat.

‘Well, I'll have to go after the bastard, won't I? With any luck I can get him back before Diamond is made aware of his absence. Although …'

Monsarrat shared Slattery's doubt. Word of Dory's escape was likely already filtering through the convicts. It was a matter of time – and not much of it – before the news reached Captain Diamond. ‘You had best go then, and quickly.'

‘Yes. Say nothing of this to Diamond, when he comes by. We'll need the smiles of all Mother Mulrooney's saints if we're to spare the eejit a flogging.'

Monsarrat had always thought Major Shelborne was an even-handed fellow. Given the distance from his immediate superior, and the time it would take for an order to reach him, the major realised he was, effectively, the absolute ruler of the settlement, rather than simply a custodian or administrator. There were some, in Monsarrat's opinion, who would have let this authority run away with them – Captain Diamond, of course, came to mind. But the major seemed to understand that life on the margins required certain adjustments, that the rule-bound way of operating he had learned in the army might not, in some circumstances, be the best way to run the settlement.

Monsarrat also felt, oddly, that while his own life had stagnated, his assignment allowed him a role in ensuring the life of the settlement moved forward. The major would dictate his wishes on punishment and mercy, on the allocation of resources, on the building of this structure or the tearing down of that one, and Monsarrat's pen stroke would make those abstract thoughts a reality. Far better than scribing for a flint-hard old man and his frivolous colleagues.

But Monsarrat, like Dory, was not at liberty to cross Shoal Arm Creek, and the knowledge of this blighted his internal landscape.
Contentment, at any rate, counted for little with Monsarrat. He had a high opinion of his own intellect, and wanted a stage on which he could show it off. So his months as a counterfeit barrister had been amongst the happiest of his life.

Finally free of Lincoln's Inn, and with his forged call to the bar, Monsarrat had known that practising in London would be impossible. The chances of detection would be unacceptably high. In fact, it was fairly likely he'd be eventually found out anywhere, and one part of his mind knew this. But the compulsion to prove he was better than the Inns of Court gadflies (‘Write a brief for me, Monsarrat, there's a good chap'), and the impulse to correct what he saw as a grave injustice, that which prevented him from coming by a call through honest means, overrode this knowledge.

In the early stages, when Monsarrat would try to honestly assess his chances of exposure, he would look at the likelihood out of the corner of his eye, quickly turning away from the unpalatable truth which stared back. After a while, he stopped looking. And from the darkness behind his closed eyes there rose another Monsarrat, a shadow who convinced him, almost, that if he found a provincial town and served his clients honestly and well, giving them no reason to discuss his failings with others, he could continue his ruse indefinitely.

By the time of his capture, the shadow had just about convinced him it was no ruse at all. He had settled upon Exeter. His father had been a clerk there, to one of the many wool merchants operating in the city, and Monsarrat had attended a small grammar school. He felt the combination of his childhood knowledge of the place, its mercantile air and its distance from London would protect him.

He had saved as much as possible over the past few years, and now put the funds towards a law library – a tenth of the cost of the libraries of the young carousers at Lincoln's Inn, but adequate – and leasing chambers and rooms, from which he called upon a carefully constructed list of solicitors who dealt chiefly in civil matters, as these attracted less attention than their counterparts in the more lurid criminal courts.

‘Yes, it was a wrench to leave London,' he'd say to their inevitable inquiry as to why a Lincoln's Inn lawyer should be paddling in Exeter's shallow pond. ‘But my father doesn't have a peerage, you see, so Oxford and Cambridge were out of reach. And I do find the people of Exeter more … practical.'

This appealed to many of the solicitors he visited, coming as they did from a merchant town which valued industry, and resented those with wealth and status who hadn't had to earn them. Many had yearned for years to sweep assuredly into their own chambers at one of the Inns of Court, equal in law with the sons of baronets. The fact that someone who had achieved this happy state had chosen to eschew it in favour of their own town made them feel their situation was perhaps not so mean as they had supposed.

Slowly, the solicitors started to send work to him. They already had barristers they liked dealing with, of course – some of whom paid a healthy commission for referred work, which Monsarrat couldn't afford to match. But when those barristers weren't available to act on minor matters, they decided to give the young man from London a chance.

So Monsarrat represented clients in matters to do with small debts or wills. He did his job well enough to widen the channel of referred work, and larger cases began to trickle through – breach-of-promise suits, contractual issues.

In one case, Monsarrat successfully defended one of the town's most wealthy wool merchants against a breach-of-contract allegation. Johnathan Ham had met a man claiming to be a London cloth merchant at the New Inn, near Ham's own premises on the Exeter high street. The man, Dodds, was unable to attend the weekly wool market, so Ham arranged to show him some broadcloth and serge. They agreed on a price per bale, as long as Dodds liked what he saw. Dodds didn't, saying he had expected better from someone of Ham's reputation, and leaving Ham's premises with a sniff.

Ham didn't think much of the man's judgement, given that his wares were universally acknowledged to be amongst the finest in Exeter. But Dodds, a small and aggressive man, returned the next
week, saying he would do Ham a favour by taking the defective (in his view) cloth off Ham's hands for a reduced rate.

Ham took a great deal of delight in telling Dodds the cloth had been sold, to the East India Company at the wool market just gone, for slightly more than Dodds had agreed to pay (he may, he told Monsarrat later, have added to the price in the retelling).

Dodds became furious, saying the pair had a contract which Ham had breached, and for a while Ham regretted his insistence on writing down the terms of their agreement, as a successful action against him would deal a possibly fatal blow both to his finances and reputation. A fifth-generation wool merchant, Ham couldn't begin to imagine what he would do if he had to leave the trade.

He was spared from having to do so by Monsarrat, who successfully argued that as the agreement included the price, any variation voided it. It was an easy argument to make, as Dodds's position was weak, and Monsarrat could have taken the fee and been done with it.

But the flimsiness of Dodds's argument made him wonder why the man bothered, and in the Sundays leading up to his appearance, he made several trips to nearby towns. He spoke to those who were willing, and in Dawlish discovered a merchant who had had a similar experience with Dodds. But the Dawlish merchant had lacked the stomach, or the resources, to meet Dodds in court, instead paying him compensation of half his revised offer for the goods he claimed were substandard.

Monsarrat continued his travels and found similar cases – all involving Dodds – in Seaton and Exmouth. As he laid this information before the court during the contract hearing, Monsarrat had the pleasure of seeing Dodds's vicious smile falter, then die. Dodds, as it turned out, was no merchant at all, and relied on his targets' desire to avoid a potentially damaging legal action by paying him to go away. He had been seriously concerned when Ham let the matter progress to court. He was later charged with fraud, convicted and transported to the colony.

In the weeks afterwards, Monsarrat found himself on the receiving end of an increasing number of briefs, many of them
revolving around thorny contractual matters. He was viewed by many merchants as something of a hero, saving them from Dodds and others like him, who would likely be deterred by the man's forced journey south.

He even received permission to walk in Rougemont Gardens with Ham's daughter Lucinda, under the supervision of her nanny, but a walk was as far as things went – she had no interest in Roman poets, and he was unable to converse on the doings of London society.

The increase in his work was matched by an increase in his status in the Exeter legal community. He was invited to and attended legal dinners, but did not make himself conspicuous by standing on benches and singing songs, or by getting notably drunk. He attended both the cathedral for evensong and the Quaker meeting house, since many Exeter merchants were Quakers. They were very decent people, the Quakers, Monsarrat found. Hard-nosed in business but not murderous, unlike some of the self-regarding bankers and merchants one saw at the cathedral.

He relished that gentler, less frantic city, over which clouds of soot did not hang, a city which looked like an English city should, not like the reports of dismal Manchester or Birmingham. In the meantime, he read his Blackstone's
Commentaries
as strenuously as any barrister in Britain, and more so than a whole lot of them.

He prospered perhaps modestly by the standards of some, but bountifully by comparison with the income of a clerk, and he was able to take two rooms and a little boxroom. His life was not that of a monk, although he would not have objected if people thought so. He had enough money left over for an occasional wilder evening in the inns along the River Exe, and would sometimes invite a few of the younger, more sociable solicitors out with him.

One of these was Samuel Smythe, who, like Monsarrat, was approaching his quarter-century. Smythe, the younger son of a merchant who had served as Exeter's mayor, was well established, and already one of the town's busier solicitors, with friends of his father's sending him business to ‘help the young fellow along'. This business was increasingly finding its way to Monsarrat.

Monsarrat liked Smythe. He honed his legal knowledge as though it was an implement, was single-minded in his business, and operated honestly, if a little bloodlessly. His only drawback, as far as Monsarrat was concerned, was a tendency to be overly impressed with London lawyers. He frequently boasted to people of his friend's Lincoln's Inn pedigree, which made Monsarrat profoundly uncomfortable.

Still, as their birthdays were only a few weeks apart, Monsarrat agreed with Smythe that they should celebrate together. Arriving at the alehouse Smythe had nominated, Monsarrat saw his friend was not alone.

‘Hugh, this is James Dawkins. His father does business with mine, and he's here for his sister's wedding, and a few gulps of fresh air. You probably know each other, both having been at Lincoln's Inn. Hugh, you were there until almost a year ago, weren't you? So you must have crossed paths.'

Monsarrat, of course, had never seen Dawkins. He hoped, desperately, that Dawkins might have seen him on some errand and remembered Monsarrat's face but not the context.

There was an odd frown on Dawkins's face as he examined Monsarrat's features. He's looking at my nose, thought Monsarrat, and thinking, Surely I'd remember that.

Monsarrat's lips began to tingle. His intestines liquefied, solidified again, and knitted themselves into a physiologically impossible pattern – perhaps a noose.

‘A funny thing,' said Dawkins. ‘I thought I was on speaking terms with everyone at the Inn. You do look familiar though. We have met?'

‘I'm sure we must have,' said Monsarrat. To his relief, he sounded casual.

‘Who were you in chambers with?' asked Dawkins.

Monsarrat knew his next words would be likely to prove fatal. But it was a likelihood balanced against a certainty of discovery if he did not utter them. ‘Oh, with old Fairburn – you know him? Bit of a tartar but very thorough. You could always gauge his mood by how much was in his decanter.'

‘Yes, you still can. I know Fairburn and the rest. How odd that we never met.'

‘Well, I wasn't there that long,' said Monsarrat.

Smythe was perplexed, as they drank their ale, at the subdued mood which had descended on the table. Dawkins excused himself after a cup or two, glancing at Monsarrat over his shoulder as he left.

Monsarrat was desperate to leave himself, but he and Smythe had both been looking forward to the evening; it would look very strange indeed to suddenly plead a headache. And while a small but spreading corner of his mind knew he was done for, he forced himself to believe he might just have saved it, that Dawkins might just think, Well, he did look familiar, I must have just forgotten him. It would be a shame to escape revelation, only to bring it on by acting out of character.

He resolved, though, that a period of absence from Exeter might be wise. He would depart first thing in the morning, send word to Smythe and his other instructing solicitors that he had to deal with a family emergency. He would fail to say what family member, or where they lived. In the meantime, the safest course was to act as though nothing was amiss, which meant drinking ale with Smythe. The ale, he thought, might do him good.

In fact, his nerves made him consume rather more ale than he was used to, being only an occasional drinker. By the time he had tottered home to his lodgings, he reasoned that he could start the preparations for his departure at first light. Dawkins, after all, was unlikely to be certain of Monsarrat's real background, and it would take some time for him to return to London, check with Fairburn and alert the authorities, if that's what he meant to do.

But Monsarrat had miscalculated. Dawkins did think he'd seen Monsarrat before, and in connection with Fairburn. But he was equally certain he knew every lawyer at the Inn. Perhaps he was doing the familiar-looking stranger a disservice, he thought, but as it was still early when he left the inn, he called on Mr Justice Allen, whom he knew, to raise his concerns. If the fellow really
was what he claimed to be, the matter could be quickly laid to rest. If not – well, the more swiftly the rot was excised, the better.

The dawn found Monsarrat still asleep. He was woken by a tap on his door, polite but insistent. On the other side, a beadle and two constables told him he was required before Mr Justice Allen. Yesterday, he was angelically clever. Today, he was being called upon to explain what could not be explained.