The Soldier's Curse (22 page)

A day's hard ride away, a group of soldiers, a few trusted convicts, an absconder who was about to be freed, and a Birpai tracker lay sleeping under the forest canopy. The major, who had indeed been on his way back when he was discovered by Diamond and Slattery, wanted to make all haste to ensure his quick return to his ailing wife. But travelling at night, in this country, was an impossibility, so they had made camp as the daylight faded, with the major appointing a sentry and warning him to wake the camp well before dawn, so they could be away on the sun's first rays.

One of the soldiers slept fitfully. He was too far away to hear the Birpai song, but the rendition from the other day still haunted him. It wove in and out of his dreams, showing up incongruously in places half-remembered, as well as in places wholly imagined.

He was a little boy now, drawing pictures with his forefinger in the dust. His mother was very insistent that he learn his letters, so he was practising, while turning the letters into something a bit more interesting – the ‘c' was given pointy ears and whiskers and made into a cat, while the ‘d' had the body of a duck appended to it, his bill raised in the air.

It was unusually warm, but not unpleasantly so – in this barely remembered place, warmth was welcome, not searing and punishing. Indeed, it was only to be had a few weeks of the year, when the gentle rain left off and the green all around could be appreciated on its own terms, rather than through a window.

Close by, his older sister Mary was with her friend. They tended to ignore him as they played, drawing pictures of elaborate dresses and playing with jacks made out of boiled-down pigs' knuckles.

Mary's friend didn't go to the hedgerow schoolmasters who were teaching him to read. She was from the big house up the road. And she was so important that the teachers came to her, and had to call her ‘my lady', or some such nonsense.

But she didn't like the house, she said, although it seemed to the boy to be a miraculous place, one room for each person with more left over, rather than one room for eight, as was the case in his family.

The girl was probably about two years older than him – perhaps eight or nine – but a few years younger than his twelve-year-old sister. He didn't play with the girl himself – if she had been willing to tolerate him, he was still a little scared to. She was a creature of fascination, her hair always smooth, her clothes bright and crisp – at least until she and Mary had scrambled through a few bushes.

He didn't know why she came down here to play. The children from the big house rarely gave the time of day to his sort. But he had heard her tell his sister that she was the youngest, that there wasn't as much money as people supposed, and that her governess had left after an argument with Father. She was nominally in the care of the cook, who had enough to do making what money there was stretch to the large family without entertaining a little girl. So as long as she was back by nightfall, present and correct and clean, no one seemed to worry what she did. And she did seem to adore Mary, who told her stories and braided her hair and followed her on whatever adventure she wanted to have that day, making sure she didn't end up in a mud puddle.

The day his sister's life changed, the girl had brought down some shiny marbles she had been given as a gift. She and Mary were holding them up to the light, giggling as it caught them, half-closing their eyes and imagining that they were jewels in a dragon's treasure hoard.

The sound of hoofbeats was common enough, but rarely were they heard hitting the ground with such velocity and force. The horses around here weren't capable of it. The only horse the young boy knew of which could go at that speed lived in the stables up at the big house.

And then that very horse hove into view in front of their house. The man on it owned all of the land around here, including the land that the boy's family farmed, or tried to farm amid the plentiful rocks.

The passage of years had given the man's face a monstrous quality in the soldier's memory. Red and contorted, snarling, purple lips pulled back over yellow teeth.

The reality may have been a little less frightening. But it may not.

The man stalked over to the girl, and grabbed her roughly by the arm. ‘You have been told, I believe, that you are not to associate with these people. They're peasants and papists. How are we to get you a decent dowry if you talk and smell like them?'

He hoisted the girl up onto the horse, and made to mount himself. The girl started wailing and reaching for Mary. Mary hated to see her young friend distressed. She put up her arms in case the girl's flailing caused her to lose her seat. The snarling man mounted then, and his foot caught Mary in the stomach. She just resisted the urge to double over, as she wanted to keep a hand up to catch the girl should she fall.

The kick may have been an accident. But what happened next was certainly not.

After he mounted, the man drew back the hand in which he held his riding crop, and slashed it with full force across Mary's face. Mary fell backwards into the dirt, howling and holding the bleeding gash in her cheek, as the man rode off with his daughter, her face looking back, an anguished mask.

The incident probably didn't have a bearing on the man's subsequent decision to raise the family's rent to unpayable levels, some time later. Certainly, they were not the only ones in the area to face such an impost, but their increase was the largest. Without a hope of paying, they packed up their belongings and headed towards the nearest city.

Mary's face was permanently disfigured by the blow. She could probably still have made a marriage, but felt she wasn't in a fit state to do so, and never would be. Surely the only man she could attract with such a horrific wound, which pitted her cheek almost to the corner of her mouth, would be a man not worth having, she said. So she hunted for work. She told her brother she wanted to be a nursemaid, but no one would hire a disfigured woman with threadbare clothes and no references. Neither would
any of the shops take her on. She tried to sell flowers for a short while, but as she picked her ragged stock from the roadside, there wasn't much interest.

The city wasn't kind to the family. They found a space in a squalid tenement, for a little more than they had paid for the farm, but there they had at least had fresh air and access to the running water of the nearby stream. Here, neither of those things existed.

The boy's mother sickened and died. His father took to drink, and eventually lost his wits and his sight to it. Mary found enough work to keep them fed. When he was thirteen, a friend, whose father was one of his sister's customers, enlightened him on what kind of work she did, in the slightly jeering tone of one whose sire had enough money to pay for such visits. The men she let inside her didn't care about a marred face.

In fact, they weren't above marring it further. One night the back of a hand against her one smooth cheek sent the side of her head into a wall, with enough force to sever the connection between her brain and the rest of her body.

It was as well that the boy was resourceful, and that the petty thievery with which he fed himself went undetected. One by one the boy's brothers and sisters drifted away, until he drifted himself, and kept drifting until he found himself sleeping at the foot of a strangling fig and its host, the one slowly enclosing the other until no trace of the original was left.

Monsarrat was greatly troubled by the tone in Diamond's letters. Not just the escalation from endearments to admonishments, although that was concerning enough. But there was a frantic depth of feeling there, a well of need, which Monsarrat had never personally experienced and did not understand. He wondered whether it was Honora, and only Honora, who had been capable of stoking such feeling in the captain, or whether the grasping desire was floating like a cloud around him, latching onto the first likely prospect.

Monsarrat had never come close to being married. He had his pretensions, and a great number of them, and they would not have been satisfied by the kind of woman who would have been happy to settle for a clerk's salary. There had been that walk with Lucinda Ham in Exeter, and a few others with various young ladies of good family. He might have pressed his suit with one of them, were it not for the fact that even shadow Monsarrat knew it would lead to certain discovery.

And then, of course, there was his trial, conviction, and transportation, none of which were conducive to meeting the right kind of woman or, for a while, any woman.

For many years after he left Mr Collins's residence, there was no one for whom Monsarrat felt genuine affection. Samuel Smythe probably came close, but that friendship was built on deceitful sands, which had of course ultimately opened and swallowed Monsarrat whole.

There had certainly been women. Many of them found Monsarrat's dark, brooding appearance compelling, and sought to rescue him from whatever turmoil sometimes appeared so plainly on his features. And occasionally, after a wild night in Exeter with some of the rowdier solicitors, he would find himself following the group to a house of ill repute, thankful that his barrister's fees stretched far enough to allow such indulgences.

Apart from these fleeting encounters, female companionship had not been easy to come by, nor did he desire it once his circumstances changed. But when reversals occurred in Monsarrat's life, they tended to occur swiftly and completely. And one such reversal bore the name of Sophia Stark.

Before his ticket of leave, Monsarrat's diligence and fine work at the Parramatta court had earned him some small freedoms. In his own time in the late afternoons and evenings, before he returned to his hut on the floodplain beneath Parramatta's version of Government House, he was permitted to sit in a small parlour in the Caledonia Inn in Church Street and rent himself out as a scribe to the considerable number of convicts and former convicts – called ‘emancipists' – who wanted letters written for posting to other parts of the colony or to relatives in Britain.

As he seldom spoke without purpose, and maintained a neutral expression, some of his customers came to view him as a vessel into which they could pour their distress. Barely coherent ramblings of wives and families left behind, wise fathers and gentle mothers who might well now be dead, paramours who had probably married somebody who had not committed a crime, or at least not been caught in that commission.

He drew what meaning he could from these emotional purgings, put them into finer and more measured language, and wove them through the words dictated by his customers.

It became known that you could go to the tall dark-haired man at the Caledonia with only a vague idea of what you wanted to say, and emerge with a letter written in the finest script, and with the finest sentiment. Gradually, demand for his services grew, so that he had to turn people away in order to return by curfew to his hut. He had no intention of jeopardising the ticket of leave which he hoped was coming by being found away from his quarters after the allotted time.

He even, to his chagrin, had to turn away a pretty, trim dark-haired woman, with a slightly foxy face which stirred him.

She was back the next afternoon, however, and had evidently been waiting some time, as a small queue of people had formed behind her.

As she sat down opposite him, he asked how he could help her.

‘In all sorts of ways, I should imagine, but taking some dictation will do for now,' she said, with a smile that to his mind was a little too arch for a first meeting.

She wanted a letter written to her brother in Kent. He was a few years older than her, and she had not seen him for ten years, nor heard word of him for nearly that long. He was a terrible waster, she told Monsarrat, and she had always been concerned for his future. ‘If you had asked our mother which one of us would be transported, she would instantly have pointed to Charles,' said Sophia.

He asked her what she would like to say to him, and she dictated a mundane letter, telling him of the guest house she owned, the difficulty in securing curtains which were heavy enough to speak of quality at a cheap enough price, and how she pretended there was a husband upstairs should any of her guests give trouble.

Doing his best with the information she gave him, Monsarrat crafted as fine a letter as had ever left the colony, and found himself asking her to let him know if she ever received a response. She thanked and paid him, and left.

The next day she was back, but deliberately stayed at the rear of the line, stepping aside to let later arrivals pass her. Monsarrat stole occasional glances at her, but knew that his customers would
become peevish if he seemed to be paying attention to anything other than transcribing then translating their thoughts into fine and edifying language.

When the line finally drew her towards him, she took a seat in front of his desk and smiled.

‘I am presuming you have not yet had a response from your brother,' said Monsarrat.

She chuckled. ‘You hear the navy boys boasting about how fast the ships are now, as though they were solely responsible for it. But no, there is no ship that fast.' Her face clouded slightly. ‘I don't expect a response, not really. There's been none for ten years, and I don't expect that will change. But perhaps he's getting the letters, you see, and reading them, and knowing that he still has a sister, although at an impossible remove. Or, if the letters do not reach him, they may at least reach someone who knows what has become of him, who may one day be kind enough to enlighten me on that score. I will continue to write until I receive word that he has died, or I die myself.'

Monsarrat found himself uncharacteristically lost for words. The small frown that had rippled over her face made him want to sail for England and find this poor correspondent of a brother, sit him down, and make him dictate a letter back to her.

‘Regardless,' she continued, ‘that's not why I'm here. I came to ask you a question. A little indelicate perhaps, but I'd appreciate your honest answer. How much do you rely on the coins you get paid drafting these letters?'

From anyone else, Monsarrat would have found the question rude. But he didn't hesitate a moment before answering her. ‘His Majesty very kindly feeds and lodges me, so I have no need of the money for the present. I am seeking to put it by for the happy day when my ticket of leave arrives.'

‘In that case, do you feel you could tear yourself away one afternoon during your free time? You see, belief in my fictional husband is wearing thin amongst some of the more amorous of my guests, and I would be greatly indebted to you if you would give him form – for an afternoon.'

Monsarrat had already entertained very vague thoughts of playing the role of Sophia's man for more than an afternoon. And he felt honour-bound to help prevent the molestation of a lady. It was agreed that the following afternoon he would make his way to the guest house, the Prancing Stag.

The place, like its owner, was small, neat, and did its best to look respectable on limited funds. It was mostly patronised by visiting merchants and the occasional officer, but sometimes some rough trade came through the door. Sophia didn't discriminate as long as she had proof that they could pay for their board, but she was thinking of changing this practice, given the looks a few of them sent in her direction.

It was for the benefit of these men that Monsarrat, on entering the parlour, addressed Sophia as ‘my dear' and moved assuredly around the room, having been briefed as to its dimensions and contents on the short walk to the place. And to maintain the deceit, it was only natural that he should retire upstairs with her as evening began to draw in.

They did not become lovers that day. Shortly after being admitted to Sophia's bedchamber, Monsarrat had to sneak downstairs again and out the back entrance to return to his hut by curfew.

But the following day, the correspondents of Parramatta were disappointed to find their accustomed scribe missing from his perch at the Caledonia Inn. A few of them muttered, and made other arrangements, but most decided to give the man a few days' benefit of the doubt, in the hopes that he would return shortly.

The man himself was at that time not in a fit condition to polish the sentiments of the town's people. He was in a rare state of neither thinking about nor needing words, closeted with Sophia in her bedchamber, his cravat on the floor slowly soaking up the contents of a cup of tea which had been accidentally spilled in his eagerness to discard it.

In London, Sophia had been a chambermaid in a hotel far grander than the establishment of which she was now proprietress.

While Sophia was a diligent worker, her brother was in and out of employment, here a labourer, there a streetsweeper. No job lasting long, as his raging thirst inevitably made him late, and not a little violent.

Sophia, who lived in a small room in the hotel's subdivided attic, made barely enough money to keep herself alive. She feared daily for her brother, whom she still thought of as the strapping lad who had thrown her over his shoulder, tickled her, played hide-and-seek with her, and told her stories when she was tiny. She worried that one day, not so far in the future, she would hear of him being found facedown in a puddle, or in the Thames.

The patrons of the hotel, meanwhile, clearly had enough funds to feed an army – why else would they give scraps from their plates to the owners' mastiff – She reasoned that if you could afford to feed a dog as well as yourself, you could certainly do without that pocket watch, or that brooch. Such items did go astray during travel, after all.

But coming from a background where treasures were few, and jealously hoarded, Sophia failed to recognise the fact that for some fortunate people, treasures were tossed aside as casually as trinkets. So the brooch she mistook for a minor piece, of little value to its owner, turned out to be an heirloom passed down through the family for several generations, and it was missed instantly on its owner's return.

Later that day, Sophia was arrested after being caught trying to pawn the brooch. Within the year she had stepped ashore at Sydney Cove.

Sophia still hoped to make a marriage one day, and live in respectability, or what passed for it here. But a great many of the men she met seemed to mirror her brother's liking for alcohol followed by violence. She might be fortunate enough to snag some nice merchant who would turn a blind eye to her past, but if she waited too long her looks would be gone, and she would be left with men who resembled her brother, but without the humanity.

To guard against this eventuality, Sophia decided to make sure she was always able to provide for herself. She saved the money
she made as a seamstress, and on getting her ticket of leave was able to afford a short lease on a well-made but slightly shabby building near the centre of town. She wasted no time in turning it into a cosy if uninspiring guesthouse, setting her rates in the narrow band which enabled a handsome profit without putting the customers off. As she became more profitable, the rooms were dressed in themed colours, and the cream teas were widely acknowledged to be amongst the best in Parramatta. By the time she met the brooding convict, she had been able to buy the building outright, and felt secure for the first time in her life.

She had had her eye out for some time now for a marital prospect, and felt this young Welsh–French hybrid could make a suitable candidate. He was industrious, and his skill with a pen meant that he would never be out of employment. He did not seem to be overly taken with drink, plying his trade surrounded by the stuff at the Caledonia Inn, but never visibly intoxicated. And she genuinely came to care for him, despite needing to hide her boredom when he recited some of Catullus's more saucy work.