The Soldier's Curse (6 page)

‘Something has certainly befallen her,' said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘It is so sudden to go from full health one day into a total decline the next, and to stay in that decline without getting better or … well, I'll say it … without dying. It is a strange, strange business, and
if in the country in Ireland such a thing happened, people would certainly believe that curses and the fairies were at work. But this is a girl who would laugh off a curse.'

‘Did Mrs Shelborne hear them singing?' Monsarrat asked.

‘I think so. Her eyes were open. But who can tell? Just the same, I sat by her, at the start, holding her hand, until I came to you for help.'

‘Well, neither you nor she need concern yourselves further. The matter is dealt with.'

Slattery, who had been silent, stood and handed his teacup to Mrs Mulrooney. ‘You are a queen amongst housekeepers,' he said, bowing. ‘But now I must return to make sure those dullards haven't made any mistakes with the papering.'

‘Off with you then, you spalpeen,' said Mrs Mulrooney, smiling.

Monsarrat also said his goodbyes, feeling an urgency to be at his desk and obviously well into the day's industry by the time Diamond arrived, if indeed he did.

But the notion of an overhanging curse continued to oppress the settlement. In the days following, he heard rumours of a curse from certain of the junior soldiers and convicts, particularly those from the countryside, and he noticed as well that some, when passing the forests, which to them represented Birpai lands, made signs that seemed an attempt to ward off curses hunkered in the shadows of the trees.

Monsarrat was, perhaps, alone amongst his convict brethren in liking his daily work. His status as a Special exempted him from the gangs cutting wood or hauling timber; the worst-behaved convicts had to perform this work in double irons. He avoided the attentions of the more brutal overseers, so was also able to escape the seeping ankle wounds the men of the chain gangs suffered, and the sloughing skin of those sent to work as lime-burners.

But his enjoyment went beyond relief at worse fates avoided. He liked the fact that here, as far from the world's administrative centres as you could possibly get, there was a tiny scrap of perfect organisation, and copperplate to rival any found in Lincoln's Inn, where some of his own work no doubt still resided.

This morning he walked to Government House, to the outbuilding from which Major Shelborne ruled the settlement and reported to the Colonial Secretary in Sydney. The building was divided into two rooms, the larger one serving as a study for the major, with a window looking over the ocean. Monsarrat's smaller workroom also had a window, the first he had had any claim to since his transportation.

On the shelves in his office, catalogued in huge envelopes tied with black ribbon and thick enough to have their spines inscribed,
were some of the older communications between Sydney and Port Macquarie. Others, perhaps more recent and more sensitive, were kept in Major Shelborne's office, which was locked with a key but one Monsarrat was permitted to wear around his neck.

He unlocked the inner office door now and went into Major Shelborne's study. He preferred it here to his other place of work, the police house in the Government House garden. There the major, who was also the magistrate and justice of the peace, heard and adjudicated minor offences, with Monsarrat making notes on the squabbles or skirmishes or petty theft or neglect of work which made up the majority of the transgressions. The work was no more repetitive than the monthly reports and returns Monsarrat transcribed in the office next to Government House, but he would take the latter any day, and had much more liking for writing about thriving crops than about black eyes or stolen chickens.

Monsarrat picked up a number of rough written drafts of letters to Sydney which he was to transcribe in his own good hand for signature by Major Shelborne on his return.

But for this copying work, Monsarrat was a free man, or as free as was possible in his current circumstances. Port Macquarie had been intended to be a place of unremitting labour – its inmates proving themselves resilient to all but the bluntest of punishments, by virtue of their second offences. The governor's instructions to the settlement's first commandant still hid amongst the ribboned documents on Monsarrat's shelves. The governor had told him to keep the convicts' ‘minds constantly employed and their bodies inured to hard labour … they are always to be kept at work from sunrise to sunset, the whole of the weekdays, allowing only a reasonable time for their meals'.

Monsarrat had read these instructions as he had read most documents in the office, aware of the irony that the leisure time which enabled him to read them contravened the governor's instructions. The reality was that some of the convicts had far more free time than Sydney would have been comfortable with.

Diamond had now put his own stamp on the settlement by imposing extra work on a great many functionaries, like Spring
in the stores and Dr Gonville, who had been asked to compile a list of all the dead for the past year, together with the cause of their death.

Monsarrat saw little point to this busy work, as such events were covered anyway in the reports to Sydney, and was grateful that Diamond had not yet got around to him, probably thanks to his relative unimportance. So once his copying was done, he availed himself of another aspect of the major's room, a collection of histories and biographies of great men, arranged in two bookcases either side of the sea-looking window and designed in their grand leather to intimidate visiting officials, soldiers and convicts.

Under Major Shelborne, tasks were only assigned which could be completed by mid-afternoon, leaving convicts with some free hours before night descended, even in winter. So once three o'clock came Monsarrat would stop for a meal, his rations cooked by one of the women and eaten off a tin plate in a mess reserved for those Specials who had proved themselves trustworthy – the convict overseers, Spring's assistant storekeeper, the coxswain, the surgeon's assistant.

Then he'd be back, read a little Roman and Greek history again, or alternate the gossipy Seneca with the fact-obsessed Tacitus (the man would have made a good clerk), or some Catullus, the Roman poet he loved. The only version in the study was in Latin, which was just as well, as some of the Roman's work made even Monsarrat blush. But he would have dearly loved to see how Catullus would have fared as a clerk – the man's habit of issuing insults, invitations and even recalls of debts in verse would have made for some interesting dispatches.

On this morning, Monsarrat took the proposed dispatches to the Colonial Secretary which were written in the major's fast hand before his departure. He went to the outer office, locked the major's door again, and sat down at his own desk, in front of his brown earthenware inkwell and the selection of pens which sat beside the great sheet of leather-bound blotting paper.

Monsarrat had also picked up reports which were to go with the major's dispatches to Sydney, standard monthly documents: receipts and issues, labour performed, infractions and punishments, convicts received and discharged.

The most notable case of the month was a man who had absconded unsuccessfully southwards, trying to walk to Sydney, but had returned himself after ten days, looking skeletal. Why do it in winter? Monsarrat thought. Surely better to wait for October, with its milder temperatures. The man deserved punishment for idiocy if nothing else. He copied the major's sentence – thirty days in the gaol on bread and water, along with the thirty lashes he had already been given.

The first commandant of the settlement had been urged by Governor Macquarie to use the lash only as a last resort, and then only up to a total of fifty lashes. He had been instructed to err on the side of mercy where a crime was uncertain. The current governor, Brisbane, had done nothing to countermand this, and in any case the major was an efficient but not a cruel man. In Port Macquarie, he had found an expression for both attributes together, as humane treatment tended to lead to better returns from the plantations and the timber parties.

He was even-handed in his punishments and knew that his future career, in this place, in this colony or in some other far-flung wing of the British world, depended exactly on that, on his calm reports and his willingness to obey the precedents of colonial punishment. But an absconder was an absconder, and there were far too many of them for a place which had been touted as providing excellent natural security. Examples must be made.

Spring's report had been compiled in haste that month, to clear some time for the audit. It noted quantities of beef, pork, flour, rice, butter, maize, wheat, tea, sugar, wine and spirits, these last two kept in a locked room at the back of the stores, and reserved for the use of the officers. Alcohol was forbidden to convicts (there was humanity, and then there was stupidity), in spite of which a great many of them seemed able to get drunk. Spring gave an account of the amounts of fish brought in by the coxswain and his crew on the days they went trawling, and rum produced from the locally grown sugar cane lived with its imported cousins in the locked room.

Gonville reported on sicknesses in the settlement – catarrh, now that winter was here, one case of pneumonia, a doomed case
of consumption amongst the women. This was all nicely tabulated according to the practice of the British Civil Service, lists of illnesses, records of pregnancies and deliveries – a child had been born to an unmarried woman named Lawson – and deaths, of which there had been a balancing one, as though to keep the scales of both worlds equal.

The dead man was an old lag who had been allowed for some years to sit by the hospital in a wicker chair whenever the weather was good. He was quite mad and would have thick-accented conversations with passers-by in the belief that he was still living in a village outside Manchester and had much to report about it – men smashing weaving shuttle machines and such. After he related the tale he always said, ‘And more force to their arms. Those boys know the way the world is going.' Now Port Macquarie had been relieved of this one demented voice, and it was replaced by an infant yelling for the milk of its bonded mama.

The superintendent of convicts had left a note for the major's perusal on his return. The treadmill installed at the granary was working well, he said. This contraption served as a punishment in place of lashes, having the advantage of grinding grain using the power of the legs of those sentenced to a few hours' service upon it. The superintendent reported on the number of men in chained and unchained gangs, those in cedar parties, those making bricks from the red earth, those employed at Settlement Farm and Rolland's Plains, and those on the lime-burners' gang.

This last was the worst job in the settlement, Monsarrat felt, and was only given to those not fit for other work. The lime-burners collected oyster shells and burned them to extract the lime, which was used to hold together the settlement's bricks. With the construction of the first church underway, and ships from Sydney under instructions to backload with as much lime as possible, their services were in demand, but the lime exacted a terrible toll. It was caustic and bestowed red eyes on those who worked with it, often eating away at their flesh into the bargain.

Now Monsarrat began copying the major's dispatches. They generally reported tranquillity and progress. The sugar cane growing
on the allocated area near the river was flourishing (and being used to produce decent rum), as were the crops at Rolland's Plains nearby. The dairy cattle were fat from the fertile mud plain pastures and were giving good quantities of milk. The major (or Monsarrat in his stead) then briefly summarised the details of the reports of the surgeon, the storekeeper and the superintendent.

And then Monsarrat came to the section of the report which he felt did not deserve his penmanship.

Making allowances for such a person! thought Monsarrat. Kiernan is playing you for a fool, my dear major, and you are conspiring in it. I would bet one of my pearl waistcoats that the river does not exist.

The report continued, ‘Should we find the river, and the pastures which Kiernan says surround it, I propose Kiernan be given a conditional pardon for his services in guiding us there.'

So, absconding was not the sin. Doing it unsuccessfully got you bread and water, not to mention a back with thirty-times-nine scars. But if you eschewed society and managed to survive in the forest like a wild animal, and insisted on evading capture in a most embarrassing way, freedom would be yours for the price of a fictional river.

And what if you possessed one of the finest hands to cross
the seas between England and the colony? What if you could transcribe, order and organise faster than any other man on this outcrop? Then you must work for a man who sees your freedom as his sentence to a substandard clerk, a man who depends on your continued imprisonment. Then the days stretch out before you without even the courtesy of having a number, uncountable as they slither past the horizon, until they deposit an older version of you on an unknown shore.

Usefulness, as Monsarrat saw it, was a curse. He was incapable of allowing himself to do work which he viewed as below standard. But that very work kept him bound to a life he did not want. And it had, he felt, been responsible for his first crime.

As a young man, skilled in penmanship and Latin but with no particular aptitude or enthusiasm for any specific trade, he had got a job clerking for a group of young and middle-aged barristers at Lincoln's Inn. He had been terrified on his first day, seeing lawyers as enhanced specimens of humanity, with wit, intelligence and drive which had been denied him. Pleased to be of service to such greater beings, he had applied himself to taking dictation, transcribing, and organising the lawyers' affairs in a manner which earned him high regard from his gentlemen, if not a rise in salary to go with it.

Knowing he would function better if he understood the lawyers' affairs, Monsarrat took to reading any document he could. By the time he was able to identify which lawyer was about to enter by the sound his heels made on the stones outside, Monsarrat felt he had a working understanding of the legal system. And by the time he was able to identify the calibre of an approaching client by their footfall (the wealthier the person, the better the shoe leather), he had a working understanding of his employers.

But as his understanding grew, his respect diminished. The senior lawyer in the group, by dint of years lived, was industrious enough, if unimaginative and lacking in drive. The younger ones, however, in Monsarrat's opinion, knew nothing of the law or scholarship. They had merely attended the necessary number of dinners at their Inn of Court and had been able to afford to buy a £500 legal library.

His regard for the profession and those who practised it disappeared altogether the day one of the younger lawyers, worse for wear after a night of carousing, asked Monsarrat to write a brief in his stead: ‘There's a good fellow.' And it turned into something altogether darker when he heard the young man accept praise on the brief from Mr Fairburn, the taciturn senior barrister who viewed praise as a finite resource which needed to be used sparingly.