The Soldier's Curse (9 page)

So for the present, Hanley was God's only representative in Port Macquarie, standing and gripping Slattery's arm in commiseration.

Slattery shrugged off Hanley's grasp. ‘As you say, Father, very sad. Young he was, too. Did you get to him in time?'

‘Yes, barely. I was able to absolve him. He died in a state of grace – assuming no unclean thoughts traversed his mind in the minute or two between amen and his final breath.'

‘He has no further need of you, so,' said Slattery. ‘Very good, you lot, at opening the door to the next world. Only God can say how good a job you're doing there. But I have my own thoughts on the job you're doing here. You should be making sure the door doesn't open too soon, and that passing through it isn't the only hope.'

‘Ah, Fergal. I do what I can. A powerless priest in a cradle of the heathens. Don't think, lad, that all of the work of Our Lord and his Blessed Mother needs to take place in the glare.'

Mrs Mulrooney, having now distributed tea, reflexively crossed herself.

‘Who's died?' asked Monsarrat.

‘One of my plastering crew. Fellow called Jeremiah. He was taken ill a few weeks ago but kept working. Well, in honesty I didn't give him a choice. Not until he wasn't able for it. You'd not believe the ruses they pull sometimes.'

‘And taken, from what I understand, by the same malady that torments Mrs Shelborne, or something very like it,' said Hanley.

Mrs Mulrooney's eyes made brief contact with Monsarrat's, then directed themselves towards the floor.

Monsarrat sought to salve his own rising sense of unease by burying it in administrative activity. He stood, placed both hands on the table and leaned forward on them. ‘Private, are any others amongst your plastering crew ill?'

‘Not deathly so. One of them has a cough, not looking his best. But that's not unusual. He's still able to work.'

‘Anyone else of whom you've heard?'

‘No, not like that anyway.'

‘Father, have you ministered to anyone with a similar sickness?'

‘No, Mr Monsarrat, nor have I heard any rumours.'

‘Mrs Mulrooney … are you feeling well?'

Mrs Mulrooney drew herself up, offended by the implication that something as trivial as a wasting sickness could render her incapable. ‘Apart from a certain lack of sleep, my health is excellent,' she said.

‘I am pleased to hear it. Private, may I suggest that you confine your crew to the sitting room for the morning?'

Slattery, for all his regard for Monsarrat, did not appreciate receiving orders from a convict. But he was not unintelligent and saw sense in what Monsarrat was suggesting. ‘I suppose so,' he said. ‘Until when?'

‘Until I have had a chance to deliver a report.'

Monsarrat meant to make two reports, in fact. With two purposes. To the same man.

He found Captain Diamond by the river, gazing at a work crew and their overseer working on the breakwater. After the rains, the frogs were competing with the sound of the convicts' tools, although Monsarrat didn't approve of their song. They didn't croak like any self-respecting frog. They tapped, in mimicry of the sticks the natives used to accompany their strange crooning. For Monsarrat, the sound was unsettling, being not far removed from the tap on the door at his Exeter lodgings, the tap which had ended his liberty and sent him here.

Diamond observed the worksite from horseback, on a sturdier and less refined beast than someone of the officer class would be used to. Nor was he self-evidently anymore an officer. For this dirty work, he had replaced his beloved parade ground reds with duller clothes, making him look from a distance like a reasonably prosperous farmer.

With the commandant away on the hunt for the fabled river, the works which had been approved before his departure were being undertaken with more than the usual haste, to clear the building schedule for his return so he might look with favour
on more important projects. A report on the poor state of the barracks roof, for example, sat amongst the increasing sheaves of paper Monsarrat had laid by for the major.

Diamond looked at Monsarrat sharply when he stopped beside the horse. ‘You have a report for me?'

‘There is no change in Mrs Shelborne's condition. Or at least in the way it manifests itself.'

Diamond spat. ‘The major should have a soldier for a secretary. Not someone who spends words like a drunk. Is she any worse, or is she not?'

‘The digestive disturbances, the bouts of coughing and the convulsions are no more frequent than they were yesterday or last week. No more severe, either. But she weakens. She takes no food, and her only sustenance is tea fed to her on a spoon. She is less able to withstand the onslaught.'

‘You don't mean to say she is closer to death?'

‘That I don't know, sir. You would need Dr Gonville's opinion.'

‘Which is precisely what I can't avail myself of, which is precisely why I have given you the opportunity to be of service,' said Diamond.

‘I think I may be of service to both you and the common good in one stroke today,' said Monsarrat. He told Diamond of Jeremiah's death, and the precaution Slattery had taken in confining his men to the parlour.

‘You fear contagion,' said Diamond.

‘I don't know, sir,' said Monsarrat. ‘But I do believe that two illnesses following the same course should be brought to the surgeon's attention. In so doing, it would be natural to discuss the condition of the surviving victim.'

Diamond looked at the men, hauling rock on top of rock in a probably vain attempt to protect the landing place from the worst of the nearby ocean's moods. The bottoms of their canvas pants would now be permanently stained brown by the river mud, which was silky to the touch and crafty at worming its way into the gap between threads. It had managed to climb, in patches, to the workers' shirts, and had also taken up residence on most of their faces.

Monsarrat wondered whether his news was causing more internal turmoil than was apparent on Diamond's features. He knew Diamond would consider it bad form to show any strong emotion in front of a convict clerk.

‘I can't go,' the captain said. ‘You must. You are right: Gonville should be informed. So inform him.'

‘And then? What if he should recommend some restriction of movement?'

‘If he does, return at once. I'll take the necessary action. Otherwise, gather what information you can on the other matter between us, and return here tomorrow. And be aware that I require more than second-hand generalities if you're to settle your debt.'

Gonville, as it turned out, did not feel a general quarantine was necessary. ‘Too disruptive to the function of the place, without any evidence of plague,' he said.

Monsarrat was aware that a plea for a larger dispensary rubbed against the to-be-approved request for the repair of the barracks roof, and that too much disruption would jeopardise both.

This knowledge sat beside a galloping fear of what a plague could do to the settlement. Monsarrat's imagination had been scurrying into dangerous and dark places during his short walk from the river up the hill towards the hospital, and he chastised himself for it. Best not to allow one's mind to create terrors, when enough of them existed in reality. One of those real terrors wore a red coat, and had handed out a secret commission which had unsettled Monsarrat more than he liked to admit. But when his thoughts were all he could control, it was crucial not to let them off their leash.

As he passed the convict barracks, the scent of the river eucalypts gave way to murkier, more human odours, which did not help. If plague was allowed to take hold, he suspected, those barracks would putrefy so much that a forest of gums wouldn't be able to compete. Its slow pace would gradually quicken – another case tomorrow, perhaps. Two next week. And then, suddenly, twenty.
Thirty. The barracks roof would no longer matter, and the need for the larger dispensary would be acute.

His mood lightened slightly as he neared the hospital. He didn't see, as he had half-expected, corpses being removed for burial, or the afflicted lying on canvas stretchers outside, their number having overwhelmed the small hospital's capacity. And now, in the doctor's office – or more accurately at his desk behind a partition at the end of the long hospital – the threat seemed even less likely. A sideboard stood next to a window, which admitted a smell of lye so strong that it would surely make any contagion impossible. The sideboard was a twin of that in which Mrs Mulrooney kept the best china and cutlery. Here, though, its surface was draped with a white runner, on which were displayed implements of unknown purpose (and Monsarrat wished their purpose to remain unknown, at least as far as he was concerned). The shelves held more books than Monsarrat had seen anywhere in the colony save the major's study.

‘What is it, then,' Monsarrat asked, ‘to strike down two people with the same symptoms? Both young, too.'

‘Mrs Shelborne has not been struck down,' said Dr Gonville sharply. ‘In any case, there is no fever. And I remain standing, as does Mrs Mulrooney. We would surely be amongst the first to fall, if the disease were liable to jump from one person to another.'

The doctor, in fact, did not remain standing, and occupied one of the office's two chairs. It would never have occurred to him to offer the other to a convict.

‘Have you seen Daisy Mactier recently?' he asked now.

Monsarrat had never regarded Gonville as particularly prudish. His employment as a colony doctor told against squeamishness, both moral and otherwise. Nevertheless, he made it a rule not to answer a question unless he was sure of the intentions of the questioner.

‘I believe she's been about, yes,' he said. He smothered his own puerile speculation on whether he and Gonville had trod the same path. He preferred to relegate such awkward likelihoods to the mists at the edge of his consciousness, where they had less chance of coalescing into facts and thus demanding attention.

‘And she's well?'

‘I've no reason to believe otherwise.'

Gonville slapped his desk. ‘There you are, then. Harlots are a bellwether of plague. They're at the crossroads, so to speak, and they can infect a great many others before being outwardly stricken themselves. No, if Daisy's well, so is the colony. Not that contagion from that source would be a concern for you, of course, Monsarrat.'

‘I hope to avoid contagion from any source, doctor. Is there nothing we can do to lessen the risk?'

‘Keep yourself as hale and well fed as possible, I suppose. Not difficult for someone with fishing privileges.'

I must be more careful on my next trip to the river, Monsarrat thought.

‘Beyond that,' said the doctor, ‘in order to advise you I would need to know which disease we are dealing with. And in all honesty I don't. The humours of this place are different. The seasons are reversed. It's not impossible that some bodies would react badly to the change in natural order, while others would be unaffected. Perhaps the air or water here is more acidic, and it's an excess of acid in the lymph glands that causes it. I have to admit, I thought of cholera for a short time. Or gastric fever. And yes, I did fear the very event you have come to discuss. But there would be more, far more by now. If we were at home, and if the circumstances were right, I might suspect arsenic poisoning. But Spring keeps the arsenic under lock and key, and makes a note of everyone who wants some for the rats. And there's no one with a wish to do in a kind gentlewoman and a harmless young felon.'

‘Your advice, then, is to watch, wait, eat and hope,' said Monsarrat.

‘It's the best I have for you right now. And you may like to take a fatalistic approach – if you are marked for it, no art of mine, and no precautions of yours, will save you.'

Monsarrat worried at the conversation as his feet pushed the path away behind him and his hands kept each other company
behind his back. He had had more than enough of professional men who seemed to lack necessary knowledge, or the shrewdness to apply it properly. He supposed that if Gonville had been a truly talented doctor, he might now be taking his ease on Harley Street.

Monsarrat's pace gradually slowed and then stopped, his feet no longer pushing the path but holding it in place.

After a few moments they quickened in a far less gradual and seemly fashion, closing the distance between their owner and the bookshelf in the study of Major Angus Augustus Shelborne.

When Hannah Mulrooney was a child, the worst insult that could be hurled at you was that you were useless.

In her family you needed to justify not only the food you ate, but the chair you occupied at the table and the air you displaced as you sat down. Now, however distant and dead he might be, she feared her father would level the dreaded accusation at her. What good was brewing tea – doing it the proper way, the only way – when you were serving it to a near-corpse, dull-eyed and slack-skinned and unrecognisable as the young woman who had captivated the major, and much of the rest of the port.

But still she brewed, delicate infusions for Mrs Shelborne and strong, black concoctions for those amongst the regular visitors to the house whom she liked well enough. Monsarrat was one of the chief consumers, and had labelled her kitchen ‘a temple of tea and counsel', earning himself a swat with a damp cloth and a reminder that he might be lettered but he was still a convict and must therefore avoid acting above his station, even verbally.

Yet secretly, Hannah Mulrooney hugged the name to herself, for Monsarrat did seek her counsel on a range of matters. How should he phrase a letter to the Colonial Secretary warning of the port's overcrowding, so that it sounded reasoned and not wheedling (for Major Shelborne often left the composition of the first drafts of such letters to Monsarrat, and Mrs Mulrooney had a gift for manipulating a language she could not read)? How much salt pork should be put by for Christmas, and should there be
a Christmas pudding in the cursed summer heat? And, chiefly, how was Monsarrat to secure another ticket of leave, this one without conditions, and be as good as free in the whole vast colony of New South Wales? She gave such answers as she could, and Monsarrat often seemed pleased, sometimes even conveying her advice to Major Shelborne (without mentioning its source).

‘You know, you're shrewder than me,' Monsarrat had said to her once.

‘Of course I am,' she said. ‘For all the good it will do me, with no letters.'

‘Maybe one day I'll teach you some letters,' said Monsarrat.

‘Well, don't think I'll find the time to take them on board me.' In the meantime, he took to writing letters on her behalf to her son, Padraig, who was droving in the plains beyond the hazy mountains. He would also read her the replies, for Padraig had enough of an education to pen them himself – Mrs Mulrooney had made certain of that, would have sold her very shoes to win for Padraig the induction into what seemed to her a mystical art.