by Meg Keneally
Hannah had already admonished one woman for failing to remove her bonnet inside, and now here was another, vastly elevated in comparison, keeping it in place. Perhaps, she thought, she’d missed a change in the rules while she was in Port Macquarie, where the proper etiquette for bonnet wearers was not a subject of regular discussion.
‘Well, I’m not sure how I can put you to use,’ said the woman, after Hannah had told her why she was there, ‘but I imagine a cup of tea will provide the necessary inspiration. Please do come in.’
There was a kettle already on the hob, with steam vines inching out of its snout towards the corners of the room. Beyond that, on a low couch in the corner near a staircase which might have led to a bedroom, lay another woman, snores leaking out of her. This woman had no bonnet, and the hair plastered to her cheek by sweat was light enough to conceal a small number of grey hairs, which were multiplying and threatening to crowd out the others until no claim to blondness could be made.
‘I shouldn’t worry about waking her,’ said the woman. ‘I doubt anything will for some hours.’ There was a cheerful clatter of cups as she got them down from the sideboard, and the swishing of the water in the teapot as she warmed it, poured it out and replenished it over a mound of fragrant leaves.
Her name, she said, was Mrs Rebecca Nelson.
‘I’m on the Ladies’ Committee, you see. Well, at the moment I am the Ladies’ Committee. Charlotte Bulmer had been running it, but her husband doesn’t want her mixing with convicts – he fears moral contagion. My husband fears moral contagion too, of course, but he takes the opposite view – he believes corruption sets in when one makes no attempt to help others. Mind you, he prefers to help from a distance. And I do believe he likes to think of me as the leading lady of philanthropy here, especially since they moved the native school into the bush. Dear Bessie Evans, she does such a remarkable job with those savage children. And now that she’s doing it well away from here, there are so few other ladies with the inclination to help.’
She was, she said, the wife of a Quaker merchant. ‘Have you seen the store a street back from the river, the large one? Nelson’s. His name is David Nelson, you see. Tea. Cloth – the kind you can’t get here, not that rough, coloured calico they make these poor girls wander around in. China and glass and cutlery. A bit of silver plate, but he tries to keep stocks low – thieves, you see. To be expected, here, I suppose.’
‘I’m sure it keeps him very busy, missus,’ said Hannah. Odd statement, she thought. Even by her own standards. But she had to admit to a level of discomfort, sharing tea with this bright creature while the shade breathed in the corner. ‘I am to be at your disposal, I understand, while my employer is engaged in the business of helping discern the identity of Mr Church’s killer.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Mrs Nelson. ‘I haven’t liked to leave poor Mrs Church, you see. Not that she would notice, I don’t think. And I do still have a few tasks to complete here, which I’d as soon attend to before the end of the day. May I ask, would you be kind enough to sit with the poor thing? Just have some water at the ready in case she wakes. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.’ And off she went with elegant, seemingly unhurried steps.
Hannah did not like sitting still. Particularly not now and with a woman she didn’t know, who might awake at any moment in an uncertain state.
Mrs Nelson had not even left her the solace of tidying. The windows set into the brown, rendered walls had been flung open, presumably to allow the sour vapours wafting off the sleeping woman a means of exit. The table had been scrubbed, recently and thoroughly if she was any judge. The hob was clean, as was the china. And the floor had been swept. A small pile of dust and detritus lurking in the corner was the only oversight Hannah could see, and she dealt with it immediately.
She picked up a cloth from a hook near the sideboard. It was unwashed – presumably Rebecca Nelson’s powers of domestic reorganisation extended only so far. Hannah dipped the cloth in some water and walked over to the form on the couch, recoiling slightly as the smell of rum hit her. Bending down, she used the coarse fabric to smooth the grey, crinkled hair away from the woman’s cheek. She got no response.
She washed and put away the cups she and Mrs Nelson had been using, and poured some more tea into a tin cup she found relegated to the shadows in the corner of the sideboard – she preferred the use of her own china and didn’t like to impose on anyone else’s. Such things mattered.
The elegance with which she’d departed had deserted Rebecca Nelson when she returned, ramming herself back into the kitchen, racing to a seat at the table as though there were others competing for it.
‘Mrs Mulrooney, I have the most marvellous idea!’
Hannah glanced over at Mrs Church. She had not moved, and it was highly likely that slamming doors were common enough in her waking life to provoke little response even when she was conscious.
‘I mentioned, of course, that I’m the sole representative of the Ladies’ Committee here at the moment,’ Mrs Nelson went on. ‘We do what we can for the girls. Of course, some are more deserving of help than others, but we try not to discriminate. Certainly one of my objectives is to equip them for life once they eventually leave this place. A smattering of letters – sewing and needlework, that sort of thing. But there are more than two hundred women here, and with only one of me, well … I’m sure you can see the impossibility of the situation.’
‘Certainly. It must be very difficult.’
‘It is! It is. That may change, however. Your employer is here, yes?’
‘Yes. Mr Monsarrat.’
‘Just so. I met him, you see, crossing the yard, and asked him if I could make use of your services during his future visits to the Factory. Wonderful man that he is – five minutes’ acquaintance is plenty of time to take someone’s measure – he agreed. So you shall be helping me here, on occasion, with these unfortunates. Assuming you have no objection to working with convicts?’
‘None at all, Mrs Nelson. I was one myself, for a time. So I’m hoping you’ve no objection to working with former convicts. I’ve been ticketed for … Well, nearly twenty years now.’
‘Even better! You will have so much deeper an understanding of them than my own. I feel for the poor wretches, but of course I couldn’t begin to understand them. Perhaps you can school me. In the manner of thinking which comes with bondage. It might enable me to help further. It changes one, I suppose. Do you not agree?’
‘If one is weak-willed enough to let it do so, perhaps.’
Mrs Nelson laughed, slapping the table in a most unladylike fashion.
‘And you are one with the strength to prevent it, yes? Like myself, or so I fancy, anyway. Do you not think, my dear woman, that we might benefit from shoring up the characters of those here?’
She fidgeted with her hat as she spoke, to the extent that Hannah wanted to swat her hands away from it. Her fingers continually sought escaping strands of hair, pushing them back inside the bonnet, which was drawn tight down over her forehead. She seemed insensible to the fact that her probing would draw out more hair in the process. An impossible task, anyway – the strands of Mrs Nelson’s hair were so startlingly red that they made the light straw of her bonnet, to which they adhered, look like the veined cheek of a drunk.
‘It will be wonderful to have someone … effective. Poor Mrs Bulmer. She is unavailable due to a nervous complaint, apparently. The kind of complaint I imagine would afflict anyone with a husband like hers, although she doesn’t, at least, take solace in rum.’
Hannah had heard the name Bulmer before, and not only from Mrs Nelson. Presumably there were not many of them here, and the only one she was aware of was the vindictive preacher who had ended Monsarrat’s first stretch of freedom. If he was the woman’s husband, Hannah thought a nervous complaint was the least of her problems.
‘Now,’ Mrs Nelson said, patting her bonnet as a reward for its efforts in constraining her hair, ‘you are a competent needle woman,
I judge.’
‘Well, yes, as it happens. Having not seen my work, though, how are you able to judge it?’
‘Your skirts, dear lady. Patched several times, I see. Please don’t worry – done in such a skilful way that few people would notice. Only those with an eye for such things, like me, would have any inkling. I hope you’re not offended by the observation.’
Hannah couldn’t help drawing her shoulders back just a little, drinking in praise which was rarely a feature of her conversations with those higher up in society. Odd, though, that a woman of Mrs Nelson’s station would notice patching on skirts – most of those with money wouldn’t think of it.
‘So I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it’s not good for the character of the ladies here to be wandering around in the clothes they were supplied with, little more than rags held together with rough stitching,’ Mrs Nelson said. ‘No finesse to it. Perhaps I might be able to impose on you to pass on some of your skill to these women.’
Hannah was not sure that she liked Rebecca Nelson’s assumption of her agreement, but it had been a long time since she had been able to impart any skills of any sort to anyone, much less been given the opportunity to show off. She decided to let Mrs Nelson assume her consent until she could see where the woman’s plans were leading. ‘I will of course be delighted to be of service in any way,’ she said, with the automatic but shallow deference the Irish had a lot of training in.
‘Of course you will! Stout person such as yourself. I shall expect you, then, shall I? At nine o’clock on Monday morning, or as close as you can manage. You and I, I feel, are going to give these ladies something which the recently departed superintendent tried to remove. We are going to give them hope.’
Chapter 6
Monsarrat had been directed to a small passage which led to the First Class yard. The women were at their work now, weaving and sewing for the greater glory of the colony, so there was no one to watch from the windows of the First Class sleeping quarters as he delicately skirted a dark patch of dried blood on the ground.
The women of the Third Class might have preferred to work at the looms of their better-behaved sisters. Certainly today it would have been preferable to the drudgery they were engaged in when Monsarrat passed through the small doorway into their yard.
The women could have gained the river within twenty or so steps, if not for the high sandstone wall separating them from it. If there was any river breeze, the wall was as effective at keeping it out as it was at keeping the convicts in. An awning stretched from the wall, propped up on two sticks, and the women huddling underneath it wore sheepskin aprons over clothes that were in varying states of repair. Some wore blue and white cotton dresses and white caps, although certain items could no longer lay claim to anything approaching white. A few wore their slop clothing, or dresses which had been very obviously stitched together from other, smaller items.
While His Majesty’s resources didn’t stretch to uniform clothing, the administration made sure everyone who saw the creatures would know them for what they were. Each woman, at her breast or on her sleeve, bore a large yellow ‘C’. The imperial coffers had also stretched far enough to provide the women with hammers, which they were wielding with varying degrees of enthusiasm, chipping away at dollops of rock that littered the yard. Their overseer sat on a stone block throwing pebbles at any crow or magpie which came into range and the women looked at him from time to time as though they would quite like to try the hammers out on him.
Monsarrat approached the man now – he was a former convict, or perhaps was still serving his sentence. He wore the same sort of neck handkerchief Monsarrat had been issued on the Morley a decade ago, its original colour now impossible to guess at.
‘Grace O’Leary,’ said Monsarrat. ‘Where am I to find her?’
Monsarrat’s entry to the yard had not attracted much attention – men from the outside did occasionally come here. Monsarrat knew Reverend Horace Bulmer walked into this yard each Sunday to see to the women’s spiritual reform, or at least to remind them how comprehensively damned they were. There were reports of several convicts converting to Catholicism to avoid his Sunday lectures. But the mention of O’Leary’s name caused a stillness to settle over them. They didn’t look at Monsarrat – the convict who survived, man or woman, was most often the one whose eyes were continually raking the ground – but some hammers paused before they struck the stone, murmured conversations were arrested mid-sentence, and Monsarrat felt the weight of their attention just as keenly as if they had been staring.
Their guard didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t think the pause relevant. He stood. ‘Who are you?’
‘You don’t need to know my name, only whom I represent – the governor and the superintendent of police. So, Grace O’Leary. Direct me to her, if you please.’
The overseer seemed unimpressed with Monsarrat’s credentials. He sat back down on the sandstone block, armed himself against avian invasion with another pebble, and pointed to the building to his left. ‘In the cells. Upstairs. Turnkey’s there, or should be. If she hasn’t killed him as well.’
The turnkey had so far escaped assassination and seemed no more impressed with Monsarrat than the overseer had been, barely willing to rouse himself from guarding the empty ground floor to admit Monsarrat to the cell above it.
Monsarrat was long used to the less savoury smells that accompanied life in a penal colony, which arose from an increase in population for whom hygiene was not a priority. And the odour of Grace O’Leary’s cell, when the turnkey admitted him, was just as rank as any male convict barracks, but somehow different. The air was heavy with grease and underneath lay a note of stale sweat, presumably female but no less malodorous for that. The bedding was no doubt the source of it – untreated wool just as it had come from the sheep’s back, oily and studded with burrs and what may have been dags, had been laid in the corner, compacted by the weight of the woman who slept on it.
She wasn’t sleeping now. She was sitting with her legs to the side in an oddly delicate posture. She looked at Monsarrat as he entered, but said nothing.
Without taking his eyes from her, he reached backwards and pounded once on the door with his fist.
‘Already?’ said the turnkey as he opened it.
‘I am to take this woman’s statement. How do you suppose I am to accomplish that without a table to write at?’
Monsarrat was unused, after so long as a convict, to speaking with authority, and was training himself to do so – he found the results were far more effective than any amount of obsequiousness as long as one was addressing the right type of person.
‘You would like me to fetch a table?’
‘Of course, man.’
‘I’m not to leave my post. Particularly not when she’s here.’
‘I assure you I am capable of defending myself against any attack from this creature. However, I am not capable of defending you against the wrath of the governor, should he hear his representative has not been afforded the ability to carry out his tasks.’
Monsarrat had no idea what the governor looked like, and Ralph Darling, yet to arrive in New South Wales, was unaware he was served by a Welsh–French hybrid of a former convict. But the turnkey knew none of this.
After the man moved away from the door, Monsarrat said, ‘Had to send the turnkey off. He would have listened, you know.’
‘Of course he would have,’ the woman said. ‘May be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him.’
Her voice was surprisingly low, sonorous, the voice of a preacher or a revolutionary.
Her face was symmetrical, angular in a way that was both alluring and somewhat fearsome. Her skin was pale enough to host a field of freckles – but they looked as though they had faded since her confinement to the penitentiary. What he could see of her hair appeared to be dark, but there wasn’t much of it – it sprang up in black and lustrous tufts here and there on her scalp, in the places where the skin hadn�
��t been abraded to the point where it would not support any growth.
‘You are Grace O’Leary.’
She didn’t bother to respond, continued to stare at him.
‘I am Hugh Monsarrat, from the governor’s office.’
‘You’re here to ask why I killed that man.’
‘Did you?’
‘No, I did not. And I owe a debt to whoever did.’
‘You’re known to have worked to destabilise him, undermine him. You have written to the governor about him?’
‘Indeed, and would have done so a hundred times more had I thought it would make any difference.’
‘So your letters were ignored?’
‘I would think so, yes. He remained in place.’
‘Until someone sought to dislodge him in a rather emphatic way. The letters, though – they were not the end of it, were they? The small matter of the riot. There are many who believe that alone should be enough to hang you.’
She absorbed this with her strange, direct gaze, unblinking at the prospect of capital punishment.
‘Then let them hang me, sir. I’ll not argue; I’ll consider it a fair price. I’m the only one with a shaved head. A far more effective means of communication than letters, I would say.’
‘Were you expecting more heads to be shaved?’
‘You haven’t heard? I suppose you wouldn’t have – not a glorious moment for His Majesty’s reign.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘Church was going to take everyone’s hair, you see. Said it was to address a general lapse in discipline, but he probably just had a wigmaker willing to pay well. And he spent a lot of time organising it – the girls were to shave each other’s heads, and he paired them up into groups of friends so each of us would be shaving the head of someone we cared for.’