Mrs. M

by Luke Slattery

A cobalt blue sea as placid as sleep reaches out to a shoreline, and above the pale cuticle of beach springs a wall of forest, lightly leaved, woven with structures from every age and place. An octagonal rotunda with a grey-green tiled roof stands in the foreground. On a promontory to one side sits a sturdy castle of Norman inspiration, as squat as a loaf of bread. A slender Ottoman minaret pierces the tree canopy as if launching itself into the pale air. A gleaming vermilion pagoda, nine tiers of uptilted eaves, never built though fondly imagined, commands a crescent-like bay. There is even a red and white striped lighthouse: a column free of ornament flanked at its base by a seaside pavilion with a shell-like dome on each side. The drawing bears a title, New World, written in the Architect’s hand.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  So the priest requires the words for the inscription on Macquarie’s tomb; would that he had loaned me a church candle two feet high for this solemn vigil. Another hour and the flickering candles on either side of my desk will need replacing. I pray that the English butler has not departed with my box of spares. I swivel in my chair, yawn and rise. It is no easy thing, this conjuring act. I am in dire need of a tonic. There is not a soul to disturb or wake, but still I go quietly down the hall. I wrap myself in my shawl and rub my hands: even on summer nights the house is chilly and when the northerly wind is up, as it is tonight, it can be bleak.

  At the kitchen stove I stir the embers, stoke the fire and fill the kettle. While I wait for it to boil I turn to the windows. There is little light in my bedchamber, sheltered as it is by the woods, but on this west-facing corner of the house the windows glow a cold steely blue. The long Hebridean winter nights, like sheets of black ice, have melted away and for a good three months in midsummer the glorious days are in full bloom. Between midnight and dawn a deep, and deepening, twilight settles over land, loch and sea. But it is not the kind of light that will illuminate a page on a bureau in a cold house enfolded by a forest in full leaf.

  I place the teapot and cup on the rickety tray — a guttering candle too — and return to my room. The tea will sharpen my wits. But is that all I need? I require something else for these reveries to serve their purpose: I need also to feel.

  In the kitchen I take down from a cupboard a bottle of whisky. The footman deceives himself into thinking it hidden. I pour, add some clear cold water, and taste. A little stronger perhaps. I add a few more drops of spirit. This is something I would not have done in my former life: a cup of tea and a glass of whisky in hot pursuit.

  I sit down again to write of Macquarie, though not of him alone. I write that I might know my heart before my heart is called upon again.

  I am a child of this turbulent age and I believe I grasp its laws — its lessons. Permit miseries to multiply and insurrection will surely follow. Hard upon the heels of bloody insurrection comes revolution; pressing close is the hell of war. Peace, when war’s infernal energies are spent, comes as a blessing. But the moment of calm is short lived, for misery deepens when there is not food enough to feed the returning soldiers, and the cycle begins again.

  Here there is clearing in the Highlands — the Hebrides, too — and despair in the smoke-stained towns. Great forces are at work, for good and ill. I am no meek observer of this restive world, surveying its drama from some lofty turret. I am it, and it is me. Driven by a thirst for adventure I married an adventurer and left with him for the end of the Earth. I returned home amid insult and indignity and in my arms I nursed a defeated — a dying — man. The bright promise and the blemished end: how it smarts! I have, at least, survived the great convulsions of the age. And while I have this past year been assailed by melancholic thoughts, creeping upon me like a lowland mist, my spirit has been strong. Often, craving the company of better times, I call upon my memories. I am like a circus performer with a brassy cry: ‘Come! Roll up!’ I put up my makeshift stage, take out my magic tricks and my castanets, and gather them in.

  I am aided by my treasury of memorabilia. Not every memento is an ageing sheet of paper inked by quill or type. Since Macquarie’s death I have had views of the harbour, and one rather brooding portrait of Bungaree, framed in town regardless of the expense. In a drawer of the bureau I keep a preserved lyrebird feather, fragile and delicately fanned; a dried rock lily, luminous yellow when plucked from its nest of green; a convict-made teaspoon stamped with the image of a kangaroo; and a brittle shred of stringy-bark stripped from that giant on the day we rode to Spencertown. I consider this private archive a shrine to the muse of memory. It is my Antipodean museum.

  Here, then, is a copy of the Sydney Gazette from 1816, bearing a most important proclamation arrayed in three ragged columns beneath the paper’s motto, Thus We Hope to Prosper. George Howe, the printer and publisher, was a large balding man with a high dome, a long jaw and a determined set of the mouth — he laughed without smiling and only ever smiled with his eyes — and a lean, powerful and determined walk. Mrs Ovens, if she knew he was expected at the residence, would declare that ‘the shark’ was calling by, and when asked to explain that marine moniker said the publisher’s blank expression had suggested it to her. But I did wonder if there was another reason — Howe was rumoured to have a number of attachments around the town. The publisher, who had worked for The Times, had been transported for shoplifting. Once in the colony he had quickly earned a ticket of leave — his skills as a journalist and printer were invaluable — and he had been a free man for several years when first we met.

  The little Gazette’s motto, printed on the masthead, hemmed an idealised woodcut of the Cove as Howe had imagined it on that March day in 1803 when he published his first edition. Ovoid in shape, it was much like a locket, and very pretty. In it a windmill, a keep and a citadel of some kind were etched against an empty sky. Picks and spades were strewn across the ground. On the right a farmer and oxen ploughed a field. On the left an imperious woman, in attitude a deity or an empress, was seated on pillowed bales of wool just as Britannia is envisioned upon her throne. Above her fluttered the flag of a ship at anchor. All in all, a remarkable vision for a colony in its infancy.

  The charm of the Gazette’s woodcut is not the sole reason I keep a copy of the brittle paper, its surface foxed with age. It is the announcement that earns this fragment a place in my affections. For all but a few it will seem a piece of history; for me it is much more. It begins: ‘His Excellency the Governor today unveils the Lighthouse at South Head, to be named Macquarie Tower.’

  The words swim a little before my eyes, as if spied through another woman’s reading glasses. I take a kerchief. I go on.

  The edifice of handsome stone blocks, already a proud feature of the landscape, rises 65 feet from a wide rectangular base designed to house a small detachment. In time four cannon will join them. The lantern with revolving light atop the tower is in readiness for today’s ceremony, to commence with the approach of night. Notice is hereby given that the light will be exhibited on each succeeding evening to aid vessels approaching the coast. It will be seen at an immense distance, and be an object handsome to behold from the Town of Sydney. The expense of raising the edifice will be defrayed by a charge, administered by Captain John Piper, on ships and vessels entering the harbour of Port Jackson.

  The colony’s poet laureate, Michael Massey Robinson, has composed an ode to the lighthouse:

  And yon tall tow’r, that with aspiring steep,

  Rears its proud summit o’er the trackless deep;

  The recent care of his paternal hand

  That long has cherished this improving land;

  Thro’ the drear perils of the starless night

  Shall shed the lustre of revolving light.

  As I read this proud proclamation, lightened by Robinson’s verse, I picture Macquarie at his study, head bent over a sheet of paper. His hand moves rapidly in a pool of lamplight, the goose quill fluttering as if filled with the life that long ago left it.

  Howe was a force of a man. The type he used to print his weekly gazette had
come out with Arthur Phillip on the First Fleet. The travails of distance meant constant shortages of paper and ink. Howe and his readers were forced to adapt when a thief made off with a pound of type thinking it was of value simply because it shone like silver when cleaned. Replacement letters were carved of wood.

  I recall the printer sitting opposite Macquarie that night, his long jaw cupped in his hands, one bent leg laid crossways over the other, quivering with coiled unspent energy. I caught the rasp of inked quill on paper. ‘There,’ said Macquarie, leaning back in his chair. ‘It is done.’

  The hour was late. A westerly wind, cold and thin, sent its probing shafts into the rambling house.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Macquarie called out in a grainy voice as Howe looked up, sensing my presence at the door. ‘The lighthouse. Announcement tomorrow. Am I well served by this?’ He held out the paper. ‘Does it round the thing out nicely — point firmly enough to the future?’ He beamed with pride.

  I return my eyes now to the desiccated sheet, for the words printed by Howe were those Macquarie showed me that evening:

  With the successful construction of Macquarie Tower our efforts will be harnessed to the completion of an ambitious building program designed to raise this settlement into a town the equal of any in the Empire.

  Work begins on a new convict hospital funded by three of the colony’s most prominent citizens in exchange for a monopoly on rum imports. A male barrack at Hyde Park will follow; and a female barrack at Parramatta; in time there will be additions to Government House and a Botanical Garden beside it in the Domain; in the town itself street widening and alignment; a parsonage for the Reverend Marsden; new fortifications on Windmill Hill; an obelisk to record the distances to the main towns; a turnpike gate in Gothic style to mark the southern end of the township. The colony of Port Jackson henceforth becomes the City of Sydney.

  It was a fine moment for the Architect, who was granted his conditional freedom with the completion of the lighthouse. It was also a landmark event for the Governor and the first of his many prideful marks on that largely unsullied landscape. His tormentors would later scorn the edifices, monuments, parks, towns and natural features Macquarie named after himself, believing it to be a gesture of supreme egotism. And yet it was not his own name that the Governor sought to glorify, preserve and aggrandise, but that of his diminished clan. A poor line now, the Macquaries of Mull — of that I am well aware.

  The Hebrides seemed a dream to me on the days when I would sit beneath a twisting fig tree and watch the natives fishing. And how powerfully strange the natives and the fig trees seem to me now.

  Nature’s eccentric Antipodean garb has been studied from the time of Banks; and doubtless there are explorers of other nations — the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch — who found it equally beguiling. But I sometimes wonder if the citizens of Jackson had not begun to dress themselves in the exotic colours of their curious abode. The skies at sunset swelled with the quarrels of those stiff-winged parakeets, the chuckling kookaburras, and the chattering bats; the folk of Sydney Town, raised on this cacophony, had become equally raucous. A native king dressed himself as an admiral in His Majesty’s navy. His queen took the whimsical name of Gooseberry: would that Shakespeare had thought of it for his Midsummer comedy. The kangaroo is a kind of biological improbability. The crimes committed at the Cove were equally fantastic: convicts had been known to band together, commandeer a vessel and set sail for Batavia, never to be seen again. Others simply melted into the bush, lived for years with the natives and stumbled back into the settlement having lost possession of their wits. Then there was the story of Polly Barker, which ran in a single column on the front page of the Gazette on the same day as the proclamation of the lighthouse. No ordinary crime for her. The story read:

  A self-confessed ‘priestess of Venus’, rumoured to have been a tambourine girl in a fairground before conversion to her religion, Miss Barker worked as a hostess at an establishment of The Rocks known as The Fallen Angel. Following her trial the Gazette can now reveal the facts.

  Miss Barker had separated half a dozen drunken young men from their lives — and their savings — after luring them into a blind corner of The Rocks beyond closing hours.

  There, in dark alleys filled with the smell of rum and the din of inebriation, she bludgeoned her victims with a stocking filled with stones (a near perfect murder weapon as it was, when emptied of detritus, returned to its former place on her oft-glimpsed thigh).

  When finally apprehended she confessed all. Last week she strode to the gallows with head held high like Zenobia of Palmyra. She boasted to a cellmate that she saw life — hers and that of her victims — as a table game. She would win for a time, and enjoy her takings to the full, in the sure knowledge that she would eventually lose all. Let her short life be a lesson: there are NO WINNERS at the game of crime.

  I wonder if Howe enjoyed this wicked juxtaposition: the fantastical tale of Polly Barker’s crime and punishment, and the solemnity of Macquarie’s proud moment.

  If not for his crime, George Howe would have had the teeming city of London as his beat and its coffee houses for his amusement, but he would not in a lifetime have written the small item I have before me if he had not been banished to the Cove. The column below the masthead was given over to Government & General Orders, followed by Arrivals & Departures at the Cove, and below this lengthy catalogue of comings and goings ran a small advertisement for a spelling book — Howe was relentless in his campaign for better literacy. But the next column along, which I re-read now with undiminished wonder, recalls a sight that I, sitting on my stone seat, had also been privileged to witness:

  This afternoon a flight of black swans from the southward, 40 in number, passed over Sydney in a direction for the ponds about Broken Bay. When over the channel that separates Dawes’ Point from the North Shore, they divided themselves into two distinct bodies, and went off at angles, the one bearing N.N.W. & the other N.N.E. In their progress they were mostly in a line with each other; and from their size and number, formed one of the most pleasing spectacles of the kind that could be possibly imagined.

  Nor did Howe restrict himself to reports of crimes, deaths by misadventure and world news — not so much a record of fresh happenings as a narrative of the events of the past decade. As the Governor’s ally — it was the Government, after all, that paid his rent and kept him in ink — Howe sprang to Macquarie’s defence in his occasional column of opinion, titled Pasquinade. This item, printed in the last year of our time in the colony, I have kept:

  Without doubt much human misery could have been avoided if Britain was ruled by one such as our Governor. Instead it is led by a vicious conservative. Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, is known far and wide as the butcher of the poor and the strangler of free speech. Hungry men and women at Tranent and Peterloo were cut down by Jenkinson’s hussars and dragoons because they dared to gather in protest. The Governor of New South Wales, in contrast, works tirelessly to raise hungry men and women up in the world.

  This provocation, like all the rest, was signed ‘Pasquino’. But the identity of its author was an open secret in the colony.

  Ah, my memories — how they run on!

  By the end of our time in Sydney, the Governor could list two hundred public works he had commissioned and built. He established towns, fostered the arts, sponsored the first expedition across the Blue Mountains. I know, for I remember the scorching hot morning when he drew up a defence of his record and bound it with a blood red ribbon. But now it is gone; lost in the chaos of our transportation home, his decline — and his death.

  I am determined that none of this shall be forgotten. And yet I am equally determined that some parts of this story shall be known to me alone.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I play a sarabande on my viola in the pure air of a Sydney spring morning. The sky is perfectly clear and hard, seeming so close that if I leap up I could touch it, returning to Earth with fingertips stained blu
e.

  I play as I wait for the Architect with his folio of designs and his birl of ideas: a new formulation, or a caprice on an old one, every hour. The stately dance is for him; a gift of mine in return for his to me. He has been as good as his word. My promised chair is now complete. Rather more bench than chair, it requires a few cushions for perfect comfort, though nothing more than that. Commanding a fine view of the harbour, my retreat is shaded by a fig tree twisting into a parasol of dense dark leaves, some of which turn persimmon yellow in dry weather. I am not particularly desirous of company at this place. I entertain only notions there. And I read. Each time I raise my eyes from a book I am assailed by the beauty of my surroundings. And to think, this is a prison!

  The Architect — and he alone — would be welcome company out there for he sees things much as I see them, or seems to. Unless he is a parrot habituated to mimicry, or a bounder skilled in the art of seduction, I read him as a man with a similar cast of mind to my own.

  The sarabande will please him. I cannot imagine he would relish a piece of music that is not an invitation to dance. For he is apt to set things in motion.

  Macquarie is in the dining room enjoying the morning sun and a view across Farm Cove as he takes tea with John Piper, whose position as naval officer permits him to collect excise. The taxation on visiting vessels, and the various goods contained therein — most especially those of a spirituous nature — funds the building and ornamentation of Sydney Town. Piper grows in importance, and he grows in wealth. I catch great gusts of his laughter over the lush chords of my viola.

  The Captain’s mighty guffaw, likely prompted by one of his bawdy jests, has barely subsided when I hear a knock. There is Hawkins’ steady voice, followed by the creaking of floorboards. It surely is the Architect; he has arrived at the appointed time. A firm rap — in this colony the servants do nothing gently! — and the door to the study is eased open. The Architect steps forward with an easy roll to his stride; he is a regular enough visitor to enter without introduction. Does he pull the hair from his collar and shake it out before stepping forward? I believe he does.