by Meg Keneally
‘Poteen can take away pain in all its forms, surely. And I must confess, I have found myself in need of it. But there’s been not a drop of it recently. That other absconder, the one last month, used to be able to get some for me, but now he’s confined I wouldn’t have the first clue where to lay my hands on the stuff.’
‘But does Slattery not distil it?’ asked Monsarrat. He stopped short of saying that he’d come upon the young soldier’s still – a bargain was a bargain. ‘Perhaps you could visit him again, although he’s probably been released by now. Ask him where he keeps it. He’d not begrudge some for young Dory, of that I’m certain.’
‘Ah, now, if Slattery was indeed a purveyor of the remarkable stuff, I’d not have a second’s hesitation in procuring some. But he never touches it – he told me himself – much less brews it. A man in his village was sent out of his wits when he drank some which hadn’t been made properly, and made blind besides. He told me he swore off it then and there. He made no such pledge in regard to other liquor, but he thinks poteen is the devil’s work, devilish though he is himself at times.’
Monsarrat frowned. He didn’t necessarily see a dislike for poteen as a disincentive to brewing and profiting from it. He resolved to ask Slattery himself, when they next found themselves facing each other over Mrs Mulrooney’s scrubbed table.
He said goodbye to the priest, and as he moved between the beds towards the surgeon’s partition, he heard Hanley humming an air which he presumed to be Irish. A little jaunty for the circumstances, perhaps, but who knew what would ease the boy’s pain, in whatever state his mind currently rested.
‘Monsarrat,’ said Gonville, as Monsarrat moved around the partition to stand in front of his desk. ‘You’re here to inquire about the boy. I must confess, I feel partly responsible for his present condition – I should have intervened sooner, and more forcefully.’
‘You did what you could, doctor. I’m certainly concerned for him. But I’m here on a matter of greater concern. Mrs Mulrooney reports Mrs Shelborne is not responding even to a squeeze of the hand. Her breathing has become laboured, and she does not seem to have been in a state of anything resembling consciousness for some time. I alerted Captain Diamond to this change in the lady’s circumstance, and he begs you to come at once.’
‘I’m sure he does,’ said the doctor. Then, standing and rounding the table: ‘Very well, Monsarrat, let’s go and see what can be done.’
On the walk to Government House, Monsarrat decided to risk a small gambit. If Mrs Shelborne was truly lying under a poisonous cloud, it was worth the danger.
‘It’s kind of the captain to be concerned for the lady’s predicament,’ he said.
‘Yes, and from a man not especially known for his kindness. I understand he and Mrs Shelborne had an acquaintance in Ireland. You know Diamond has been with the major for some years: in Madras, Ireland, and now here.’
‘Yes. They do seem to have different views on how to run the settlement, though,’ said Monsarrat.
‘Very different men. Most people here have been into the hospital at least once, and you hear rumours. Of actions which someone of the major’s nature would consider … unpalatable. Things that needed to be attended to nonetheless. By someone with fewer scruples. Anyway, I’ve heard Diamond claim he has a particular friendship with the lady, although nothing untoward, I’m sure.’
‘Forbid the thought,’ said Monsarrat.
On arriving at the kitchen, they found Mrs Mulrooney cleaning skillets that she had already cleaned twice that morning. Her hands were raw from scrubbing the kitchen table, which must now have lost at least half an inch to her brush.
‘Please conduct me to the bedroom, Mrs Mulrooney,’ said the doctor. ‘Monsarrat, do you know where the captain is to be found?’
‘In the major’s study, sir. At least that’s where he was when I came to you.’
Gonville’s eyebrow quirked up slightly. ‘Please inform him I’m here.’
‘Will you come by the study to make a report, doctor?’ said Monsarrat.
‘Make a report? Diamond has no right to a report. Mrs Shelborne’s condition concerns her husband and no one else. I will recommend urgent action, if I feel it necessary. If not, I will return directly to the hospital, where there is a young man with a wound beginning to look infected. Saliva is a filthy substance.’
Monsarrat returned to the workroom. The door was hanging open, as was the door to the major’s study, with no sign of the captain. Evidently, Monsarrat thought, he did not apply the same force to closing doors as he did to opening them.
In the major’s study, he was confronted with the kind of disorder which offended his clerk’s sensibilities. The dispatches which had been laid aside, the reports to the Colonial Secretary awaiting the major’s signature, all correspondence he had organised so neatly to await the major on his return, lay in a jumbled mess on the desk. Some of the document seals were broken. Rifling through the chaos, Monsarrat noticed that one of those belonged to Dr Gonville’s report.
What had he been at? thought Monsarrat. Was he simply a man unused to dealing in papers, who had decided to leave the clerk to clean up the mess? Or had he been looking for something?
Monsarrat started the task of setting the desk to rights. Resealing those seals that had been broken, checking the documents to make sure their contents were not sensitive, placing them back where he believed they should live. The work soothed him. He always enjoyed creating order where there had been none. It gave him an illusion of control, which he knew his reality did not match.
When she was well, Honora Shelborne had been in and out of the major’s study. He allowed her to keep some of her own documents in there, and to use his desk when he had no need of it. As he sorted through the papers, Monsarrat noticed that while most of them were jumbled in no particular order, papers concerning Honora were set slightly to one side. There were letters, notes on speeches she might now never give, recipes, jotted observations on how life in the settlement could be improved for its inhabitants. There were even notes on the success of the experiment with the hydrotherapy tent, which she proclaimed had returned colour to the cheeks of the ageing housekeeper.
Monsarrat had never dealt with Mrs Shelborne’s papers, as she preferred to completely manage her own affairs. So he had no way of knowing whether anything was missing. He did notice that some of the letters bore a family crest, a rampant stag on a background of crimson and white. These declared themselves to be from Castle Henry, Wicklow, Ireland. Monsarrat presumed these were from her family. He knew he could have confirmed his suspicion by reading them, with very little risk of a consequence. Even had the captain re-entered at that moment, he could simply busy himself with reorganising the place. But despite the fact Mrs Shelborne would never know or care, he felt he had spied on her quite enough as it was.
He was on the verge of completing the task of restoring the study to its former state of glorious organisation when the main door opened. It wasn’t flung open by Slattery’s shoulder, or by Diamond’s fist, but nor was it tentatively nudged, in the manner of Edward Donald.
Walking into the outer room, Monsarrat found Dr Gonville. The surgeon stood as still as always, but a red tinge climbing his neck betrayed a state of agitation. ‘Not here then, eh? Do you know where he is?’
‘I’m sorry, doctor, I’m not sure where he’s gone, but I imagine you may find him near the barracks. Is there anything I can do to assist?’
‘As a matter of fact, Monsarrat, there is. I very much fear Mrs Shelborne has little time left. I intend to entreat the captain to lead a party in search of the major, so he may have a chance of returning before his wife departs. I would be very grateful if you would come to the hospital, as soon as your duties allow, to assist me in transcribing a letter to the major laying out the case for his return, and urging him to make haste.’
‘Of course, doctor. And will you seek out the captain now?’
‘I must get back to the hospital, M
onsarrat, to see to the man the captain put there, amongst others. May I ask you to search him out, and have him come to me at his earliest convenience? If a party sets out at first light tomorrow, there may yet be time.’
After the doctor left, Monsarrat fought down an impulse to visit the kitchen. Given Mrs Mulrooney’s state recently, he could only imagine the distress she must be in. But that distress would be compounded if any time was lost on her account.
Captain Diamond had, it transpired, merely laid aside temporarily his work of rifling through the documents on the major’s desk, intending to return after the day’s main meal. Monsarrat found him in the mess. He would gladly have endured a week without Mrs Mulrooney’s tea to avoid disturbing the captain at his dinner – bream caught by the coxswain, who had clearly taken his own advice on the tides.
Monsarrat attracted several sideways glances from the officers sustaining themselves there, and even a nod from Lieutenant Thomas Carleton, who was a soldier in the vein of Major Shelborne – efficient, ruthless when necessary, but not inhumane.
The captain didn’t look up as he approached, but as he drew in front of Diamond, the officer laid down his knife and fork.
‘Monsarrat,’ he said, taking a swig from his cup.
‘Captain, I beg your pardon for disturbing you. I have been sent on a most urgent errand.’
‘State it then, and leave as soon as you can.’
‘Captain, I fear it is a matter of delicacy. You may wish to hear my report in a more private setting.’
Diamond put down his drinking cup with more force than necessary, and walked towards the door of the mess, Monsarrat following.
‘Captain, the doctor has examined Mrs Shelborne, and fears her time may be drawing to a close. He begs you to mount an expedition to find the major, so he might return before his wife … departs.’
Again Monsarrat forced himself to look into the captain’s face, trying to keep his gaze as neutral as possible lest Diamond read some imaginary insult into it. And again Diamond failed to reward him with much obvious outward sign of distress. Monsarrat did, however, fancy he noticed the captain’s lips compressing slightly, and perhaps an increasing pallor.
The two stood for what seemed like some time. Monsarrat feared to break his gaze. The captain seemed to be searching his features for any sign of delusion or deceit.
Finally, he said, ‘Go to Dr Gonville and tell him I’ll do as he suggests. Then return to the study. Please make sure it is in a state of organisation when I meet you there,’ he added, as though Monsarrat had been responsible for strewing papers about, perhaps in a fit of childish pique.
Diamond went back into the mess, took young Carleton’s drinking cup away from him when it was halfway to his lips, beckoned, and the pair stalked off through a grey drizzle which had just started up.
Chapter 14
Monsarrat hurried through the delicate curtains of rain towards the hospital. The water left glittering beads on the wool of his coat, before slowly being consumed by the fibres. He thought of the sweat on Dory’s brow, and wondered if the boy’s body was still in a condition to produce it.
Hanley was gone, but otherwise there was little change at Dory’s small bed. The man remained on his stomach, eyes half-open, unconscious, sweating and moaning. Dory’s wounds seemed more pustular, the rot more pronounced.
Monsarrat reported Diamond’s response to the surgeon, and begged leave to return to the major’s office to fetch paper and ink to take dictation. He concealed the writing supplies in a canvas sack which he had made for this very purpose – occasionally he was required to ply his trade in various parts of the settlement, and the rain of winter (not to mention the torrents of summer) was frequent enough to threaten the parchment, considered far more valuable and rare than the convicts.
On his way back to the hospital, he passed a work gang trudging in the other direction. Their shoes, woven straw or cobbled together from canvas, would be no protection against the puddles which had quickly formed in the ruts on the road. After a few days, he knew from experience, the skin on the feet of these men would soften and crack, admitting any foul substance they came into contact with.
By the end of Monsarrat’s own time in a work gang, a great many of his fellow convicts were hobbling. Some had lost toes, and one man his entire foot, to gangrene. Monsarrat had heard the screams as the offending extremities were removed. He understood the men would die if the infected portions remained part of them, but he thought such an extreme of pain must change a man, and wondered if the bestial screaming announced the arrival of a being less human than the one who had limped into the surgeon’s tent. But alive, at least, as the decay had affected an area which could be easily removed, unlike Dory’s back.
When he had first arrived in the colony, Monsarrat had held hopes of a clerkship, particularly given his experience on the Morley. But either his paperwork hadn’t been read properly or there was no need of a clerk in the vicinity of the convict barracks at Hyde Park, where Monsarrat slept in a long room, his own small hammock dangling from wooden beams along with scores of others. So he went to a work gang, dressed in canvas pants and a shirt emblazoned with arrows which declared him to be untrustworthy, felonious, and fit only for manual work. Wearing his arrows, he spent a miserable three months on an unchained gang on the road between Sydney and Parramatta. It was the hardest his body had ever been worked.
Monsarrat found himself in company with another educated convict, a man named Cathcart who had forged a contract for the delivery of sugar in order to get a bank loan. The overseer on their road gang, a terrible bristle-headed and jowled monster and former smuggler named Jevins, had loved having two gents on his gang. He singled out Cathcart with a special barbarity, hitting him regularly throughout the day, making him stand forward at assembly in the mornings, and delaying him on his march, often of two miles or more, back to the feeding station at the dinner hour, so that the poor fellow would just arrive when it was time for him to turn around and go back to work digging drainage and pounding stone.
Cathcart absorbed most of Jevins’s malice, a fact for which Monsarrat was guiltily grateful. But sometimes Jevins would remember that he had not one but two jumped-up convicts to deal with, two men who thought themselves better than him.
One morning, the beast cracked Monsarrat over the ear for daring to wipe his nose at assembly. ‘Who said you could wipe your fucking nose?’ he said, drawing back to strike again but checking himself at the last moment, perhaps not wanting to disable Monsarrat for the day’s digging.
As Monsarrat and Cathcart shared a similar background, both in education and forgery, Monsarrat attempted to engage the man; he had a kernel of hope that perhaps Cathcart, too, was a lover of Catullus, and that they might lose themselves in discussion – quietly of course, as there was no telling what Jevins would do if he overheard them discussing poetry. But there was something not quite right about Cathcart. Monsarrat wondered if he was being a little harsh in this judgement, yet Cathcart’s eyes always slid sideways in an unsettling way, looking for a chance to filch some food from under the nose of another convict, or the opportunity to call someone else out on an infraction, thus drawing Jevins’s gaze off himself, at least for a short time.
In the end, Cathcart made a diabolical bargain with Jevins – he would run away from the gang, so that he could be quickly retrieved by Jevins himself, who would receive a reward of two pounds. Cathcart would be subjected to twenty lashes, but then fed and left without molestation. It was a questionable contract, lining up behind the equally questionable contracts which had got Cathcart to this point.
At first Monsarrat had thought less of Cathcart for making the bargain. But after several weeks, with Jevins beginning to share his attention more evenly between the two felons, he considered asking for a similar deal.
He was saved from this necessity by the death of one of the clerks at the courthouse in Parramatta. Again the records were scanned for a clerk and again Monsarrat
’s name came up. It was of course an unpaid position, but Monsarrat knew he would likely be dead had he been left on the road gang.
The Port Macquarie road gangs, chained and unchained, were certainly not pleasant. But neither were they as brutal as the one Monsarrat had had the misfortune of serving on – Major Shelborne saw to that. With his usual strategy of cloaking humanity (which he possibly feared some would see as weakness) in a drive for maximum efficiency, the major ensured the gangs were fed and left relatively unmolested. But not even the major’s beneficence extended to their feet, and Monsarrat still occasionally heard the shrieks from the hospital as a putrefying growth which used to be a toe was removed.
If the rain lasted, the surgeon might have more such procedures to perform, Monsarrat thought. But for now, Dory remained the hospital’s main patient, wedged between life and death, in a condition that was possibly worse than either.
‘My dear major,’ dictated the doctor, when Monsarrat had settled opposite him and laid out his writing equipment, ‘I write to advise you that your wife is suffering from a grave illness. We had hoped to restore her to full health before your return from the important expedition you are currently engaged on. But in recent days, her condition has deteriorated to the point where I fear no human agency can assist her.
‘Enclosed is a report I compiled on her condition two days ago, set aside for your perusal on your return – please put that report in the packet, Monsarrat – so you may see how her condition has progressed.
‘Since this report was written, her periods of consciousness have dwindled to nonexistence. She does not respond to stimuli in the way she did as recently as yesterday, and lack of nourishment has sapped her strength.
‘She will continue to receive the best treatment to be found anywhere in the colony, in the hopes she may yet rally. However, I beseech you to return with all haste. Your humble servant, et cetera, et cetera.