The Soldier's Curse

by Meg Keneally

‘Now, Monsarrat, see that this goes directly to the captain as soon as it is transcribed. I wish the major to have the news from me, and none other.’

  Monsarrat returned to the workroom to put all in order for when Diamond came by. The captain was busy arranging matters so that a party could leave in search of the major at first light the following morning. He himself would lead the party, and Lieutenant Carleton would manage the settlement in what was envisaged to be a short absence – it was hoped that the major had reached his objective, and was already returning.

  Monsarrat wondered how Diamond could possibly hope to locate the major. The pathways such as the natives used were no pathways at all to the eyes of men on horseback who didn’t know the country. The natives seemed to navigate using a system of songs and stories, which somehow infallibly got them to their destination. The songs and stories of the paler-faced inhabitants belonged in a world which might as well no longer exist. They were certainly of no use in negotiating the uncertain terrain in the unexplored north. Nor would they help in choosing a path which would not see a man eventually having to squeeze a large horse through close-standing eucalypts. The vegetation here refused to behave like its English counterparts, not stopping a polite distance before precipices but crowding in a rabble all the way up to the edges of cliffs, so man and horse could ride out of a stand of trees and into oblivion.

  So Spring, the Scots commissary, had been invaluable to the captain. Perhaps relishing the idea of having the man out of the way for a time, he had interceded with the Birpai to procure the services of a tracker, who had visited the area for which the major was heading and knew where the fresh water, as well as the dangers, lay. The tracker, as Spring later told Monsarrat, was Bangar, brother to Spring’s love and Monsarrat’s occasional walking companion. Monsarrat knew Bangar was well capable of looking after himself, but feared for him under Diamond’s intolerant rule.

  Had it not been for Major Shelborne himself, this bargain might not have been possible. A scant four or five years ago, relations between the Birpai and the strange ghosts who had usurped their territory were seemingly impossibly strained. The cedar-cutters, who were often the harbingers of the coming invasion, were rough and hardened men, and did not have the incentive or ability to deal diplomatically with the natives. Having no other experience of the foreigners, some natives must’ve concluded that all of the ghost people were brutish, violent and not to be trusted, and the resemblance of some of them to dead ancestors was a cruel trick. This may have been the motivation for some of the attacks on cedar parties, as well as a raid on a vegetable garden which had resulted in the death of a convict.

  Some raged over the insult, and insisted it be avenged. But Major Shelborne, who had been appointed commandant shortly afterwards, quickly recognised that the landscape did not care who was in the right. It was chiefly concerned with keeping all humanity in the same place, guarded by mountains and thwarted by sea. Not everyone in the settlement was a convict, but everyone was equally imprisoned in practical terms. So, to Major Shelborne’s mind, the need to develop a working relationship with the Birpai was acute.

  The young man was arrested. The major later told Monsarrat that when he first saw the fellow, he had a moment’s regret that natives could not be enlisted in the British Army, so well formed was he. Kiernan was still an ornament to the settlement at that stage, but his natural talent as a linguist, which had never been called upon before, was already enabling him to converse in passable Birpai. He was used as an intermediary, and it was agreed the man would be returned to his tribe, and punished under native law, not British.

  The rapprochement continued, over the next few years, with each tribe punishing their own for infringements on the other. Monsarrat remembered Diamond becoming indignant when the major punished a soldier for attempting – and failing – to take a Birpai woman. Surely, Diamond and others said, a sin against the British was a far greater one than infractions against the natives. But this act, and others like it, had helped to build a relationship from which Diamond was even now benefiting.

  The captain stomped in and out of the workroom and study throughout the day. After the second time, Monsarrat no longer bothered to close the door behind him as he left; clearly closing the door himself was the furthest thing from Diamond’s mind.

  He lolloped in, shouted some commands to go to the store and requisition some salt beef, write a report on the second expedition to the Colonial Secretary, and then go to the barracks to check the water skins were being filled, because one couldn’t trust some of the more junior soldiers.

  The soldier and the clerk worked well into the night, and the early hours of the following morning. As Diamond wished to be off at first light, Monsarrat saw no point in trying to ignore the cold and capture sleep in his little hut. Instead, the rain having blessedly stopped, he walked down to the ocean to confront the cold head-on. He stood looking at the white crests as they loomed out of the darkness and destroyed themselves on the sand below. To the south, a few headlands away, he could see the light of a fire. It was in an area where natives were known to dwell. Had they, too, some presentiment of what was to happen, without the need for modern medical arts to tell them so?

  After a time he felt the cold tightening its grip on his fingers and immobilising them. That would never do – he would need them in working order, particularly over the next few days.

  A barely perceptible lightening of the sky betrayed the sun, as it attempted to hide behind the clouds. Normally he did not appear at the door of the kitchen before six, but this being winter it must be nearly that hour now. In any case, he doubted Mrs Mulrooney had got any sleep either.

  He was right, and the kitchen together with its uncooperative utensils were being driven by Mrs Mulrooney far more ruthlessly than Jevins had ever driven him in the work gang. She always seemed to believe a frenzy of activity was the best way to ward off disaster. As she flitted around filling this, pouring that, chastising anything that looked like it was even thinking about not working, Slattery sat at the table, a full cup of tea sending steam towards the ceiling.

  ‘Have some more tea,’ Mrs Mulrooney was saying. ‘You’ll need some warmth inside you for the journey. The rain will be back, I guarantee it.’

  So accustomed a presence was Monsarrat in the kitchen that neither of them so much as glanced at him as he pulled back the chair opposite Slattery, and sat down tentatively, unsure whether he was facing the old laughing rogue, or something newer and darker. Monsarrat had heard many people say taking a flogging changed a man. And he feared it might have changed this one in the giving.

  ‘A journey, private?’ he said.

  Slattery raised a brow and gave Monsarrat a half-smile, in a way which made it look as if the corner of his eye was dragging up the corner of his mouth. ‘Yes, Monsarrat, I thought I’d take in a little of the seaside to the north – does a man good, you know. And His Majesty is paying for the excursion, God bless and save him.’

  ‘You’re going with Diamond, then.’

  ‘For my sins, which are legion, yes. He said he’d rather have me under his watch. He thinks Carleton is a bit too soft and might let me get away with things. I’ve always found Carleton a decent man myself, but I suppose there is no secret between the three of us as to what I think of Diamond’s decency.’

  Monsarrat didn’t know how to frame his next observation. The two men had traded insults only – insults which were intended to mask affection while at the same time communicating it, but insults nonetheless. It was their conversational currency, and they had never used any other. ‘Slattery … You know you did your best. It was a brave thing to go up against him like that.’

  The smile disappeared, and the arcing anger threatened to return. ‘There’s nothing to be done, Monsarrat,’ Slattery said flatly. ‘The captain is the authority here. And there’s none to overrule him in the godless waste between here and Sydney. So he might as well be the ruler of the world.’

  He stood up, s
lowly, as though his frame had suddenly become heavier. He went to stand beside Mrs Mulrooney, his back to Monsarrat, and began helping her in assembling the tea things.

  ‘You’re kind to do that, Fergal, but there’s no need. You’ve a big journey ahead, please, sit down.’

  ‘Not a bit of it, Mother Mulrooney, I might as well, while I can.’

  Mrs Mulrooney smiled. She turned to Monsarrat. ‘He’s a good boy for all his many faults, isn’t he, Mr Monsarrat? He saw me struggling with the tea tray a few weeks ago, and ever since then he’s put it together for me and carried it across to the main house whenever he’s been here when it’s time to take it. It’s a weight off my mind as well as my arms – I often fear I’ll drop the thing.’

  With the tea things laid out to his satisfaction, Slattery turned, picked up the tray. He wormed the tip of his boot between the house-side door and the frame, opening it with his leg and standing against it to let Mrs Mulrooney through. They both trudged across the avenue to the house, Slattery handing the tray to Mrs Mulrooney and opening the door for her, and bowing with a flourish.

  ‘A good boy indeed,’ said Monsarrat when the soldier returned. ‘Private, you mind you stay good on the road. If Diamond is willing to act like a brute in front of the whole settlement, there’s no knowing what he’ll do when the only witnesses are a native tracker and some trees. And keep an eye on Bangar, won’t you? He’s a fine lad – I’d as soon not see him abused by Diamond.’

  ‘Ah, never you mind, Mr Monsarrat. I like Bangar – I’ll make sure no harm comes to him. Apart from that I have no intention of causing the slightest trouble. Not on this trip.’

  ‘Not on this trip? And on your return?’

  Slattery’s half-smile reasserted itself. ‘Ah well, then I will revert to my troublesome self, of course.’ He muttered something in the impenetrable Irish tongue.

  ‘What was that?’

  Slattery said it again. God alone knew how the words were spelled, Irish spelling being one of the universe’s great imponderables as far as Monsarrat was concerned. But it sounded like chockie-o-lah.

  ‘Just a little thing I say to bring myself luck from time to time, Mr Monsarrat. Now, you stay good yourself too. And look in on Dory for me now and again, won’t you?’

  And the soldier stepped out into the dawn.

  Chapter 15

  It was an hour yet before Monsarrat was due to be in his workroom. He decided to spend that hour in the kitchen, as in the normal run of things he’d be here at this time anyway. He got the whetstone and took to sharpening some of the blunter-looking knives while waiting for Mrs Mulrooney to return.

  When he heard footsteps, he sprang up to open the door. He was a little shamed, to be honest, by the assistance which Slattery had so willingly given the older woman. He chided himself for not doing likewise more frequently. Leaning against the door to hold it open for Mrs Mulrooney, he immediately took the tray from her hands and set it on the table. It seemed unnaturally heavy for a tray bearing an empty teapot.

  Mrs Mulrooney looked approvingly at the array of sharp knives before him. ‘Thank you, Mr Monsarrat,’ she said. ‘If I were a superstitious woman, I’d think the fairies came in at night and blunted them all. They can’t be trusted to retain their sharpness, so you’ve given me easier work.’

  ‘You’re most welcome. And I’m happy to see you in a more cheerful frame of mind than yesterday. With Slattery going, I must confess I feared you’d sink further into despondency, but the reverse seems to be the case.’

  ‘I’ll miss the young devil. But I hope his journey won’t be a long one. They may yet come upon the major not far from here, if he has completed his mission and is indeed returning. Those Birpai trackers, now, they are a marvel. But my spirits owe more to Mrs Shelborne this morning.’

  Monsarrat, who’d been arranging the knives as she spoke, looked up. ‘You don’t mean to say there’s been an improvement?’

  Mrs Mulrooney surprised Monsarrat with a girlish laugh, she who had a great impatience with girlishness. Frivolity didn’t get the tea made. ‘Yes, there has, Mr Monsarrat. Christ and his saints be praised. Particularly his saints, to whom I’ve been praying these past few weeks.’

  Monsarrat had only a vague acquaintance with the basic tenets of his own Protestant faith, which he had left behind in childhood, so the mechanisms of the Catholic religion went over his head. He tended to view Catholic saints like ministers of the Crown – each responsible for their own area, and vying for the attention of the prime minister so they could progress their portfolios.

  ‘And who have you been dealing with?’ he asked.

  ‘Well now,’ said Mrs Mulrooney, ‘I went to Father Hanley, you see, and asked him who would be most likely to help Mrs Shelborne. Her ailment has so many manifestations; I thought they might be too many for one saint to handle. So we agreed, he and I, that we’d asked St Pio to direct the efforts of the other saints, him being a general healing saint.’

  ‘Ah. And which troops have you asked St Pio to marshal?’

  ‘Well, there’s quite a list. I asked Father Hanley to repeat it to me several times so I could make sure to remember them all. We have St Bernardino of Siena for the lungs, St Pancrus, St Teresa of Avila and St Crescentius for her headache, St Elmo for her digestive disturbances, St Quinton for her cough, St Vitus for those awful wrackings, and St Deodatus of Nevers for plague. I know Gonville’s ruled it out, Mr Monsarrat, but I’m praying to so many as it is, it’s hardly a trouble to add one more. Even if it’s not plague, it might sway him, in case he’s been considering blighting us for our lawlessness anyway. Yesterday I put them all aside and started praying to St Joseph for her peaceful death. But I may have done so too soon, because it seems they are in the midst of answering my prayers. Ah, would you ever put that pot back on the counter for me, before we forget?’

  Monsarrat did as he was asked. The pot he took from the tray was most definitely still full. ‘Well, it must’ve been the saints, as clearly it wasn’t your tea, as reviving as it is – it seems she didn’t drink any.’

  ‘No indeed, Mr Monsarrat, we’ve no time for thoughts of tea. I went in there as I do every morning. I put the tray on at the table near the window – she keeps a small table and chair near the window, so she can read in the light. Or she could, when she was still in a position to. So I put the tray on that, as I do every morning, and went over to smooth out her covers. I haven’t needed to do that much lately. When she first got sick she would be thrashing around all night and I would come in to find the covers on the floor, or tied in knots by her legs. Now, unless she’s having convulsions, they stay perfectly still. But it’s a habit. So I went over and did it. And do you know what happened, Mr Monsarrat?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t.’

  ‘She opened her eyes – praise be to the Blessed Virgin, she actually opened her eyes. It was the first time I’d seen them in some days. Even a week ago, her eyes were usually only half open, and there was no spark behind them – they could have belonged to anyone. But this morning, she opened them properly, and I saw her in them. You have no idea, Mr Monsarrat, how many times over the past few days I have had the awful feeling that I was tending to a breathing corpse. There seemed to be nothing left of the dear woman, and I wasn’t sure what was keeping her body going. I thought maybe she was like a carriage wheel which had been lifted off the ground – they keep turning, you know, for a little while, even after the carriage is no longer moving.

  ‘But when she opened her eyes – not half an hour ago! – I saw immediately that it was her. And I just stood there like an eejit, gasping and gaping, unable to believe it myself.

  ‘And then she smiled – the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to tempt them, but none of those saints I’ve been praying to could match it. Her poor lips are very dry; it’s been two days since I was even able to get much moisture between them. So when she smiled, gaps opened within them, and I saw that they would soon start to bleed.
Still, it was her, her smile, and therefore lovely.

  ‘Thank the Lord I managed to remember to bring water with me – I haven’t been bringing much on those trays recently, to be honest. There’s been very little point. But I like to bring something every morning, as you never know what will be needed. While she draws breath I’ll not stop doing it.’ She sounded annoyed now, as though Monsarrat had suggested she should desist from bringing sustenance to the invalid’s room.

  Monsarrat himself was listening to her recount in astonishment. Everything he’d heard had led him to believe that Mrs Shelborne would die, and soon. The doctor had believed so, and more importantly Mrs Mulrooney had agreed with him. But this sudden reversal had him considering the possibility that Mrs Mulrooney’s saints had indeed had a hand in things. If he were a saint, he would most certainly respond to her entreaties with the greatest speed.

  ‘So I brought the water over to her and dribbled little teaspoons of the stuff in between the lips, just to moisten them to start with. She smiled again, and this time one of the cracks started oozing blood, which I mopped up. I’ve been washing her face every day, and now I went over it with a cloth soaked in cool water. It seemed to soothe her. Then she spoke – actually spoke, and here was I thinking she’d uttered her last words. The voice sounded like dried leaves in the wind, I had trouble at first hearing what she was saying. Then when I leaned in I realised she was thanking me.

  ‘She’s still so weak, though, Mr Monsarrat. Even that small effort exhausted her. I made her as comfortable as I could, smoothed down the coverlet, and held her hand. I gave it a squeeze, and I got the strongest squeeze in return than I’d felt for many days. Then she drifted off again, and sleep will be her doctor for the next little while.’

  ‘I have no doubt this sudden improvement is due in large part to your determined nursing,’ Monsarrat said. He realised that he was grinning, and made no attempt to stop himself, despite the fact that it went against the usual gravitas he tried to project. ‘I must confess, it has been so long since I received good news that I had stopped looking for it in any form.’