The Soldier's Curse

by Meg Keneally

  Monsarrat had an uneasy feeling her listlessness would grow and consume her, if something wasn’t done. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you would show me how you make your tea. I’ve tried, but I can never achieve the depth of flavour which I find in your cups.’

  Mrs Mulrooney gave a wan smile, perhaps recognising the question as an attempt to divert her. But the temptation to hold forth on the proper handling of domestic objects (which would get up to all kinds of mischief otherwise) proved too great. And, it must be said, she wholeheartedly agreed with Monsarrat’s assessment of her tea.

  She stood, pocketing the crumpled papers, and got down a pumpkin-shaped teapot, painted simply with tiny flowers. The more elaborate, taller pot in which she had brought Honora her tea was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘I would venture, Mr Monsarrat, that you fail to warm the teapot first.’

  ‘Ah, when I’ve had occasion to make tea I’ve poured the water directly from the kettle into the pot, over the leaves.’

  Mrs Mulrooney gave a small, derisive ‘Tch’. How, said her expression, have you survived to manhood knowing so little?

  The fire needed stoking so as to bring the kettle to the boil. This done (by Monsarrat, under Mrs Mulrooney’s direction on the precise placement of each quartered log), Mrs Mulrooney poured hot water into the teapot, leaving it for a few minutes to warm the china before pouring it out. As she went to refill the pot, Monsarrat asked, ‘Won’t you need to boil the water again?’

  Mrs Mulrooney gave him a look of pure pity. ‘If you scald the poor little leaves, they can’t give you all their flavour, can they? The water needs to be hot, yes, but not boiling. Honestly, Mr Monsarrat, did they not teach you anything at that fancy grammar school?’

  ‘Clearly not,’ said Monsarrat, ‘at least nothing of any practical value.’

  Mrs Mulrooney said the tea needed to be given a decent amount of time to steep. ‘I usually leave it for two Hail Marys and an Our Father, but as you’re not of the one true faith you wouldn’t know how to time it properly. Recite one of those Roman poems you like so much in your head twice, and that should do it.’

  Mrs Mulrooney strained the tea through a cloth, and they both sat down to drink the product of their collaboration. She pronounced the results adequate, ‘although you’d never have been able to do it without me’. Monsarrat readily agreed.

  When he was able to see the bottom of the cup through the brown liquid, he said, ‘Are you going to tell me what those crumpled papers are?’

  Mrs Mulrooney exhaled loudly. ‘I would, if I knew what they were myself. And I am glad you reminded me, because I wanted to show them to you. But you led me down the path of tea making, and I forgot them for a while, and all of the nastiness and grief which probably surrounds them.’

  She drew the papers out of the pocket, and smoothed them out on the table. Monsarrat could see that the writing was cramped and inconsistent, with odd gaps between sentences and then none at all, and lots of dripped ink like crushed flies.

  She handed them to him. ‘I’ll need those back, now. I was tidying Mrs Shelborne’s room, you see, after … well, after she stopped being her and became that object which lies in her bed. I went to make sure that her wedding ring was still in place in its drawer – which it was – when I noticed a piece of paper crammed right into the back of it. When I drew it out, it turned out to be several pieces of paper. Now, I know she is – was – particular about her things, she used the major’s study from what I understand. So these wouldn’t have been put there accidentally, or treated as they have been unless there was a reason to do so.’

  ‘Would you like me to read them to you now?’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘No, I most certainly would not. I’ve no wish to go prying into her affairs. But I feel somebody should read them, as they may have something to say which bears on our current situation. May I ask you, Mr Monsarrat, to take them to the major’s study with you, go over them while you’re doing your other work? I’d then be very grateful if you would return them to me, so I can replace them where I found them.’

  Monsarrat was about to say he would be delighted to help her, but delight didn’t really enter into it. He had a sense of foreboding about the contents of the letters, which wasn’t helped by the fact that he had immediately recognised the handwriting – being a student of such things – as belonging to Captain Diamond.

  Not knowing when the major would return, or when he might be interrupted, Monsarrat set straight to going over the mysterious correspondence.

  The letters were unsigned. Nor did the salutations mention a name. The earlier ones started with ‘my darling’ or ‘my love’ or ‘my heart’s desire’. There was no date on the letters, so it was impossible to know in which order they had been written, save for the order in which they had been placed before being crumpled together into a ball. But Monsarrat was nevertheless able to detect a progression.

  The earlier letters, in which Diamond had clearly been attempting to use his best penmanship, were un blotched and relatively neat. They were nothing more than descriptions of the lady’s beauty, the radiance of her smile, the grace of her movement, and her amiable disposition.

  After a few of these, however, Diamond must’ve decided that Honora was not sufficiently galvanised to action by his protestations of love, and made so bold as to suggest courses of action to her – that she should meet him for a walk in the woods near her family’s home, or that she should grace him with her presence at tea in one of the finer hotels in Dublin when she was next there.

  He clearly did not receive the response he had hoped for. The later letters began without endearments, and chided her for ignoring his most appropriate and earnest suit.

  The last letter was the most cramped and blotched, and the words had taken on a jagged appearance which hadn’t been apparent in the earlier missives. The letter informed Honora that the captain had learned of her engagement to his commanding officer. He would have hoped, he wrote peevishly, to have heard of such an arrangement from her own lips, given that they had what he termed ‘a particular friendship’. He intimated that she had been holding out for the highest rank she could get, given that her family’s nobility wasn’t matched by appropriate funds. The letter ended with an ominous statement: ‘Those who spurn the honest regard of an upright man may find themselves reaping a response which is equally strong as his former love, but nowhere near as benign.’

  Underneath the last letter there was a note. This was on a less fine type of paper, the kind that Monsarrat himself used for reports to the Colonial Secretary. It was also, he knew, the type of writing paper used by the settlement’s military and civil officers. This letter was brief and correct. Diamond welcomed Mrs Shelborne to the settlement, and said he hoped they could resume their former good relations from some years past. It was the only letter which was addressed to Honora by name, and signed by Diamond.

  Monsarrat had smoothed each of the letters as he read them, and assembled them into his best guess at the order in which they were written. He now folded them – as neatly as their former ill treatment would allow – into one packet, enveloping this in a blank sheet of paper and sealing it with a ribbon and some wax. He felt it should join the doctor’s report on the convict Mercer’s daughter in a safe hiding place in his hut.

  He knew he should acquaint Mrs Mulrooney with the contents of the letters, but equally knew they would distress her greatly. She had had little peace recently, and if he was right, there was less still in her immediate future. He decided to delay the evil moment when he would have to lay out the letters, and the story they told, in front of her.

  He longed to dive into the cool, calm waters of Catullus, but looking at the bookshelf, he found his eye instead snagged by a copy of the Edinburgh Review, the same volume he had taken into Mrs Mulrooney’s kitchen to read the other week. It contained the article which had prompted him to ask about the colour of the wallpaper in Honora’s bedroom.

  He had dismissed it, after f
eeling an initial thrill of incipient discovery. The doctor had at the time, after all, ruled out poisoning. And surely any poisoner, of humans or rats, would have to go to the stores for their weapon, risking discovery. Now, though, he began to see the information in a new light, and decided that it was timely to re read the article.

  In keeping with the Edinburgh Review’s anti-Tory leanings, the article started by decrying the government for not taking in hand the manufacturers of wallpapers, cloth, and other dyed materials. The article’s author wanted such regulation because a particular dye used in wallpaper, cheap and therefore commonplace from the most sumptuous drawing rooms to the meanest of huts, had been implicated in a number of deaths.

  There were reports of a family of children in Limehouse dying after developing coughs, respiratory complaints and other problems. Their deaths were said to have been caused by diphtheria; however, mysteriously, other children in the area failed to fall to the disease.

  Then there was the physician who was overcome by nausea every time he sat behind his desk in his recently papered study, only to find the symptoms dissipate when he retired to bed. The same physician noted the case of a couple he had treated, who after redecorating their home were overcome by sore throats, nausea, dizziness, headaches, and an odd, raindrop-shaped discolouration on their extremities. Their beloved parrot was similarly overcome – listless and off his food – although the physician couldn’t attest to whether the raindrop rash had appeared beneath his feathers. The couple and their avian friend retired to the seaside, where they regained full health almost immediately.

  There were also a great many cases of ladies wearing cloth coloured with the suspect dye fainting and becoming ill.

  In the author’s eyes, though, the most damning evidence came from a German chemist who noted a mouse-like smell emanating from the damp walls of houses papered in a particular colour, and, after taking scrapings, confirmed this to be the result of an acid produced by the pigment. He found that a lethal dose was present in each of the samples he took, and theorised that small particles had broken free of the paper and been inhaled.

  This looming public health scandal, the author said, was threatening to kill – was, indeed, already killing – people in their homes, in their place of greatest refuge. But because the government profited from the mining of the substance used in the pigment, and because paper manufacturers were good taxpayers and influential lobbyists, nothing had been done to ban this insidious evil.

  The pigment in question was known as Scheele’s Green. And the substance which gave it its brilliant emerald hue was copper arsenite, a derivative of arsenic.

  It was dark by the time Monsarrat walked across the Government House courtyard towards the kitchen, wondering for a second time whether he should share the information about the wallpaper with Mrs Mulrooney. The question turned out to be moot – the kitchen was dark, the fire out. Mrs Mulrooney had clearly retired to bed in Government House’s smallest room, at the tip of one of the arms of the U.

  In a way, he was glad of the reprieve. Today’s information was curdling in his mind, refusing to mix and mesh happily. He decided to retrace the route he had taken this morning after talking with the doctor, walking past the now quiet lumberyard to the water’s edge.

  The Hastings River looked relatively calm tonight, despite the muttering he could hear from the sea a few hundred feet away at the river’s mouth. As that mouth was wide, this waterway wasn’t always so peaceful. Men drowned unloading cargo in heavy weather, underestimating the fury which spilled in from the Tasman Sea.

  But on this occasion, the river did not appear to be in a drowning mood. It lapped and murmured, making its presence felt, but did not seem to be howlingly angry at Monsarrat or anyone else.

  The river was calm enough, in fact, for the Birpai to supplement the food stores which, Monsarrat felt, had to have been affected by the presence of so many ghosts, as the natives thought of the new arrivals. They were, unfortunately, not ghostly enough to forgo the fish which jumped so willingly out of the surf or swam tantalisingly close to the surface of the Hastings.

  The natives were ingenious when it came to fishing. Monsarrat knew they made use of a particular kind of tree sap to put fish in a watering hole to sleep, enabling them to scoop up as many as they wished.

  But the Hastings was obviously a little larger and more unpredictable than a watering hole, and here they took advantage of the nocturnal habits of the fish. They used hooks made from particularly vicious thorns which grew here, and paddled canoes. Their path along the river, and their work in the canoe, was illuminated by small fires they lit inside their vessels, using melaleuca or paperbarks to dispel mosquitoes.

  Tonight, a flotilla of Birpai canoes was engaged in this activity. Monsarrat couldn’t see them, or the men who paddled them, but jewels of fire shone from various points in what Monsarrat knew to be the middle of the river, lining up to make a necklace around the estuary’s throat.

  From the opposite shore, also invisible in the dark, he heard faint singing. It was low and thrumming, and seemed informed by natural rhythms rather than any design of man, much like the singing Monsarrat had heard at Government House. Perhaps they were singing Mrs Shelborne to sleep, he thought. Perhaps they were lighting her way out to the ocean with their canoes.

  A day’s hard ride away, a group of soldiers, a few trusted convicts, an absconder who was about to be freed, and a Birpai tracker lay sleeping under the forest canopy. The major, who had indeed been on his way back when he was discovered by Diamond and Slattery, wanted to make all haste to ensure his quick return to his ailing wife. But travelling at night, in this country, was an impossibility, so they had made camp as the daylight faded, with the major appointing a sentry and warning him to wake the camp well before dawn, so they could be away on the sun’s first rays.

  One of the soldiers slept fitfully. He was too far away to hear the Birpai song, but the rendition from the other day still haunted him. It wove in and out of his dreams, showing up incongruously in places half-remembered, as well as in places wholly imagined.

  He was a little boy now, drawing pictures with his forefinger in the dust. His mother was very insistent that he learn his letters, so he was practising, while turning the letters into something a bit more interesting – the ‘c’ was given pointy ears and whiskers and made into a cat, while the ‘d’ had the body of a duck appended to it, his bill raised in the air.

  It was unusually warm, but not unpleasantly so – in this barely remembered place, warmth was welcome, not searing and punishing. Indeed, it was only to be had a few weeks of the year, when the gentle rain left off and the green all around could be appreciated on its own terms, rather than through a window.

  Close by, his older sister Mary was with her friend. They tended to ignore him as they played, drawing pictures of elaborate dresses and playing with jacks made out of boiled-down pigs’ knuckles.

  Mary’s friend didn’t go to the hedgerow schoolmasters who were teaching him to read. She was from the big house up the road. And she was so important that the teachers came to her, and had to call her ‘my lady’, or some such nonsense.

  But she didn’t like the house, she said, although it seemed to the boy to be a miraculous place, one room for each person with more left over, rather than one room for eight, as was the case in his family.

  The girl was probably about two years older than him – perhaps eight or nine – but a few years younger than his twelve-year-old sister. He didn’t play with the girl himself – if she had been willing to tolerate him, he was still a little scared to. She was a creature of fascination, her hair always smooth, her clothes bright and crisp – at least until she and Mary had scrambled through a few bushes.

  He didn’t know why she came down here to play. The children from the big house rarely gave the time of day to his sort. But he had heard her tell his sister that she was the youngest, that there wasn’t as much money as people supposed, and that her governess
had left after an argument with Father. She was nominally in the care of the cook, who had enough to do making what money there was stretch to the large family without entertaining a little girl. So as long as she was back by nightfall, present and correct and clean, no one seemed to worry what she did. And she did seem to adore Mary, who told her stories and braided her hair and followed her on whatever adventure she wanted to have that day, making sure she didn’t end up in a mud puddle.

  The day his sister’s life changed, the girl had brought down some shiny marbles she had been given as a gift. She and Mary were holding them up to the light, giggling as it caught them, half-closing their eyes and imagining that they were jewels in a dragon’s treasure hoard.

  The sound of hoofbeats was common enough, but rarely were they heard hitting the ground with such velocity and force. The horses around here weren’t capable of it. The only horse the young boy knew of which could go at that speed lived in the stables up at the big house.

  And then that very horse hove into view in front of their house. The man on it owned all of the land around here, including the land that the boy’s family farmed, or tried to farm amid the plentiful rocks.

  The passage of years had given the man’s face a monstrous quality in the soldier’s memory. Red and contorted, snarling, purple lips pulled back over yellow teeth.

  The reality may have been a little less frightening. But it may not.

  The man stalked over to the girl, and grabbed her roughly by the arm. ‘You have been told, I believe, that you are not to associate with these people. They’re peasants and papists. How are we to get you a decent dowry if you talk and smell like them?’

  He hoisted the girl up onto the horse, and made to mount himself. The girl started wailing and reaching for Mary. Mary hated to see her young friend distressed. She put up her arms in case the girl’s flailing caused her to lose her seat. The snarling man mounted then, and his foot caught Mary in the stomach. She just resisted the urge to double over, as she wanted to keep a hand up to catch the girl should she fall.