by David Field
‘Do you want the whole story, or simply Mary Murphy’s likely version of it?’
‘We’re obviously here for a while,’ Daniel replied, ‘and since we’re not likely to be talking again in the natural course of events, perhaps I’ll choose the whole story.’
‘Well, it was like this,’ Martha continued in a clear, musical voice that was just as entrancing as her Irish lilt, Daniel couldn’t help thinking as he listened, spellbound, to a voice he could happily listen to forever, ‘I was born in Trowbridge — that’s in Wiltshire — where my father owned a successful business making textile machinery. “Mallett and Price”, it was called and I grew up with all the luxuries you’d expect of a spoiled only child in a successful middle-class family. Then Matthew Price took up with a wicked woman he’d met in Birmingham and made off with all the money. The last we heard, he was somewhere in Holland with all his ill-gotten gains and Father never recovered from the shock of the betrayal and the reversal of business fortunes. He hanged himself one evening and left me to find the body. Mother remarried and my stepfather only seemed interested in feeling me up, so I ran away.’
‘And the theatre?’ Daniel prompted her.
‘That was the easy bit, in one sense,’ Martha replied, her eyes glazed into the middle distance as she sat propped up against the wall of the small cave they were sheltering in. ‘I’d always had a talent for different voices and I used to keep my school friends in stitches imitating our teachers — even the male ones. So I decided to try my hand at acting in a proper theatre, but soon learned that the only way to succeed as an actress is to act the whore with theatre managers. That part of Mary Murphy was true at least, should you be at all interested — I’m still a virgin.’
‘And the thieving?’ Daniel demanded.
Martha looked down at him sadly. ‘Must you be so judgmental all the time? I was a girl of just twenty, all alone in London, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Even the lowest flophouses cost money and I needed to eat. I could have sold my body for quite a sum, to judge by some of the offers I’d already received from so-called ‘gentlemen’, but I wasn’t prepared to sink so low. Somehow it was only too easy to use my talent for being someone else in order to sneak-thieve things I could sell. My best regular performance was probably the sweet old lady begging in the gutter — when fine gentlemen stopped to give me a conscience-soothing penny, I could palm their purses or their gold watches with the best of them.’
‘Presumably it wasn’t an old lady who deprived a bishop of his drawers?’ Daniel asked, now completely fascinated by the tale she had to tell, whether it was more lies or not.
Martha giggled. ‘My finest achievement, they tell me, although it got me sent out here. There’s obviously no resale value in a clergyman’s underpants, but I did it for a wager with another pickpocket I shared a bed with in a flophouse in Shoreditch. She liked to think of herself as the best “dip” in the trade and she dared me to come back to the house with a pair of under-drawers bearing the name of a clergyman sewn into its label. Round the corner from where we stayed was a convent and the nuns were obviously taking in washing. I followed several of them until I found them calling regularly at a big house in Clerkenwell, where an old man dressed like a clergyman often came to the door. So, dressed as a nun, I called at the house one day and the housekeeper came out. I told her that we thought there’d been a mix-up with laundry from another clergyman and could she possibly search in the washing basket that had come from the convent the previous day? When she brought the basket to the door, I was fortunate enough to find the drawers in them, grabbed them and ran off. The housekeeper called in the constables and since the sight of a nun in full flight carrying the drawers of a bishop is not an everyday occurrence in the streets of North London, I was soon spotted and you know the rest.’
Despite himself, Daniel burst out laughing. He wiped a tear from his eye and noticed that Martha was doing the same. Then he realised that hers were not caused by laughter and he stopped laughing and reached out a consoling hand. Martha grabbed it with both hands and kissed it fervently several times before she composed herself and continued.
‘Funny though that exploit was, it was what led me out here. I honest to God thought I was going to be hanged, but I batted my eyelids at the old misery who was the judge at my trial and he decided that my life was to be spared. There are days when I wish he hadn’t.’
‘It’s not much fun out here, I agree,’ Daniel said. ‘In fact, earlier today I made my mind up to go back on the next vessel sailing for England on which they have a passage for a marine lieutenant.’
A look of fear crossed Martha’s face. ‘No!’ she cried.
Daniel looked up and across to where she was sitting. ‘Why should you care?’ he asked, curiosity blending with hope.
Martha seemed about to blurt out something else, but she bit her lip and thought for a moment before replying. ‘You’re a good man,’ she said. ‘There aren’t so many around like you and this colony is going to need all the good men it can get, if it is to become something other than a prison camp by the sea.’
‘I do the job for which I was commissioned,’ Daniel replied with resignation. ‘I’m surely not the only one who does that.’
‘But you do it without exploiting others,’ Martha pointed out. ‘Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I know I have good looks, but they’ve been nothing but a handicap in my dealings with men. Of course I’ve used them for my own ends...’
‘Like pretending to be Mary Murphy and seducing an officer of His Majesty’s marines into giving you preference,’ he interrupted her. ‘When we first met, you were one of over a hundred transported criminals in the stinking hold of a rat-infested convict ship. Now you’re a nursemaid to a family that will grow in prestige and preferment, given George Johnston’s obvious ambition, and in due course you’ll no doubt be married to money and power. Not bad for a Shoreditch pickpocket. Tick me off as another of your dupes,’ he added bitterly.
‘If you had let me finish,’ she persevered, ‘I was going to tell you just how true a gentleman you are. May I finish what I need to say, before you go off again?’
‘Continue,’ Daniel said, lowering himself back down off his elbow to continue studying the rock ceiling.
‘I admit that to begin with I used you,’ Martha continued. ‘I thought you just saw me as a pretty Irish girl with a good body and a wayward girlish charm. That continued until the evening you came back and told me that you could arrange for me to go ashore and live in peace from those who were persecuting me. When I climbed under that canvas with you, I was expecting to have to finally pay the price with my long-preserved virginity. But you just held me in your arms as if I was someone special and you showed me genuine affection rather than lust. After you fell asleep, I cried in your arms until I fell asleep myself. I’d finally found someone who saw more in me. So don’t try and pretend that you’re not something special, because you are.’
Daniel could stand it no longer. He was being dragged down a lovely dark tunnel that could only have one possible ending and he had to escape while he still had command of his very soul. ‘You really should have become an actress,’ he said as he rose to his feet and looked across the bay. ‘The storm’s over now — you go back to your world and leave me in mine.’ He strode determinedly back towards his tent.
4
A week or so later, Captain Shea died from the illness that had laid him low ever since the fleet had landed and which everyone was praying had not been cholera. His burial was swift, with all the officers of his regiment ordered to the graveside while the colony’s chaplain, the Reverend Richard Johnson, read the fastest burial service that was humanly possible, as if apprehensive that even the ground into which the body had been consigned in a naval canvas shroud might itself be infected.
‘It’s an ill wind,’ George Johnston said as he pinned the new captain’s regalia onto his red frock coat, standing on the veranda outside the governor�
�s house on which the officers of the Marine Corps had been paraded in order to learn of the resulting promotions. Major Ross had not unduly taxed his brain in the choice of replacements, simply moving everyone up in the order of their seniority. George was now Captain Johnston and Daniel was a First Lieutenant, thanks to George’s patronage.
By the time that the governor’s fine sandstone mansion was ready for his occupation, the colony was in serious difficulties. Every officer had been ordered to open up a small garden adjacent to their hut and almost all of them had reported the same crop failure. Those who had sown seeds brought from the Cape had the satisfaction of watching green shoots spring up from the ground, only to wither, turn yellow and die under the remorseless sun. Those who had planted English seed didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing early shoots and all attempts at plant cultivation were abandoned in the beach area — including in the governor’s own private garden — when it was deduced that the seed they had brought with them would not grow in sand without some heavy manure, of which there was virtually none.
One result of this agricultural experiment had been to force Daniel into a hut, which he shared with another lieutenant and two privates. He had deliberately chosen one on the ‘Rocks’ side of the cove, in order to be as far away as possible from where Martha was living and he had managed to exchange duties so that he no longer had to walk past their hut twice daily. He was now in command of the prison brig hut and was also on permanent standby for any action that might be required in response to attacks from the natives.
The natives, for their part, had not come any closer to the settlement than the foliage surrounding it, which was now about a mile back from the shore as the simple colony slowly expanded. The quarry that Daniel had once guarded was now a brick works anyway and most of the timber from the first forest area had been felled, requiring teams of convicts to move further and further out from the safety of the main settlement and float logs behind ships’ cutters from where they had felled them to the south, all the way down to the original landing site at Botany Bay. Here they were more vulnerable to attack from the natives and from time to time the embryonic community in Sydney Cove would learn that another group of convict forestry workers had been attacked and killed, or had been dragged into the ‘bushland’ and never seen again. Whenever marines were sent to protect the convicts the natives seemed to keep their distance and it was not long before no one was allowed beyond a mile from the foreshore without a military escort.
The result of all the tree felling, house construction and quarrying had been a need for new tools, as old ones became blunt, or damaged beyond repair. Two former blacksmiths had been ordered to open and operate a forge, but there was little metal to be had and everyone waited anxiously for the Second Fleet that had been promised. Every day lookouts were posted on the ‘South Head’ of the long estuary that led from the ocean opening into the broad sheltered cove for sight of approaching sails. When they didn’t come, the Sirius was sent back to the Cape to purchase supplies with what little money was left.
It was rapidly becoming apparent that the only realistic prospect of a sufficient crop to feed the growing Port Jackson colony lay inland, along the banks of the many inlets that ran west from the Cove, which had their origins in freshwater streams and ran through more fertile-looking land. Within the first year, only one man had succeeded in growing wheat within the immediate environs of Port Jackson and while it was not an adequate crop to feed the entire colony, it demonstrated the man’s obvious talents as a farmer. His name was James Ruse and he had farmed land in Cornwall before being transported for burglary.
Upon learning of the man’s talents, Governor Phillip arranged for him to travel inland to an area that he had already identified and named ‘Rose Hill’. It was some fifteen miles inland from Port Jackson, along a wide saltwater tributary that wound its way west until it opened out into a fertile valley through which fresh water flowed. There was a defensible hill called ‘The Crescent’ upon which a military garrison could be stationed and Phillip had ambitions to expand the entire area into a second colony, if it could be made to sustain a sizeable population. Phillip lost no time in sending Ruse out west to Rose Hill, to develop an experimental farm and with him went a detachment of marines led by Daniel, who was glad to be free of the constraints of Sydney Cove and the ever-present possibility of crossing paths with Martha. However, his orders were to establish the garrison, then leave it to others to man it.
Upon his return Daniel was met by a very aggrieved George Johnston, who insisted that Daniel accompany him to the waterfront, where a massive wharf had now been built at which smaller vessels could load and unload people and supplies, should any arrive. George pointed down at the wharf, where a queue of people had formed.
‘See there?’ George said. ‘That’s the Charlotte — she’s setting sail for China today and the Lady Penrhyn and Scarborough go tomorrow.’
‘So?’ Daniel asked. ‘We knew they would leave eventually.’
‘Take a closer look at that woman sitting on the bollard next to that wagon.’
Daniel peered more carefully and there was no mistaking the long black hair flowing out from under the bonnet. ‘It’s Martha, clearly — so what?’
‘She’s been sitting there every day for a week,’ George complained. ‘She seems to be terrified that you’re planning to leave without her and we haven’t been able to get any work out of her. I tried to convince her that you were out west at the new garrison, but she accused me of covering for you while you slipped away without her. What in God’s name did you promise her?’
‘Nothing,’ Daniel insisted. ‘I told her that I was seeking a passage back to England but I haven’t made my wishes known to the governor yet. I made Martha no promise that she could come with me — I could never trust another woman to play true with my heart, and in any case a woman with her background would be completely unacceptable in English society.’
‘For God’s sake, man,’ George remonstrated with him, ‘your prospects of a return passage are very remote, let me assure you. For one thing, you’re too highly thought of here. For another, there are very few berths for non-paying passengers on any voyage back to Portsmouth. And thirdly — and most importantly, to my mind — you have a happy future mapped out for you here, with a respected position, a society free of the sort of social divisions that made Martha an outcast in the first place, and a willing and beautiful woman who worships the boots on your feet.’
‘I don’t want worship, George,’ Daniel told him, ‘simply a safe reception for my love and devotion. But I’ll go and reassure Martha that I’m not leaving just yet, then perhaps she’ll resume her duties.’
Daniel walked down to where Martha was sitting, musing over what George had said. She was certainly beautiful, but it was her lively personality that held him entranced. But he could not risk the agony of being rejected, or — even worse — being cuckolded after they had married. Daniel knew that his heart could not take the constant worry of being the ageing spouse of a beautiful woman.
She looked up as he walked over and a wide smile of relief lit up her face.
Daniel nodded towards the Charlotte, where people and baggage were being hauled over the gunnels. ‘Did you think I was leaving on her?’
Martha nodded.
‘I may leave one day, as I told you. But I’ll be sure to let you know when that day comes — if it comes.’
Martha reached out and grasped his hand. ‘If it does, I would also like to be on the passenger list.’
‘Any woman who goes back to England with me would have to be Mrs. Bradbury.’
‘Is that an offer?’ Martha asked eagerly.
‘No, it is not,’ Daniel told her. ‘But I feel sure that with your looks, your charm and your ability to be whatever someone wants you to be, you’ll have no shortage of other offers.’
‘Funny you should mention that,’ Martha replied with a hardened expression. ‘There’s a young private in Ge
orge’s detachment who leaves me in no doubt that he’d like to make an honest woman of me. Name of “Perkin” — you should take care that you don’t get too high and mighty, else I might take him up on his offer. Just make sure you don’t wait too long for the right woman!’
With that she bristled off back up the beach, leaving Daniel lost for words, but in a sense less troubled in his mind, in the belief that he’d finally driven her away from where she could torment his indecision.
5
Rachel’s baby — a boy — was born in late October. They called him George Junior and a celebration party was organised for one evening in the second week following the birth. The invitees consisted principally of marines, naval officers and the governor and his staff, and Daniel did not feel he could politely refuse, even though it would mean another uncomfortable meeting with Martha, in a very confined space in which they would be obliged to make polite conversation. But as it transpired it was a balmy dry evening and once the sun dipped behind the range of hills to the south-west the party moved out into the failed garden immediately in front of the cramped hut. Daniel had delayed turning up until the last moment consistent with good manners and by the time he got there, the party was in full swing.
Martha lost no time in walking over the coarse sandy grass towards him on the arm of a marine private, who replaced the black tricorn hat on his short ginger hair when he realised that he was about to be introduced to an officer. He saluted as they stood before each other, the younger man squaring the broadest pair of shoulders Daniel had ever seen inside a red tunic.
‘Daniel,’ Martha announced, ‘I imagine that you know Private Perkin.’
The young man leaned down from well over six feet in height to shake Daniel’s hand as if determined to crush the circulation out of it.
‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said. ‘Edward Perkin. I don’t believe we’ve actually spoken before. I was on the Scarborough on the way out, and I gather that you were on the Lady Penrhyn.’