by Moir, Tanya
‘Aye.’
‘Will you tell me his name, and where to find him? Perhaps I might be of some use at the school.’
Sutherland removes the nail from his mouth. ‘His name is Johns, and you’ll find his house next but one to the schoolyard.’ He sighs heavily. ‘But you may as well save your legs, and your breath. I can tell you now, Peterson, you won’t find many round here with a use for men of your persuasion.’
Daniel’s face begins to burn.
‘There are a few who might let you clear their stumps, if you keep your mouth shut — but I know for a fact you won’t get near their sons.’
Seventeen
‘He shouldn’t have spoken to you like that.’ Letitia is angry. ‘And to think I wasted flour on such people.’
‘He meant to warn me, I think.’
There is a pause. Hester imagines her father pressing his knuckle between his brows, where the muscles tighten on his skull, and the sun is carving a deepening line. Her mother’s voice, blunted by the bedroom walls, continues.
‘What does he know of our politics?’
‘Nothing.’ Daniel’s bitterness seeps through the boards. ‘He knows nothing about us. But he’s made his assumptions, and is quite satisfied with them. He’s a man of some slight wealth and education, so naturally the truth must be as he observes it. I keep Massey’s poetry upon my shelf, therefore I am a Chartist.’
‘And what if you are? What law is there against believing all men should have the vote? Are we not halfway there in this country already?’
‘The laws of Nature are against it, he would say! If I am a Chartist, then it follows — what could be more likely? — that I wish to turn the world on its head, and the slow sons of farmers into revolutionaries.’
‘A revolt against what?’
‘Men who believe that paying more than five pounds a year in rent should buy them some distinction.’
There is a bang, a hairbrush perhaps, set down hard on the dressing table, and then another silence. Her mother’s voice, when it comes, is softer, tired.
‘I thought we’d left people like this behind us.’
‘It seems we can’t go far away enough for that.’
‘It was supposed to be different, here.’
‘It’s a different sort who have risen to the top, and a different sort they try to force down to keep their new position.’ Daniel’s voice stretches into a yawn, and the glow of light through the gaps in the wallboards flickers and is extinguished. ‘But in truth, it’s just the same here as it was at home.’
‘No,’ says Letitia, mouth close to the wall. ‘It’s harder.’
Hester pulls the quilt up around her neck. She can make out the pattern of the roses quite clearly in the light of the full moon. Outside her as-yet-uncurtained window, the scrub casts shifting shadows on the ground. Her eyes are heavy. But for a moment she sees, with perfect clarity, the face of old Mr Halloran through the glass.
Eighteen
March 11th, 1867
Dearest Lucy,
Since I last wrote, we have come to know our neighbours a little better, and Robbie and I have exchanged rooms. I am very well pleased with my attic quarters, which, were their walls but made of stone, not wood, would do well for a gothic novel;— they certainly wuther a great deal in the easterly, and shriek as loud as any ghost in a sou’west gale. I can stand upright only in the very centre of the room, but have more horizontal space in which to lie, or sit, than anywhere in the house, and so consider myself well served.
Shall I now treat you to a lurid story, worthy of my attic? You will remember, perhaps, the Hallorans of my last letter? Well, it seems old Mr Halloran has been in the habit of visiting our house after dark, to observe us through our windows. Father and Rob called upon him last week in an effort to dissuade him from this entertainment;— but from the manner of their return, I gather their interview was unsuccessful.
Let me try to give you some flavour of the scene:
Mrs Delacroix had just come by with the week’s potatoes, and Mother and I were entertaining her in the kitchen when our men came in, somewhat out of breath, and looking very shaken. They offered no account of their meeting;— Father said only that Mr Halloran was insane, and to be avoided at all costs.
Mrs Delacroix seemed to find this most amusing. Having first assured us that ‘Old Mick’ was ‘alright’, she then enquired as to whether he had ‘got his gun out’!
Mother nearly dropped the teapot, and wanted to send for the Police without delay. This only served to heighten Mrs Delacroix’s mirth. The Constable, she informed us, was familiar with Old Mick, and would not trouble an ‘old chum’ over the minor matter of shooting at trespassers;— all the more since, as she pointed out with a grin, ‘he didn’t get you, did he?’.
Mother expressed sorrow that men of Mr Halloran’s sort should be allowed to come to the Colonies at all, to which Mrs Delacroix replied that King William himself had sent our neighbour — as far as Norfolk Island, that was. For the final leg of his voyage, she added, Old Mick had not sought any man’s permission, but had made his own arrangements.
Mother, who was by now very pale, asked if we were to understand Mr Halloran to be an escaped convict. Mrs Delacroix responded that his time must surely have expired by now.
Robbie was quite breathless with excitement, and eager to discover how Halloran had made his way to here. According to Mrs Delacroix, he and three fellow-prisoners had taken the lieutenant’s dinghy and kept rowing. To hear her, one might have thought that nothing could be simpler! Father scoffed at the idea of four men crossing such rough seas in an open boat, but Mrs Delacroix was quite adamant. She said the story came not from Old Mick, but from her own dear ‘Dad’. That gentleman, it turns out, was also on the voyage.
You can imagine, dear Lucy, the silence that followed this revelation. Eventually, Robbie got up courage to enquire what crime Mr Halloran had committed. Mrs Delacroix professed herself unsure. She recalled it having involved a woman in Liverpool, and that Old Mick had ‘gone down for a good old stretch’. It was not the done thing, she said, to ask questions;— men could be ‘touchy’ on the subject.
Thus warned, we did not dare to ask of what crime her own father had been convicted, and remain to this day none the wiser. I must tell you, though, that the minutes until our neighbour took her coat and her leave passed very slowly.
Now I have come to the end of my tale, and must take to my bed, for my candle is almost gone, and my eyes and hand are deeply weary. I had barely any sleep last night, so long did Mother and I sit up, sewing curtains.
Your loving friend,
Hester
Nineteen
Daniel lies wakeful. His ears strain the night noise of the bush, seeking to separate the fearful from the strange, the stirring of the watery wind from a body’s movement through the branches, the creeping of rats from footsteps. He practises, in his mind, the movements he will need to reach the gun beneath the bed.
He closes his eyes, and sees again the Hallorans’ hut, the squalid scar of its clearing. Its walls are rough slabs of wood, set hastily and ill, its roof a mouldering thatch of flax, tired veteran of many winters. A wet-wood smoke reeks from a rusting chimney, blending with the ammonia of pig shit in his nostrils. A whale pot languishes to one side. The doors and windows of the hut are closed.
Daniel opens his eyes, not wishing to pursue this recollection further. But it grinds on, like a barrel-organ tune, and he cannot evade its chorus.
There are noises coming from inside the hut, brutal and unmistakeable. Sordid noises, of a kind that Robbie should not hear. Daniel pauses, halfway across the clearing. But it is too late. Halloran’s dog has seen him.
In response to its furious warning, a shutter is flung open. And there she is, again, Mary Halloran, red throated and open mouthed, head pulled back by the hair in her father’s hand. He sees her only for an instant. Gunfire follows. Yet the image will not leave him.
Daniel tells
himself it is not his affair. He has a family of his own. A wife, and a daughter. They are alone here. All that stands between them and Halloran are a few miles of empty darkness, and a path their neighbour knows too well. An armed man, capable of … Daniel shudders. What chance would they stand, if they gave him reason to come their way?
Now, outside his bolted window, the stems of the rosebush shake. A morepork calls. Beside his ear, there is a scuffling slide, and something thuds and rolls on top of the sea chest. He lifts his head up slowly. A silver rat looks him in the eye as it takes a bite of his fallen candle. He waves his hand, but to no avail. A kiore, Daniel thinks, a native rat. They have not learned to fear people.
Letitia stirs in her sleep, and Daniel gives up, resting his head back on the bolster. He wonders, drifting, how a man is supposed to make his way in a world where rats are bigger than owls, and braver than men.
Twenty
A dead sky presses heavy on Hester’s forehead. Across the saddle, the nor’east wind drives low and bitter, and she pushes her hands further into the pockets of her coat. Below, a sallow light hangs across the entrance to the harbour, as though, somewhere out beyond the heads, a gasworks burns.
Her glove touches something in her right pocket. A paper of some kind. As the road drops out of the teeth of the wind, she takes it out. ‘London & South Western Railway, Day-Return, Third Class, Clapham Junction to Southampton.’
Hester’s footsteps down the hill recall the rhythm of the 8.05, its sway and rattle out of blackened terraces towards soft gold fields. Even before they had left the city, and the prescribed sea air had filled her lungs, Letitia had been bright, their plans drowning out the din of the hated train and the ugly new tenement housing.
Across Hampshire, bronze-skinned men and women were making hay. Clean children stopped their play to wave; mothers held up little ones for nothing more than a smile. Everyone had looked so happy. And at the end of it all, there was the sky, opening up with the light of the sea.
They had walked in the shadow of steamers and sailing ships. Bombay, New York, Capetown, Melbourne, all ready at the end of a hawser, no more than a gangway apart. In a park overlooking the docks, they had rented deckchairs and bought ices.
For the first time, Hester had not wondered about the people who boarded the ships, their ends and their beginnings. They were no longer a race distinct from hers, but comrades in adventure.
High above La Rochelle’s Road, the crumpled ticket flaps in the wind. ‘Look,’ says Hester to her mother. Letitia does not seem to hear her.
Hester looks at the ticket again. She remembers a girl in a purple-feathered hat, looking down from a first-class deck at the crowd on the dock with genteel condescension. The girl’s pity, Hester knew, was not for their dress, or their station in life, but for those who stay behind.
She quickens her step, puts a hand to her mother’s elbow. ‘Look what was in my pocket. Our last outing. Remember?’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Letitia smiles briefly, and walks on.
Hester remembers the scent of violets, and face powder. Her mother’s head close to her own, bent over the list they were making. They were trying to decide what colour flannel to bring, and laughing at the absurd finality of such a choice, their future forever striped red, or green. She sees her father in the next-door deckchair, watching them, with such a smile on his face. As if he had given them the world. And Letitia, looking back at him, as if she had received it.
Part
Two
One
John Barrington eyes the cut of Daniel’s coat, the whiteness of his collar. In the low-slanting sunlight, the collar blazes. Barrington is reminded of a spotted shag on a sunny rock, chin down, dark shoulders huddled, and eyes wary.
Barrington himself is wearing a woollen vest, once red, now a sun-bleached, streaky pink. It has a hole in it, as do his trousers, which are held up with string. But his voice, when it comes, has the authoritative clip of the Home Counties.
‘So, you’ve taken the old La Rochelle place, have you?’ He nods his head in time with Daniel’s. ‘It needs some work, I hear.’
Daniel is silent, allowing Barrington to continue.
‘Old Jock McLean offered Carter a good pair of boots for it. We all thought it a fair trade. But it seems Carter found himself a better deal. How much did you pay for it?’
Daniel’s eyes flare with alarm. ‘I … I’m not sure I should …’
Barrington raises his eyebrows. ‘That much, eh?’ One side of his mouth curls down as he smiles. ‘That why you’re here? You need to sell? You won’t find many takers in this market.’
‘I need work. I heard you run a couple of gangs. I thought perhaps you might need another man.’
‘Labouring work?’ He reappraises the sulky bird of a man with greater interest. ‘You’ve done it before, that sort of work?’
Daniel squints into the sun. ‘I’ve done little else since I got here.’
Barrington nods. ‘Five shillings a day. Be here at seven tomorrow if you want it.’
The next morning, Daniel walks through the half-light of a blustery dawn to Barrington’s yard. He is early. Below, the harbour is sullen under nor’east cloud, and the cold wind buffets him like a schoolyard bully. He is wearing a coloured shirt and fustian trousers, the outfit his New Zealand Handbook advises for the labouring man. He is proud to wear these emblems of the working class. He thinks of his father, waiting every morning outside the mill in the damp of a Norwich morning. But there is a void in his stomach that feels like falling.
He waits, reciting Massey to himself against the chill.
Come from the den of darkness and the City’s soil of sin, Put on your radiant Manhood, and the Angel’s blessing win!
At seven, he joins five other men on Delacroix’s bullock dray, and sways with them in blear-eyed silence down to the flats of German Bay. They pass through neat orchards and tidy vineyards to the scar of a recent burn. Daniel spends the day bent in a hole, between charred earth and dying tree roots. The reek of the burn gets into his pores. They walk the bullocks back by lamplight.
He does this for five days before he learns that the other men on the gang get six shillings and sixpence. He says nothing to them of this, or of Gerald Massey.
Two
April 4th, 1867
Dear Lucy,
Please thank Mr Fitzjohn for sending us the latest ‘Punch’;— I am sure that, as he says, Father will enjoy it immensely, when he finds time to read it. Our custom of reading aloud in the evenings has lapsed somewhat in these last months. Usually, Father falls asleep over his supper, and Mother has to wake him to take his bath and retire to his bed. I must admit we have not yet finished ‘The Odyssey’, which we began on the ‘Matoaka’, and I begin to fear we shall never do so.
I had hoped we might have some of our old entertainment this afternoon, for it is raining so hard we were forced out of the bush by lunchtime. But Father is hard at work on the roof, which is leaking in several places, and Mother is busy attempting to remove the mud of the morning’s work from our clothes and floors. So you, dear Lucy, are my only diversion!
I am sure our life here does seem harsh to you;— indeed, it often seems so to us also. For myself, I do not mind it so much. The housework is constant, tedious and tiring, but I find that I can bear it. In the outside work, I find a liberty of thought and body I had not expected. Nor could I, in our old life, have imagined it. I am not sure I can explain it further. Perhaps it has something to do with the meaning of that old Massey poem which Father used to recite so often, back in London;— ‘The Chivalry of Labour’ — do you remember? It is a long time now since I have heard it. In any case, I can tell you that there is no sleep so sweet, or so sound, as that which follows a day of cutting scrub.
I do worry for Mother, though. As you know, she has never been strong. Still, the climate here may yet prove healthful, as we hoped.
I trust your own dear parents are well. Please will you tell Mr & Mrs F
itzjohn that Father and Mother send their compliments, and best wishes?
Your loving friend,
Hester
Three
In the public bar of Waeckerle’s French Hotel, Daniel is feeling nervous. He cannot afford the beer in front of him, or the time it will take to drink it. What is worse, Frank has bought it for him, a favour he must return, so he will owe not sixpence, but twelve.
He is thirsty enough. But the ale is sour in his throat, and churns in his stomach like a steamer screw in heavy water. It is a long time since Daniel has had a drink. The rough alcohol rises straight to his head, where it fuddles his desperate calculations. Six pounds of flour, three pounds of sugar, Letitia’s face. That is what it is costing. A week’s worth of potatoes, an ounce of tea. Hester and Robbie, waiting.
It is five o’clock on a Friday, and the three of them — Daniel, Frank and Roy — are on their way home from clearing stumps above Red House Bay.
‘Let’s stop in for a quick one,’ Frank had urged, as they passed the hotel.
Alarmed, Daniel had shaken his head, held up his hand. ‘No, no, I can’t, Frank. Not for me.’
‘What, have you taken the bloody pledge, or something?’ Roy gave him an unfriendly grin, and sniffed. ‘I might have known.’
‘He’s not like that,’ said Frank. ‘Are you, Dan? You’ll have a beer with us, won’t you?’
‘It’s not that I don’t drink’ — Daniel examined the red mud beneath his feet — ‘I just don’t …’