The Soldier's Curse

by Thomas Keneally

  Monsarrat knew that, ticketed or not, there were still many traps in a man’s way, and many watchers who, out of pure darkness of soul, would love to find a flaw for which a man could be sent back into servitude. Yet he, like those convicts in Major Shelborne’s party, desired a ticket so keenly that he would have abandoned the comfortable kitchen and taken to the bush had he thought it would do any good.

  * * *

  Monsarrat considered making himself a second cup of tea, but knew Mrs Mulrooney would view this as presumptuous. Instead he opened the drawer of a sideboard – one of the few polished surfaces in the room, as it housed the good china – and extracted a whetstone. He sat at a table less substantial than it had been some years ago, thanks to regular and vigorous scrubbing, a penance imposed on it by Mrs Mulrooney, and he started work on her recalcitrant knife.

  Just as he had made the edge keen enough to please her, a hammering struck up on the outer door. ‘Yes!’ called Monsarrat in weary permission. The door opened flat against the wall, its leather hinges complaining. In stepped smiling Private Fergal Slattery, Mrs Mulrooney’s pet soldier. His red and buff coat, his plumed hat, rested in the genteel barracks; today he was dressed for work rather than show, in canvas pants, shoes he had woven from straw, and a sheepskin coat over a red shirt.

  ‘God bless all here,’ he muttered, as his mother had raised him to say. He closed the door and made sure it was properly in its frame. Then he blew on his hands to warm them and ran one of them through his brown hair. His eyes twinkled as if some fun were about to arise – but it was a futile expectation here.

  ‘Oh, it’s the gentleman fookin’ convict himself,’ he said, twinkling away.

  ‘And it’s the worst soldier in His Majesty’s whole damned army,’ said Monsarrat.

  It was an established banter of theirs. Monsarrat would not have taken quietly such a statement from any other private soldier without making a complaint to the commandant. The man was at least ten years younger than him to start with. But there was something endearing about young Slattery.

  He never moaned, as some of them did, about how poverty had sent them into the army and now they were no better off themselves than convicts, or how drunkenness had made them take the shilling on a dare at some country fair. The truly amusing aspect of Slattery was the way he recounted serious events, wide-eyed and with unconscious humour. With Mrs Mulrooney he traded the sort of genial whimsical insults at which – Monsarrat had noticed – the Irish were so good. It was the way they expressed affection.

  ‘And how is our Magpie today?’ said Slattery, lowering himself into a chair which had never known fine upholstery and brocade, unlike its counterparts in the neighbouring building. Even humble Slattery had the right to sit while Monsarrat stood – Monsarrat might be one of the more trusted and well-treated convicts, but was still beneath all those who were free. Slattery wasn’t the only one to call Monsarrat ‘the Magpie’. He owed the name to the threadbare but expertly tailored black coat he customarily wore over one of his waistcoats, to his elongated nose, and to his habit of walking with both hands clasped behind his back.

  Monsarrat wasn’t sure whether offence was intended by those who used the name, but he took none. Magpies were silent watchers, always present but rarely noticed, offering violence only when something precious was threatened.

  ‘The Magpie is as well as he was yesterday, and thanks you for your concern,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s herself?’ asked Slattery.

  ‘She’s seeing to Mrs Shelborne.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the soldier, tossing his head. ‘I could surely appreciate a cup of tea from her dear old hands.’

  ‘There’s the pot, on the stove.’

  The young man went to the tea chest, which Mrs Mulrooney never bothered to lock even though it contained the most expensive leaves in the kitchen, a delicate infusion flavoured with cinnamon, which was reserved for Mrs Shelborne’s sole use. His back to Monsarrat, he made a great show of breathing in the scent of the forbidden leaves, then returned to the table and sat down heavily. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘although it isn’t the same without her pouring it. I’m better off waiting.’

  ‘And you’ll be overseeing the men in the sitting room?’ asked Monsarrat.

  ‘Oh, I will,’ said Slattery, nodding. ‘If they know where their true interests are, they should be here in a second. For I am a demon for discipline.’ He winked and laughed and Monsarrat shook his head in mock reproach.

  Some wallpaper from England had arrived by way of the Sally, ordered by Mrs Shelborne when she’d been in better health. It had waited in the storehouse until a party of convict labourers had been put together to plaster the bricks of the sitting room and make all smooth. They would normally have laboured under one of the convict overseers, but in this case Private Slattery had been chosen because he had claimed to the major’s second-in-command, the brooding Captain Diamond, that he had once worked as a plasterer and hung paper in a house in Ireland. Mrs Mulrooney behaved as if this was a deception, though her attitude to him was so indulgent that it was evident she did not blame him for the lie.

  Overseeing plastering and papering was an easy job. Slattery would sit in the kitchen with Mrs Mulrooney, chatting and drinking tea, and occasionally walk in to make sure that the four convicts were doing the job properly. The four men seemed to work in good order – so Mrs Mulrooney had told Monsarrat – under a pressed-tin ceiling designed to stop the big huntsman spiders, harmless as they were, climbing down to infest the floor.

  The plaster the men had put up was now cured and they were onto hanging the paper, a pattern in keeping with Mrs Shelborne’s taste for green. Monsarrat had seen this wonderful paper, brought to a settlement devoid until now of such things: vibrant green with bosky white flowers that seemed to grow out of it. There were few shades of such rich colour in the bush, the swamps, the dense forests and the gullies running down the high coastal mountains, and it made Monsarrat think Mrs Shelborne was homesick. She likes green because she comes from green pastures, he thought, and full-bodied flowers because the summer gardens of her childhood were riotous with them.

  Mrs Mulrooney, her ministrations to Mrs Shelborne at an end for now, re-entered through the kitchen door on the house side. ‘It’s that Slattery, sitting when he should be standing. How they ever get him upright for parade escapes me entirely,’ she said.

  ‘And may the saints smile down upon you, Mrs Mulrooney,’ said the soldier, ‘and spread their grace upon ye.’

  ‘Surely enough they need to include you in that, and smile on dear Mrs Shelborne too,’ said Mrs Mulrooney.

  ‘Dear Mrs Shelborne, with all her family’s money, has no need of saints and their grace,’ said Slattery.

  ‘You’re an awful one for grudges against the rich, especially as a lad who spends his evenings taking money from others across a card table,’ said Mrs Mulrooney, making her way to the large teapot on the hob. She got a cup from one of the low wooden shelves beside the stove – the Shelbornes’ used china – and rearranged its shelf-mates before pouring black tea for the soldier and refilling Monsarrat’s cup.

  ‘Later than most mornings,’ she said. ‘This all means a certain boy I know is getting utterly used to his lazy job and taking it for granted. And it means I wish he wasn’t.’

  ‘It means a boy was up late last night playing Three Card Brag. Now, I wouldn’t call it taking money, Mother Mulrooney. More a redistribution of resources. Making sure everything’s balanced.’

  ‘Ah, the devil’s work and you’re so good at it.’

  ‘Don’t you worry. God was on my side and I lost.’

  Now there was another knocking on the outside door. Private Slattery rose and opened it to admit the convict labourers, their flat hats on their heads, and their rough canvas clothes painted with broad arrows which indicated their felonious status.

  ‘Come through then, fookin’ lags the lot of you,’ said Slattery. ‘Mrs Mulrooney, would you be kind enough to
show us into the sitting room?’

  For only she had the authority. She opened the house-facing door and they trooped through the kitchen past Monsarrat, nodding to him because he had a little margin of power compared to them, being the major’s clerk, and so they went out the door and into the house to work.

  When Mrs Mulrooney came back, Monsarrat stood. ‘I must go to the office,’ he told her, as if he was some respectable banker or clerk.

  ‘Will you come by in the morning again? I enjoy our talks, though common soldiers and felons might interrupt them.’

  ‘Certainly. But I must go for now – I need to be in the office from half past seven lest Captain Diamond comes by and finds me not there. I’m too old to be an absconder.’

  Chapter 2

  The port’s inhabitants had become accustomed to strangeness.

  When they first arrived in New South Wales to face their antipodean punishment, many had been told stories of their new land by more experienced convicts. Stories of kangaroos, which seemed as good a name as any, as there was nothing in the new arrivals’ lexicon which would have sufficed. They were said to be capable of disembowelling a man with one downward stroke from their powerful hind legs. Such stories were largely dismissed by those who heard them. Their lives contained enough brutality at the hands of their own species for them to give any credence to tales of mythical beasts with violent tendencies.

  There were other oddities to be described too. The body of an otter and the bill of a duck, joined together by some unknown power. Large clumps of grey fur which clung to the trees and ate their leaves. And then cautionary tales about snakes whose venom was, as venom goes, fast as any poison vouchsafed by the devil to the tribe of serpents.

  Some of those recently off the boat were more credulous than others. But some things couldn’t be dismissed by even the most sceptical. The birds were different, for a start, as anyone who had been woken by their deranged cackling knew. And the seasons, which mocked the calendar months of the civilised parts of the earth by being their opposites.

  When their feet struck this land for the first time, most convicts had well and truly lost track of the passage of time. They might have been voyaging for a month or a year. So a warm breeze or a chilly drizzle didn’t immediately seem out of place. Until Christmas Day brought ferocious heat, or work crews stepped out into a damp June pre-dawn.

  For some, this amalgamation of oddness stood like an unbridgeable barrier between them and the lands of their birth. Any distance which could give rise to such abnormality was distance indeed.

  To the miles they had travelled to the colony, some convicts who had racked up a colonial conviction could add the 230 or so between Sydney and Port Macquarie, a sea journey which took between three days and two weeks, depending what mood the winds were in. By that time, the gentle rains, mild summers and familiar livestock of their former homes felt more like myths than the dreary routine which marked their life in the colony.

  Still, in Monsarrat’s view, one would not have expected the mundanity of a young woman stepping off a cutter to excite such interest, curiosity and speculation.

  Honora had married Angus Shelborne two years previously, in a chapel near her family’s estate, just before he left to take up his commission. They had met several times during his period in Ireland, as many families considered a well-turned-out officer an essential accessory to any social event. At dances, they made lively conversation. But at hunts, they began chastely to map each other’s true boundaries, seeing if these went beyond the official charts, those drawn up for the daughter of a baron and a promising captain (as the major was then). Both were delighted with what they found, their personal geographies sharing many borders.

  The major’s family had made a tidy amount trading in wheat. People always needed wheat, Angus’s father was fond of saying, no matter what other crazes or appetites might come and go. Young Angus’s aptitude for all things martial, his instinctive integrity and his ability to lead assisted his advancement, but he had another advantage which was equally important – a family who could afford a commission.

  Despite assumptions by those of lower castes that a title and a castle came with a guaranteed fortune, a commission could not have been afforded for Honora had she been born male. A few generations of poor stewardship and her father’s ruinous gambling had seen to that. And while the family was in possession of a castle, their capacity to maintain it had been undermined by the collapse of markets after the fall of Napoleon. So while the common Shelbornes were delighted to secure an Irish peer’s daughter for their son, the peer was equally delighted by their discreet payment of certain debts.

  It was decided that the major (newly minted in advance of his next posting) would precede his wife to the colony, to ensure all was adequate for a highborn bride. A minor lung infection, followed by some temporary financial difficulty caused by Honora’s father and his injudicious application of funds to racehorses, had delayed her passage.

  Six months previously, when the cutter Sally finally sailed past Lady Nelson Beach, traversed the bar without incident and deposited Honora on the dock, Major Shelborne had smiled. It was an awkward smile, rusty from lack of use, too tentative to sit comfortably on the face of a professional soldier and the ruler of this small collection of humanity.

  Honora’s smile, by contrast, was broad and strong and lacking in self-consciousness, with none of her class of women’s tendency to try to hide her teeth with tight lips. They, in any case, required no concealment as all were present and white, the teeth of a woman who had grown up in dairy country. Monsarrat had the opportunity to examine the smile at close quarters when he was presented to the young woman. He, together with the rest of the household staff and a few senior officers, had lined the dock awaiting her inspection. She shook hands with all, even the felons, clearly not sharing the view of some that moral bankruptcy was as contagious as a plague and could pass from one person to another through physical contact.

  She spent more time greeting her husband’s officers, and Monsarrat noticed that the young captain Michael Diamond, with a broad-shouldered frame which seemed too large for his short legs to carry, bowed particularly low and said he was delighted to see her again. Monsarrat idly wondered where they could have met before.

  The major’s smile became more assured with use over the next few months, as he discovered he had (as hoped and suspected) married a kindred spirit, a woman at home in the saddle and at ease with a firearm. Honora could expertly and instantly don the mask of a gentlewoman at need. But she was happiest when dragging the major (without much need for force) out for early morning rides in the direction of the new settlement at Rolland’s Plains which often turned into races. She also added to the settlement’s food stores, proving the equal of any of the men at shooting, felling ducks, and at one point a kangaroo, before handing the gun down to the ancient Quilty, a former convict who had spent his youth reloading guns for aristocrats until he was caught shoplifting silverware on a journey to some English town.

  In another place, Honora’s spirit would have been viewed as an unladylike amalgam. Here, at the world’s edge, she set the boundaries of appropriate behaviour based on her own inclinations and wishes. It was her right as the settlement’s ranking female.

  The response of the settlement’s few other women ranged from admiration to envy. Amongst the convicts, some had seen their youth leak away during the course of their sentence, taking with it any claims they might once have had to an unsoured beauty which the major’s wife wore so effortlessly. They felt they could have held onto these assets for far longer had they had the same resources as the young woman, who would never know the need to steal for survival.

  The settlement’s fascination with Mrs Shelborne was returned, and at her husband’s indulgence she was allowed to implement certain measures which she felt would improve the lives of those who lived near her, be they free or felon. She behaved like a normal landlady of some well-run village.

&nb
sp; She was equally solicitous to the wives of officers and to the free wives of convicts who had been shipped here to share their spouses’ period of sentence and lived with their husbands in huts. It was she whose will prevailed on her husband to allow extra rations for those expecting babies, and she noted the birthdays of all the settlement’s children, who attended lessons at the small schoolhouse, given by a man called Wilkins. Occasionally, she would go to the schoolhouse herself and tell the children stories of dragons and princesses, creatures as far removed from their own experience as the kangaroos and platypus had been from that of their parents.

  Her first experiment came to Monsarrat’s attention during one of his early morning visits to Mrs Mulrooney.

  The major had engaged Mrs Mulrooney in Sydney, before departing for Port Macquarie. She had been housekeeper to a family in Camden, who had decided that their antipodean adventure was all very well but it was time to return to the real world on the other side of a long voyage. The major had met the family’s father at a dinner at Sydney’s Government House (a far grander building than its Port Macquarie counterpart), and on his urging had interviewed the Irishwoman. He had been impressed by her former employer’s praise for her efficiency, and even more so by her pleasant but forthright manner.

  The housekeeper was quite taken with her new mistress. She had spent the past eighteen months looking after Government House and its sole, male resident, and longed for a little more colour and chaos in the household. This, she felt, was provided amply by Mrs Shelborne.