The Soldier's Curse

by Thomas Keneally

  After a few minutes, Diamond stalked into the workroom. ‘Oh, Monsarrat,’ he said as he pushed open the door. ‘Please also make a note that we will not be using a trustee to carry out the sentence. Clearly they are not doing a proper job, if thirty lashes is not putting people off. Slattery, now there’s an interesting soldier. You’re acquainted with him, I believe. Do you know, he went after the absconder with no means of restraining him? He brought him back without so much as a belt or a rope around his wrists. I applaud his initiative, but he really needs to be more careful. He will give the prisoner his hundred lashes. It will teach him not to be sloppy in future.’

  * * *

  He knew it was cowardly, but Monsarrat would have liked to avoid seeing his young friend scourge a fellow he had some regard for. The choice, however, wasn’t his. All convicts were required to watch floggings. In a society where many viewed convicts as irredeemable, born criminals who could not change their nature, Monsarrat found it odd that observing a flogging was thought to prevent further, similar misbehaviour. If transportation and its attendant miseries hadn’t forced a man to change, what difference was watching someone else suffer going to make?

  So he stood in the yard near the convict barracks that afternoon, with a great number of other felons, staring at the triangular frame, slightly taller than a man, which had been set up there. The wood of the frame was light but festooned with darker blotches, which Monsarrat knew to be blood stains.

  Dory was brought in, his eyes down. He was made to face the frame, his wrists tied to its apex. Then Slattery entered, both arms straight, trailing the scourge, its nine cords knotted to increase their capacity to sunder flesh. His jaw was set, whether in determination or horror was not immediately clear. But as he approached the frame, his eyes moved over the crowd, settling on Monsarrat.

  The older man had to stop himself from stepping backwards, shrinking from the alarming change in his friend. The laughing rogue he had faced across yesterday’s kitchen table was gone. Slattery’s eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into his skull, as though he had balled up his fists and pushed them in with the considerable force of which he was capable. Leaping out of them, in almost visible arcs, was a ferocious anger. This is not our dancing boy, Monsarrat thought. This is not our bluffer, our teller of tales. He has been scooped out and replaced with refined hatred.

  Slattery gave Monsarrat the briefest of nods, and approached the frame. He put one hand on Dory’s shoulder, placed his head next to the boy’s, and whispered something. He saluted Diamond, who was watching impassively. Then he stepped back, and struck.

  Monsarrat had seen coachmen use whips on horses in England. At the first flogging he attended (and there had been dozens since), he had expected the flail to emit a similar crack. But the sound he heard was duller and all the more horrifying for it, and became more muted as the flesh of the back opened up, the blood and tissues absorbing the noise.

  Slattery’s first blow was far weaker than it could have been. He did not turn his body and extend his arm backwards. He simply held up the flail, and propelled it towards Dory. Even so, the first lash left large welts, as did the next three. The fourth left a line of blood. Slattery, Monsarrat noticed, was taking care to strike in different places each time, to put off the inevitable moment when the flesh would shred beyond repair.

  Diamond, though, was getting impatient. ‘Use more force, private,’ he called. ‘If you are incapable of carrying out a task we usually give to the convicts, we may have to reconsider your position.’

  For a moment, Slattery showed no sign that he had heard. Then he did reach backwards, and the lash connected with Dory with enough force to open a wound from one shoulderblade to the other. Dory, who until now had been impressively silent, grunted but did not cry out. Convict etiquette dictated that punishments be endured with as little evidence of pain as possible, and younger felons were told by gaolyard elders with scarred backs that crying out only made it hurt more anyway.

  The next few blows were just as strong. Then, Monsarrat noticed, Slattery began to decrease the force of each blow, almost imperceptibly, no doubt hoping Diamond wouldn’t notice.

  Diamond did. ‘If it’s too much for you, private, we can get one of the ladies to do it,’ he said, earning a snicker from some of the more sadistic or toadying soldiers.

  The next thirty or forty lashes continued in the same vein, with Slattery gradually decreasing the force until Diamond noticed and urged him to greater brutality.

  By fifty lashes, when Dory’s back was more welt and wound than skin, he was grunting with every blow, but still managing to resist the urge to cry out.

  Diamond had clearly decided he wanted more noise, and was sick of Slattery’s game. He stepped forward. ‘Private, I find myself forced to give you some guidance in administering punishment. Hand me the flail.’

  Slattery looked momentarily alarmed, before the instincts which served him in Three Card Brag enabled him to rearrange his features into a study in neutrality. He gave Diamond the flail, and stepped away.

  Diamond turned his torso side on to the frame, stretching his arm as far back as he possibly could. He paused for a moment, uncoiled, arcing the flail upwards and then down towards Dory. When it connected, it made a sound which was as close to a whip crack as Monsarrat had ever heard at a flogging.

  And he kept doing it. Turning, stretching, uncoiling and lashing with inhuman detachment. Each movement was precise, coordinated and perfectly timed. It was calibrated to cause maximum damage.

  Everyone watching, including Slattery, had expected Diamond to make his point and then hand back the flail. But he didn’t. He seemed to become lost in the dance, seeing nothing except the flail, caring about nothing except its trajectory and velocity. He did not stop. He did not seem to tire from the effort. He became an extension of the flail, merely its power source, a river to its mill.

  After Diamond’s first few lashes, Dory was unable to stop a cry escaping him. After the next ten, he was no longer trying to stay silent. After twenty, the cords on the scourge began to excavate glimpses of bone, which became larger as Diamond continued with the same force, the same gap between strikes, and the same vacant look. By now, Dory was screaming.

  ‘Captain!’ shouted the doctor. ‘Let me examine the boy!’

  But Diamond ignored him. At around eighty lashes, Dory’s legs stopped supporting his weight, and he fell silent. Monsarrat couldn’t see his face, but hoped he had only lost consciousness. He was now held up solely by the ropes tethering him to the frame, his toes the only part of him making contact with the ground, as though he had been frozen in the act of kneeling. His back was a gelatinous, glistening red field, dotted with snowflakes of exposed rib, and streaked with a few – a very few – yellow smears of fat, a commodity he didn’t possess in any great quantity.

  Monsarrat wondered what Dory was experiencing, wherever his mind had taken him. Was he still dimly aware he was being flogged, or was he lost in a dark wasteland, the sky illuminated by red flashes of pain?

  Monsarrat had been counting every stroke, partly because of his natural clerk’s thoroughness, and partly as a distraction. On the hundredth, he exhaled. Whatever was to come, Dory’s suffering was at an end for now.

  And then Diamond coiled, released and struck again. And again, hard enough to make the frame scrape backwards, taking Dory with it. Diamond did not seem to notice. There was a vacancy to him, and the lashes seemed to be powered more by momentum than by any will of the captain’s.

  Dr Gonville stepped forward. ‘Captain,’ he said, ‘the sentence has been carried out. You are exceeding the maximum allowable number of lashes, and I am officially informing you that further punishment may jeopardise the prisoner’s life. Please, stand down.’

  Diamond stopped, looked at him, smiled as if in a daze, and then struck again, and again.

  ‘Stand down, captain!’ Gonville shouted again. ‘By God I will report you!’

  He started towards Diamond.
The captain gave no sign he noticed Gonville’s approach, but as the distance closed, he suddenly shoved out a hand and sent the doctor staggering backwards.

  Monsarrat had by now counted one hundred and twenty lashes. Gonville was gathering himself for another approach, but Slattery, who had been watching in shock, suddenly darted forward and grabbed Diamond’s wrist as he drew back to strike.

  ‘Let him alone, you mad bastard!’ he yelled. ‘You’ve punished him enough.’

  Diamond did stop, then, looking at Slattery’s hand on his wrist, and then into the young man’s face. ‘Those additional lashes were not to punish the felon, private,’ he said. ‘They were to punish you.’

  He dropped the lash at Slattery’s feet, and ordered Dory taken down from the frame. Then he gave orders for Private Slattery to be taken to the guardhouse, there to spend the night as punishment for insubordination.

  Dory was being handled by another private, who had hold of him under each arm, dragging him facedown towards the gate. Major Shelborne always had convicts taken to the hospital after a flogging. He claimed it was to ensure the convict returned to a productive state as soon as possible, but Monsarrat suspected him of more humane motives. He fervently hoped Diamond would leave this practice in place.

  He did. But as the prisoner was being dragged past him, he held up a hand to stop the private. He bent over, examining Dory’s back. Then, with the deliberateness he might have applied to loading a musket, he spat into the wound.

  Chapter 11

  Slattery did not come by the kitchen the next morning, being possibly still incarcerated, and nor did his diminished crew. Monsarrat himself had only intended to make a brief appearance, perhaps even denying himself a cup of tea. But when he arrived, he found Mrs Mulrooney standing at the stove, quietly weeping. Her tears were not interfering with her work. Some of them splashed, fizzled and died in the skillet in which she was frying the breakfast eggs she knew would not be eaten.

  In two years, these were the first tears which had been allowed to escape Mrs Mulrooney in Monsarrat’s presence, and they alarmed him. Without words, he took her by the shoulders and guided her to a kitchen chair. He took the skillet off the stove and tried to ignore the small splash of grease which hopped from it onto his pearl waistcoat. He poured her a cup of tea – the first in their acquaintance, balanced against the hundreds she had poured for him – and sat down opposite her, waiting in silence.

  Mrs Mulrooney was breathing deeply now, regaining her composure and dabbing at her eyes with the edge of her pinafore. ‘I’m a foolish old woman,’ she said.

  ‘That is the most extreme falsehood I’ve heard since leaving England, and I’ve heard hundreds, some quite imaginative.’

  One side of Mrs Mulrooney’s mouth quirked up in a distracted half-smile, before her despondency quashed it. ‘I don’t think it’s long, Mr Monsarrat. I held her hand all night. Her fingers are so thin, her wedding ring slipped off her hand into mine – I’ve put it in the drawer of her dresser, by the way, should the major be looking for it. No point putting it back on her finger, not until … well, the major might wish it to make the last journey with her.’

  ‘Is there no hope? I thought the bleeding and cupping had curtailed some of the worst of her symptoms.’

  Mrs Mulrooney looked at Monsarrat strangely. ‘Had I told you about the bleeding and cupping, then? I can’t recall it.’

  Monsarrat was tempted, sorely tempted, to confide in her regarding Diamond’s interest in Mrs Shelborne’s condition, and the task he had been set. But her distress worried him, manifesting as it was in someone not prone to histrionics. ‘You must have mentioned it, I suppose.’

  ‘Hm. Well, the wedding ring, those fingers made of sticks, they’re not the worst of it. If she’s sleeping fitfully, I give her hand a squeeze. It calms her. She knows someone’s there, then, watching over her, I know she does because she squeezes back. So last night, she began moaning. She does that a lot now, and I gave her hand a little squeeze. Her finger twitched. That was all. There was no squeeze. If she’s too weak to squeeze my hand, Mr Monsarrat, she might be too weak to keep breathing.’

  ‘You should mention it to Dr Gonville – he surely should be told of such a change in her condition.’

  ‘I can’t leave here though, Mr Monsarrat. I don’t know what time that awful man is going to let Fergal free. He’s friendly with some of the other young soldiers, told one of them he would return the stake the man had lost at the last card game if he would come to me with the news of Fergal’s whereabouts. He brought the news of the flogging for free. I want to be here when Fergal comes by, if he does. After a night in the guardhouse he’ll need tea. May I ask you as a favour to me, would you go and see the doctor?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Monsarrat, ‘though I’ll need to wait for Diamond. Nevertheless, I’m sure his interest will prompt him to allow me to make the errand.’

  Mrs Mulrooney looked up sharply. ‘His interest, you say. And you have sparked mine, for I must confess, I have long suspected Diamond’s chief interest is taking everything that belongs to the major.’

  ‘You mean his job,’ said Monsarrat, in a futile attempt to dodge the question.

  ‘His job, yes, that’s part of it,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘You know what they’re all like, Monsarrat; they’re interested in advancement, in glory. And there’s precious little of either out here. They could commit the most outrageous act of valour here, but without anyone to record it, without a general there to witness it, what’s the point? That’s what they think, anyway. Some of their eyes are as dead as those of the felons. I suppose it’s a kind of sentence for them as well. That’s why young Slattery is such a tonic. That boy could find fun in hell.’

  ‘Well, if our captain wants advancement to the lofty rank of major, he’s going the wrong way about it,’ said Monsarrat. ‘I would not be at all surprised if the doctor reported his conduct yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, advancement’s only part of it for Diamond. If you were to ask me, I would say that there’s something else of the major’s he wants. Do you remember when Mrs Shelborne let me come with her in that sea box?’

  ‘Let you? To hear you talk at the time, she nearly had to compel you at the point of a musket.’

  From the look Mrs Mulrooney gave him, Monsarrat considered himself fortunate he was not in swatting range.

  ‘A most delightful afternoon it was, and I won’t hear you talking ill of it, Mr Monsarrat. But while we were there, we heard someone passing. Just as well, thought I, for the canvas sheet protecting the young woman’s modesty. It was a bright day, and whoever it was passing by outside cast their shadow on the canvas. It was no woman.’

  ‘You know who it was?’

  ‘Indeed I do, for he spoke. I recognised the voice as Diamond’s, right enough, but I’d only ever heard it barking orders before. It sounded different that day, though. Oily, like someone trying to convince you they’d found a way to weave gold out of straw. He must’ve thought that that was what Mrs Shelborne was used to hearing, or that it would please her. But his presence didn’t please her, anything but. I saw her draw her shift more tightly about herself, even though he wouldn’t have seen more than her outline through the canvas.’

  ‘And what did he say, in this oily voice?’ asked Monsarrat.

  ‘That he hoped she was well and enjoying her time in the ocean. That one of the great benefits of this place was that imaginative individuals such as herself could start undertakings which would have been impossible in the old world. Then he just stood there for a while. Well, Mr Monsarrat, she is the soul of courtesy, that girl; she thanked him, and wished him a good day. It’s a funny thing with those who are born to it – they can let you know you’re dismissed without actually dismissing you. But he didn’t seem to realise he was being sent on his way. He stayed there for what must’ve been a full five minutes. I think he was facing us, because I couldn’t see the outline of his nose. She glanced towards him every now and then, and kept
giving me little smiles, as though she was concerned I might be discomfited by his presence. She was right about that, I can tell you. After a while, he moved off. Without another word. She turned to me, all smiles, and said how wonderful it was that even here, one could still find a familiar face from home. Then she asked me how I was finding the water, whether I was becoming chilled or would like to stay in the box for longer. Well, I didn’t want to get out right then, didn’t know whether Diamond would be lurking nearby. Although to be honest I was becoming a bit cold. We stayed in for another little while after that, and she didn’t mention the captain again.’

  ‘I must admit,’ said Monsarrat, ‘that I did get the impression when we were presented to her that she and Diamond already knew each other.’

  ‘I’m certain of it,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘But how or when, and what the nature of their acquaintance was, is not something I can shed any light on. And judging by his performance yesterday, the captain seems to be a bit deranged. It frightens me.’

  ‘Yesterday was certainly amongst the more disturbing things I have witnessed,’ said Monsarrat. ‘He was always a martinet, but he seems to be straying into a level of brutality I haven’t seen since my time on the road gang.’

  ‘Then you should be on your guard, Mr Monsarrat, for he is the authority here now. And he seems to believe you have too lofty an idea of yourself. It’s to be hoped he doesn’t decide to teach you your place.’

  ‘That very eventuality is one of my chief concerns at the moment,’ said Monsarrat.

  Mrs Mulrooney got up then, and traced with her feet the well-trodden but invisible lines that marked her daily path around the kitchen. The eggs had congealed in the skillet, earning it a glare from her, and a few muttered words of Irish which may or may not have been entirely appropriate from the mouth of a woman her age.

  As she restored the skillet to the stove, her eyes on it all the while, she said, ‘Mr Monsarrat, you’re to tell me at once, what do you know of the captain’s interest in Mrs Shelborne? And of the cupping and bleeding, for that matter?’