The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘You contradict yourself.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You said you were at the mercy of your company.’

  Frances put a hand to her cheek, frowning and staring ahead of her. Lieutenant Edwards of the fifty-seventh, who had been sent from the settlement to discharge the Isabella, had come up on deck and was talking to Captain Clunie, while Amelia Bulwer, with swinging skirts, now paced the deck silently and alone except for her gliding shadow. ‘Then I shall have to learn to resist it,’ said Frances in an undecided voice.

  ‘Learn to adapt to it. Adapt. These ideas will impede you. But never mind, so quickly picked up, they will be quickly dropped.’

  ‘But were they quickly picked up? I think—they began a long time ago. After mama died, Letty and Cass lived most of the year with our Dublin or Bristol aunts, and papa was—hard to talk to, and Lydia and Hermione were only babies, so I was mostly with the servants, and they were a link with the people about. And there was famine, and in Sligo, some rioting. Which is indeed why Captain Logan was sent there.’

  But when she looked to Louisa for a reply, she saw an averted head, deeply hooded again. Rebuffed by what she took for boredom, she got up and went to the side. But almost immediately she ran back. ‘Mrs Harbin, we have entered the river.’

  The reply seemed to come from cold distances. ‘I know. I recognised that clump of pines.’

  To Frances’s eyes, half-shut against the sun, the thin branches of the pines melted away and left the dark tufts of foliage as if exploding in air. ‘They are very curious,’ she said timidly.

  Louisa’s hooded head did not move. ‘Quite distinctive.’

  ‘We must be nearly there.’

  ‘Hours yet.’

  But Frances, at the side again, saw in the thick brown swirls just below the surface of the water, a first greeting from their destination. Since nobody else seemed in the least excited, she crossed her arms on her breast, over her shawl, and hugged herself. But almost at once, this flush of excitement receded, leaving her face pale and frightened. She stared for a moment at the swirls of mud, then turned and went back slowly to Louisa. Refusing now to be unnerved by that motionless hooded figure, she sat down and spoke softly and earnestly.

  ‘I didn’t know it was a penal station.’

  Louisa drew back her head. For the first time, she looked angry. ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Oh, I knew—’

  ‘Certainly you did.’

  ‘I have put it badly.’

  ‘Then put it well.’

  ‘I knew it was a penal station. And I knew it was for those convicted twice, once at home and again in the colony. But I didn’t know it was only a penal station. I thought of it as a mixture of convict and free. Like Sydney, only smaller. Letty simply didn’t think to explain the difference. I didn’t know the waters were proscribed for fifty miles around. And the land too. I didn’t know that the commandant is coroner and sole magistrate and censor. I didn’t dream that every single article that enters is under his scrutiny—all mail, every single thing.’

  ‘And who informed you?’

  ‘Mr Edmund Joyce. We mean to correspond.’

  ‘My dear girl, you are right about the proscription of the land and water, but about the mail, someone has exaggerated. Those are the regulations, certainly, partly because where there are ships there is smuggling. But the commandant will not examine mail sent or received by his own household, or the officers’ households either. That’s what I dislike about your radicals—their childish suspicions and crude assumptions. It is always the same. Directly one begins to sympathise with them a little, something of this sort occurs, and puts one off. Oh but come now, don’t cry because your friends were mistaken.’

  Frances wiped her eyes and cheeks. ‘I am not. I am crying because I’m afraid.’

  ‘Lord, child! What of?’

  ‘I suppose—of arriving. You don’t like it yourself, ma’am, it seems to me.’

  ‘A mood. It comes when we enter the river, and goes as fast as it comes.’ Louisa set back her hood. ‘See me now, looking forward to my books and my sketching pads, and to tea from a china cup. And as for you, my dear, you are going to your own sister.’

  ‘A stranger. I haven’t seen her for eight years. And Captain Logan,’ said Frances, passionate through fresh tears, ‘is a perfect stranger.’

  Louisa set a long knobbly hand on one of hers. She said no more, but looked around the great sky as if finding there a confirmation that it was indeed a confounding world into which such young and lonely creatures were venturing every day. And no matter in what bold ignorance they set out, they must observe this detail, and that detail, until it must occur to them, one day, to be frightened. Frances had stopped crying; Louisa patted her hand. Her own two daughters, aged ten and twelve, were with relatives in England. She found it hard to recall their features, a fact she pressed home to her husband by pretending to forget their names. Captain Clunie and Lieutenant Edwards had gone below, and Amelia Bulwer was crossing the deck towards them.

  ‘You have not done much to cheer her,’ she remarked. But without a second glance at Frances, she sat on Louisa’s other side and spoke close to her ear.

  ‘He has come to relieve Lieutenant Bainbrigge.’

  ‘We all know that.’

  ‘But it is all we know. And what is more curious, it seems to be all he knows. But to send a captain—’ she broke off and directed a glance across Louisa at Frances. ‘Well, it is of no consequence,’ she said lightly.

  Frances excused herself and got up and went to the side. ‘But to send a captain,’ said Amelia, ‘to relieve a lieutenant? to become subordinate to another captain? It is not natural.’

  ‘You make too much of it.’

  ‘All the same, all the same, I wonder if he has come to take the command.’

  ‘Very likely, if Captain Logan’s regiment is for India.’

  ‘If the fifty-seventh is for India, it will not be until next year. This is only August.’

  ‘Or if the commandant is needed in Sydney.’

  ‘To press his libel action? Well, to be sure. But an absence of a few weeks hardly warrants a captain as relief. Indeed, if Captain Clunie is not to take the command, it is a perfect riddle.’

  ‘There will be an answer to it in the mailbag, Amelia. Nobody is sent without a covering letter from Mr Macleay.’

  Alexander Macleay, colonial secretary in Sydney, was Governor Darling’s closest colleague. ‘I am sure I hope so,’ said Amelia. ‘But there has been talk, and one does wonder. Does she, by the by—’ she pointed with her muff at Frances’s back—’know what the father of her boon companions wrote about her sister’s husband?’

  ‘I have not told her.’

  ‘She ought to be told.’

  ‘Leave her to Letty.’

  The muff was still pointing at Frances, though Amelia’s eyes were watching Louisa’s face. ‘A delightful young lady. But does she think a little too well of herself?’

  ‘No. Only a little too much. How boring these journeys are. I wish we were there.’

  ‘Dear Victor will be enchanted to see you.’

  ‘I shall be a change from overseers’ wives, to be sure.’

  Amelia put her muff to her mouth and giggled into it. ‘You are bold beyond anything.’

  ‘Glum rather than bold. I shan’t be enchanted to see dear Victor.’

  ‘Louisa, at heart he is the best of men. In my Lancelot’s opinion he is second to none.’

  ‘I know that, Amelia.’

  ‘Damon and Pythias. How pleasant it is to see them at night, with their pipes. I think, Louisa, the peace of our little community during the next few months will depend on how congenial our good commandant finds our new captain. But I am confident they will get on. Both are
Scots, both much of an age, both of a foot regiment . . . Indeed, I should not care for the task of establishing seniority. Oh, Louisa, look at that girl. I am not a critical woman, but just look.’

  Frances was standing with her elbows on the rail, her chin in her hands, and her bottom stuck out.

  ‘But her ignorance is not her fault,’ said Amelia. ‘It is the old old sad story, Louisa. Brought up by servants!’

  I shall live on that island, said Frances to herself, I shall live there for ever with my beloved husband.

  Her continuous search for a sanctuary, which was one aspect of her fear of the gaping world, had been directed by her reading into romantic expression. She had hardly admitted to herself her fear of the world, but that she knew her search to be only a fantasy was apparent in her choice of places, for she never chose any real or practicable place, but was attracted only by glimpses and suggestions and cities in clouds. In this case, the island rising out of the muddy river, though made more pleasant by contrast with flat and undistinguished shores, was only a mound of yellow sand on which grew a small grove of slender trees with thin foliage blowing all one way. In contour as plain as a pebble, it was a token or toy island, and since it was too small and unprovided to live on, it did not combat, by raising questions of ways and means, its ideal occupation by Frances and her husband. Nor did the figure of the husband demand gross definition, but was simply required to exist there, in the featureless blaze of romance. She fell into one of her elated trances. Her eyes, unfocused by staring at the island, could now see only a blurred image of the trees, like tall candles with green flames blown sideways, and presently they too disappeared, and so did the husband, and the dream of retreat itself, leaving her elation in its pure form, a matter of the affinity of her youth with air and water. She reasoned that if she were conscious of being asleep with her eyes open, she could not really be asleep, and yet she did maintain a kind of sleep, holding herself most beautifully at the very margin of the unconscious. And in this state time became so distorted that she could have believed this shortest stage of her journey to be the longest—longer than from Cork to Sydney, longer than from Sydney to Dunwich. But the progress of a new fantasy (that they would sail on like this for ever and ever) was impeded by an anxiety, only faintly jarring at first, but presently formulating itself into two words.

  ‘My hair.’

  They would soon arrive. All her hair, as commanded by Amelia, was thrust beneath her bonnet: she must go below and dress it.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Henry Cowper.

  ‘Are you speaking to me?’

  ‘My face is three inches from yours. Who else might I be speaking to?’

  Frances repressed nervous giggles. ‘I am nearly eighteen.’

  ‘Good Lord. You look as old as your sister.’

  ‘It’s my hair.’

  ‘Hair? I don’t see any hair.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. It was too wobbly underfoot to dress it. I had to poke it all under my bonnet again.’

  ‘Why didn’t you get Madge Noakes to help you?’

  She was sobered by the memory of Madge Noakes’s face gliding into the dark mirror behind her shoulder. ‘She offered her help, but I like to do my own hair.’

  ‘Then you ought to get a hairpiece like Mrs Harbin’s.’ He raised his voice for the benefit of Louisa, who stood nearby with her back turned. ‘Mrs Harbin has a hairpiece,’ he said, ‘like six red dead snails.’ Louisa looked at him over her shoulder and pursed her lips thoughtfully. Frances had discarded her shawl, cinched her waist with a wide belt, and was holding a reticule. Lieutenant Edwards sauntered by with his hands at his back, Amelia Bulwer and Captain Clunie stood in tired silence, and Madge Noakes and the Bulwers’ servant Maria, holding shawls and cloaks and muffs, talked apart in low voices. There was a slight whistling in the sails, a hurried whispering sound in the wash. Louisa Harbin, still looking over her shoulder at Henry, raised her eyebrows and drawled, ‘Lord, Henry, how you smell of rum.’

  ‘I always smell of rum.’

  Frances giggled again. Louisa looked at her hands fiddling with the reticule, then stepped back and stood at her side. On the banks of an olive green creek vines like ropes were twisted round gigantic trees with buttressed roots. Frances’s eyes searched the dark alleys between the trees, her imagination engaged by their unseen extensions; but she was tired and nervous, and rather cold (for she had discarded her shawl out of vanity), and could not for the moment proceed with fantasy. Then a sudden bend in the river disclosed another kind of country: on one bank pleasant wooded hills, and on the other low fields swarming with men in yellow hoeing between rows of very young wheat. They were so close that Frances could hear the unrhythmic sounds of their shifting irons and the collapsing links of chain. Overseers, carrying heavy sticks, lumbered over the unsettled soil among them, and on the perimeter of the field moved red-coated soldiers, crosses of white webbing stark against their breasts, and bayonets shining and precise against field and sky. All the passengers on the cutter were watching them. Captain Clunie exclaimed at the area under cultivation, and Amelia Bulwer told him in a fast pleased voice of other fields, other crops. In the streets of Sydney Frances had seen iron gangs coming and going from barracks, but she had never before seen so many at once, and nor had she seen them at work. It was their great number, perhaps, or the clumsiness of their fettered movements that made them appear sub-human, like animals adapted to mens’ work or goblins from under the hill. She hated herself for her aversion from them, for the recoil of her spirit and the agitation of her heart. She was still standing between Louisa and Henry Cowper. ‘Dear God,’ she whispered, ‘why must they look like that?’

  Both turned to look at her. She felt in their attitudes a kind of caution. ‘Like what?’ asked Henry Cowper.

  To spare them, or herself, she temporised. ‘They are so—small.’

  Henry Cowper shrugged, thrust his hands in his pockets, and with a swing of his shoulders moved away. He stood at a short distance, hands still in pockets, chin sunk in cravat, and his curved legs thrusting his calves against his trousers. Frances wondered how such a weary face could look so childish. ‘Mrs Bulwer told me he is good,’ she said to Louisa.

  ‘Amelia will never speak ill of anyone, though she sometimes pulls faces.’

  ‘Then he is not good?’

  ‘I am no judge of goodness. I believe he sometimes tries to be.’

  The wheatfield was spread across a long point of land. The cutter had passed the head of this point, and had reached the other side, when cries broke out from the field. One man had grasped his hoe near the blade and was bringing it down upon his neighbour’s head and shoulders. The attacked man fell, his attacker fell with him, and the rest of the gang drew inwards about them. The soldiers, their feet avoiding the young wheat, began to converge on this congestion of yellow, but before they could arrive it was broken into by two overseers. These, parting the gang, disclosed the two on the ground, one felled, the other propped on an arm like a man at a picnic. The soldiers drew back and watched, while on the cutter, the two convict women, and all the passengers except Frances, were watching in the same manner, impassive yet attentive. But the two overseers bent over the men on the ground and obscured them from view. The rest of the overseers brandished their sticks and shouted something like, ‘Hup! Hup!’ The prisoners began to work again, and the passengers to turn away.

  Henry Cowper came back to Louisa and Frances. ‘The fellow picked his time.’

  ‘Do you mean—’ began Frances. The shock of the incident had made her voice hoarse; she cleared her throat. ‘Do you mean he wanted us to see?’

  ‘No doubt of it.’ His voice still held a shade of the sulkiness, or resentment, with which he had met her first emotional response to the prisoners. ‘It’s a thing they often do,’ he said.

  The knowledge did not eliminate F
rances’s pity, but tempered it with an unwelcome reserve. ‘It simply shows,’ she said, reaching back for that first pity, ‘their great desperation.’

  ‘And their great cunning, alas,’ said Louisa.

  ‘It is said they kill because they wish to hang,’ said Frances.

  Henry nodded towards the receding wheatfield. ‘There’s no evidence that the fellow was killed.’

  ‘No. But I have heard it of others. And read of it, too.’

  ‘In the Monitor, no doubt,’ said Louisa. ‘Miss O’Beirne,’ she said to Henry, ‘is an admirer of Mr Smith Hall.’

  Frances had not imagined he could look shocked. He opened his little blue eyes as wide as possible. ‘Oh, I say! I say!’

  ‘Is Mr Smith Hall such a monster?’ cried Frances; but Louisa put a hand on her arm and said peremptorily, ‘Not so loud!’ And Frances, looking about her, caught the cold eyes of Amelia Bulwer, and noted Lieutenant Edwards’s blank astonishment and Captain Clunie’s quelling little blink. She lowered her voice, but still spoke with passion. ‘Mr Smith Hall would not have them worked in chains. And when Mrs Shelley was in Pisa—’

  ‘Mrs Shelley?’ echoed Henry with bewilderment.

  ‘The widow of the poet,’ interposed Louisa.

  ‘When Mrs Shelley was in Pisa, and saw chained prisoners sweeping the streets, she refused to stay.’

  ‘How did that profit them?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Had she money of her own?’ enquired Louisa.

  ‘It may have profited them,’ said Frances to Henry, ‘by drawing attention to their condition.’ And to Louisa she replied, rather more thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know about the money.’

  Frances herself had eighteen pounds a year, from her mother.

  Amelia Bulwer crossed over to them. After glancing unsmilingly from Louisa to Henry, she put both hands on Frances’s, over her reticule, and looked her full in the eyes. ‘Round the next bend you will see our botanical gardens. And round the one after that—’ she brought up her hands and softly clapped them—‘the settlement!’