Both men fell silent before they reached the path beyond the verandah. Hands clasped behind and heads slightly bent, they walked by at a relaxed and companionable pace. The path took them on a winding ascent to the road. At the gate Private Collison stood to attention, and was put at ease. The commandant’s house was the last on the road along the river bank. With their backs to the window and the attentive women, the two men stood facing the main settlement, while the commandant, with one stiffened hand, described a slow arc in the air, as if outlining the curve of Windmill Hill. He held it for a few moments at the foot of the hill, then moved it up and down in a chopping movement, talking all the time into Clunie’s face, while Clunie nodded and nodded.
Letty was watching as if afraid to breathe, while beside her, Louisa made a sour mouth. The dissatisfactions of her marriage made her slightly resemble those women who disparage the marriages of their friends, continually asking what so-and-so can see in such-and-such a man; but she was saved from the excesses of the type both by her ironic self-awareness, and by an appreciation (also owed partly to the dissatisfactions of her marriage) of the attractions of men. She could usually divine what any woman could see in her particular man: she could now surmount her own distaste and see that Patrick Logan, even when standing still, gave an effect of movement only momentarily checked, of so much energy compressed that he made Captain Clunie beside him look heavy and staid and plumb-weighted.
The two men and Collison moved off towards the settlement. Louisa sighed, and said, ‘Well,’ and turned rather angrily from the window. ‘Well!’ said Letty also, in a tone of glad relief. She put her fingertips together and smiled at Louisa. She was pretty at all times, but the infusion of love into her face could make her beautiful. Louisa sighed again. ‘Well, we may hope he has taken one of his likings. Continue your rest, Letty. I shall see Frances in the nursery on my way out.’
*
Outside the french doors of the nursery, Robert Logan, aged six, was leaning against a verandah post watching two of the gardeners at work. Inside, Frances sat in a child-sized chair across the table from her niece Laetitia, called Lucy to distinguish her from her mother. When Frances turned her head she could just see, above the intervening foliage, the heads of Captain Clunie, Patrick Logan, and the young soldier who had come to the wharf last night. In the commandant’s head was the talking mouth, Captain Clunie’s head kept nodding, and the soldier’s flat and regular profile was unmoving. Frances sat bolt upright, a toy teacup of water in one hand and a saucer in the other. Now the commandant’s hand was chopping up and down, and disappearing at every downstroke into the foliage. ‘Will you take something, ma’am?’ she heard Lucy ask.
She turned to meet an upraised enquiring gaze. Lucy, four years old, was quite comfortable at the little table, but Frances had to sit away from it, lest she tip it up with her knees. ‘A little cold meat, if you please,’ she replied.
‘You must call me ma’am.’ Lucy handed her aunt an empty plate. ‘This is real meat, not kangaroo meat.’
‘It is delicious, ma’am,’ said Frances. She peeped from the corner of an eye through the french doors, but the three heads had gone.
‘You’re not eating your meat,’ said Lucy.
Frances made vigorous chewing movements, and Lucy, watching her closely, did the same. On the verandah Robert called, ‘What are you doing, Martin?’
Martin’s reply could not be heard.
‘No, you’re not, Martin.’
Martin must have said he was.
‘No, you’re not pulling weeds, Martin. Because why? Because you couldn’t.’
Martin may have asked why he couldn’t.
‘Because you couldn’t pull a greasy stick from a dog’s arse, that’s why, Martin.’
Frances rose and went through the french doors. She had already seen the gardeners on her way to and from the privy that morning, and she guessed that Martin was the dark young man, hardly more than a boy, who had stopped his work to watch her from beneath the brim of his cloth hat. She could see him again now, but was careful not to look full at him. All the same, as she took Robert by a shoulder and turned him towards the room, she caught a glimpse of his face twisted into a leer. It seemed directed at her, seemed to announce a victory over her. ‘You are hurting me,’ said Robert, and indeed, she was gripping his shoulder with angry force.
Lucy was still at the table. With her head on one side, she offered Robert an empty plate. ‘A little cold meat?’
‘No. It has ants on it.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Lucy with a threatening simper.
‘It has. I hate ants. They taste hot. And anyway, it’s only pretence meat.’
Lucy could not say pretence. ‘It is not. Is it, Aunt Fanny? What he said?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Frances. ‘Look, I am eating it.’ And she sat down and chewed unhappily.
Robert knocked the plate out of his sister’s hand. ‘It’s rotten meat. It’s got maggots in it.’
Lucy flung herself on the floor, screaming. Robert crushed the plate underfoot. ‘I’m killing the maggots,’ he shouted.
Frances knelt by Lucy and raised her, still screaming, into an upright position in her arms. Robert ran and put his arms as far as they would reach round them both. ‘Don’t cry, Lucy,’ he said. ‘They would have crawled up Lucy’s arm,’ he said to Frances. ‘That’s why I did it.’
Lucy stopped screaming and hit him, in a feeble and rather experimental manner, in the face. He laughed, and so did Lucy. ‘Aunt Fanny,’ said Lucy then, ‘make him take some cold meat.’
‘Oh, very well,’ said Robert, ‘I’ll take a bit of your old meat.’
The two children went and sat at the little table. Both were pale and beautiful.
‘Aunt Fanny,’ said Lucy, ‘you come too.’
‘There are only two chairs.’
‘You can sit on the floor.’
Frances was about to sit on the floor when the door was opened by Louisa Harbin. By Frances’s rush of relief at the sight of her, by her seeming so familiar, like a relation or an old friend, Frances was able to gauge for the first time the full extent of her own feeling of estrangement in her sister’s household. She got to her feet and crossed the room quickly. ‘I hope you are well this morning, ma’am.’
‘Quite well. I have been with Letty and am on my way home.’ Louisa was looking at the two children, who were laughing and rapidly picking all kinds of food from here and there on the table. ‘What hair they both have,’ she said. ‘They could light dark places.’
‘I wish I could put my mind to them. I’m so unsettled.’
‘That’s very natural. I enquired about the man in the wheatfield. A man named Fagan. He wasn’t much injured. He is in the hospital.’
‘And his attacker?’
‘I expect he will be punished. You didn’t think to enquire yourself?’
‘I thought of it,’ said Frances in a low voice.
‘I wondered about you last night. Which of your selves came out?’
Frances laughed, but desperately flung out a hand. ‘The very worst.’
‘The radical?’
‘No, no.’ Frances covered her face with both hands, then took them away and said, ‘The coward.’
‘Gracious, child, we all have one of those.’
‘Not as absurd as mine.’
‘Well,’ said Louisa, ‘you can’t be afraid of Letty.’
Frances considered for a moment. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Of the commandant?’
‘Yes!’ Frances beat her fists together. ‘It’s as if I were nine years old again.’
‘Familiarity is the cure.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Frances bleakly.
‘Letty will join you soon. Then you will feel better.’
&n
bsp; ‘I think I shall feel worse, because she will think me more stupid than ever. I feel quite wildly unsettled. What is wrong with me? My room is very pretty. She had gone to such trouble. How can anything so pretty be so forbidding? I feel it almost impertinent of me to lie upon the bed. Yet I have been in lodgings, and in ships. But then, they don’t pretend to be one’s home, do they? Mrs Harbin, if I feel like this, arriving in my sister’s house, what must servant girls feel in their first place?’
‘I can answer only for myself. I felt exposed and mortified, a horrible hybrid thing.’
Frances simply stared. ‘I was a governess,’ explained Louisa.
‘But a governess is hardly—’
‘Frances, never let anyone persuade you of that. Unless you are marvellously lucky, the mistress will consider you one. And the band of servants will not presume to befriend you. Governessing made marriage look very attractive, and with all my present knowledge, Frances, it would make it so again.’
‘Mar-tin!’ called Robert from the verandah.
‘They are not allowed to talk to the gardeners,’ warned Louisa.
Frances called Robert as she went to the french doors, and he came back to the room at once, without remark. As she was shutting the doors, the young gardener, who was working nearby with an older man, raised his face to her. In his rough grey clothes he looked ugly and crumpled and stunted, and the face he raised was as unattractive as his clothes. But there was no mistaking the fear in his eyes, and the plea that surely sought mercy for his former spontaneous jeer. The older man went on working without faltering, but with a set and stony look on his face, as if to make clear his dissociation from the boy. Frances recognised him as the man who had carried the torch to the wharf the night before. He was taller than most, bandy and wiry, with a big hooked nose and a prim mouth. Like the overseers in the wheatfield, he wore grey slops and a straw hat.
Frances shut the doors. The children had resumed their game. ‘I wish Letty had warned me,’ she said to Louisa.
‘Letty is forgetful at present. The children are not allowed to speak to the men, nor are the men allowed to speak to the children. The commandant,’ said Louisa, ‘would be quite beside himself.’
‘Would he have the men punished?’
‘I expect so. All the prisoners assigned to the households are of the first class. At the very least they would lose their pay and privileges, so leniency is not a kindness. The children pick up words so fast. You have a young man here who used to help with the bullocks, and the bullock drivers do use the most curious language to urge their beasts on. Some of the officers find it vastly amusing, but not Captain Logan, I assure you. You consider that so amazing?’
Frances’s amazement was not for Patrick Logan’s prudery, but for the disclosure that there were working bullocks on the settlement. She did not correct Louisa’s impression because she was reluctant to reveal her Sydney friends in another mistake. But when Louisa had gone, and she was picking up the plate Robert had broken, she set herself to recall the words of Edmund Joyce.
‘You will find when you get there, my dear girl, that there is not a working beast on the place. The prisoners are the working beasts. The regulations are quite clear. Working cattle are not to be employed in labour that can be done by men. And what labour can not be done by men,’ he asked bitterly, ‘if there are enough of them, and their lives are held so cheap?’
‘You are saying, then, that Captain Logan is—’
But he had not let her say what the commandant was. ‘Oh, up to a point, he is bound by the regulations.’ In speaking of Logan his manner had resembled that of the Hall girls, holding in its evasion a touch of stern pity for her, and an embargo on further questions. It had made her feel both vaguely humiliated and vaguely grateful, but she now asked herself if there had not been something shallow and ostentatious about both his sympathy for her, and his bitterness about the plight of the prisoners.
Lucy had spilled water on her dress, and Robert was complaining of hunger. In reply to Frances’s summons on the bell came Elizabeth Robertson. An emancipist, brought by the Logans from Sydney, she was of a type soothingly familiar to Frances: a fat old woman, garrulous and inattentive, with a ruminating mouth and sore feet.
‘The pretty plate, it’s a shame. Hungry. Well, hungry will have to be fed. The cabbages got that bit of frost on them. And Miss Lucy needs drying off. Frost sweetens them. And put in the pan with that lump of pig fat, and that bit of caraway. Martin come and asked me for caraway. For Gilligan, he says. Get away, says I, Gilligan wants for nothing. His own hut in the garden. All the greens he can eat.’
‘Why is he so privileged?’ asked Frances.
‘Well, miss, he can’t live in barracks, for what the men would do to him. Him being scourger too.’
‘Gilligan lays it on!’ cried Robert. He raised an arm, then brought it down. ‘Swoosh!’
‘I never give Martin that caraway,’ said Elizabeth.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Another weak point,’ said Patrick Logan.
From a bench he took a circlet of leather, like the top of a boot, and offered it for Clunie’s inspection. ‘It is necessary,’ he said. ‘It stops the iron from damaging their legs. And yet, it wears, d’you see? Or can be scraped with a stone, bit by bit, and thinned down. And then they grease their heels, and slip their irons, and run.’
Five musters a day, thought Clunie, and five inspections, and still they run. He did not know whether to be admiring or appalled at such ingenuity and determination. But the commandant had begun to look irritated, and was joggling the circlet as though to hurry him into comment. Although their long discussion in the office had come to a friendly conclusion, it was clear that the commandant continued to be fretted by the ambiguity of Clunie’s presence at Moreton Bay. For the most part he was good-humoured and friendly, but now and again his anger flashed. As he proffered the leather circlet he was scowling.
Clunie, himself unable precisely to explain his posting, but not of a nature to be worried by it, took the circlet and turned to the light of the doorway to examine it. They were in the lumber yard. They had inspected the tailors and boot-makers, the tanners, the soap and candle makers, the carpenters and coopers and wheelwrights, and had now entered the foundry and smithy, where nails and bolts and chains were made, where animals were shod and men ironed. Wherever they had gone, the commandant had explained that when he was away at Dunwich, or at the Limestone Station, or the Eagle Farm, Bainbrigge had done this, or Bainbrigge had done that; for having reached their friendly conclusion, no possibility must be mentioned than that Clunie had been sent to take Lieutenant Bainbrigge’s place as engineer and second in command. Clunie examined the leather circlet with conciliating care. ‘I suppose they will continue to run,’ he said, ‘as long as you’ve too few capable overseers.’
‘You’re right. They’re slack. They tire of the details. They’re slack.’ All irritability gone, he eagerly took the circlet from Clunie’s hand. ‘See?’ He traced with a finger the variation in its thickness. ‘They missed that.’
Dismay showed in Clunie’s face. ‘It’s very slight.’
‘Enough. Fellow who wore it was out for a week. Came in yesterday with a spear wound in the arm.’
He tossed the circlet on to the bench and led the way further into the smithy. Tall, stiff-backed, his step delicate, his head, restless or watchful, turning this way and that, he impressed Clunie as being rather too much of the commandant. Clunie did not doubt that the manner was natural to him, but considered that for these prisoners and their guards it would have been better modified.
The twenty prisoners who had come in the Isabella, and who had been brought up the river that morning in the settlement’s second cutter, the Glory, were waiting in a row for their irons to be knocked off. Clunie had watched them at exercise on the deck of the Isabella a
nd recognised them now by nodding along the line. But Logan was looking them over in the sharp but musing manner of a craftsman inspecting new tools. ‘A wretched lot,’ he said despondently.
‘None was sentenced to be worked in irons?’
‘None of these.’ A sudden cessation in the hammering and clanging did not make him lower his voice. ‘But these three over here—all old hands, quite degraded—I sentenced these to be ironed yesterday.’
All three old hands must have heard this soft laconic statement, but none showed signs of doing so. Two were of the usual deficient height, and one of these was now pointed at by the commandant. ‘Bulbridge. You saw him attack another man in the wheatfield.’ The third man had a bandaged arm; he was of more than middle height and looked in his thirties. ‘And this is the absconder I just spoke of,’ said Logan. ‘He won’t run again.’
Clunie saw that the twenty new arrivals could not take their eyes off Logan, whom they were scrutinizing with a surreptitious greed and terror, but that the attention of the three old hands was fixed on himself. The tallish absconder was standing, waiting for his trousers to be split to accommodate the irons already on his legs, and the two little ones, Bulbridge and the other, sat on the ground, their backs against the wall and their legs extended before them. The commandant, pointing to their ankles, explained that this was a new method, still on trial, to circumvent their trick of making their feet swell before the irons were put on. ‘We do them in the coolness of the morning, and sit them down beforehand.’
The Commandant Page 5