Eveleigh certainly did not seem to expect a response. ‘In any case, Monsarrat,’ he said, ‘I was certainly genuine in my remarks about Robert Church. He was not a well-loved man. It may be that the rebellious O’Leary is the one we have to thank for ridding the world of him, but I’d be more comfortable if we established it beyond doubt before shipping her to the gallows. I’d like you to spend a few days at the Factory, if you would. Talk to O’Leary, of course. Take a statement. But talk to anyone else who seems of interest, as well. Because I’d really rather not hang a woman for a crime she didn’t commit, and the truth of the matter may turn out to be rather more complex than Daly would like.’
Chapter 3
I am well plaiced here now. I have a small room by the kichen and only Mr Monsurat (was that how his name was spelled? How dreadful she hadn’t asked!) to look after. It is his hand wich rote all of the letters you have had from me for the past two years. I’m happy and proud to ashore you that these words were put on the page by me without need of anyone else.
Hannah Mulrooney wrote quickly. Certainly too quickly to avoid the blotched pages for which Mr Monsarrat sometimes gently berated her. She was desperate to catch the letters and employ them to create meaning before they floated out of reach, before they became again what they had been for all but the past month of her life – meaningless symbols whose secrets were reserved for others. And she always felt impatient in getting letters off to Padraig, imagining him reading them in astonishment at the phenomenon of a literate mother.
She was reasonably pleased so far, though. Only a few minor smudges. Until the knock on the door startled her into a more egregious blotch at the end of the sentence. She glared at the pen until she was confident it felt the full weight of her irritation, then put it down and went to the door.
When she opened it, her peevishness transferred itself to the person who had knocked.
‘May I come in?’
‘And there’d be little use in that, now, Miss Stark. Mr Monsarrat’s at his labours. As all people are at this hour. Decent people, in any case.’
Sophia Stark’s eyebrows drew together at the slight. You’ll have wrinkles if you keep at it, Hannah thought.
Hannah had enjoyed Monsarrat’s friendship for two years. And until recently that friendship had lived entirely within the confines of the Port Macquarie penal settlement, where as a free woman and housekeeper to the commandant Hannah was considered a higher class of human than the twice-criminalised clerk.
Monsarrat was one of three people she deeply cared about in that claustrophobic place, with its glowering mountains and voluble seas. Those other two were gone now, one at the hands of the other. And for a time after, her friendship with Monsarrat and thoughts of her son had been the only things keeping her tethered to the earth. Sometimes she had feared they would not be enough.
Odd, then, to be here in Parramatta, Monsarrat’s servant instead of his superior. She didn’t mind, of course. Not a bit. She was happy to continue to produce large quantities of tea, happy to continue conversing with the man who had made the penal settlement bearable. Not quite so happy to be his student in the matter of letters, but willing to put up with it.
But, still, it required a certain amount of adjustment.
It was even more difficult to adjust to the fact that Monsarrat had not sprung fully formed into the world two years before. That he had in fact existed for significantly longer, and had a past of which Hannah knew only the barest outlines. They had not spoken to each other much about their backgrounds. People didn’t here. If you travelled too far down this river you would invariably be snagged by a submerged log. Better to leave threats beneath the surface.
But sometimes the river ejected pieces of detritus on to the bank where they had no business being. And in Hannah Mulrooney’s view, the sharpest of these was Sophia Stark.
Hannah knew that Sophia and Monsarrat had had a liaison of sorts. She also knew that Monsarrat had lost his first ticket of leave after being found out of his district, on the way from Sophia’s bed; that if Sophia hadn’t insisted he increase the frequency of his visits to her, ensuring he was abroad on a Sunday, at a time when the particularly vehement, convict-hating Reverend Horace Bulmer was likely to be plying the roads around Parramatta, he might have escaped detection.
This did not make Hannah look kindly on the younger woman at the door.
‘I’m aware of Mr Monsarrat’s location, Mrs Mulrooney,’ Sophia said. ‘And had I wanted to visit him, I’d have come at a time when I knew he’d be home. It is not him I’ve come to see, but you.’
Hannah simply stared at Sophia’s sun bonnet, which bore a fussy cloth flower. Surely the time has passed for such girlish decorations, at least in your case, she thought. She was mildly alarmed at her attitude. She usually enjoyed the company of women, had in fact yearned for it after the death of Honora Shelborne. She would, she liked to think, welcome anyone who could make Mr Monsarrat happy.
But if Sophia was making Mr Monsarrat happy, Hannah had yet to see evidence of it. She was not, it had to be admitted, looking particularly hard. It was difficult to see past the brittle pretensions of the former chambermaid, who had been brought here for the theft of items of far greater value than those stolen by most convicts.
It usually took a far longer acquaintance for Hannah to decide to devote some of her time to truly disliking someone, to doing it properly. Sophia had first walked through the door of the small house on Monsarrat’s arm a few weeks before, and Hannah had been fully prepared to warm to her. She was still negotiating her way around the altered geography of her friendship with Monsarrat, and wasn’t immediately sure how she should greet Sophia as she stepped into the small parlour, lifting her skirts to avoid snagging them on some crates which had not yet been removed. A tentative smile, Hannah thought, might do it. A few steps in her direction, perhaps to be followed by a word or two of welcome, an offer of tea.
She never got as far as the offer. Sophia took off her shawl, handed it to Hannah, and turned without acknowledging her to comment to Monsarrat on the dust on top of the mantle.
Hannah was generally difficult to offend. Particularly if she believed the offence was unintentional, she was able to shrug it off, a useful ability in this place. But there were people who pretended to be what they weren’t. Who aspired to a status they were not born to. There was nothing wrong with this in Hannah’s mind, except that those thus inclined tended to be dismissive of their fellow former convicts as a means of distancing themselves from their own squalid histories. They vaulted a chasm that would never again allow them to stand in the Irishwoman’s good graces. In treating Hannah like a coat rack, Sophia had crossed that line.
Perhaps Monsarrat had spoken to Sophia after that tense first encounter. In any case, the next time she arrived at the house, she gave Hannah a nod and a clipped good evening. Hannah responded in kind, but no greeting, however effusive, could have pulled Sophia back into the warmth of her regard.
And now Sophia stood here again, interrupting her letters, her new communion, still fragile and tenuous and, Hannah feared, prone to destruction if she was not given the peace to concentrate on it.
‘Might I come in,’ Sophia said. Not a question. A demand.
‘You might, I suppose. Whether you’re welcome to …’
Sophia sighed, forcing the air out through her nose rather than her mouth. ‘This is getting tiresome, you know. Please let me in and I can assure you I won’t detain you longer than absolutely necessary.’
Hannah stood aside, watching as Sophia made her way into the parlour and seated herself. She looked at the housekeeper, perhaps expecting tea to be offered. If so, the woman was in the grips of a futile hope.
Hannah sat down opposite her. ‘Kindly remove your hat,’ she said. ‘You are inside.’
Surprisingly, Sophia did so. She put the hat in front of her, its ribbons neatly folded underneath it, and adjusted it so that it sat square. She looked like a goddess looming
over a small straw mountain.
‘You wish to speak with me.’
‘Indeed. I seek your cooperation.’
Hannah said nothing. It cost her – while she had been able to call upon the written word for only a short time, she used the spoken word with skill, and enjoyed doing so. But she also enjoyed the discomfiting effect her silence seemed to be having.
‘Your cooperation in the matter of Mr Monsarrat.’
‘I didn’t know he had become “a matter”, as you put it.’
‘I am aware that he relied heavily on you in Port Macquarie. That he holds you in high esteem.’
‘He does, as a matter of fact. I have given him reason to.’
‘Are you aware, Mrs Mulrooney – no, of course not, how could you be? – that a woman in my position, letting rooms and so forth, requires a certain amount of protection if her reputation is not to be irrevocably besmirched?’
‘I’ll need to take you at your word for that, now.’
‘Please do. And the most effective form of protection comes in the shape of a man. I wish it were not so, but my … friendships, shall we say, with certain discreet and highly placed gentlemen have ensured I can operate my business without having soldiers knocking on the door in the early hours of the morning, full of rum and shillings.’
‘I see. You trade in a different currency, I suppose.’
‘If you insist on characterising it thus. I had for some time a particular friendship with a clerk in the colonial secretary’s office, a man who frequently travelled from Sydney to Parramatta, and was unable to stay at Government House.’
‘Not highly placed enough, I suppose.’
‘Perhaps not. Even if he were, he would probably have needed lodgings – Governor Brisbane refused to have guests at Government House. I shall not name this gentleman, but he was very generous. I owe him my business.’
‘Only him?’
‘Mrs Mulrooney, you and I both came here on ships on which men outnumbered women, exiled to a colony which suffers a similar imbalance between the sexes. We have both seen the sailors and the soldiers and the civil officers and the merchants come and go, offering favours in return for favours. I do not surmise you fell for those blandishments. Pay me the same compliment.’
‘Yet those blandishments worked on some,’ said Hannah. ‘On many, perhaps even on most. I may be the only one honest enough to openly question the source of your money, but I’d be surprised if no one else were thinking it.’
‘Then you, and they, are wrong. This friendship with the colonial secretary’s man was not … onerous, I suppose, but it served to provide a measure of protection from those among my customers who might otherwise have expected me to take my hospitality too far.’
‘This clerk, he ran away?’
‘No. I imagine he is at this very moment sitting in the colonial secretary’s office just as Mr Monsarrat is sitting in the governor’s. Still there, and still rather happy to be reputed to be my friend. Or he would be, if I had not ended the matter with him.’
‘And why did you do that?’
‘Mr Monsarrat came back. Need you ask?’
‘And I suppose, given his employer, you feel Mr Monsarrat can provide a higher level of, as you call it, protection.’
‘Not a bit of it. I’d say he could, of course, but that’s not why I ended things with the colonial secretary’s clerk. Quite simply, I am rather attached to your employer. And his high regard is very important to me, as you might imagine.’
Hannah grunted.
‘So I’ve come to ask you something of a favour. Given that you have his confidence, and his esteem.’
‘That is true.’
‘I’m aware, Mrs Mulrooney, that you may not feel I am an appropriate consort for Mr Monsarrat.’
Hannah wasn’t certain what a consort was, but she was not going to admit that to this woman, who would have taken it as further evidence that tea and dirt were the only elements she could cope with.
‘None of my business,’ she said, ignoring the internal voice that chided her when she lied. ‘Mr Monsarrat is as free as he was before you convinced him to break the conditions of his ticket of leave – don’t think I don’t know about that. Two years in Port Macquarie and he never once mentioned you, you know. And then the story came out shortly after we got here.’
‘I wasn’t responsible for his losing his freedom.’
‘Oh? What was he doing out of his district then?’
‘You will believe as you wish, Mrs Mulrooney,’ said Sophia. ‘However, I would like you to think about Mr Monsarrat’s future. A man of his years – soon he will be closer to forty than thirty – surely his happiness rests on being accepted by his social betters, and his acceptance rests, at least in part, on marriage. And Mr Monsarrat is not the type to marry for convenience.’
‘No. Convenience has never been his chief reason for doing anything. And his acceptance will surely rest as much on whom he marries as on the existence of a marriage itself.’
‘Yes, and I’m aware that you are free with your opinions – far more so than most domestics would be with their employer.’
‘I am not a domestic. I am his friend.’
‘That being the case, may I ask you to cease whispering against me? I know what you say, I can guess. I can read it in between his words to me, in his caution. There is a reserve there now that didn’t exist before Port Macquarie.’
‘Put there, no doubt, by your lack of correspondence when you thought he was lost to respectable society, in the wilds of the north.’
‘It’s true I didn’t write to him, nor he to me. We both knew that would be the way of it. Now he has returned, though … I am not asking you to praise me to him, just to refrain from highlighting what you may view as my inadequacies.’
‘Miss Stark, I will make you only one promise. I will speak as I see. I always have and I do not intend to change that.’
Sophia stood, lifting her hat, calmly placing it back on her head, tucking in any strands of hair that didn’t frame her face to its best advantage, and tying the ribbon beneath her chin so that it was perfectly symmetrical.
‘Very well then, Mrs Mulrooney. Thank you for your candour. I also must speak as I see fit, and while your honesty today is commendable, perhaps you have been less than forthright with Mr Monsarrat when it comes to certain aspects of your past.’
Hannah narrowed her eyes. Of course, in this place you could make veiled references to dark pasts and be right eight, nine times out of ten. She was polishing a retort so it would fly smoothly when she ejected it, when the front door opened.
Monsarrat was flushed, she noticed. Accounted for, no doubt, by his insistence on wearing that black coat in the November heat.
‘Mrs Mulroonry, I need to … Oh, hello, Sophia. Unexpected delight, as always. You’ll have to excuse me for the moment, though. I am on business, and a rather indelicate variety, not one I’d wish to burden you with.’
‘Of course,’ said Sophia smoothly. ‘I was simply passing the time with your housekeeper. I shall leave you to your affairs.’ She glanced at Hannah, and would almost certainly have seen the smirk the Irishwoman was unable to keep from her face.
After Sophia left, closing the door very firmly, Monsarrat turned to Hannah.
‘We’re to go to the Female Factory first thing in the morning,’ he said.
‘We? You wish me to accompany you?’
‘Of course. It seems there may have been some feminine involvement in a crime which has been committed. As I am teaching you to write, I must beg you to return the favour and teach me to read.’
Chapter 4
For an institution of women, the Female Factory drew an inordinate number of men to the gates in its austere sandstone walls, whose verticals gave the place a solidity and a pretension to authority which other structures in Parramatta lacked.
The men, of course, were there because of the women. The superintendent paraded the First Class inmates before any
man who came seeking a wife. Emancipated convicts who had got themselves a piece of land to farm, which could only be reached by day upon day of dusty travel. Labourers and dock workers, perhaps. Rough men who had no romantic notions of marriage, most of them viewing it as a cheap way to get a servant. The man would select a woman and if she was willing the marriage would be arranged.
And the woman generally was, although not always. There were whispers of a fight that had broken out in the room where the women were brought, one by one, to be assessed. One man – a romantic, a rare species here – had brought a bonnet to give to the woman he selected. The object of his attention liked the bonnet. Unfortunately, she didn’t like the man who was offering it, and he left, wifeless, with only a black eye and a handful of shredded straw and ribbon.
* * *
Monsarrat was grateful that Hannah had agreed to come with him today, grateful to have at his side a woman whose mind naturally ran in the channels of logic and observation, channels into which he had had to train his own thoughts to flow. To tell the truth, he occasionally envied Mrs Mulrooney her analytical brilliance, bestowed as it was on a former convict who in the normal run of things would have had little call for it.
But it had not been the normal run of things for quite some time, and certainly was not now. Hannah Mulrooney had been his friend when he himself was still a felon. Now he had been able to offer her employment, he intended to press her into service not only in making tea but in making deductions as well. While the governor’s man might attract attention at the Factory, his housekeeper would become all but invisible among her bonded sisters, and Monsarrat had no doubt she would use that advantage to its fullest extent.
‘Sophia was assigned fairly soon after she arrived, I think,’ said Monsarrat. ‘But she may have been at the Female Factory for a short while. I shall ask her.’
‘If you think she’ll be open with you,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. She was weaving her way along the road, trying to avoid the worst of the ruts and holes and to stay in the shade available from the river gums. ‘Madam won’t welcome it, the reminder that she used to be a convict. But if you’re going to annoy her, it might as well serve a purpose.’
The Unmourned Page 3