by Lena Dowling
The woman lifted a handful of knives and forks out of the bottom of the tub and dropped them clattering into the rack that looked like it had been put together with old bits of wire found around the farm.
‘And where do you think you’re rushing off to, madam? Since you’re here you can attach yourself to that and help me out.’ The cook pointed to the end of the bench and Colleen picked up a towel.
‘He was a real gentleman, your Mr Biggs, standing up for your honour like that.’
‘What do you mean?’
What was the old woman talking about, Samuel defending her honour? It was the first she had heard about it.
‘When Mr Biggs roughed up that convict who made comments against your character a few days back. Had him on the ground fit to kill him. It were only Mr Hunter intervening that saved him so they’re saying.’
‘Oh, yes, that.’ Colleen said, trying to sound as if she knew all about it.
‘Whatever it is that’s gone wrong between you two, best not to let the sun set too many times on it eh? You’ve found yourself a good one there. You don’t want to go spoiling it with pointless bickering.’
Back in the cabin, after all the dishes were dried and put away, Colleen chewed on what the cook had said. If Samuel truly believed she was a whore why would he do that? Why did he care enough about what some lowly convict thought of her that he would risk attacking a man?
There was a silly flutter of hope in her chest. The sort of hope only an eejit would pay any mind to. She knew better. If she knew anything, she knew men. She had seen enough of them over the years and men were like that. Fights broke out over the girls all the time at O’Shane’s and not because they specially cared but because it’s just what men did.
She was still Samuel’s wife. A slight on her was a slight on him. Most likely it was just Samuel’s manly pride getting the better of him.
But she had her pride as well. For years it had been the only thing she had besides Nellie to keep her warm at night. That, and believing one day she would be freed.
‘Zon-er-rated’ is what Nellie had called it. Nellie liked to dream that one day when her love, Sir William Mellwood, learned the truth of what his mother had done, he would come for them and they would both be found innocent.
To make Nellie happy she had played along although she doubted William could have been in the dark. He must have suspected. If he really loved Nellie he would have seen through her wickedness and had them freed.
But Colleen had turned it into a game, the zoneration game, to take Nellie’s mind off things. They would each choose the first three things each of them would do, buy, and eat as soon as they were freed and then have to give their reasons why.
Here with Samuel she was practically free but nowhere near zonerated and with no one, least of all her own husband, who believed she was innocent.
That thought more than anything else brought the heat surging back up under her collar. Samuel could think what he liked about her, but before he made up his mind for good he was feckin’ well going to hear the truth.
‘So this is where you’re hiding out,’ Colleen said after she found Samuel were she expected to, in the barn, beside a nest of blankets and a handful of candle stubs laid out behind the horse stalls.
Samuel sniffed.
‘I’m not hiding. I’m whittling.’
‘If you want to think of me as a whore then there’s not much I can do about it, but before you make up your mind you can hear my side of it.’
‘If there’s something you need get off your chest then don’t let me stop you.’ Samuel said without looking up, shaving another slice of wood from the figure he was carving.
‘I wasn’t the thief they said I was. I never stole that silver. I’ve never stolen anything in me life, actually. Not even so much a hairpin and that’s the fact of it.’
‘You were innocent?’ Samuel stopped with the whittling and looked up, his eyes wide as if he had never even considered the possibility that she had been stitched up for something she hadn’t done.
‘Both of us were, me and me cousin. The lady we worked for, Lady Mellwood, trumped the whole thing up — to get rid of us because her son was all eyes for Nellie and she was afeared, with some good cause as it happened, that they’d run off together. She hid a box of silver knives and forks under our bed and got us both fourteen years. It was really meant for Nellie, her son wouldn’t have bothered with me, but because we shared the bed they said it were both of us.’
‘Fourteen years for a simple theft? There must have been more to it than that?’
Samuel looked doubtful but she wasn’t shutting up now. She had come to give him the truth and she wasn’t leaving until he had heard all of it.
‘There was. Lady Mellwood told the court we went for the knives when she found us out, cut herself and everything, which made it worse. It was all lies. The whole lot of it. She just wanted to make sure Nellie was well out of the way and wasn’t never coming back for her precious son.’
Samuel closed his eyes, pursed his lips upwards and sighed as if he believed her yet wished he didn’t have to.
Samuel hadn’t been expecting that. Not that he had imagined she had been involved in anything heinous, just the theft of some lace, or a trinket or some silver perhaps, something shiny or pretty that a young girl from deprived circumstances had been unable to resist. But completely innocent?
‘And I’ll tell you something else n’ all. I didn’t choose to go there, to O’Shane’s. Nellie and me, Nellie my cousin that is, we were tricked. We thought it were going to be a respectable place. I was an untouched maid until my first night there.’
‘Oh God. Colleen,’ he said as the full meaning of what she was saying sank in. It hadn’t even crossed his mind. ‘And your cousin?’
‘Still there in that evil place and there isn’t nothing anyone can do about it neither. Danny’s got some friends in high places, although not so high and mighty they can’t lower themselves to grace his upstairs rooms.’
‘Oh Lord, come here,’ he patted the space on the horse blanket beside him. She looked at him for a moment as if she didn’t quite believe he had accepted what she had told him.
‘Is there is anything I can do?’
She shook her head.
‘Everything you can do you’ve already done by marrying me and setting me free.’
He might have done her a good turn in marrying her but for some reason the thought didn’t make him feel any better. He had been cruel with his comments. The woman could hardly be dubbed a whore, not when she had been forced.
‘That night in your bed, you were me first. My real first. The first man I ever chose to be with, willingly.’
The words came out muffled as if she was on the brink of tears.
It shocked him to see her buckle. Colleen had so much gumption about her, this new vulnerability beneath her boldness rocked him to the core.
Not to mention her words.
First time.
It had been a first time for him as well. The first time a woman had seduced him. The first time a woman had taken him in his mouth, the first time his blood had run hot and thick with desire for a wife.
Amelia had been devoted and kind but he had never felt about her the way he felt for Colleen. His first wife had been willing. No, even that wasn’t the right word for it. She had been acquiescent but he never really knew if she enjoyed it or not. Whenever he had been with Amelia the coupling had had its source elsewhere, a barmaid heaving her breasts as she lifted the tankards in a crowded tavern, a comely courtesan he had passed in Covent Garden, or memories of women he had lusted after but had spurned his advances when he was a ruddy faced overweight man of business amongst a sea of better prospects. With Colleen it had been different.
‘It’s alright Colleen. You needn’t say anymore.’
‘But I want to. You need to know that to be doin’ this through choice with no one forcin’ me, no one payin’ for it, it’s like it’s all ne
w.’
She looked up at him, her sweet brown eyes dewy with tears. Instinctively he brushed a droplet away with his thumb. It was just a single drop, but making contact with her warm soft skin set all hell breaking loose inside him.
‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been such a fool.’
‘You’ve been a stupid eejit, you mean.’
He raised his arm around her and pulled her to him.
‘Yes, Colleen I’ve been an absolute stupid eejit.’
Chapter 13
Samuel set off, scuffing along the track to the nearest tavern which lay partway between Hunter Downs and The Factory. He could have ridden to the drinking establishment, but he needed the walk. He had to straighten the chaos out in his head once and for all, especially now that he knew the truth, that Colleen had done nothing to deserve her sentence of transportation and even less to end up in a whorehouse.
After what Colleen had told him, he needed a drink — no scratch that out — he needed several; enough to numb him, and prevent his imagination throwing up images of what she had been through. Even if she had been guilty of the crime she was transported for, which he quite believed she wasn’t, forced prostitution as a punishment was a travesty of such magnitude he couldn’t bear to think of it.
Why hadn’t he asked her more about her background before?
He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know the answer to that now. He had been too nervous about what he would discover. If it was bad he would have only felt even more inclined to protect and comfort her than he already did, and if it was good it would only have heaped more confusion on his feelings for her.
But just how much of an idiot had he been and how wrong was it to want another woman so soon after he had lost his first wife? These were the questions he was struggling with most.
And even if it wasn’t too soon, there was the price to be paid at the end of it all, a tariff that he had met so many times before and didn’t have the stomach for again.
But she was his, she was there, he wanted her. So where would be the real harm? The competing thoughts went round and around as he wrestled with the problem from every angle.
The tavern, when he reached it, was little more than a wooden shed with a dirt floor and a wooden bar to lean against. Besides that, there were several chest high tree trunks that had been rammed into the floor and then topped with a thin cross section from a larger tree to serve as leaning posts and a place to rest a tankard. There were no stables, just a post to hitch the horses, and once inside he found the only food on offer was some mouldy cheese with a pile of equally dubious looking bread heaped up beside it, half-heartedly covered with an inadequate square of cheesecloth.
He ordered rum which came served to him in a handle-less vessel once used for storing jam or pickles. Cautiously, he took a sip guessing, correctly as it turned out, that based on the standard of the accommodations the tavern provided, the alcohol might be equally as rustic.
The half a dozen men in the place were gathered around a single stump, heads bent together in conversation. The men were a mix of roughly and well-attired types, none of whom on their own would have outweighed or outmatched him, but there were six of them all together. He stood at the bar and waited for an invitation before approaching.
The most vocal man in the group looked over and pointed in Samuel’s direction. ‘You’re new. Where are you from?’
‘The Hunter’s place,’ Samuel said, picking up his drink and moving towards the group.
‘You’re that new overseer they’ve got up there, then?’ The man gestured roughly in the direction from which Samuel had come. ‘The one that’s taken over from Her Majesty.’ Samuel smiled. The locals had her ladyship pegged, then. The nickname suited her.
‘If by Her Majesty you mean Lady Hunter then, yes. I’m Biggs, Samuel Biggs.’
Samuel extended his hand and the man shook it, introducing himself as Ed. ‘Yes, that’s what they call Lady Hunter round here, her ladyship who thought she could run a farm.’
‘As if,’ one of the other men said before he drained the contents of his tankard and slammed it down on the round of tree trunk that served as a tabletop.
A shorter man standing next to him shoved him in the arm with his drinking vessel.
‘What about Macarthur’s wife?’
The taller man snorted.
‘She’s not running that farm, it’s that overseer of hers does most of it.’
‘I dunno about that,’ the small man said, reaching up to place his tankard on the timber top, ‘I heard it’s mostly her.’
‘You’re soft in the head, you are.’
The one who had been making the case for women farmers was about to take another drink but thought better of it, pulling his tankard away from his lips and narrowing his eyes at the man who had slighted him.
‘Who you calling soft?’
‘Whoa, settle down boys.’ Ed broke in before tempers flared any further. He turned back to Samuel. ‘You’ll do well working for Hunter. He counts himself as one of us. So where do you stand then?’
‘Stand?’ Samuel asked, confused.
The man folded his arms, and stared him in the eye.
‘Do you support the Emancipists or are you with the Exclusives?’
‘I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it too much.’
Samuel wished he paid better attention when James was giving him a summary of the local politics. What would be the right answer in a mixed group like this?
‘Pretty simple question if you ask me. Are you with us or against us?’ The small man said, making an unco-ordinated lunge in Samuel’s direction.
‘He’s agin us. He’s the one who roughed up our Mick,’ said a man who up until then hadn’t spoken but now had his hands raised in a couple of cudgels. Exacerbating matters further, Samuel judged from the change in posture and demeanour of the others that there had been a distinct cooling in the mood of the other men as well.
He glanced nervously towards the door as another man stepped out of the shadow it cast in front of it.
There was nowhere to run.
The man near the door advanced again and Samuel pulled his own hands into fists. He had never been one for fighting. The tousle with the convict he now knew was called Mick had been his first since he was a child in the workhouse. Despite witnessing several other seamen settle disputes that way, he had managed to avoid involvement in any scuffles on the voyage over. He could only hope it would be a fair fight and the other men would stay out of it.
The man in the shadow stepped into the low evening light that was only just illuminating the inside of the bar.
It wasn’t until then that Samuel realised it was James.
‘Your brother’s got a mouth on him Sid, and you all know it.’ James said, ambling in amongst the group. ‘If it wasn’t Samuel, it would have been someone else. Samuel here’s the one who managed the hitherto unknown feat of carrying off a third-classer from The Factory. Colleen Malone, some of you might have heard of her.’
‘Why didn’t you say? He’s one of us, lads,’ said Ed.
‘Colleen Malone, you jammy beggar. You’ve scored yourself a pot of pure gold there,’ said the man who had only seconds before been intent on pummelling him into the dirt. After that the compliments came thick and fast.
‘Here’s to the luckiest man in Parramatta,’ said Ed, raising his tankard in a toast to which all the men drank.
‘Being married to a convict is a good thing?’ Samuel said as he followed James, the only one without a drink in his hand, away from the group and over to the bar where he ordered a rum.
James leaned against the bar.
‘Not everyone would think so, but around these parts it is. Next time you crash in on an Emancipist meeting you might want make that known sooner rather than later.’
Samuel gestured to the ragtag bunch of men drinking around the stump. ‘This is a meeting?’
‘It was, but there won’t be much talk now with you here. Meeting
at all can be dicey and they’re fussy about who knows, but it’ll be safe enough for you to drink here from now.’
The mention of drink prompted Samuel to take another swig of rum. He coughed. It hadn’t improved on standing.
The barman took James’ order while Samuel cleared his throat enough to query the men’s reaction to Colleen.
‘Colleen’s past occupation didn’t bother them. In fact, if anything, they seemed to viewed it as a recommendation.’
‘Bother them?’ James laughed. ‘You probably won’t have had the opportunity to notice yet, but if you look around you’ll find women are in grievously short supply in the colony. Some men’s morals would prohibit it, but out here there’d be any number of men that would take her on if you ever tired of her.’
‘What, take up with another man’s wife?’
James paid the barman and took a gulp of rum, sending it down with a practiced swallow followed by an appreciative hiss that left his ability to converse unaffected.
‘There are plenty of common law unions and what you would call irregular arrangements going on in the colony — sometimes in quarters you’d least expect.’
‘So it’s almost respectable?’ Samuel said, testing him, trying to decide whether James was having him on.
‘Ah now, I wouldn’t go that far,’ James said, swirling his rum. ‘You won’t be getting an invitation to dine with any of the Exclusives any time soon, but don’t let that worry you. There are a lot more of us than there are of them.’
‘Exclusives?’ Who were they, he wondered?
James scratched his head. ‘I explained all this the other night, but then, you were somewhat distracted. Still, you are a newlywed so I suppose allowances can be made.’
A newlywed.
For the first time since his marriage, Samuel actually felt like one.
‘Get away with you. You smell like a distillery.’
Colleen arms flailed, half asleep swatting at the stinky boozer who was ruining her lovely peaceful sleep.
‘Now, there’s no way to be talking to your husband.’