The Governor's House

by J. H. Fletcher

  With a song in my heart, but who was to know?

  Within seconds Mrs Boss was there. Her own superstructure might resemble a lava flow on Mount Merapi – I’d have laid odds it had been a while since anyone had tried to grope her – but there was nothing wrong with her eyes.

  ‘There is someone simply dying to renew your acquaintance,’ she gushed and led him limping towards Di Hardcastle, a bouncy enthusiast in the Asian Languages Department. I had a low opinion of her. So did Tim. ‘Get personal with that one and you’d need a scrub down with Dettol,’ he’d said, yet Di, twenty-eight years young and stacked, had once boasted in my hearing that she had bedded every celebrity who had entered our hallowed portals in the last three years. Who knew, the poxy professor might strike it lucky, after all.

  Golden boy, Yale bound, had his say, displaying a touching if phony modesty, and Dick Cottle brought a late arrival to meet me. I looked him over. He was worth the look, neither tall nor particularly large but well put together, trim moustache and well-shaped lips, black hair, brown eyes and skin. He looked at me earnestly and did not smile.

  ‘This is Dr Wiranto’s first visit to Tasmania,’ said Dick with a hint of gush. ‘He flew in today.’

  ‘To farewell our hero?’ I guessed. ‘You a chemist, Dr Wiranto?’

  ‘No, no.’ Dead-Eyed Dick was obviously enjoying this. ‘He’s come to see you.’

  ‘I am with the Department of Antiquities in Jakarta,’ Dr Wiranto explained. His teeth were good, his English impeccable.

  ‘Hoping to find out where you’ve hidden this missing crown of his,’ said Dick, with a wink and a nudge. Ho ho! ‘You’d better come clean, Joanne. Isn’t that right, Dr Wiranto?’

  ‘Anything I can do,’ I said.

  ‘I would welcome a discussion with you,’ he said. ‘Would tomorrow be convenient?’

  ‘Make sure you read her her rights first,’ Dick chortled.

  FOURTEEN

  Dr Wiranto had suggested meeting in a waterfront restaurant which someone had told him served the best coffee in Tasmania.

  ‘A place we can chat without being overheard.’ His shrewd eyes watched me.

  ‘Over coffee.’ I wanted to be sure I’d got him right.

  ‘Coffee and cake,’ he said. I saw the flicker of a smile. ‘Islam frowns upon the consumption of alcohol. Chocolate cake is my consolation.’

  Now I sat and waited for him. For a man eager for chocolate cake he was taking his time. It gave me a chance to think about his spare figure and well-sculpted features, the eyes that I suspected missed little. I had googled him last night and come up with zilch. Just his name and the fact that he had a position with the government in Jakarta in the Antiquities Department. Odd; antiquarians tended to be dusty souls but Wiranto looked more like a soldier: a lithe man with a tough jaw, a gravitational field that drew one in. He had certainly drawn me in. In the pre-Tim days I could have fancied him quite a lot. I did fancy him quite a lot. He’d know it, too, the bastard. A man like other men, he’d not be above taking advantage of it, given half a chance.

  The thought did not trouble me as maybe it should.

  The wharf was crowded with holidaymakers; from the earliest days it had always been a busy place. The gibbets and lashing triangle of Cat Haggard’s time were long gone but the ghosts remained. Once I had believed ghosts existed only in the imaginations of the superstitious but over the years I had learnt they were with us always. They surrounded us with echoes of the past and their claim upon us was as vital and compelling as that of the living.

  Cat Haggard had been dead one hundred and three years. Yet how could that be? She was with me on the Hobart waterfront as she was on the terrace of the house she’d named Cat’s Kingdom and which was now mine. The house, like my turbulent ancestor, was as much a part of my heritage as the blood that flowed in my veins. Ghosts, like I said.

  They pressed about me now. The child running wild in the fishing village of her birth, the chains and degradation of the St Vincent, the bushrangers’ thundering hooves, the hissing seas cleft by the treasure ship’s prow, the laughing face of the man who had claimed her at the last…

  Did she really steal the crown of Muar? To have flown here especially Wiranto had to think there was something to the story.

  There’d certainly been a tonne of publicity since Cat Haggard’s journal had turned up. Articles had appeared in the newspapers; I’d written a few myself. The ABC had got in on the act; I’d been invited to present papers at conferences in Australia and Singapore. The Kiwis had shown interest and the Poms. The London Times had devoted a two-column feature to Cat Haggard’s life and times. I’d even won a medal for it (Mrs Boss had loved that). I wasn’t complaining. Academics live and fall by their reputations and the whole circus had been great for mine, but none of it had anything to do with the crown of Muar. Now, with Wiranto bobbing up the way he had, I had the nasty feeling he thought I could help him find it – hey, see what I found? – but the plain fact was I had no more idea than he where the wretched thing was. I hadn’t a clue whether Cat Haggard had been involved in its disappearance, either, but that wouldn’t help me if Wiranto thought I was telling porkies. Not a good thought; from what I’d seen of him he might be super-glam but I reckoned he could be a nasty bit of work if you got on the wrong side of him.

  There he was at last, making his way through the crowd to join me.

  He was as neat as the previous night, white shirt open at the neck, bare arms corded with muscle. He smiled at me. I smiled at him. I feared it was a goofy smile, gonads all of a twitter. Nasty bit of work or not, he made me feel like a besotted teenager. He sat down and flicked raised fingers. Within seconds a waitress was there. Even in Australia some men, just a few, had that knack. And some women, just a few, came running.

  ‘Coffee for two,’ he said. ‘Hot and strong. And chocolate cake. Two slices.’

  He smiled at her. She flushed; she was overcome. She left to fill the order and he switched his mega smile to me. I felt myself simper. Heaven help us all.

  ‘So young,’ he said.

  ‘Old enough,’ I said.

  ‘I prefer someone with more life experience.’

  Like yourself, his eyes said.

  ‘The old tend to have that,’ I told him. ‘It goes with the territory.’

  ‘At thirty-two you are hardly old.’ He had been checking up on me. ‘In any case we are talking about knowledge.’

  That was going some. In my experience most Asians liked to waffle a bit before getting down to business. Dr Wiranto had a different style. Blitzkrieg on the hoof. Maybe he should have been a colonel. Maybe he was a colonel.

  The coffee and cake arrived. The waitress gave Wiranto her I’mhere-if-you-want-me look. Me she ignored. Now he’d got what he’d ordered there was no need for the megawatt performance. He dismissed her with a perfunctory nod. She stared as though he’d slapped her, then stalked away with her nose in the air.

  ‘More life experience?’ I said.

  He gave me a blank look but knew what I was on about, and knew that I knew, too. Smiling, he inflicted mayhem on his chocolate cake.

  ‘A knowing woman is an affliction to the wise,’ he said.

  ‘Ali ibn-Abi-Talib?’ I guessed.

  He looked at me with a straight face. ‘Wiranto,’ he said.

  Served me right.

  He sighed with pleasure as he finished his cake. ‘Simple pleasures…’ His expression changed: the military man was back. ‘The sultan’s crown,’ he said. ‘What can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Nothing. It isn’t mentioned in the journal,’ I said.

  His eyes peeled me to the bone. ‘Doesn’t that surprise you?’

  ‘Why should it? She’d hardly want to incriminate herself if she had stolen it and if she hadn’t there was nothing to say.’

  ‘But she does mention the loss of the Antares.’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I said.

  It had been the Great Train Robbery of her day.
The barque had arrived in the Derwent River at dusk on 8 June 1858, bringing with her what in today’s values was twenty million pounds in silver – the colony of Tasmania, renamed from Van Diemen’s Land three years earlier, was pretty much broke and the Old Country had stepped in to avert disaster. It was too late to unload that night; also it was the dark of the moon, so she anchored in mid-stream with a detachment of marines aboard to provide protection. One hundred per cent safe, or so you’d think. Yet by morning she and her cargo had vanished.

  ‘Fingers were pointed at Catherine Haggard at the time,’ Wiranto said.

  ‘They were pointed at everyone,’ I said.

  ‘It was generally believed the crown was on board when Antares disappeared,’ he said.

  I wasn’t buying that. ‘There was no general belief about anything. Hardly anybody in the colony had even heard of the crown. The odd rumour, maybe, but no more than that.’

  Like lots of our politicians he wasn’t prepared to admit he’d got it wrong. He did what they all did: he changed the subject.

  ‘The journal has how many pages?’

  ‘Two hundred and twenty-three in the original manuscript.’

  ‘Yet you say there is nothing in it?’

  ‘Nothing about the crown,’ I said. ‘You know that. You’ve read it yourself.’

  ‘Some of it,’ he said.

  ‘The only sections you haven’t seen relate to Catherine’s early life. There’s nothing in them about Antares or the missing crown. As to where it is now… I’m not even sure it still exists.’

  ‘I am convinced it does. Something the size and value of the crown of Muar is unlikely to have been lost. Nor do I think it was broken up and sold. We know the size and number of the stones, which were reported to be not only huge but of magnificent quality. If they had been sold there would have been some record.’

  ‘You think there would have been some record.’

  ‘That is the hypothesis we are working on.’

  Fair enough. When nothing was certain you had to start somewhere.

  ‘We have traced the records back to the time of Sultan Mansoor,’ he said. ‘You know his predecessor was assassinated?’

  Yes, I had known that. As I had told Dick Cottle, assassinations were all the go in those days; being a sultan was a risky business.

  ‘The crown could have been damaged when Mansoor seized the throne,’ Wiranto said. ‘Given the lack of facilities in Muar at that time, we think he sent it abroad to be repaired. Shipping records indicate he may have selected Tengku Idris, his predecessor’s nephew, as its escort.’

  Tengku was a title, meaning Prince. There was nothing new in any of this but I thought I would check him out.

  ‘But why send it to Hobart? And would the new sultan really have picked a potential rival to take the crown to be repaired? Surely he would have been more likely to bump him off?’

  ‘No doubt he would have liked to but Mansoor had a problem. He needed the backing of the Dutch to keep his throne and the Dutch did not favour sultans who went around murdering people. Yet from the records it’s clear they regarded the nephew as a destabilising influence too, so we believe they and the sultan came up with a plan. Flatter Idris, show how much they trusted him by getting him to take the crown to Batavia –’

  ‘And clobber him,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Exile him to another of their possessions. An island in the Caribbean, say.’

  ‘How do we know that didn’t happen?

  ‘Because we are convinced the crown came here.’

  ‘Griggs’s notes only refer to a valuable artefact. The crown isn’t mentioned.’

  ‘Nevertheless we believe it was the crown. Tengku Idris was seen, you see.’

  That was news. ‘He was seen?’ It was getting a tad confusing. ‘I need a drink,’ I said.

  A flick of Wiranto’s finger and the waitress was there. Smiling, what was more, evidently willing to give him a second chance.

  ‘A glass of chardonnay,’ I said.

  ‘Another slice of chocolate cake for me,’ he said.

  Two minutes later she was back with the order. Wiranto seemed to take no notice. I might even have imagined he was unaware it had arrived had it not been for the way his fingers brushed the waitress’s arm as she stood beside him. She responded, too; you could see her quiver. Some guys have things too much their own way, ask me about it.

  I looked at his plate. ‘How can you get through so much of that stuff?’

  He looked at my wine. ‘I could ask you the same.’

  We smiled and were companionable for a moment.

  ‘Go on with your story,’ I said.

  Between mouthfuls of cake he did.

  ‘We have the report of a Dutch agent in Singapore saying that two men from Muar boarded a south-bound vessel in April 1858.’

  ‘They could have been anybody,’ I objected.

  ‘One of them was Idris,’ Wiranto said. ‘The agent identified him. Idris was clearly nobody’s fool. He had either guessed the plan or was tipped off. Either way, it seems he steered clear of Batavia and headed for the new British colony of Singapore, where he boarded a ship for Hobart with one companion and a quantity of luggage.’

  ‘Which I take it you believe included the crown. But why Hobart? Hobart was the ends of the earth.’

  ‘Nathaniel Griggs was one of the top jewellers of his day. No doubt you know he had done work for the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother.’

  He smiled. He didn’t believe I had known that. He was right. I looked at him with the dislike we feel for someone who knows more about our pet subject than we do. I watched a squadron of pelicans sailing majestically near the wharf but they gave me no help.

  ‘There must have been jewellers in Singapore,’ I said.

  ‘Probably no one to match Nathaniel Griggs. The colony of Singapore was only thirty-nine years old, remember. But the reason doesn’t matter. We have evidence Idris and his companion headed to Hobart where a master jeweller of the highest skill was known to be available.’

  ‘And there the trail ran cold,’ I said. ‘What happened to Tengku Idris and his companion?’

  ‘Never heard of again.’

  ‘Maybe they sold the crown? It must have been worth a packet.’

  ‘The crown was both sacred and a symbol of authority. Possessing it would have given Tengku Idris his best chance of claiming the throne for himself. He would never have sold it.’

  Wiranto was certain about it and I thought he was right.

  ‘There is no evidence Cat Haggard had anything to do with it,’ I said. ‘No evidence the crown was on Antares, either.’

  ‘I am convinced of three things,’ he said. ‘I believe the crown came here. I think it highly probable your ancestor was connected in some way with its disappearance. I think it is almost certainly still here.’ He smiled at me across the table, this man whom I suspected would make a good friend but very bad enemy. ‘Perhaps our combined efforts will enable us to find it.’

  I was way short of being convinced about that. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘If I’m right in my thinking, you could be in great danger.’

  FIFTEEN

  I went back to my office with Wiranto’s words hovering in the air about me. You could be in great danger.

  I looked at the room as a stranger might. The familiar objects now seemed threatening. The shelves of books. My desk. The computer table and filing cabinet. The comfortable aura of research accomplished; of so much more, gratifyingly, still to do. I looked at the photos on the wall: of my childhood home overlooking the Huon River, half an hour south of Hobart; of me, aged eight, waving from my red-sailed Mirror dinghy, the first boat I ever owned; me again after graduation, wearing a silly mortarboard hat; me once more, tarted up in my doctoral robes, being presented with the Gillespie medal by the chancellor of Melbourne university; a studio portrait of my mother taken the year before she died. All these things. My office, my
home from home. Peaceful, rich with memories.

  Many times, caught up in research, I had worked at that desk all night, sensing the dawning not only of the coming day but of a truth I was at last digging from beneath the stone. To find, as the sixteenth-century poet John Davies had said, the truth that was buried deep below. Often it was like drawing teeth to get at it but when you succeeded it gave you a rush like no other.

  You could be in great danger.

  Catherine’s granddaughter Myrtle would have said it served me right. Now there was a hag on a mission. She’d died in the 1970s but Ma used to say the Delphic oracle had nothing on Myrtle; she’d never known anyone better able to snatch calamity from the jaws of joy. Not surprising when you thought of Fred Wickett, the cretin she’d married back in 1910. The year after Catherine’s death and in the expectation of an inheritance that never materialised, Fred had borrowed a vast sum of money which he placed in a sure-fire investment in tsarist Russia only to see it go down the tubes when the Revolution came four years later. That had been bad enough but he’d conned others into joining him on the strength of what one would have to say were extremely optimistic forecasts. There had been hell to pay: talk of lawsuits, even of fraud. To keep Fred out of gaol the family had agreed to make good the other investors’ losses. They took a bath to do it – they’d had to sell all their copper interests to raise the cash, and at the bottom of the market, too. In one blow that had wiped out a large chunk of the family fortune (the rest had followed in the Great Depression). Thank you, Uncle Fred: not that Myrtle had ever admitted he was in any way to blame. But it had soured her and Ma said from that time she had always been looking to the next generation to restore what they – they, mind you – had lost. The idea of her great-great grand niece becoming an academic instead of going into business would have blown her gaskets.

  Ma would have liked me to do it too. She never said such a thing, mind, never a word or complaint before cancer carried her off at the age of fifty-six, but I knew. The problem was that business had never interested me and I doubted I’d have been any good at it: history and the mysteries of the past had been my bag from the time I’d first starting hearing about the life and times of my harumscarum ancestor. Luckily it seemed I had a knack for it and so here I now was, a historian with a growing reputation and the bane of Dick Cottle’s existence.