The Governor's House

by J. H. Fletcher

  ‘I believe you did, Catherine. I believe you did. Well, well, we’ll say no more about it.’

  It wasn’t enough. ‘But sir –’

  Dr Morgan raised his hand. ‘I said we’ll say no more about it. I believe you but thought you should know what some malicious person has been saying.’

  ‘Who, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know, Catherine. And if I did I would not tell you. The matter is closed.’

  Except that it was not. Regularly, while she was working or lying in bed at night, it came back to haunt her. Always without warning. Such a wicked untruth… If I knew who’d said it I’d skin her alive, she thought.

  Fortunately there was no chance of that but she knew the accusation would remain with her for a long time.

  A week after the constable’s visit Dr Morgan went away but Mrs Amos said he had only gone to visit his brother.

  ‘The one in Wales?’

  ‘Of course not, silly girl. The younger one what lives in Sydney. He come ’ere once. Nice man he was, years younger than the doctor. Said he’d like to retire to Tasmania when the time comes.’

  ‘I didn’t know he had a younger brother.’

  ‘Just shows you don’t know everything.’

  It was nice to give Cat a dig from time to time, to remind her not to get above herself.

  ‘That’s something I won’t stand for,’ she told Mr Moffatt. ‘Young girls getting above theirselves.’

  ‘I’ll lay that won’t happen, Mrs A. Not with you to keep an eye on her. You need to have a care, though.’

  ‘What you saying to me, Mr Moffatt?’

  ‘Give the doctor a year, Mrs A. That’s what I’m saying. Maybe less. I reckon it’ll be Miss Catherine then.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  The doctor had been gone a week when early one morning Cat went out to hang up some kitchen cloths and saw some men on the high ground adjoining the doctor’s property.

  Convicts, she thought. What are they up to?

  A series of stones marked the boundary of the Morgan land. Curious, Cat walked across to find out what was going on. She saw at once the men were not all convicts. Apart from the usual guards – the probation system had been officially abolished after the last transport arrived two years ago but in practice it hadn’t changed, as Cat knew well – well-dressed men in boots were carrying sheaves of paper and walking purposefully this way and that, kicking the ground and pointing, while an underling took notes.

  ‘Enough sandstone here for the whole building,’ one of them said.

  ‘He won’t want a quarry on his doorstep,’ his companion said.

  ‘Fill the digs with water. Turn them into ornamental ponds. Why not?’

  Cat spoke to one of the convicts. ‘What’s to do?’

  ‘Building a big house,’ the man said. ‘They say it’s going to have a hundred rooms.’

  ‘Why do they need a place as big as that?’

  The man spat derisively. ‘For the bloody governor, innit?’

  ‘All right for some,’ Cat said.

  ‘You got that right,’ the convict said.

  A guard bellowed. ‘Hawkins, quit yer yappin! Git over ’ere!’

  The convict grimaced and slouched away. Cat went back to the kitchen.

  ‘They’re building a house for the governor,’ she told Mrs Amos. ‘Right next door. They say it’s going to have two hundred rooms.’

  ‘That right?’ Mrs Amos’s hands were deep in a bowl and Cat saw she couldn’t have been less interested. ‘Got to live somewhere, I suppose.’

  ‘It’ll be a proper palace.’ Cat liked the idea of having such a grand building as their neighbour. ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ll never see the inside of it so I don’t see why you should care,’ Mrs Amos said. ‘Now stop your jawing and give me that cloth.’

  The doctor was away two months. When he came back life resumed much as before. Cat had wondered whether as a widower he might want to bed her. He was still a man, after all. It wasn’t such a horrible prospect now she knew him but nothing happened. He still went to his clinic every day; he still rode up the mountain or across the open countryside; if he grieved for his wife he kept it to himself.

  She couldn’t make him out. She was there, wasn’t she? She was his servant, which meant she had to be available if he wanted her yet, except for her lessons, he took no notice of her at all. She supposed she should have been pleased but in fact became more and more vexed with him. Did she smell bad? Was she so hideous? What was the matter with him? Or with her?

  ‘I might as well be a block of wood,’ she complained to herself, slapping an indignant duster at the furniture.

  At least in her lessons she was making progress. She still had a problem with forming her letters but had more or less mastered the reading side of it. One day after her lesson she did not go back to the kitchen but walked around the library, looking at the books. So many books: she thought it would take her a lifetime to read them all. The doctor was watching her from his desk and she wondered if he might be annoyed with her for taking such a liberty. But what was the point of learning to read if she was not allowed to look at the books? So she walked on, taking her time, spelling out the titles letter by letter. She reached up and took down one that had caught her eye. At any moment she expected him to tell her to put it back but he did not. She opened the book. So many words… How could anyone be expected to read so many?

  ‘Would you like to read it?’

  The doctor’s voice startled her. She stared doubtfully at him, the book open in her hand. ‘I doubt I could do that,’ she said.

  ‘All it takes is practice,’ Dr Morgan said.

  ‘What’s it about?’ The enormity of what he was offering frightened her.

  ‘It’s about a poor boy. He suffered bad times when he was young and had lots of bad experiences but it has a happy ending.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  She didn’t like being put on the spot like that but it was a challenge she must overcome. If I don’t get the hang of it I shall never be free, she told herself.

  Slowly, saying each letter to herself under her breath, she spelt it out.

  ‘Ol… iv… er… twist,’ she said eventually. ‘Oliver Twist?’ She looked questioningly at him, doubting she could have got it right. But from the way the doctor’s face lit up she saw she had.

  ‘Well done!’ he said.

  He seemed pleased but Cat was still unsure.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It’s a name. The boy’s name.’

  ‘Funny kind of name,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the name Dickens gave him.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Charles Dickens. The man who wrote the book.’

  That was a new thought. Reading a book was challenge enough but writing one… She couldn’t imagine anyone doing such a thing.

  Dr Morgan laughed and waved his hand around the library shelves. ‘Don’t look so surprised, girl. How could all these books exist if someone hadn’t written them?’

  She supposed he was right but it was still hard to get her head around the idea. Nevertheless she took the book and began to read it. It was cruel work. To begin with she couldn’t believe she would ever manage a whole page but somehow, sentence by sentence, she managed it. Then it was a whole chapter and she managed that too. It was easier now and before she knew it she was no longer battling the words but feeling them, tasting them, and the sensations they opened up excited her so that she could barely wait to get back to the book again. Which was not to say she had no questions.

  ‘How are you enjoying it?’ Dr Morgan asked.

  ‘It’s a good story. But Dickens got some things wrong.’

  The doctor raised his eyebrows.

  ‘How could Oliver have been so stupid? Brought up the way he was, he’d have seen the Dodger’s game straight off. And Fagin. How could he not have known?’

  He looked a
t her with a quizzical smile.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Charles Dickens is a famous writer. You think you know better than he does about such things?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about being a writer. But I know about thieves. I spent over a year surrounded by them. Two hundred on the St Vincent,’ she said. ‘And on the hulks in Plymouth Sound before that. Thieves or worse, nearly all of them. It gets so you can smell them a mile away. That Oliver, the life he’d had, he would have known. I’m certain of that.’

  ‘I am coming to believe you are a remarkable young woman,’ Dr Morgan said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She looked at him suspiciously, thinking he was making fun of her. But no, he was quite serious.

  ‘I think you may be right about Oliver Twist. Too innocent by half, isn’t it? But that isn’t my point. What I am saying is that very few with your background would dare make such a comment about the most famous writer of the day.’

  ‘Because I’m a convict?’ Resentment quivered.

  ‘Because you lack education. No blame to you, mind, but that is the truth. And I am sure you are right about Oliver Twist. So now I am asking myself, what potential would you have had with a different upbringing?’

  Cat felt herself floundering. She sensed the doctor was leading her into deep waters and she doubted her ability to swim. ‘Too late to be thinking about it,’ she said.

  ‘I am not so sure of that,’ Dr Morgan said.

  The following afternoon he went to see a patient of his, a woman called Mrs Hargreaves. She was a former lady’s maid from a big house in Warwickshire and when the doctor came home he told Cat he had engaged Mrs Hargreaves to teach her how to be a lady.

  Cat thought it a sorry business to be turned into something she was not. Mrs Amos thought so too, while Mr Moffatt pointed out he had prophesied something of the sort nearly twelve months ago. It made no difference what any of them thought. The doctor was determined. Catherine Haggard would be turned from fisherman’s brat into lady whether she liked it or not.

  Mrs Amos doubted the wisdom of that but it was Mrs Hargreaves she resented most, because there was no opening for a lady’s maid in the colony and Mrs Hargreaves had been forced into another line of work to keep body and soul together.

  ‘Entertaining harlots? I never thought I’d see the day, Mr Moffatt. I only hope he don’t expect me to cook a meal for her, that’s all.’

  He did not. Four mornings a week Mrs Hargreaves brought her raddled face to Aberystwyth’s back door. Four mornings a week she was admitted, very much under sufferance. Four mornings a week she sat with Catherine – no more Cat: Mrs Hargreaves was insistent on that, whoever heard of a lady called Cat? – and began, as Mrs Amos put it, the step by step process of creating a silk purse out of what, if not a sow’s ear, was most certainly no better than a fish’s head.

  How to dress, how to walk, to smile, to condescend, to talk.

  ‘It is not simply a question of the correct use of grammar,’ Mrs Hargreaves said, ‘but of the proper modulation.’

  ‘Please?’ Catherine said, her vocabulary not up to the niceties of genteel conversation.

  ‘It is not enough to use the correct words,’ Mrs Hargreaves said. ‘You also have to sound like a lady.’

  ‘You make it sound like play-acting.’

  ‘That is it exactly. Even the most aristocratic are not born wearing a coronet. They have to be taught, as I am teaching you. You will be playing a part, as they do.’

  ‘A coronet is a type of crown, isn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed it is.’

  A crown, the old gypsy woman said in the frowsty tent peopled with shadows. A crown with diamonds.

  You will be playing a part, as they do… Mrs Hargreaves might be no better than she ought to be, as Mrs Amos claimed, but she had the knack of explaining things so Catherine understood. Think of learning to play the part of a lady and what had previously seemed impossible became something that not only could but would be done.

  ‘Belief in yourself is half the battle,’ Mrs Hargreaves said. ‘Keep telling yourself you’re a lady and people will take you at your word soon enough.’

  To Catherine it became a game. When she was sure no one was spying on her she walked in stately fashion about the house, back straight and the crown of England heavy upon her head. She issued her orders in a languid voice.

  ‘Tonight,’ she told Mrs Amos, ‘we shall have the fish and a joint of veal.’

  She ordered Mrs Arsenia Byfield put in the stocks for twelve hours. She felt a glow of satisfaction at the thought of Mrs Byfield being bombarded with refuse, of Mrs Byfield pleading frantically and unavailingly for mercy, of Mrs Byfield with legs pinned, helpless to avoid wetting herself. As for Arthur Dunstable…

  If there’s justice in the world, she thought, I shall live to see him hanged.

  Even a lady could have vengeful thoughts on occasion.

  All the same, there were times when Catherine had her doubts. Some of Mrs Hargreaves’s instructions made no sense. Whoever heard of a kitchen maid with soft white hands and shapely nails? With rouged cheeks and elegantly groomed hair? With not only the latest in gowns but the flair to wear them to best effect? With delicately perfumed undergarments? With any undergarments?

  ‘This is impossible,’ she said.

  Over and over again she said it; over and over again Mrs Hargreaves told her otherwise.

  ‘Already you could be mistaken for a lady,’ Mrs Hargreaves said.

  But passing yourself off as a lady among convicts and labourers was one thing; doing the same in front of what in Hobart society was considered gentry would be something else again.

  ‘A false bill of goods is what I am,’ Catherine said. ‘One look at me and they’ll send me round to the kitchens, quick as winking.’

  Dr Morgan was a patient man. Mrs Hargreaves said he required weekly reports on Catherine’s progress but made no attempt to interfere. He had carried this to the point where for weeks now he had not invited her to talk with him in the library. She missed their chats and the comfort of the book-lined room. Also Mrs Amos seemed to be finding innumerable extra chores for her to do so time was at a premium, while her hands grew redder, her nails more broken, by the day.

  ‘I shall make sure she don’t get above herself, Mr Moffatt,’ said Mrs Amos. ‘You may stake your life on that.’

  Mr Moffatt was more cautious. ‘Have a care, Mrs A. It won’t do to be too hard on her. Remember what I said when the missus passed away. He’s got a soft spot for her, I said. Mark my words, he’s doing all this for a reason.’

  ‘You’re saying he’s got a soft spot for a kitchen maid?’

  ‘Don’t make no sense otherwise.’

  Mrs Amos was appalled. For a doctor, widower or not, to have any kind of spot for a kitchen maid struck at the foundations of society as she knew it but Mr Moffatt remained adamant. ‘A cat may look at a king, Mrs A. Never forget that.’

  ‘A cat’s got nothing to do with it,’ she said. ‘I swear to you, Mr Moffatt, much more of this and I shall walk straight out that door.’

  Both of them knew she did not mean it.

  Catherine had finished the book she’d been reading and wanted another but didn’t like to take one without the doctor’s permission. She had more freedom than she would ever have imagined but was still a servant and a convict and it didn’t do to presume.

  She had been expecting the doctor since six, which was his usual time for getting home from the clinic, but tonight he was late and Mrs Amos, rosy with heat from the stove, was grumbling about ruined meals and serve him right if he ended up with a burnt offering for his supper. When she was in that mood Mrs Amos was capable of finding any number of chores to keep Catherine busy so she waited until the cook’s back was turned and slipped out of the kitchen into the cool evening air.

  She loved being out of the house. It gave her an illusion of leisure to which she was not entitled but knowing that only added to the plea
sure. And now there was something else to coax her out of doors.

  She walked up the slope, feet crunching on strips of fallen bark, until she came to the first of the perimeter stones. Work on the governor’s house had finished for the day but there was enough light for her to make out the shape of the building that was rising above her. She could see piles of lumber – cedar and oak from an old ship, according to the same convict she had spoken to before, and the slate for the roof had been imported especially from Wales.

  ‘Expense ain’t no object for the rich,’ he had said.

  It seemed so. But it was the house itself that drew Cat’s eye. More than her eye: her whole being, because for her this was more than a house. It was the symbol of all she desired in life. When it was finished the great house would be home to a man who could do what he liked. That was true freedom, something that would be impossible for a woman but for a man…

  How she wished she were that man. To be free, answerable only to herself… That would be freedom indeed but there was no point dreaming about it. In this world no woman could ever be the governor, though even to be a guest in that house… To be welcomed… She believed that too would be a kind of freedom.

  Lying in bed that night she listened to the horses shifting below her and remembered reading in one of the doctor’s books about a search for a magic goblet called the Holy Grail. Dr Morgan had told her it had been mentioned in an old Welsh tale called the Mabinogion.

  ‘Why did they look for it?’

  ‘Because it had the power to give the finder his heart’s desire,’ the doctor said.

  I should ask the Holy Grail to put me in the Governor’s House, she thought. Because that is where freedom is.

  Mrs Amos was likely right and she would never see the inside of it but who could say what the future might bring?

  That was a warm thought indeed. She smiled to herself and fell asleep. She did not dream.

  Days passed, then weeks and months. Next door the big house was nearing completion. Mrs Hargreaves continued to come four days a week. The play-acting that had marked the start of the process had become second nature now and a year after she started Mrs Hargreaves informed the doctor she had taught Catherine everything she could. Catherine had grown in other ways too. She was devouring books as fast as she could read them. Smollett, Fielding, Shakespeare, Homer and Bunyan: she read them all. Not only read them; she absorbed them as greedily as a sponge. She laughed over the adventures of Mr Pickwick, wept over Cordelia’s death. Always she had questions.