The Ink Stain

by Tom Keneally

  Hannah glanced at the slanted tables. One of them bore the remaining intact frame. The letters were no longer in a jumble beside it – some were arranged within it. She walked over. The letters weren’t in any discernible order, but some were coated in fresh ink. She turned towards Cullen, raising her eyebrows. ‘You know, don’t you, that in trying to find out who killed Mr Hallward, we will not falter, even if it leads us straight to the governor.’

  ‘I thought I knew,’ said Cullen. ‘But then you arrive dressed like a governess, with your footman here.’

  ‘Steady on,’ said Monsarrat.

  Cullen turned to him, his jaw jutting with barely restrained anger. ‘You speak like a toff. In the same voice as Duchamp, and you expect me to believe you’re not in league with him?’

  ‘Yes. You can trust me. I was a convict, you see. Twice.’

  Cullen paused, then threw back his head and laughed. ‘You say I should trust you because you’ve committed two crimes?’ He wiped his eyes. ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘I was sent here for forgery,’ Monsarrat said, ‘and then lost my ticket of leave for visiting a woman out of my district.’

  ‘Was she worth it?’

  ‘No, as it turns out.’

  ‘There’s often a woman involved, I find.’

  ‘And was one involved in your crime, Mr Cullen?’ asked Monsarrat.

  ‘Not directly, although the need to feed my sister entered into it. I bled my landlord’s cattle – not to death, mind, nor anywhere close. Just enough to make blood cakes. They can keep you alive, mixed with a little oatmeal. But then I was arrested and sent here. A few years ago, the priest sent a letter. My sister had passed away with no one to care for her.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘Sometimes we gaze up at these foreign stars, and it’s months before we find that those we love have joined them.’

  Hannah felt a little guilty about the action she was about to take. While the men had been talking, she’d moved gradually towards the room’s rear entrance. Now, she called out, ‘I hope you don’t mind, Mr Cullen, but I am just going to get some fresh air.’

  ‘Wait!’ he called back, beginning to stride and then run.

  By the time he and Monsarrat reached her, she was standing in the backyard, pulling the canvas off the lump in the corner: a large roll of paper.

  ‘There were showers the other day, but this is dry,’ Hannah said. ‘Almost as though the place is still in use.’

  Cullen stared at her, saying nothing.

  ‘Neither Mrs Mulrooney nor I will tell anyone about this,’ said Monsarrat. ‘But Vindex’s latest pamphlet hints at knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Mr Hallward’s death. I need to know if it is supposition, or something more.’

  ‘You’d have to ask Vindex,’ Cullen said.

  ‘Am I doing so right now?’

  Cullen slowly shook his head.

  ‘But you are helping him. You know who he is.’

  ‘And I cannot tell you. Not for any cost.’

  ‘Can you ask him, then? For Mr Hallward’s sake. If I leave you the address of my boarding house, will you be able to discreetly let me know if anything else comes to mind?’

  ‘If I can.’ Cullen handed Monsarrat a pencil stub and a piece of scrap paper, and Monsarrat scribbled down the address. ‘And if I am still at liberty tomorrow morning, I may even begin to trust you.’

  Chapter 13

  ‘I’m going to share a secret with you,’ said Hannah. ‘One which will help you. One which I don’t often talk about.’

  Some of the ten young women sitting at their desks, those not struggling with Monday afternoon drowsiness, leaned forward. Hannah knew that very few people ever shared anything with them, let alone anything helpful. In her austere, expensive jacket and skirt, with the brooch glittering at her neck, she was by far the most eminent person who had ever given them anything apart from orders.

  ‘Kitchen utensils need to be watched severely,’ Hannah said. ‘Knives in a drawer go blunt overnight. A skillet will crack just for the sake of it. The bottom will fall out of the kettle. You can’t just trust them to go along with it, day after day. You need to check them first thing every morning, make sure they’re not up to anything. Give them a good stove and they’ll respect you.’

  Some of the girls nodded politely, while others looked confused.

  ‘And on the subject of kettles,’ Hannah continued, ‘I wonder if any of you can tell me how to make tea.’

  One girl put up her hand. ‘Tis just throwing the leaves in the pot and pouring water over them.’

  Hannah gazed at her. ‘I knew domestic service required training, but I had no idea how … deficient your knowledge was.’ She regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, and hoped the girls did not feel she was mocking them. In all honesty, she had said it out of pride in the fact that she now knew a word like ‘deficient’.

  ‘My ma’s always done it like that,’ the girl retorted. ‘It tastes fine.’

  ‘Young lady … I’m sorry, what is your name?’

  ‘Susanna,’ the girl said, scratching her cheek, which was pitted with the after-effects of smallpox. Her clothes were drab, no doubt thinner than they had once been, but neatly patched, and her cap sat tidily on her brushed, scraped-back hair. ‘People call me Suse.’

  ‘You must never allow them to do that, Susanna,’ Hannah said. ‘Your name is important. If you let people take liberties with it, they will take liberties with you as well. Now, I’m sure your mother is a grand woman, but I’m afraid that tea doesn’t taste fine when you scald the poor little leaves. You’ll see for yourself. I’m going to make you all a nice cup of tea – you look as though you could use it.’

  In the corner of the room, for the purposes of this demonstration, sat a stove of the kind that only existed in grander houses, stoked and ready to educate the colony’s future servants. Hannah placed the kettle on top of it, glaring at the wretched thing so it knew that it would fail her at its peril. As she instructed the girls – about warming the teapot, waiting for the water to cool a little before pouring it onto the leaves, turning it round, locking the tea chest securely to stop both moisture and furtive hands getting in – Hannah glanced over her shoulder from time to time to make sure the kettle was still at its work.

  ‘You have to take your time with it,’ she said. ‘Show it some respect.’

  ‘No one has ever shown us any,’ said Susanna, ‘but we have to respect tea leaves?’

  Hannah suppressed a chuckle. It wouldn’t do to reward the lass for cheekiness. Much as she admired it, such a characteristic would not serve Susanna well in the wider world. ‘If you want to do the job well.’

  ‘Why should we care?’ said Susanna. ‘My cousin, now. So happy, she was, when she got a job on the governor’s staff. But her mistress still can’t remember her name, and sends her out on all sorts of odd errands without so much as a thank you.’

  Now this, Hannah thought, was far more interesting than talking to bored girls about tea. ‘And who would her mistress be?’ she asked Susanna.

  ‘I wouldn’t know. One of the women there. Sends her to take messages in the dead of night – into a rough part of town, too.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hannah, ‘I’m sure those messages are important.’

  ‘They must be, missus, if she wants them delivered so quiet like. You ask me, though, there are easier ways to write to the newspaper.’

  Here, we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a ‘bunyip aristocracy’.

  Monsarrat folded the newspaper clipping of Donnelly’s article and laid it on the dressing table in his room. His canvas clothes were now folded on the bed, as he shrugged into the black coat that he had worn throughout much of his sentence.

  He couldn’t fault Donnelly’s rhetoric, nor his argument. Donnelly had taken exception to a push
to create titled aristocrats in the colony. Monsarrat had never had much sympathy for a system where an accident of birth conferred wealth and social standing, while the intelligent but poor could only hope to empty chamber-pots. And in this place, what would the aristocrats call themselves? Lords of the void? Dukes of the wasteland?

  He found himself looking forward to his next meeting with the man.

  A letter lay on the table. Judging by the handwriting on the envelope, Eveleigh had not temporarily engaged a replacement clerk. He clearly felt this message was either unimportant or urgent enough to use his own spiky scrawl.

  It is as we suspected. The Reverend Bulmer and Socrates McAllister – as you know, both governors of the Female Factory – engaged the current superintendent. An unimaginative man, by the way, and thankfully that lack of imagination extends to his proclivities and his use of factory labour and funds.

  In any case, he was not in a position to resist the Reverend and Mr McAllister when they insisted Grace O’Leary would be best deployed on a property in the far west. Nor did he have any inclination to resist them, the fellow told me. They insisted that such an assignment would provide Miss O’Leary with the space to think about her incendiary ways, while removing her from a large population of inmates whom she could potentially incite to riot. As to where exactly she has been sent, the superintendent either does not know, or will not say.

  It was his fault, Monsarrat thought. They had sent Grace to a parched corner of the colony to get her away from him. She had been starved. Beaten. Her head brutally shaved so that some patches of scalp would remain forever barren. They had tried to kill her in all manner of ways, and failed.

  Wherever they had sent her, whatever station she had gone to, it would be run by someone sympathetic to the views of McAllister and Bulmer. Someone who believed all convicts were irreparably damaged, and had been since birth. But perhaps someone who might not see that stain as a barrier to taking the more attractive among the females. The thought made Monsarrat clench his teeth so hard he could hear them grinding, feel a minute part of one of them calving off. He wanted to take the nearest horse – legally or not – and ride west to …

  Where, though? He had no idea where she was, beyond a vague compass point. And he knew that, as frustrating as it was, his surest route to her was to find Hallward’s killer and then beg Eveleigh for indulgence. And that meant dealing with another member of Reverend Bulmer’s cruel fraternity. Another clergyman.

  He had arranged to meet Reverend Alcott at St James’ Church to, hopefully, learn something of how a newspaper editor came to be accused of trespass by the colony’s most eminent cleric. The convicts would have been able to hear the church bells from their third-floor hammocks in the barracks opposite. They would have heard the chatter of the congregation as they gathered for Sunday muster in the gravelled yard, in the shadow of the three-storey sandstone building engraved with the date of its birth and the name of the governor who fathered it.

  Monsarrat saw a group of convicts emerging, in jackets the colour of the sea they had crossed and white trousers that would not remain so for long, shuffling off towards a day spent fortifying their ocean-walled prison. He waited for them to pass, then turned towards the church. It was an odd-looking creation from the front – it could have passed for a bathhouse were it not for the tall, angular spire that rose above its arched windows; the copper encasing the spire was probably among the brightest things the convicts in the barracks opposite had ever seen. The church itself was far longer than it was wide, with a columned and porticoed entry leading in to an aisle flanked by the first stained glass used in the colony. Monsarrat reflected that it was little grander than one in a prosperous English town, but here, in the church-starved Antipodes, it might as well have been a cathedral.

  The man waiting for him at the end of the aisle seemed drab in comparison to his surroundings. Reverend Alcott wore ballooning white sleeves tied at the wrist with black ribbon, and a white bib that looked almost lawyerly, under a black vest. He watched as Monsarrat walked slowly up the aisle, past the open public pews and the enclosed box pews towards the front. Monsarrat had never sat in a box pew – they were for those who could afford to pay for the privilege of communion with God in privacy.

  Reverend Alcott didn’t seem to be glaring at him, at least not with the same ferocity that Reverend Bulmer always employed when he saw Monsarrat. Perhaps Alcott was a reasonable churchman. Monsarrat had been assured that such creatures existed, but he suspected they were rarer than Donnelly’s bunyips.

  It did not take long for Alcott to prove he was no such rare creature. ‘I am here as a mark of respect for the governor and for the rule of law,’ he said as Monsarrat approached. ‘But I urge you not to try my patience.’ His voice was deep, quiet but sonorous. The kind that could be raised to great effect in the denunciation of sin as it bounced off stone walls towards the parishioners.

  Here we go, thought Monsarrat. Another churchman who believes he is owed, but that he himself owes nothing.

  ‘I do appreciate your time, Reverend,’ he said. ‘There must be many calls on it in a place such as this. Convicts, I am sure, can make challenging parishioners.’

  ‘Oh, they go to St Philip’s. I don’t concern myself with the fallen.’

  Of course not. Why minister to those in most need of it?

  ‘I do not know how much assistance I can give you,’ Alcott continued. ‘I have not seen or spoken to Hallward since the business in March.’

  ‘I do not expect you to give me information about his murder,’ said Monsarrat. ‘I’m simply trying to build a picture of the man. There is a chance that understanding him might help me understand what happened to him. And, so far, those I have met seem to view him either as the guardian of free speech or a cynical provocateur.’

  ‘Hallward was a treacherous, mendacious agent of chaos, and I’ve never respected the law more than when it enabled us to hold him to account for wrecking our service.’

  ‘And how exactly did he accomplish that?’

  ‘By insisting on sitting near respectable people, some of the most high-ranking officials in the land, who had absolutely no wish to be near him. By airing his grievances in public. By refusing to bow to authority, even that of God. In other words, by being himself.’

  A housekeeper had appeared as Alcott led Monsarrat into the presbytery, a plain room with a writing desk in one corner but dominated by a large wooden table, surrounded by spindly but sturdy wooden chairs. Alcott had waved the woman away.

  ‘I cannot spare you much time, and nor do I wish to,’ he said. ‘But if I must talk about that man, I would rather do so away from any parishioners who might come in seeking succour.’

  Alcott gestured to a seat and took one himself.

  ‘So, Reverend,’ asked Monsarrat, ‘what did Mr Hallward do to earn your low opinion of him? Make too much noise during service?’

  ‘No, the man bought a box pew.’

  ‘Oh. And why was that a concern? Shows piety, I would have thought.’

  ‘Piety!’ Alcott rose, began pacing the length of the table. ‘Let me tell you, Mr Monsarrat, that man never did anything for pure reasons. He leased a very specific box pew. The one right behind the governor’s! Wanted to make the man uncomfortable, I can only assume. Perhaps overhear what he could. When the governor found out, he was furious.’

  ‘Why did you let the pew to him, then?’

  ‘An oversight by a deacon. When I discovered, I had only one possible course of action. You understand.’

  Monsarrat was not sure that he did. ‘And that action was?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I had to nail it shut, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Hallward can’t have been happy the following Sunday.’

  Alcott flopped heavily back into his seat. ‘No, of course he wasn’t. He was angry because, as he put it, we had taken his money for nothing, and he simply wanted to – how did he put it? – commune with the Almighty in a degree of comfort.
Ridiculous. He didn’t want to pray, he wanted to protest!

  ‘Then the governor said he could not concentrate on his own worship with such a man nearby. He might have gone to St Philip’s! And of course everyone would have followed, and the generosity which has supported this church since it was built would have gone with them.’

  Ah, thought Monsarrat. Even in the house of the Lord, it comes down to money. ‘What did Hallward do?’ he asked. ‘When he found his box pew was no longer his?’

  ‘Hoisted himself up, climbed in over the top! His feet profaning the carvings! Everyone was staring, and quite a few seemed upset.’

  ‘At a man entering a pew he had paid for?’

  ‘At a man causing a scene in a church! It was too late for me to do anything that day so I had workmen come in during the week and nail some boards to the top of that pew.’

  ‘You were reasonably certain he would be back, then,’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘Yes. The following week he was apoplectic when he saw the planks on top of the box.’

  ‘Did he tear them off?’

  ‘No. He sat in the aisle. People had to walk around him – thankfully the governor was away that week. I asked Hallward afterwards for an assurance that he would not cause any further disruption, and he refused to give it. Of course. And then …’ Alcott reached into a pocket and pulled out a newspaper article. Did half the men in Sydney have snippets of Hallward in their pockets? The reverend handed it to Monsarrat. ‘Proof.’ He waited, clearly expecting Monsarrat to read it on the spot.

  While Hallward’s article did indeed attack the archdeacon, its first target was Gerald Mobbs.

  The Colonial Flyer has been pleased to pass a high eulogium on the Venerable Archdeacon Harvey. As we differ somewhat from the editor on this subject, and as his panegyrics will go to refresh our memories on certain points of the public character of the archdeacon, we will here quote them piecemeal, and make our remarks thereon.

  The Flyer tells us: ‘No Church dignitary that ever breathed could have been more zealously, faithfully, and ably employed in advancing the morality and piety of a country than the present archdeacon of New South Wales, since his acceptance of an office which is no less irksome and responsible, than it is useful and important.’