The Soldier's Curse Read online

  ‘What wits you haven’t already lost to poteen,’ he said, hoping to restore a sense of normalcy through reversion to their accustomed banter, and aware that the potato-based spirit, pronounced ‘pocheen’, was a feature of the card games Slattery attended. He was rewarded with a glare from the young man, who threw himself into a seat as though he was trying to punish it.

  Monsarrat had to sympathise – the sound was beautiful, to his ears. But, entering its second hour, it was beginning to interfere with his ability to concentrate.

  Mrs Mulrooney seemed likewise affected. The indulgent tutting with which she would normally have greeted Slattery’s petulance was not in evidence today. ‘Stop hurling yourself about – you’ll have the timbers down around our ears,’ she said, swatting him on the head with her cleaning cloth. ‘And while the strong young soldier sits there squalling like a babe, at least the old woman and the convict are doing something.’

  ‘Drinking tea until they grow old and die?’ said Slattery. But his genial nature, which sometimes ran away like a young child trying to make a point, usually returned just as quickly. ‘At least your tea, Mother Mulrooney, is a suitable drink, along with some others I could name, to eke out the course of a lifetime.’

  Mrs Mulrooney succumbed to his twinkling, giving him a distracted smile and pouring him a cup of wonderfully bitter black liquid. She was right, though. So far, she was the only person making the vaguest attempt to take the situation in hand.

  Mrs Mulrooney had fetched Monsarrat that morning. He was using the grey time before the sun was fully aloft to scrub his teeth with a eucalyptus twig, ensure his cravat was properly tied and his waistcoat unmarked. Monsarrat had always been particular about his personal appearance. Now it had risen to the level of obsession. His dress was as important as any soldier’s uniform, distinguishing him as it did from his fellow prisoners in their slop clothing. His presentation was also one of the very few things over which he had any control.

  Monsarrat was able to complete his daily preparations in the privacy of his own timber hut – a relative luxury afforded to him along with other trusted convicts, or those with wives and families at the penal station – rather than in the less congenial atmosphere of the convict barracks. He knew barracks living, and hoped never to know it again. In a pack, personal grooming could easily be seen as pretension, an attempt to separate oneself from the group. The responses ranged from derision to violence.

  It was possible that the convicts who had built the one-room hut had guessed it was for one of their number who thought himself above them, a toff, as culpable as they, but with access to comforts and privileges they would never know. If they were aware, they had clearly taken their revenge in the shoddiness of the construction – surely it must have required effort and planning to engineer gaps in the woodwork which would admit chilly winds but not gentle summer breezes, and a door that fitted so poorly it would blow open at the merest waft. Like many buildings here, the floor was made of river pebbles, but these had not been packed so tightly with dirt as they had in other structures, making their surface uneven and prone to damp. And Monsarrat feared that the red earth of this place – so unlike the polite brown English soil – had designs on his waistcoats, and might yet achieve them due to its looseness amongst the pebbles.

  Mrs Mulrooney had never knocked on Monsarrat’s door, so she wasn’t aware of its frailty. When she had knocked this morning, the door had flown open as if hit by a battering ram. It was the first time Monsarrat had ever seen her blush. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Monsarrat, I intended to wait until you answered.’

  ‘Of course, please don’t worry, it’s the door’s fault. And as you see, I am ready. In fact, I was about to make my way to you.’

  ‘I couldn’t wait for you to get around to the kitchen this morning, Mr Monsarrat. There is a situation on which I need your most urgent advice.’

  ‘I am in your debt to the tune of gallons of tea. How can I assist?’

  ‘It’s best if I show you. I wouldn’t know where to begin to describe it.’

  Together they made their way to Government House, Monsarrat struggling to adjust his loping gait to Mrs Mulrooney’s small, quick steps as they climbed the hill towards the construction site which would ultimately produce the church, surrounded by the medical holy trinity of hospital, dispensary and surgeon’s quarters. From there, Mrs Mulrooney fastidiously lifting her skirts to avoid the kind of mud only a building site can produce, they crossed to Government House.

  Mrs Mulrooney led Monsarrat to the front of the house. As he approached, he became aware of a low, thrumming sound, felt in the gut as well as heard by the ears. The sound of human voices – female voices – singing, or at least making the same noises at the same time. Their song had none of the baroque flourish of European music, and was the more fascinating for it. It seemed to rise and fall to match the mountains and the tides of the river, rather than by any human intervention. The closest thing Monsarrat had heard was Gregorian chant, but even that was a poor approximation for the hypnotic music he was listening to now, and he began to understand why some convicts believed native women could sing spells.

  Rounding the corner to the front of Government House, the entrance reserved for the free and important, Monsarrat saw perhaps fifty Birpai women, old and young, their bodies streaked with white and red, sitting on the grass in front of the house and its empty verandah. Somewhere behind the verandah’s sloping roof, Monsarrat knew, lay Honora Shelborne, entering the second week of her sickness in an uncertain state of consciousness.

  A few of the singers looked distracted, like women in a parish church reciting familiar prayers. They seemed to Monsarrat earnest as a company, their eyes taking in either the house or the sky, seriously concerted in what sounded like prayers. A few of them looked up, half-seeing him before their eyes flicked back to their immediate environs.

  ‘Now, tell me,’ said Mrs Mulrooney, ‘what does this mean? For what purpose are they disturbing the poor woman’s rest?’

  Monsarrat thought. He could hear or see no meaning. ‘Perhaps we should ask Mr Spring,’ he said.

  Simon Spring had a Birpai lover, and the Birpai seemed to like him, rather than merely adjust to his presence as they had done with white settlers in general.

  ‘I must be back to the kitchen in case the bell rings,’ Mrs Mulrooney said. ‘Mrs Shelborne may have more need of me this morning, with this disturbance. Can I ask you, Mr Monsarrat, to talk to young Spring? I don’t like this, but there is nothing I can do to prevent it. They don’t seem to mean harm, so I don’t want to get the soldiers. If Spring can tell us their intentions, we can decide what to do, hopefully before Captain Diamond notices.’

  Fortunately, Monsarrat thought, the captain would be busy that morning. Major Shelborne had mandated frequent drilling for the troops – Monsarrat had transcribed the order himself – to prevent boredom. Diamond would be marching his soldiers up and down this morning, with a sense of urgency which would make you think a French invasion was imminent, and no doubt thinking himself very gallant while doing so. Only soldiers with specific assignments, like Private Slattery and his plastering job, were exempted. The military barracks and its parade ground were close to Government House – too close for Monsarrat’s liking. But perhaps the sound of boots striking the ground, muskets being shouldered and unshouldered, and the captain’s love of his own voice as it barked commands would allow the song to escape his attention.

  ‘Come to the kitchen for a cup of tea first.’

  So back they went, Monsarrat avoiding the accusing gaze of the blank office window as he passed. It was as he was finishing the fortifying cup that Slattery had made his abrupt entrance.

  Now, having heard the plan, Slattery looked into his own nearly empty cup. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said. ‘Spring might be more forthcoming to a soldier than a convict.’

  ‘Ah, you have your own work to do,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘Mrs Shelborne will need the solace of a papered sitting
room as she recovers.’

  And indeed, Slattery’s work crew were gently knocking at the outer door, as if to atone for their overseer’s roughness. They waited while Mrs Mulrooney let them in, led them through the kitchen and then across the intervening yard to the main house. ‘You’d best be off,’ she said to Monsarrat as she left. ‘Parade won’t last all day.’

  As he made towards the commissariat stores, Monsarrat heard Slattery’s voice from the verandah. ‘Off with you, you heathen bitches,’ he was yelling. ‘We’ve a sick woman here who doesn’t need your fookin’ pagan screeching!’

  His words failed to cause a ripple in the ocean of chanting voices.

  * * *

  Simon Spring was a vigorous young man, despite his myopic eyes, for which he wore thick-lensed glasses. He shared Monsarrat’s interest in history, and with his wages had built up a small library. It was rumoured he intended to marry his native woman, which offended some (and very possibly the offence was shared by the Birpai, if they were aware of his wish).

  Like many a man taken with a native woman, Spring’s chief purpose in life was to make a Birpai–English dictionary. His work was routine, and probably always would be, and this dictionary was his chance of intellectual glory.

  ‘Mr Monsarrat,’ he said, not standing. He did not share the common view of convicts as irredeemable, spoiled goods whose humanity had vanished with their offence. Nevertheless, he felt no impulse to rise as Monsarrat entered. ‘I enjoyed our discussion on Celtic barrow graves,’ he said, removing his glasses and absently polishing them on his shirt. ‘Made me wonder how many of my own people lie in them.’

  ‘My ancestors are more likely to be in mass graves,’ said Monsarrat. ‘My father’s Huguenot forebears courtesy of the French, and my mother’s Welsh thanks to the English.’

  Monsarrat would never have made this statement to an Englishman. But he knew Spring had a rebellious streak which he kept carefully concealed. The arrangement with his native paramour, and the occasional use of the word ‘sassenach’ when drink had been taken, had alerted Monsarrat to its existence. He hoped to awaken it now, in hopes it might incline the man to help.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Spring. ‘Our graves, yours and mine, will be in a land which has never known our kind. I wonder whether it will revolt as it consumes us? It’s not used to consuming people, you know – the Birpai leave their dead in sacred trees in the hinterland.’

  ‘Well, they may be in a state of mild revolution as we speak,’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘Surely not! Hard to imagine a more peaceable people than the Birpai, when they have been given cause not to be, as well. What can be happening?’

  Monsarrat described the scene outside Government House. ‘Mrs Mulrooney is chiefly concerned with Mrs Shelborne’s rest,’ he said.

  ‘As well she might be,’ said Spring. ‘I understand the dear lady is very ill.’

  ‘Indeed she is, but there are other concerns. Parade will finish before noon. If Captain Diamond comes upon the scene at Government House, he may act rashly. He’s been playing at soldiers all morning, you see, and he might decide he’s finished with playing.’

  Monsarrat knew Spring had little liking for Diamond with his clipped vowels, moustache and manner. In the major’s absence, Diamond had been feeling his way through the command, and had ordered an audit of the stores, offending Spring with both extra work and the implication of thievery.

  ‘We thought,’ he said, ‘if you could help us divine their intention, we might be able to convince them to disperse before any harm is done.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Spring, laying aside his ledger and standing. ‘It sounds like a matter of utmost urgency.’

  * * *

  Spring tried to share his fascination with the Birpai and their ways with those willing to listen. Monsarrat had cause to see Spring on a regular basis, as with the rest of the settlement he lined up weekly at the commissariat stores for his rations – bread, salt beef, and vegetables, which he was encouraged to supplement with whatever he was able to grow in the small garden attached to his hut.

  The patch of red dirt was, in his view, unworthy of the name garden, producing the occasional anaemic carrot or runtish bean, and despite his coaxing utterly failing to give him a pumpkin. He refused to believe this was down to his own gardening skills, adopting an attitude of which Mrs Mulrooney would have approved – it was the garden’s fault.

  So his visits to the store were necessary for his continued survival. On occasion he had seen Spring there in conversation with a particularly tall and strong Birpai man called Bangar, one of the bush constables, in unmarked canvas. Monsarrat was under the impression he was the brother of Spring’s lover, and the pair certainly seemed friendly whenever Monsarrat saw them together, conversing in the Birpai tongue, although Bangar was an intelligent man, and also spoke English.

  Bangar faded in and out of Monsarrat’s daily life. In his free time (of which he had more than another, more disciplinarian commandant would have allowed), Monsarrat frequently walked down to the river, along its southern bank, turning as it emptied into the ocean, until he reached the blackened tongue of rock which jutted out from Lady Nelson Beach, pointing into oblivion. He preferred to stand at an angle to it, facing south towards the hundreds of miles separating him from Sydney. Sometimes he would take a few symbolic steps, and tell himself he had begun his journey back.

  Occasionally on these walks he would find Bangar in step beside him, the man’s movements quick and quiet. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they walked in silence. But Bangar noticed everything. Recently, they had seen the corpse of a pademelon – which looked like a small kangaroo – rolling backwards and forwards at the edge of the ocean. An odd place for it, as pademelons preferred the forest. Bangar frowned at this. The pademelon was his totem, he told Monsarrat. All life had its meaning and purpose.

  When he had seen Monsarrat looking towards the Three Brothers, Bangar had told him the story of these mountain triplets.

  The land around here, he told Monsarrat, had once been flat, and amongst its people had been three brothers whose mother was the spirit of the lake. When the brothers grew old enough to be initiated into their tribe, they were sent to other Birpai clans. The oldest, Dooragan, went to the stingray people to the north (no, Bangar smiled when Monsarrat asked, they didn’t look like stingrays – the animals were their totem). The middle brother, Mooragan, went to the crab people near the sea. And the youngest, Booragan, he went south to the shark people.

  Mooragan was jealous of the youngest, and tried to engage Dooragan in a plot to kill Booragan, so there would be more maternal love to go around. Dooragan refused, but Mooragan was not to be dissuaded. He pursued Booragan as the youngest walked south to meet his destiny. That destiny, unfortunately, ended with his death at the hands of his brother.

  But the murder did not take place unobserved. A watchful bird, known as a willie wagtail, saw everything, and flew to the boys’ mother with the news. The lake spirit was enraged, and immediately exacted her revenge on both of her surviving sons, discovering too late that only one of them was guilty.

  In punishing her boys, she angered the Gamal, the head of the Birpai people and the one who had the power to dispense justice. His justice, on this occasion, was to turn the three boys into mountains – Dooragan in the north, Mooragan in the middle and Booragan in the south. He took care to position Dooragan so that the boy-mountain split the lake in two, sundering his mother’s spirit.

  Monsarrat was fascinated by this tale. He knew the mountains had also been named the Three Brothers by his own people, although Captain James Cook had a far more prosaic reason for giving them the name – when he saw them from the deck of his ship, he simply felt they looked alike. The fact that they had been given the same name by the Birpai countless generations ago made them seem to Monsarrat to have an independent consciousness. After that, and despite himself, he often looked warily at the looming, murderous Mooragan.

  ‘Why
do you put up with us?’ Monsarrat asked on one of these walks.

  ‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ Bangar said.

  But of course, it was a little more complicated than that. When the Birpai had first seen a party of whitefellas stumbling their way through the bush, they were somewhat amused at the newcomers’ incompetence. We’ll keep an eye on these ones, they thought, but they don’t seem up to much.

  But then more came, and more. And the rougher ones, the cedar-cutters and the like, would just as soon go through a Birpai home as around it.

  The Birpai people realised that these men did not share their connection with the land. They didn’t know how to use spider webs to pack a wound, how to light a fire in a canoe when fishing at night, using the right wood to keep the mosquitoes away, or how to make fishhooks from thorn trees. They didn’t know how to cut a shield from a tree in a way which wouldn’t kill the tree itself. They took what they wanted and more – timber, fish and, it was rumoured, sometimes women. And they seemed to believe the land would always provide more, no matter how much they abused it.

  There had been skirmishes – Birpai tribesmen, protecting their land, had raided parties working upriver. From then on these parties were heavily guarded, and the Birpai spears, lethal as they were, did not have the range of the muskets which took many of their lives.

  ‘If we’d known the nature of you, we might have speared you before there were so many,’ Bangar had once told Monsarrat genially. Monsarrat smiled as though Bangar was joking, but he knew he wasn’t.

  ‘There’s a lot of land, though,’ said Monsarrat. ‘Why not just move on a bit?’

  Bangar’s face tightened. ‘So what if I come in and take that kitchen,’ he said, ‘and I say, eh Monsarrat, it’s a big house up here on the hill – which used to be ours. Why don’t you just go and make your tea in the bedroom? But there’s no stove in the bedroom, you say. Well, this place is our house. We have places for hunting, places for ceremonies. Every place has a use. We can’t just move on.’