The Soldier's Curse Read online

  I must be more careful on my next trip to the river, Monsarrat thought.

  ‘Beyond that,’ said the doctor, ‘in order to advise you I would need to know which disease we are dealing with. And in all honesty I don’t. The humours of this place are different. The seasons are reversed. It’s not impossible that some bodies would react badly to the change in natural order, while others would be unaffected. Perhaps the air or water here is more acidic, and it’s an excess of acid in the lymph glands that causes it. I have to admit, I thought of cholera for a short time. Or gastric fever. And yes, I did fear the very event you have come to discuss. But there would be more, far more by now. If we were at home, and if the circumstances were right, I might suspect arsenic poisoning. But Spring keeps the arsenic under lock and key, and makes a note of everyone who wants some for the rats. And there’s no one with a wish to do in a kind gentlewoman and a harmless young felon.’

  ‘Your advice, then, is to watch, wait, eat and hope,’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘It’s the best I have for you right now. And you may like to take a fatalistic approach – if you are marked for it, no art of mine, and no precautions of yours, will save you.’

  Monsarrat worried at the conversation as his feet pushed the path away behind him and his hands kept each other company behind his back. He had had more than enough of professional men who seemed to lack necessary knowledge, or the shrewdness to apply it properly. He supposed that if Gonville had been a truly talented doctor, he might now be taking his ease on Harley Street.

  Monsarrat’s pace gradually slowed and then stopped, his feet no longer pushing the path but holding it in place.

  After a few moments they quickened in a far less gradual and seemly fashion, closing the distance between their owner and the bookshelf in the study of Major Angus Augustus Shelborne.

  * * *

  When Hannah Mulrooney was a child, the worst insult that could be hurled at you was that you were useless.

  In her family you needed to justify not only the food you ate, but the chair you occupied at the table and the air you displaced as you sat down. Now, however distant and dead he might be, she feared her father would level the dreaded accusation at her. What good was brewing tea – doing it the proper way, the only way – when you were serving it to a near-corpse, dull-eyed and slack-skinned and unrecognisable as the young woman who had captivated the major, and much of the rest of the port.

  But still she brewed, delicate infusions for Mrs Shelborne and strong, black concoctions for those amongst the regular visitors to the house whom she liked well enough. Monsarrat was one of the chief consumers, and had labelled her kitchen ‘a temple of tea and counsel’, earning himself a swat with a damp cloth and a reminder that he might be lettered but he was still a convict and must therefore avoid acting above his station, even verbally.

  Yet secretly, Hannah Mulrooney hugged the name to herself, for Monsarrat did seek her counsel on a range of matters. How should he phrase a letter to the Colonial Secretary warning of the port’s overcrowding, so that it sounded reasoned and not wheedling (for Major Shelborne often left the composition of the first drafts of such letters to Monsarrat, and Mrs Mulrooney had a gift for manipulating a language she could not read)? How much salt pork should be put by for Christmas, and should there be a Christmas pudding in the cursed summer heat? And, chiefly, how was Monsarrat to secure another ticket of leave, this one without conditions, and be as good as free in the whole vast colony of New South Wales? She gave such answers as she could, and Monsarrat often seemed pleased, sometimes even conveying her advice to Major Shelborne (without mentioning its source).

  ‘You know, you’re shrewder than me,’ Monsarrat had said to her once.

  ‘Of course I am,’ she said. ‘For all the good it will do me, with no letters.’

  ‘Maybe one day I’ll teach you some letters,’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘Well, don’t think I’ll find the time to take them on board me.’ In the meantime, he took to writing letters on her behalf to her son, Padraig, who was droving in the plains beyond the hazy mountains. He would also read her the replies, for Padraig had enough of an education to pen them himself – Mrs Mulrooney had made certain of that, would have sold her very shoes to win for Padraig the induction into what seemed to her a mystical art.

  Padraig had travelled to the colony while still in his first year of life, transported as a satellite of his butter-thief mother. When he was eight, she had earned her ticket of leave, and since that day she had been putting money aside in the hopes of eventually helping Padraig into ownership of a public house, installing herself as the power behind the alehouse throne.

  For a time, Mrs Mulrooney had considered inviting Fergal Slattery to join them in the enterprise, whenever that might happen. Padraig had breathed Ireland’s air for less than a year, and she believed the venture needed someone with a working memory of the place, to ensure things were done properly.

  Now, though, she was beginning to think she would need to look elsewhere, perhaps even to herself.

  She had just returned from delivering tea to Slattery’s plastering crew during their confinement to the parlour. Even if they were contagious, she believed the disease had enough sense to leave her alone. Indeed, it clearly had more sense than the plasterers themselves, as she’d had to admonish them for damaging the paper, which showed white in some small sections where the green colouring had been scraped off.

  Slattery was waiting in the kitchen, his feet up, whittling a stick.

  ‘Get your dirty great hooves off my table.’

  Slattery obliged without looking up. ‘Not yours though, is it?’ he said.

  ‘Of course it is, as good as.’

  ‘Try making off with it and see if the Shelbornes agree.’

  ‘I’ve no patience for this today, Fergal,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘There’s a long night ahead, if last night was anything to go by, and I can’t be doing with talk of stealing tables.’

  ‘Hopefully not too many more sleepless nights for you; I imagine she’ll be dead soon.’

  Mrs Mulrooney was shocked by the baldness of the statement – even in a settlement where barely a week passed without a funeral, talk of death was couched in euphemisms, as though by referring to it obliquely people could avoid attracting its attention. ‘You be careful, young Slattery. Ears everywhere.’

  ‘Including two on my head, to keep my eyes company. Those eyes which saw her ladyship stepping off the Sally, followed by trunk upon trunk – when the rest of us arrived with so little. What does one person do with so many possessions? And why do they feel the need to haul them about?’

  He was unfolding himself from his chair when Monsarrat came in. ‘Private, you can do as you will with your men. Gonville says there’s no threat of contagion.’

  ‘Why, thank you very fooking much,’ said Slattery, bowing with no trace of his usual good humour. He flung his much-whittled stick towards the grate and marched out – without thanking Mrs Mulrooney, an omission of which his mother would have been ashamed – and could be heard a short time later barking at his unfortunate charges.

  Monsarrat took his place, spread a publication out on the table, and began to read. Though she couldn’t string the letters together, Mrs Mulrooney recognised his beloved Edinburgh Review, which he had just retrieved from the major’s study. Monsarrat sometimes liked to read in the kitchen, comforted by the sounds of domesticity. He also liked, from time to time, to seek Mrs Mulrooney’s view on what he had read.

  ‘Mrs Mulrooney,’ he said now, looking up from his reading, ‘what colour is the wallpaper in Mrs Shelborne’s bedroom?’

  Mrs Mulrooney had spent too long, recently, staring at that wallpaper, a restful blue and white stripe. It was the inanity of the question, rather than its personal nature, which bothered her the most. ‘Do you think I’ve the time to be discussing wall decorations?’ she said, casting him into the outer darkness by removing his half-drunk tea.

  ‘Please, it
may be important. I’ll explain when I understand more. Is it green, as in the parlour?’

  ‘No, blue and white. The blue may have a nodding acquaintance with green in certain lights, but that’s as far as it goes.’

  ‘I see.’ Monsarrat, disappointed, returned to his reading.

  Mrs Mulrooney had heard other men talk as Slattery just had. The dispossessed often did, even those who took the imperial shilling. It was a symptom of a spreading malaise which dug trenches in their minds, diverting their original natures down courses that ended in black and stagnant ponds. Here, they bloated into new and terrible shapes. She still had hopes that the lightsome Slattery would resist taking these paths, find a way to avoid the swamp. So she decided, for now, not to mention the scraped wallpaper, or the green flecks she had noticed on the knife Slattery was whittling with. A few of these had transferred themselves to the stick he had flung aside, an object which now found its way into Mrs Mulrooney’s pocket.

  Chapter 8

  Slattery’s good humour was restored the next morning.

  He entered the kitchen shortly after Monsarrat, with his usual assault to the door, loped over to Mrs Mulrooney and sank into an exaggerated courtly bow. ‘Mother Mulrooney, queen amongst housekeepers, would you ever forgive me for yesterday? It was worry about Mrs Shelborne’s condition that took hold of my spirits. I’m myself again and I beg your kind pardon.’

  Mrs Mulrooney had been intending to give Slattery the kind of dressing-down she usually reserved for household tools and cooking utensils. She turned her back on him now, but Monsarrat saw she was smiling. ‘Go on with you then, Fergal,’ she said. ‘I’ll forgive you so your poor dear mother’s soul can rest, as it would certainly have been roused by your carrying on yesterday. And the same worry is disturbing my own rest. In penance you can fetch me some firewood.’

  Slattery left, and returned with an armful of quartered logs, whistling as he laid some on the fire and the rest on the scuttle. He then guided her to the chair he would have occupied and turned to fiddle with the tea chest, scooping some leaves into the fine china pot reserved for Honora.

  ‘You’re too cheerful to be suffering from a night soaked in poteen, or any other kind of the swill you boys like to drink,’ said Monsarrat, as Slattery sat down opposite him and awaited his tea.

  ‘Ah, not a drop of poteen has passed my lips since I left Ireland, water of life though it is,’ said Slattery. ‘It’s my virtuous living that has lifted my mood.’

  Monsarrat said nothing, his challenge to the claim evident in his stare.

  ‘And I won a decent amount at Three Card Brag,’ said Slattery.

  ‘Better. Next time you lie to me, please have the courtesy to make it convincing.’

  ‘Oh, he’s convincing,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘Last week he begged me for a piece of the shortbread I’d made to try to tempt Mrs Shelborne’s appetite. Said it was for someone who was ill. Don’t think I didn’t see the crumbs on your whiskers, Fergal.’

  Slattery smiled and winked at Monsarrat. He wasn’t, as Mrs Mulrooney no doubt assumed, sharing boyish glee at having misappropriated shortbread. He was urging Monsarrat to silence.

  Monsarrat would have had no trouble believing Slattery guilty of obtaining shortbread by deception. But in this case, he knew, the Irishman had been moved by purer motives.

  Of the three surviving members of Slattery’s plastering crew, two were subject to regular tongue lashings by the young soldier. Frogett and Daines were Cockneys and had occasionally worked decorating houses in London. The fourth member of the crew, Jeremiah Cassidy, lay freshly in his grave, but in life had looked as if he had never decorated anything except maybe a pigpen with swill.

  Frogett (who had assaulted a bailiff and then a fellow prisoner in Sydney) and Daines (who had robbed a man at knifepoint and was then found drunk in Windsor) looked unreliable, and Slattery blamed them for looking like that. But Monsarrat knew it had been bred into them – the powerful had proved to them that surface reliability got you nowhere in the end. They were not characterised so much by sullenness, a quality often attributed to convicts, but by great wariness; their eyes were foxy because they believed they needed to be foxes to negotiate the system.

  But the last man in the crew, William Dory, still had some sensibility left in his features. Dory, originally a country boy from somewhere in the west of England – or maybe he was Cornish, Monsarrat had forgotten – had grown from a boy to a man as a convict, but at eighteen was still only a sapling and had hopes that the other two had lost.

  Those hopes, as it turned out, were fed by Slattery. So, occasionally, was Dory himself.

  Monsarrat had become aware of the unlikely connection one morning when, passing the sitting room on the way to the office, he’d heard Slattery’s dancing laughter, which often graced the kitchen but had never, as far as Monsarrat knew, reverberated off the wallpaper.

  Dory had been telling Slattery about his first attempt at riding a horse, during which he had hoisted himself up at the wrong angle and found himself facing the wrong end of the nag. While Slattery laughed, the other members of the plastering crew worked quietly, if resentfully, occasionally glancing in their overseer’s direction. When Slattery noticed, he barked at them to stop wasting time and get on with it and then, spotting Monsarrat in the doorway, gave him a mock salute.

  The next time he saw Slattery, Monsarrat said, ‘Playing favourites, aren’t you?’

  Slattery grinned, his first response to any situation. ‘Ah, he’s a good lad,’ he said. ‘And I don’t think he deserves to be here, not really. He didn’t hurt anyone, not like those other two lags, criminals to the bone. His family lost their farm when the rent went up, you see. They moved to London, and it didn’t agree with his mother’s health. His father couldn’t get work, so Dory took some bread – stale, mind – off a cart for his mother. Unfortunately, a peeler was watching. Then in Sydney he met another boy his age – he can’t have been more than fourteen – and the overseer of their work gang used to single them out for special attention, them being the youngest and weakest. The overseer had Dory’s friend flogged for neglecting work, and was going to flog him again the next day for the same offence – poor bastard could barely walk after the first flogging – when Dory flattened him. So here he is.’

  ‘He seems reasonably cheerful for a convict,’ said Monsarrat. More cheerful than me, certainly, he thought, when he has even less reason to be cheerful than I do.

  ‘He’s a bright boy, and he has letters,’ said Slattery. ‘I’ve told him a decent fellow such as himself could do well in Sydney, once he gets his ticket. He’s making plans, wants to apply for a baker’s licence when he’s free.’

  But Dory, like Jeremiah, had started coughing, and then vomiting. Slattery had insisted Dory take regular rests, and sent him outside, between the kitchen and the main house, to do so. Monsarrat was unsure about the wisdom of sending an ill boy outside in winter to rest, but presumed Slattery was trying to avoid a mutiny by sending Dory off on invented errands.

  And Monsarrat had seen Slattery take the shortbread outside and offer it to Dory. Dory took it, broke it in half, and handed a piece back to Slattery, who raised it as though it was a cup of ale, before they both ate.

  * * *

  Monsarrat was more than willing to comply with Slattery’s winked request for silence, although the need for secrecy was beyond him. In any case, it was not the only winked request between them. The other one held a far greater peril, both for Slattery and for the friendship between the two men.

  Just after Major Shelborne’s departure into the hinterland, Monsarrat, with his customary efficiency, had finished the morning’s transcribing in good order. It was unnaturally sunny, so he decided to leave Catullus and the Edinburgh Review to themselves for the afternoon. He adored, when the mood was upon him, climbing up to a headland several beaches away – this was particularly the case if the wind was forcing the waves to stand to attention for an instant before hurtli
ng against the sandstone cliffs, as though they harboured the same self-hatred as Monsarrat did.

  The route he chose would take him three headlands to the south. He was reasonably assured of not meeting anyone on the way, as this was the territory of Goliath – an unusually large snake the rumour of which had reached the settlement, although the serpent itself hadn’t.

  Goliath was known to reside in the south, along with many more of his kind – Slattery had been headed that way some time previously and, seeing several snakes imitating sticks as if to deceive the unwary, had later warned Captain Diamond of the danger. Neither Goliath nor any other snake had been known to pierce regimental skin, but they were to be presumed venomous until proved otherwise.

  To replace a soldier fallen to a snake, Diamond would have had to negotiate a lengthy administrative labyrinth, as well as wait for a replacement to arrive from Sydney. He preferred to avoid the trouble, and therefore forbade all soldiers from going to the place that Slattery had described. Convicts, presumably, were more expendable, and he had not placed a similar prohibition on them. And while conditions were nowhere near as harsh as even the progressive Governor Macquarie had envisioned, most convicts did not have sufficient liberty (or inclination) for long rambles, especially under Diamond’s command. So the snakes and the distance and the need to scramble up loose diagonals of sandstone meant that few people, free or felon, visited the area.

  But Monsarrat, who had called for Daisy the night before and felt in need of scourging himself, decided that the exertion, and the likelihood of a run-in with the dread Goliath, would serve well as a punishment.

  Monsarrat crossed a headland, a tiny escape. It was hard work getting up it, but the view from the top of it, of the ocean and the coastline, was sublime. No man who stood atop it on such an afternoon could be considered entirely a slave.

  Another headland. This was further than he’d walked before; below him stood a beach into which a creek flowed, fringed by low swampy country and those paperbarks which, had the Egyptians begun their civilisation on this river instead of the Nile, would have provided them with papyrus.