The Soldier's Curse (15 page)

As the judge was pronouncing a sentence of death by hanging, Monsarrat's thoughts turned to how he could make a respectable end. He had expended his emotion in his private cell the night before. Now he approached the business of his death as though it were a legal problem. How to make sure he didn't mewl or snivel when mounting the gallows. Perhaps he would need one more purging, one more hour raging at fate, weeping for the years lost to him, and shuddering with fear. Other felons would see him, of course, as he was unlikely to get a private cell again. But he didn't care for their good opinion. He would be remembered for the wrong reasons by his friends, colleagues and clients. But
when they gave future accounts of him, he wanted them to say, ‘He made a good end, though, I'll give him that.' If it wasn't too much to hope for, he might wish them to add: ‘And he was a good advocate, if a false one.'

Planning one's death tends to absorb a man, so Monsarrat almost missed the judge removing the black cloth and recommending him to the King's mercy.

He knew what that meant. If mercy were indeed to be granted by the King, he would be following Dodds to a place no man here had seen, a place wreathed in misty tales of murderous natives and rampaging monsters. A place which, if half the tales were true, might make him wish the black square had stayed resting on the judge's wig.

His initial, reflexive relief at not dying soon fell away to dread of a land as unmapped as the one which lay beyond this life.

As Monsarrat had expected, there was now no possibility of a private cell. He was put into the condemned cell, which gradually filled up that day with half-a-dozen other men. There, he awaited word on whether the King would follow the recommendation of one of his subjects, and spare the life of another.

He was in there for two months, until the sheriff appeared at the grille one breathless summer day and informed those within that the King had extended his mercy to five of the prisoners, and that their sentence had been commuted to transportation for life.

Monsarrat's spirit until then had not been too dismal. One of his few negotiable assets was his ability to convey a sense of threat and a certain dignity, despite the mockery of common criminals who declared him a fantailer and a nob. So he was left alone by the others in his cell. He had found himself moping very little and was entertained by the frequent fashionable visitors who came to look at the condemned men as some people would go to an art gallery to look at paintings, paying the gaoler for the privilege. Young men would bring pretty women, who would
exclaim over the evil aspect and obvious moral degradation of the men there, and move closer to their escorts for protection (this making the place one of the chief attractions for young couples). Monsarrat, though, was a particular favourite. He had the advantage of being able to converse with gentlemen who visited the prison as a spectator sport. His accent, his sensibilities, so like their own, leavened their visit with a delicious tickle of fear that they could easily, if rash, become him. Some of his regular visitors had kept him well primed with liquor, passing tankards from the inn through the bars. And since the warder was running such an interesting zoo, he protected his own reputation by ensuring his charges had fresh straw weekly and clean blankets on which to lie.

But sometimes the full weight of knowing he must endure a lifetime of penal suffering descended on Monsarrat and sank him into a deep despair. There were times when the noose seemed to him a lost opportunity for escape. The warder could see this and made sure that all sharp tools and implements were kept far from Monsarrat – even a spoon could be honed on stone to make a blade with which a man might cut his veins.

The next day, chained at wrist and ankle to each other, the transportees rode by cart into Plymouth, where people hooted at them in the streets, and at last down to the dock, where they were rowed out to the prison hulks moored in the Tamar River, and given suits of wool and canvas marked with black arrows.

The hulk in which Monsarrat and the others were placed to await their transportation to Australia was a dismasted asylum of a place. Its prisoners, most of whom would work building docks and harbour fortifications while they waited for their ship to leave for the south, were locked down at night into a Hades where young boys were taught every criminal skill known to the combined faculty of felonry that presided over the dimness. The new men were threatened and pawed, and Monsarrat was driven to think only of his own flesh and its integrity.

Each morning he was taken ashore in a rowboat and guarded heavily at his work, although he was not chained. He was of course unused to the work with stone. He wished he'd bent his skill to
being a mason, because they toiled much less harshly than the mere haulage animals he and most of his fraternity now became.

But a few weeks later, someone on the hospital ship scanned the record for a clerk, and he was called out of the work gang and, grateful once again for his education, he became a clerk on a hospital ship, the
Charon
.

Relieved to be spared the work gang, Monsarrat did such a good job that he was held back and missed the next ship sailing for Australia, into which were absorbed his four former cellmates from the Exeter assizes. Instead, he found himself taken aboard the
Morley
, a small ship barely more than four hundred tons, but fast sailing, and not badly run, with a good surgeon who had made a number of journeys to Australia and knew how to deal with prisoners in the early stormy days through the Channel, the Bay of Biscay, and into the Atlantic past the Azores, the terrible belt of heat and slack winds off West Africa, and the roaring gales then encountered to the south.

The ship itself, as Monsarrat would discover, had already made the journey to Australia, either to Port Jackson or to Hobart, a number of times. Whether the caulking between the planks of decking turned liquid in the tropical sun or collected a gloss of ice much further south, the ship's timbers seemed to Monsarrat to be accustomed to those stresses, and to be able to accommodate them. With time Monsarrat could not help thinking of the ship not perhaps as an alma mater, a sweet motherly floating institution, but at least as a mater, the mother who gave birth to his Australian existence.

The journey into the penal netherworld was made less painful for him by the fact that the surgeon, after a suitable period of probation, had him up to the ship's hospital to write his correspondence and the details of his medical log.

In calmer weather he copied out sections of a book the surgeon was writing on the motions of the earth and heavenly bodies as explainable by electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, and on the impact of this magnetism on the health, growth and decay of man. The surgeon also had various notes for a tract on
irrigation of land, based on what he had seen of Egypt, Syria and South America.

It was from offhand remarks by the surgeon that Monsarrat got a picture of New South Wales, this colony now half-free and half-convict; of its systems of discipline and the various steps a man or woman could take towards freedom: an absolute pardon, which would enable a person to return to Britain if he had the means to do so, or a conditional one, which made him an Australian for life, and the steps in between – the ticket of leave and so on. From the surgeon he learned that at the end of seven years, a life-serving convict could get his ticket of leave, which allowed him to work for himself, and at the end of fourteen, a condition of freedom within the colony.

More than a decade later, thanks to Monsarrat's second, colonial conviction, that condition now appeared almost unreachable, receding further with every passing day, and seemingly quickening its retreat under the glare of Captain Diamond.

Monsarrat needed to walk through the long room of the hospital, with the beds on either side of one central alley, to get to Dr Gonville's office behind its partition at the back. And so he could hardly have missed Dory's prone frame.

Dory was lying on his stomach. Now that most of the blood had been sopped up, the wound that took up the entirety of his back looked far more gruesome, more jagged, the exposed bone more visible. Some parts of it had also taken on a disturbing purple or grey puffiness at the edges. Most of it had been smeared with hog's fat, in a bid to provide a barrier between the wound and the outside world and thus prevent infection. But Monsarrat feared this measure might have sealed the infection in, especially if Diamond's saliva was as poisonous as his character.

Dory had his head to the side. His eyes were slightly open, only small white slivers visible. His lips were parted, and his breathing ragged. Despite the cold – not a cold any self-respecting winter in England would have produced, but cold just the same – Dory's forehead had a slick of sweat on it. This was being mopped up, at intervals, by the rotund Father Hanley.

Dory didn't respond as Monsarrat neared his bed, save for a grunt which told of the pain he felt even as his mind struggled
to protect him from it by shutting down. He was beyond response, perhaps permanently. Hanley, however, looked up. His face was drawn in a way that Monsarrat wouldn't have thought possible for a corpulent man, and his greeting lacked the self-conscious formality to which he had subjected Monsarrat in the kitchen the other day.

‘Good morning, Mr Monsarrat,' he said. ‘I understand you witnessed these wounds being inflicted.'

‘I did, Father. And I hope never to witness anything like it again.' Not wanting to be reported for gossiping about the captain, Monsarrat lowered his voice. ‘You've heard, Father, of the captain's unusual intervention?'

‘I have. May God forgive him. An excess in brutality when delivering a punishment is a sure sign of a compromised soul. I'd go to the man now offering spiritual guidance, but he wouldn't take it, and I might find myself here in a similar situation.'

‘How long have you been here?' asked Monsarrat.

‘All night. I heard of Fergal's incarceration, came to find him. The soldier on guard is a good son of the church, now, and he let me in. I know Fergal doesn't like me. He wants a warrior priest, not a corpulent cleric. But he told me about this young fellow, what he had been through. Asked me to be with him, in case the fellow passed away and needed shriving. I have no idea whether he is a follower of the one true faith, but the Reverend is in Sydney, and surely even a Protestant would take a Catholic rite over no rite at all.'

Monsarrat, having heard Diamond and many others rail against Catholicism, wasn't certain.

Father Hanley reached over again towards Dory, and Monsarrat noticed the sweat on the boy's forehead had been replenished. Gently, and with a small smile as though Dory could see him, the priest dabbed at the boy's face. It's just possible I might have misjudged Hanley, thought Monsarrat.

‘Has he been in this condition the whole time?'

‘Much like it, although his fever seems to be getting worse. Dr Gonville, not a bad man when all's said and done, has looked in a few times. But apart from the hog's fat he hasn't done much. He
says we must allow the healing to take its course, although I can see precious little evidence of healing on this bed in front of me.

‘The soldiers pride themselves on having seen more death than anyone else, as though it were a matter for boasting. But I tell you, Mr Monsarrat, a priest sees death too, and in all its forms, not just the glorious blood of the battlefield. And there's an air to them all, man or woman, when they're about to leave, when their heart is counting out its last beats. To my mind Dory has that air to him now. I don't believe he will be with us for long.'

‘Do you think, Father, that Dr Gonville might be persuaded to give him something to help with the pain? Or I could try to find some poteen – a few drops on the lips might do some good.'

‘Poteen can take away pain in all its forms, surely. And I must confess, I have found myself in need of it. But there's been not a drop of it recently. That other absconder, the one last month, used to be able to get some for me, but now he's confined I wouldn't have the first clue where to lay my hands on the stuff.'

‘But does Slattery not distil it?' asked Monsarrat. He stopped short of saying that he'd come upon the young soldier's still – a bargain was a bargain. ‘Perhaps you could visit him again, although he's probably been released by now. Ask him where he keeps it. He'd not begrudge some for young Dory, of that I'm certain.'

‘Ah, now, if Slattery was indeed a purveyor of the remarkable stuff, I'd not have a second's hesitation in procuring some. But he never touches it – he told me himself – much less brews it. A man in his village was sent out of his wits when he drank some which hadn't been made properly, and made blind besides. He told me he swore off it then and there. He made no such pledge in regard to other liquor, but he thinks poteen is the devil's work, devilish though he is himself at times.'

Monsarrat frowned. He didn't necessarily see a dislike for poteen as a disincentive to brewing and profiting from it. He resolved to ask Slattery himself, when they next found themselves facing each other over Mrs Mulrooney's scrubbed table.

He said goodbye to the priest, and as he moved between the beds towards the surgeon's partition, he heard Hanley humming an
air which he presumed to be Irish. A little jaunty for the circumstances, perhaps, but who knew what would ease the boy's pain, in whatever state his mind currently rested.

‘Monsarrat,' said Gonville, as Monsarrat moved around the partition to stand in front of his desk. ‘You're here to inquire about the boy. I must confess, I feel partly responsible for his present condition – I should have intervened sooner, and more forcefully.'

‘You did what you could, doctor. I'm certainly concerned for him. But I'm here on a matter of greater concern. Mrs Mulrooney reports Mrs Shelborne is not responding even to a squeeze of the hand. Her breathing has become laboured, and she does not seem to have been in a state of anything resembling consciousness for some time. I alerted Captain Diamond to this change in the lady's circumstance, and he begs you to come at once.'

‘I'm sure he does,' said the doctor. Then, standing and rounding the table: ‘Very well, Monsarrat, let's go and see what can be done.'

On the walk to Government House, Monsarrat decided to risk a small gambit. If Mrs Shelborne was truly lying under a poisonous cloud, it was worth the danger.

‘It's kind of the captain to be concerned for the lady's predicament,' he said.

‘Yes, and from a man not especially known for his kindness. I understand he and Mrs Shelborne had an acquaintance in Ireland. You know Diamond has been with the major for some years: in Madras, Ireland, and now here.'

‘Yes. They do seem to have different views on how to run the settlement, though,' said Monsarrat.

‘Very different men. Most people here have been into the hospital at least once, and you hear rumours. Of actions which someone of the major's nature would consider … unpalatable. Things that needed to be attended to nonetheless. By someone with fewer scruples. Anyway, I've heard Diamond claim he has a particular friendship with the lady, although nothing untoward, I'm sure.'

‘Forbid the thought,' said Monsarrat.

On arriving at the kitchen, they found Mrs Mulrooney cleaning skillets that she had already cleaned twice that morning. Her
hands were raw from scrubbing the kitchen table, which must now have lost at least half an inch to her brush.

‘Please conduct me to the bedroom, Mrs Mulrooney,' said the doctor. ‘Monsarrat, do you know where the captain is to be found?'

‘In the major's study, sir. At least that's where he was when I came to you.'

Gonville's eyebrow quirked up slightly. ‘Please inform him I'm here.'

‘Will you come by the study to make a report, doctor?' said Monsarrat.

‘Make a report? Diamond has no right to a report. Mrs Shelborne's condition concerns her husband and no one else. I will recommend urgent action, if I feel it necessary. If not, I will return directly to the hospital, where there is a young man with a wound beginning to look infected. Saliva is a filthy substance.'

Monsarrat returned to the workroom. The door was hanging open, as was the door to the major's study, with no sign of the captain. Evidently, Monsarrat thought, he did not apply the same force to closing doors as he did to opening them.

In the major's study, he was confronted with the kind of disorder which offended his clerk's sensibilities. The dispatches which had been laid aside, the reports to the Colonial Secretary awaiting the major's signature, all correspondence he had organised so neatly to await the major on his return, lay in a jumbled mess on the desk. Some of the document seals were broken. Rifling through the chaos, Monsarrat noticed that one of those belonged to Dr Gonville's report.

What had he been at? thought Monsarrat. Was he simply a man unused to dealing in papers, who had decided to leave the clerk to clean up the mess? Or had he been looking for something?

Monsarrat started the task of setting the desk to rights. Resealing those seals that had been broken, checking the documents to make sure their contents were not sensitive, placing them back where he believed they should live. The work soothed him. He
always enjoyed creating order where there had been none. It gave him an illusion of control, which he knew his reality did not match.

When she was well, Honora Shelborne had been in and out of the major's study. He allowed her to keep some of her own documents in there, and to use his desk when he had no need of it. As he sorted through the papers, Monsarrat noticed that while most of them were jumbled in no particular order, papers concerning Honora were set slightly to one side. There were letters, notes on speeches she might now never give, recipes, jotted observations on how life in the settlement could be improved for its inhabitants. There were even notes on the success of the experiment with the hydrotherapy tent, which she proclaimed had returned colour to the cheeks of the ageing housekeeper.

Monsarrat had never dealt with Mrs Shelborne's papers, as she preferred to completely manage her own affairs. So he had no way of knowing whether anything was missing. He did notice that some of the letters bore a family crest, a rampant stag on a background of crimson and white. These declared themselves to be from Castle Henry, Wicklow, Ireland. Monsarrat presumed these were from her family. He knew he could have confirmed his suspicion by reading them, with very little risk of a consequence. Even had the captain re-entered at that moment, he could simply busy himself with reorganising the place. But despite the fact Mrs Shelborne would never know or care, he felt he had spied on her quite enough as it was.

He was on the verge of completing the task of restoring the study to its former state of glorious organisation when the main door opened. It wasn't flung open by Slattery's shoulder, or by Diamond's fist, but nor was it tentatively nudged, in the manner of Edward Donald.

Walking into the outer room, Monsarrat found Dr Gonville. The surgeon stood as still as always, but a red tinge climbing his neck betrayed a state of agitation. ‘Not here then, eh? Do you know where he is?'

‘I'm sorry, doctor, I'm not sure where he's gone, but I imagine you may find him near the barracks. Is there anything I can do to assist?'

‘As a matter of fact, Monsarrat, there is. I very much fear Mrs Shelborne has little time left. I intend to entreat the captain to lead a party in search of the major, so he may have a chance of returning before his wife departs. I would be very grateful if you would come to the hospital, as soon as your duties allow, to assist me in transcribing a letter to the major laying out the case for his return, and urging him to make haste.'

‘Of course, doctor. And will you seek out the captain now?'

‘I must get back to the hospital, Monsarrat, to see to the man the captain put there, amongst others. May I ask you to search him out, and have him come to me at his earliest convenience? If a party sets out at first light tomorrow, there may yet be time.'

After the doctor left, Monsarrat fought down an impulse to visit the kitchen. Given Mrs Mulrooney's state recently, he could only imagine the distress she must be in. But that distress would be compounded if any time was lost on her account.

Captain Diamond had, it transpired, merely laid aside temporarily his work of rifling through the documents on the major's desk, intending to return after the day's main meal. Monsarrat found him in the mess. He would gladly have endured a week without Mrs Mulrooney's tea to avoid disturbing the captain at his dinner – bream caught by the coxswain, who had clearly taken his own advice on the tides.