The Soldier's Curse (16 page)

Monsarrat attracted several sideways glances from the officers sustaining themselves there, and even a nod from Lieutenant Thomas Carleton, who was a soldier in the vein of Major Shelborne – efficient, ruthless when necessary, but not inhumane.

The captain didn't look up as he approached, but as he drew in front of Diamond, the officer laid down his knife and fork.

‘Monsarrat,' he said, taking a swig from his cup.

‘Captain, I beg your pardon for disturbing you. I have been sent on a most urgent errand.'

‘State it then, and leave as soon as you can.'

‘Captain, I fear it is a matter of delicacy. You may wish to hear my report in a more private setting.'

Diamond put down his drinking cup with more force than necessary, and walked towards the door of the mess, Monsarrat following.

‘Captain, the doctor has examined Mrs Shelborne, and fears her time may be drawing to a close. He begs you to mount an expedition to find the major, so he might return before his wife … departs.'

Again Monsarrat forced himself to look into the captain's face, trying to keep his gaze as neutral as possible lest Diamond read some imaginary insult into it. And again Diamond failed to reward him with much obvious outward sign of distress. Monsarrat did, however, fancy he noticed the captain's lips compressing slightly, and perhaps an increasing pallor.

The two stood for what seemed like some time. Monsarrat feared to break his gaze. The captain seemed to be searching his features for any sign of delusion or deceit.

Finally, he said, ‘Go to Dr Gonville and tell him I'll do as he suggests. Then return to the study. Please make sure it is in a state of organisation when I meet you there,' he added, as though Monsarrat had been responsible for strewing papers about, perhaps in a fit of childish pique.

Diamond went back into the mess, took young Carleton's drinking cup away from him when it was halfway to his lips, beckoned, and the pair stalked off through a grey drizzle which had just started up.

Monsarrat hurried through the delicate curtains of rain towards the hospital. The water left glittering beads on the wool of his coat, before slowly being consumed by the fibres. He thought of the sweat on Dory's brow, and wondered if the boy's body was still in a condition to produce it.

Hanley was gone, but otherwise there was little change at Dory's small bed. The man remained on his stomach, eyes half-open, unconscious, sweating and moaning. Dory's wounds seemed more pustular, the rot more pronounced.

Monsarrat reported Diamond's response to the surgeon, and begged leave to return to the major's office to fetch paper and ink to take dictation. He concealed the writing supplies in a canvas sack which he had made for this very purpose – occasionally he was required to ply his trade in various parts of the settlement, and the rain of winter (not to mention the torrents of summer) was frequent enough to threaten the parchment, considered far more valuable and rare than the convicts.

On his way back to the hospital, he passed a work gang trudging in the other direction. Their shoes, woven straw or cobbled together from canvas, would be no protection against the puddles which had quickly formed in the ruts on the road. After
a few days, he knew from experience, the skin on the feet of these men would soften and crack, admitting any foul substance they came into contact with.

By the end of Monsarrat's own time in a work gang, a great many of his fellow convicts were hobbling. Some had lost toes, and one man his entire foot, to gangrene. Monsarrat had heard the screams as the offending extremities were removed. He understood the men would die if the infected portions remained part of them, but he thought such an extreme of pain must change a man, and wondered if the bestial screaming announced the arrival of a being less human than the one who had limped into the surgeon's tent. But alive, at least, as the decay had affected an area which could be easily removed, unlike Dory's back.

When he had first arrived in the colony, Monsarrat had held hopes of a clerkship, particularly given his experience on the
Morley.
But either his paperwork hadn't been read properly or there was no need of a clerk in the vicinity of the convict barracks at Hyde Park, where Monsarrat slept in a long room, his own small hammock dangling from wooden beams along with scores of others. So he went to a work gang, dressed in canvas pants and a shirt emblazoned with arrows which declared him to be untrustworthy, felonious, and fit only for manual work. Wearing his arrows, he spent a miserable three months on an unchained gang on the road between Sydney and Parramatta. It was the hardest his body had ever been worked.

Monsarrat found himself in company with another educated convict, a man named Cathcart who had forged a contract for the delivery of sugar in order to get a bank loan. The overseer on their road gang, a terrible bristle-headed and jowled monster and former smuggler named Jevins, had loved having two gents on his gang. He singled out Cathcart with a special barbarity, hitting him regularly throughout the day, making him stand forward at assembly in the mornings, and delaying him on his march, often of two miles or more, back to the feeding station at the dinner hour, so that the poor fellow would just arrive when it was time for him to turn around and go back to work digging drainage and pounding stone.

Cathcart absorbed most of Jevins's malice, a fact for which Monsarrat was guiltily grateful. But sometimes Jevins would remember that he had not one but two jumped-up convicts to deal with, two men who thought themselves better than him.

One morning, the beast cracked Monsarrat over the ear for daring to wipe his nose at assembly. ‘Who said you could wipe your fucking nose?' he said, drawing back to strike again but checking himself at the last moment, perhaps not wanting to disable Monsarrat for the day's digging.

As Monsarrat and Cathcart shared a similar background, both in education and forgery, Monsarrat attempted to engage the man; he had a kernel of hope that perhaps Cathcart, too, was a lover of Catullus, and that they might lose themselves in discussion – quietly of course, as there was no telling what Jevins would do if he overheard them discussing poetry. But there was something not quite right about Cathcart. Monsarrat wondered if he was being a little harsh in this judgement, yet Cathcart's eyes always slid sideways in an unsettling way, looking for a chance to filch some food from under the nose of another convict, or the opportunity to call someone else out on an infraction, thus drawing Jevins's gaze off himself, at least for a short time.

In the end, Cathcart made a diabolical bargain with Jevins – he would run away from the gang, so that he could be quickly retrieved by Jevins himself, who would receive a reward of two pounds. Cathcart would be subjected to twenty lashes, but then fed and left without molestation. It was a questionable contract, lining up behind the equally questionable contracts which had got Cathcart to this point.

At first Monsarrat had thought less of Cathcart for making the bargain. But after several weeks, with Jevins beginning to share his attention more evenly between the two felons, he considered asking for a similar deal.

He was saved from this necessity by the death of one of the clerks at the courthouse in Parramatta. Again the records were scanned for a clerk and again Monsarrat's name came up. It was
of course an unpaid position, but Monsarrat knew he would likely be dead had he been left on the road gang.

The Port Macquarie road gangs, chained and unchained, were certainly not pleasant. But neither were they as brutal as the one Monsarrat had had the misfortune of serving on – Major Shelborne saw to that. With his usual strategy of cloaking humanity (which he possibly feared some would see as weakness) in a drive for maximum efficiency, the major ensured the gangs were fed and left relatively unmolested. But not even the major's beneficence extended to their feet, and Monsarrat still occasionally heard the shrieks from the hospital as a putrefying growth which used to be a toe was removed.

If the rain lasted, the surgeon might have more such procedures to perform, Monsarrat thought. But for now, Dory remained the hospital's main patient, wedged between life and death, in a condition that was possibly worse than either.

‘My dear major,' dictated the doctor, when Monsarrat had settled opposite him and laid out his writing equipment, ‘I write to advise you that your wife is suffering from a grave illness. We had hoped to restore her to full health before your return from the important expedition you are currently engaged on. But in recent days, her condition has deteriorated to the point where I fear no human agency can assist her.

‘Enclosed is a report I compiled on her condition two days ago, set aside for your perusal on your return – please put that report in the packet, Monsarrat – so you may see how her condition has progressed.

‘Since this report was written, her periods of consciousness have dwindled to nonexistence. She does not respond to stimuli in the way she did as recently as yesterday, and lack of nourishment has sapped her strength.

‘She will continue to receive the best treatment to be found anywhere in the colony, in the hopes she may yet rally. However, I beseech you to return with all haste. Your humble servant, et cetera, et cetera.

‘Now, Monsarrat, see that this goes directly to the captain as soon as it is transcribed. I wish the major to have the news from me, and none other.'

Monsarrat returned to the workroom to put all in order for when Diamond came by. The captain was busy arranging matters so that a party could leave in search of the major at first light the following morning. He himself would lead the party, and Lieutenant Carleton would manage the settlement in what was envisaged to be a short absence – it was hoped that the major had reached his objective, and was already returning.

Monsarrat wondered how Diamond could possibly hope to locate the major. The pathways such as the natives used were no pathways at all to the eyes of men on horseback who didn't know the country. The natives seemed to navigate using a system of songs and stories, which somehow infallibly got them to their destination. The songs and stories of the paler-faced inhabitants belonged in a world which might as well no longer exist. They were certainly of no use in negotiating the uncertain terrain in the unexplored north. Nor would they help in choosing a path which would not see a man eventually having to squeeze a large horse through close-standing eucalypts. The vegetation here refused to behave like its English counterparts, not stopping a polite distance before precipices but crowding in a rabble all the way up to the edges of cliffs, so man and horse could ride out of a stand of trees and into oblivion.

So Spring, the Scots commissary, had been invaluable to the captain. Perhaps relishing the idea of having the man out of the way for a time, he had interceded with the Birpai to procure the services of a tracker, who had visited the area for which the major was heading and knew where the fresh water, as well as the dangers, lay. The tracker, as Spring later told Monsarrat, was Bangar, brother to Spring's love and Monsarrat's occasional walking companion. Monsarrat knew Bangar was well capable of looking after himself, but feared for him under Diamond's intolerant rule.

Had it not been for Major Shelborne himself, this bargain might not have been possible. A scant four or five years ago, relations between the Birpai and the strange ghosts who had usurped their territory were seemingly impossibly strained. The cedar-cutters, who were often the harbingers of the coming invasion, were rough and hardened men, and did not have the incentive or ability to deal diplomatically with the natives. Having no other experience of the foreigners, some natives must've concluded that all of the ghost people were brutish, violent and not to be trusted, and the resemblance of some of them to dead ancestors was a cruel trick. This may have been the motivation for some of the attacks on cedar parties, as well as a raid on a vegetable garden which had resulted in the death of a convict.

Some raged over the insult, and insisted it be avenged. But Major Shelborne, who had been appointed commandant shortly afterwards, quickly recognised that the landscape did not care who was in the right. It was chiefly concerned with keeping all humanity in the same place, guarded by mountains and thwarted by sea. Not everyone in the settlement was a convict, but everyone was equally imprisoned in practical terms. So, to Major Shelborne's mind, the need to develop a working relationship with the Birpai was acute.

The young man was arrested. The major later told Monsarrat that when he first saw the fellow, he had a moment's regret that natives could not be enlisted in the British Army, so well formed was he. Kiernan was still an ornament to the settlement at that stage, but his natural talent as a linguist, which had never been called upon before, was already enabling him to converse in passable Birpai. He was used as an intermediary, and it was agreed the man would be returned to his tribe, and punished under native law, not British.

The rapprochement continued, over the next few years, with each tribe punishing their own for infringements on the other. Monsarrat remembered Diamond becoming indignant when the major punished a soldier for attempting – and failing – to take a Birpai woman. Surely, Diamond and others said, a sin against the
British was a far greater one than infractions against the natives. But this act, and others like it, had helped to build a relationship from which Diamond was even now benefiting.

The captain stomped in and out of the workroom and study throughout the day. After the second time, Monsarrat no longer bothered to close the door behind him as he left; clearly closing the door himself was the furthest thing from Diamond's mind.

He lolloped in, shouted some commands to go to the store and requisition some salt beef, write a report on the second expedition to the Colonial Secretary, and then go to the barracks to check the water skins were being filled, because one couldn't trust some of the more junior soldiers.

The soldier and the clerk worked well into the night, and the early hours of the following morning. As Diamond wished to be off at first light, Monsarrat saw no point in trying to ignore the cold and capture sleep in his little hut. Instead, the rain having blessedly stopped, he walked down to the ocean to confront the cold head-on. He stood looking at the white crests as they loomed out of the darkness and destroyed themselves on the sand below. To the south, a few headlands away, he could see the light of a fire. It was in an area where natives were known to dwell. Had they, too, some presentiment of what was to happen, without the need for modern medical arts to tell them so?