The Soldier's Curse (2 page)

When Kiernan escaped, they had obviously seen a dead relative returned in his features; he was also helped by his lack of front teeth. No one was better equipped to avail himself of such good
fortune: Kiernan had travelled with a number of expeditions in the colony's south.

The loss of the
Isabella
still stinging, Major Shelborne had spent a lot of effort scouring the wooded foothills and penetrating the deep gullies of the mountains, looking for him amongst tree ferns larger than a house, grass trees, scribbly gum and huge verticals of eucalyptus trees. But it was impossible.

Kiernan had been a particularly troublesome convict, those who had seen him before his escape said. He kept a lurking violence in check most of the time, but unleashed it freely when provoked. On one occasion he had been hit with a stick when making a johnnycake out of meal for his supper at the convict barracks, using an ancient frying pan to cook over the fire. The frying pan was, after years of intemperate use, part sieve, but it was the only weapon he had to hand, so he used it on his assailant's head, breaking the pan rather than the skull, so the other man ended up wearing the pan around his neck, with a secondary necklace of welts quickly springing up. For that, Kiernan got a few dozen lashes on a back which was already scored from at least one other past punishment.

But the fresh cuts in his back seemed to galvanise Kiernan in a way his previous flogging had not. Kiernan had grown up with a code of conduct as strict as any army's, and more brutally enforced. The code of the street said you had a right to strike someone who struck you, and whoever started it was the greater sinner. So when he was not only punished for defending himself, but given the same number of lashes as his attacker, he came to the conclusion that he could not live within such a ridiculous system of right and wrong. This was Monsarrat's assumption, anyhow, for Kiernan had absconded shortly afterwards.

Out of a kind of envy, the other convicts felt rancour towards Kiernan, and a desire to see him caught and flogged again, and sentenced to working in chains or on the lime-burners' gang. But the garrison and the guards had never caught him.

Nevertheless, all contact with Kiernan had not been lost.

Slowly a system had developed by which Kiernan would send messages via one of the handsome and athletic young Birpai
men that this or that absconder was hiding in a particular area. Kiernan was protective of his woods and did not want too many other convicts to find a home there. He would also communicate the feelings and attitudes of the Birpai, and these messages went largely ignored, centring as they did on concerns about cedar-cutters tramping through sites of great sanctity and significance to the tribe.

Now, though, Kiernan had sent a message that in his travels with the natives far to the north-west beyond the coastal range, he had found another river valley with what he said were wonderful flood plains and pasture land, and forests full of cedar. In return for this important intelligence, Kiernan sought a conditional pardon.

It was to meet Kiernan at a particular point and visit this river himself that Major Angus Shelborne had started out several days before, led by a local coastal Birpai named Scotty. With the major were Lieutenant Freddy Craddock and six mounted and armed soldiers of the 3rd Regiment, the Buffs as they were called, thanks to the buff facings on their bright red coats.

Also travelling with him were a local ex-convict with some navigational ability and three or four reliable convicts, one of them a cook. It had not been said explicitly, but they all hoped that if they found the river and Major Shelborne came back home happy, he would recommend them to the Colonial Secretary for a reduction of their sentences or even a ticket of leave. A ticket of leave would complete the transformation that their arrival in the colony had begun – at home, on their release, they would have remained condemned, their former felonry a barrier to any decent life. But the opprobrium which rang so loudly at home was more muted here. It tinged the edges of the frame, but did not blot the painting, and its absence created a space in which emancipated convicts could do very well indeed.

Monsarrat knew that, ticketed or not, there were still many traps in a man's way, and many watchers who, out of pure darkness of soul, would love to find a flaw for which a man could be sent back into servitude. Yet he, like those convicts in Major Shelborne's party, desired a ticket so keenly that he would have
abandoned the comfortable kitchen and taken to the bush had he thought it would do any good.

Monsarrat considered making himself a second cup of tea, but knew Mrs Mulrooney would view this as presumptuous. Instead he opened the drawer of a sideboard – one of the few polished surfaces in the room, as it housed the good china – and extracted a whetstone. He sat at a table less substantial than it had been some years ago, thanks to regular and vigorous scrubbing, a penance imposed on it by Mrs Mulrooney, and he started work on her recalcitrant knife.

Just as he had made the edge keen enough to please her, a hammering struck up on the outer door. ‘Yes!' called Monsarrat in weary permission. The door opened flat against the wall, its leather hinges complaining. In stepped smiling Private Fergal Slattery, Mrs Mulrooney's pet soldier. His red and buff coat, his plumed hat, rested in the genteel barracks; today he was dressed for work rather than show, in canvas pants, shoes he had woven from straw, and a sheepskin coat over a red shirt.

‘God bless all here,' he muttered, as his mother had raised him to say. He closed the door and made sure it was properly in its frame. Then he blew on his hands to warm them and ran one of them through his brown hair. His eyes twinkled as if some fun were about to arise – but it was a futile expectation here.

‘Oh, it's the gentleman fookin' convict himself,' he said, twinkling away.

‘And it's the worst soldier in His Majesty's whole damned army,' said Monsarrat.

It was an established banter of theirs. Monsarrat would not have taken quietly such a statement from any other private soldier without making a complaint to the commandant. The man was at least ten years younger than him to start with. But there was something endearing about young Slattery.

He never moaned, as some of them did, about how poverty had sent them into the army and now they were no better off
themselves than convicts, or how drunkenness had made them take the shilling on a dare at some country fair. The truly amusing aspect of Slattery was the way he recounted serious events, wide-eyed and with unconscious humour. With Mrs Mulrooney he traded the sort of genial whimsical insults at which – Monsarrat had noticed – the Irish were so good. It was the way they expressed affection.

‘And how is our Magpie today?' said Slattery, lowering himself into a chair which had never known fine upholstery and brocade, unlike its counterparts in the neighbouring building. Even humble Slattery had the right to sit while Monsarrat stood – Monsarrat might be one of the more trusted and well-treated convicts, but was still beneath all those who were free. Slattery wasn't the only one to call Monsarrat ‘the Magpie'. He owed the name to the threadbare but expertly tailored black coat he customarily wore over one of his waistcoats, to his elongated nose, and to his habit of walking with both hands clasped behind his back.

Monsarrat wasn't sure whether offence was intended by those who used the name, but he took none. Magpies were silent watchers, always present but rarely noticed, offering violence only when something precious was threatened.

‘The Magpie is as well as he was yesterday, and thanks you for your concern,' he said.

‘Where's herself?' asked Slattery.

‘She's seeing to Mrs Shelborne.'

‘Oh,' said the soldier, tossing his head. ‘I could surely appreciate a cup of tea from her dear old hands.'

‘There's the pot, on the stove.'

The young man went to the tea chest, which Mrs Mulrooney never bothered to lock even though it contained the most expensive leaves in the kitchen, a delicate infusion flavoured with cinnamon, which was reserved for Mrs Shelborne's sole use. His back to Monsarrat, he made a great show of breathing in the scent of the forbidden leaves, then returned to the table and sat down heavily. ‘Sure,' he said, ‘although it isn't the same without her pouring it. I'm better off waiting.'

‘And you'll be overseeing the men in the sitting room?' asked Monsarrat.

‘Oh, I will,' said Slattery, nodding. ‘If they know where their true interests are, they should be here in a second. For I am a demon for discipline.' He winked and laughed and Monsarrat shook his head in mock reproach.

Some wallpaper from England had arrived by way of the
Sally
, ordered by Mrs Shelborne when she'd been in better health. It had waited in the storehouse until a party of convict labourers had been put together to plaster the bricks of the sitting room and make all smooth. They would normally have laboured under one of the convict overseers, but in this case Private Slattery had been chosen because he had claimed to the major's second-in-command, the brooding Captain Diamond, that he had once worked as a plasterer and hung paper in a house in Ireland. Mrs Mulrooney behaved as if this was a deception, though her attitude to him was so indulgent that it was evident she did not blame him for the lie.

Overseeing plastering and papering was an easy job. Slattery would sit in the kitchen with Mrs Mulrooney, chatting and drinking tea, and occasionally walk in to make sure that the four convicts were doing the job properly. The four men seemed to work in good order – so Mrs Mulrooney had told Monsarrat – under a pressed-tin ceiling designed to stop the big huntsman spiders, harmless as they were, climbing down to infest the floor.

The plaster the men had put up was now cured and they were onto hanging the paper, a pattern in keeping with Mrs Shelborne's taste for green. Monsarrat had seen this wonderful paper, brought to a settlement devoid until now of such things: vibrant green with bosky white flowers that seemed to grow out of it. There were few shades of such rich colour in the bush, the swamps, the dense forests and the gullies running down the high coastal mountains, and it made Monsarrat think Mrs Shelborne was homesick. She likes green because she comes from green pastures, he thought, and full-bodied flowers because the summer gardens of her childhood were riotous with them.

Mrs Mulrooney, her ministrations to Mrs Shelborne at an end for now, re-entered through the kitchen door on the house side. ‘It's that Slattery, sitting when he should be standing. How they ever get him upright for parade escapes me entirely,' she said.

‘And may the saints smile down upon you, Mrs Mulrooney,' said the soldier, ‘and spread their grace upon ye.'

‘Surely enough they need to include you in that, and smile on dear Mrs Shelborne too,' said Mrs Mulrooney.

‘Dear Mrs Shelborne, with all her family's money, has no need of saints and their grace,' said Slattery.

‘You're an awful one for grudges against the rich, especially as a lad who spends his evenings taking money from others across a card table,' said Mrs Mulrooney, making her way to the large teapot on the hob. She got a cup from one of the low wooden shelves beside the stove – the Shelbornes' used china – and rearranged its shelf-mates before pouring black tea for the soldier and refilling Monsarrat's cup.

‘Later than most mornings,' she said. ‘This all means a certain boy I know is getting utterly used to his lazy job and taking it for granted. And it means I wish he wasn't.'

‘It means a boy was up late last night playing Three Card Brag. Now, I wouldn't call it taking money, Mother Mulrooney. More a redistribution of resources. Making sure everything's balanced.'

‘Ah, the devil's work and you're so good at it.'

‘Don't you worry. God was on my side and I lost.'

Now there was another knocking on the outside door. Private Slattery rose and opened it to admit the convict labourers, their flat hats on their heads, and their rough canvas clothes painted with broad arrows which indicated their felonious status.

‘Come through then, fookin' lags the lot of you,' said Slattery. ‘Mrs Mulrooney, would you be kind enough to show us into the sitting room?'

For only she had the authority. She opened the house-facing door and they trooped through the kitchen past Monsarrat, nodding to him because he had a little margin of power compared
to them, being the major's clerk, and so they went out the door and into the house to work.

When Mrs Mulrooney came back, Monsarrat stood. ‘I must go to the office,' he told her, as if he was some respectable banker or clerk.

‘Will you come by in the morning again? I enjoy our talks, though common soldiers and felons might interrupt them.'

‘Certainly. But I must go for now – I need to be in the office from half past seven lest Captain Diamond comes by and finds me not there. I'm too old to be an absconder.'