Chapter 1

‘Now you’re mocking me, I swear it. It simply cannot be possible. You’re having a laugh at a poor woman’s expense.’

Hugh Llewelyn Monsarrat braced himself. The effort wasn’t wasted. A second later, the corner of a rolled-up cleaning towel, Mrs Mulrooney’s answer to a whip, connected with his temple.

‘I assure you, dear lady, it’s simply the way the English language works. The King himself has to follow these rules, whether they be logical or not.’

‘Well I assure you that this is not a language I can take seriously. And I’ll hear no more sniffing from your good self about Irish spelling and pronunciation, thank you. Any language that lets the C get away with so much mischief has a lot to answer for. You’d have me believe it makes two different sounds in the same word! It needs to make up its mind, so it does. Circle should start with an S, and that’s the end of it.’

This was by no means the first pitched battle Monsarrat had engaged in with his housekeeper over the irrational nature of the English language. The tiny kitchen had seen many of them, heard her small, calloused fist bounce in frustration off the over-scrubbed table. Mrs Mulrooney insisted, for example, on spelling war with two o’s, like door. ‘Otherwise you’d say it as warr, like far, wouldn’t you?’ she asked, although Monsarrat had no reason to believe she was actually interested in his opinion on the matter.

She would threaten, on occasion, to abandon the whole exercise, but Monsarrat knew she wouldn’t. Her admission into the world of readers had been at the request of her previous mistress, the late Honora Shelborne, for whose murder he suspected Mrs Mulrooney still wept and said nightly rosaries.

But for all her complaining, Mrs Mulrooney’s progress was exceptional. She had been Monsarrat’s student for little more than a month and she was already writing the letters to her son that he used to write for her. If the boy noticed that the letters came with a few less flourishes and a few more ink blotches than they used to, Monsarrat felt sure he wouldn’t mind.

This morning, though, he perceived they’d probably come as far as they could. She needed, perhaps, a day or so to adjust to a world in which the letter C could shimmer and change in such a maddening fashion. He stood and gathered the pens, the paper, the small slate on which she had started forming her first letters with a stylus, made redundant by her quick grasp of the language (except those parts she felt had no right to stand as they made no sense).

‘May I trouble you, Mrs Mulrooney, for some tea before I go?’

She snorted, exasperated that he felt the need to make such an obvious request.

‘I’ll bring it to the parlour, so. Out with you now. Out, out, out!’

Strictly speaking, of course, Mrs Mulrooney had no right to order Monsarrat out of the kitchen. It was his, after all, a fact he still found miraculous when barely a few months previously his possessions had added up to two threadbare waistcoats (one eternally ruined by a smear of red dust), a thinning black coat and an ink pot.

In those days, his presence in Mrs Mulrooney’s large, distempered Port Macquarie kitchen had been an indulgence, only possible when the commandant of the settlement had turned a blind eye. But no one save Mrs Mulrooney herself could challenge his right to stand in this small, whitewashed box here in Parramatta.

His purchase of the cottage that housed it had been made possible by a leather sack handed to him aboard the sloop Sally, which six weeks ago had ferried him and Mrs Mulrooney from Port Macquarie to Sydney, and then committed them by cutter to the journey up the river to Parramatta.

‘The major knew you wouldn’t accept this, so he asked me to give it to you when we were too far to turn back,’ the Sally’s first mate had said as the last of the cruel black rocks which marked the beaches around Port Macquarie slid out of view.

Major Shelborne, Monsarrat’s master in Port Macquarie, was born into wealth, while his tragic and beautiful young wife, Honora, was impoverished but of blue blood. The money, said the accompanying note from the major, was by way of thanks. ‘This is but a fraction of what I feel I owe you for bringing my wife’s killer to justice,’ he had written. ‘Please do me the honour of accepting it, together with my wishes for your success in Parramatta.’

But while Monsarrat’s reward had paid for the kitchen, Mrs Mulrooney had a moral right to the space, or so she felt, and with a passion which had all the authority of an edict. She required Monsarrat to knock before entering, which he happily did.

The Port Macquarie kitchen where he had first met her had been a freestanding outbuilding of the Government House to which it belonged, and this was no different, an outbuilding to the main edifice. Kitchens couldn’t be trusted, apparently – had a habit of burning down – so they needed to be kept away from the house to avoid the contagion of flame.

This kitchen had a small room to the side, tiny and tidy, whitewashed walls, a small bed, a table with washing necessities and a rudimentary wall sconce. Monsarrat had offered Mrs Mulrooney the finest bedroom in the small main house, but this was where she preferred to sleep. And while the four rooms of the main house – the sitting room, a parlour and two bedrooms, darkly painted according to respectable practice – were Monsarrat’s domain, he did not impose a reciprocal requirement that she knock before entering.

This was just as well as it would have been difficult for her to do so while carrying a tea tray. She put one down in front of Monsarrat after he had obeyed her command and made his way to the main house to sit in the small parlour and try to stretch out his legs (not easy for a gangly specimen when the legs in question had to fit under a small table), fiddling with his cravat as he weighed his new good fortune.

‘Anyone would think you’d never seen a cravat before. You’ve had one of those things around your neck for decades – you’d think you’d have learned the art of them.’

‘And so I have, as a matter of fact,’ said Monsarrat, feeling the mild irritation that her scolding sometimes brought forth, a blemish on their friendship which was nevertheless easily washed away by her excellent tea. ‘But you realise I need to be above reproach. There are those who wouldn’t hesitate to characterise a poorly tied cravat as a symptom of an irredeemably criminal nature.’

Some of those people, Monsarrat knew, inhabited this town, and saw from a distance the black streak of a man stalking daily up the hill to Government House. It was one of the reasons he needed the fortification of Mrs Mulrooney’s tea before departing for work. As he went, he seemed unable to break the habit of glancing to the side occasionally, expecting to see his old associate Bangar silently keeping pace with him. But the Birpai tribesman was in Port Macquarie and therefore not in a position to soothe Monsarrat with his quiet companionship. In Monsarrat’s six weeks here he had not met one member of the Burramattagal, whose name the colonisers had mangled in christening Parramatta. There were very few of them now in the vicinity. They had been shifted towards the area recently christened Blacktown and were discouraged from staying near the river which had been named after them.

As well as taking pains over his cravat, Monsarrat liked to be early to pass below the crudely cut sandstone lintel of the outbuilding in which he worked, across a courtyard from the main structure of Parramatta’s Government House, with its white-rendered edifice painted with lines to make people believe it was constructed from the finest marble rather than crude convict-made brick.

He supposed, really, that he should walk up the meticulously paved, curving driveway, before skirting the columns of the main entrance – not for the likes of him – and walking to the side of the building where pristine render gave way to the honest, whitewashed brick. But while Monsarrat claimed to be one for proprieties, he was less fastidious when a convenience could be gained by disregarding them, and when no one was looking. So he climbed the side of the hill leading from his house into the governor’s domain, past Governor Brisbane’s twin follies of bathhouse and observatory, and arrived at his workplace without passing the glaring façade of the governor’s empty residence.

As early as he was, he was not the earliest. The governor’s private secretary in Parramatta, Ralph Eveleigh, was always at his desk by the time Monsarrat arrived. Fresh paper, fresh blotter, fresh ink, usually a partly composed document in front of him. In the short time Monsarrat had been working for Eveleigh, he had never walked into the man’s office without seeing him push back quickly from his desk, as though caught in some illicit act rather than the drafting of a letter to the colonial secretary or orders for the commandant of a remote penal station.

Nor was his conscientiousness reserved for when the eyes of authority were on him. Eveleigh was between governors. Thomas Brisbane, who had caused no small amount of consternation by making his home in Parramatta rather than Sydney, had recently made his final journey down the winding drive, the first yards in a journey which would take him back to England. And his replacement, Ralph Darling, was taking his time to arrive. He was in Van Diemen’s Land, apparently, and would next spend some time constraining Sydney’s bureaucrats, grown wild under the absentee Brisbane. There was no word on when he might come up the river.

Even with a man of Eveleigh’s habits in charge, this was the first time Monsarrat had been called at this hour into the office, a spacious room by colonial standards, white-limed with a fireplace and a northern window through which Monsarrat could see a scatter of huts in the shade of grey gums and shaggy barks.

Eveleigh, for once, was not sent reeling back from some document or other when Monsarrat entered. Nor was there any work in progress in front of him.

‘Monsarrat. Good morning. On time, I see, and that’s all to the good, as it happens. Thank you for your punctuality.’

It was still strange to Monsarrat, being thanked, being spoken to as if his presence was a matter of pure choice. But while he was now an emancipist, and not of a mind to leave Eveleigh’s employ, he was not quite free. His ticket of leave had come with the precondition that he serve this man, and with more than his immaculate copperplate writing.

Ralph Eveleigh was one of the few in the colony whose pale skin had, for the most part, escaped discoloration by the sun. A formidable intellect in a frail, sandy-complexioned body, Eveleigh never stepped outside without a hat, and never rolled up his sleeves, even in the worst of the heat. To do so would have creased the fabric, something Eveleigh couldn’t countenance. He had enough to deal with as it was, with a crop of hair so unruly that he’d told Monsarrat he had considered having it shaved.

But for all his fastidiousness, Eveleigh didn’t share the prevailing view that a convict was rotten to the core by nature. Informed by his master that his request for an additional clerk had been approved, that he would have charge of one with special investigative skills which could be brought to bear from time to time on what the colonial secretary had described, on a visit to Parramatta, as ‘more delicate matters where a galumphing police investigation may not produce the desired result’, Eveleigh intended to utilise these skills, both investigative and clerical. Monsarrat was a refined tool, and as long as he performed he would be treated well within the walls of the offices where Eveleigh reigned. Yet Monsarrat knew that his deductions, which had brought a killer to justice in Port Macquarie, owed much to the perceptiveness of the woman who now ruled his kitchen. Thus access to first-rate tea was the least of his reasons for employing her.

‘I had your morning planned, you know,’ said Eveleigh now. ‘Preparing the Parramatta tickets of leave for our friend the colonial secretary.’

‘Ah,’ said Monsarrat. Tickets of leave. The laborious process of trawling through the records to find the ship, crime and transportation date which matched a name he’d been given, the owner of which was about to be released from penal servitude.

‘Tedious work, I know. But at least you already have one. It would be something of a cruelty to make a Special write the words which will give freedom to another.’

When Monsarrat had been a Special – a convict with skills beyond muscle, which could be put to use by the government – the chief clerk of the day had not displayed a similar sensitivity, and he had spent years writing freedom for others while the prospect of his own had remained impossibly remote.

‘As you wish, of course,’ Monsarrat said. Not quite an ally, Eveleigh was nonetheless civil. That fact, and his position, made him someone Monsarrat was anxious to please.

‘Well, I have a different wish now. I have been informed of a particular incident,’ said Eveleigh.

‘Incident?’

‘Yes, although that’s a rather inadequate term. More accurately, I suppose the word would be murder. And a fierce one, not that any of them are tame. So it seems, Mr Monsarrat, that I’ll have to find someone else to scribble out those tickets of leave through half-closed eyes, while I finally have a chance to use your … more unique skills.’