Chapter 5

Hannah Mulrooney thanked Christ and His saints that the Factory had not yet been built when she had pressed her foot to the earth of this place for the first time.

The nine huts along Church Street into which she had been rammed on her arrival were still there. Not a lot of care had been lavished on their construction – particularly as the labourers were not builders by trade but pickpockets, rebels, poachers – and the administration seemed to have believed the huts would be capable of altering their meagre dimensions to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers of convict women.

Perhaps none of this would have mattered, thought Hannah, had it not been winter when she had disembarked. Certainly the cold was not as bad as it would have been at home, nor the damp. But cold was cold, particularly wearing the woefully inadequate cotton and calico the navy had given her. A lot of the other women wore the clothes they had been tried and convicted in under their navy slops – in most cases it was essential just to preserve one’s modesty. Hannah had to contend with the chill without the benefit of her own clothes, as her infant son was wrapped in them.

So, while conditions at the Female Factory might have been somewhat more physically comfortable than those in the huts, she would not have traded. Because with the Female Factory came the Orphan School. The Orphan School was where the children of the Factory women went when they reached the age of four. They were supposed to be reunited with their mothers at the expiry of their sentence, but women could be assigned as servants anywhere in the colony, without the means to get back here at the end of the standard seven or fourteen years. Sometimes mother and child never saw each other again.

As a veteran of this place, Hannah had not had to face that particular cruelty among the multitudes she was exposed to. She had been able to keep her son, Padraig; dragged him with her even as she was assigned to service as a hut keeper in the shearers’ quarters of a property a day’s ride from Parramatta, the river mudflats giving way on the journey to jagged hills, bald in places, and twisted trees with crows in their branches that spoke with the same accent as the children.

Padraig was raised with the property’s other children, he played with them, and she engaged in her first transaction with the Protestant faith when she sent him to the local rector, who had an educated convict teach children to read. It was not a gulf she wanted to jump, the one between her faith and the god of the Methodists. But she was willing to do it, to procure for her son the education which could ultimately mean the difference between a labourer who had spent his health by thirty, and a comfortable man of trade. So Padraig sat and learned his letters with the sons of felons, ticket-of-leave men and the occasional native stockman.

As he grew she could see that his features were expanding until they filled a framework laid down for them at birth. With his red-gold hair he looked, increasingly, like his father, and this was why she refused to allow him a pudding bowl cut which would make his hair look like a cap. And his hair was never, ever to be cropped.

At any rate, judging by what Monsarrat had told her of his conversation with Dr Preston about Mrs Church, neither Hannah nor her son would have benefited from the matron’s drunken care at the Female Factory.

But this can’t be Mrs Church, she thought, as the door of the superintendent’s residence opened at her knock. She and the woman who faced her must have been almost the same height, both of them struggling to graze five feet. That, however, was the end of the resemblance. The woman had certainly been in the world a good decade and a half less than Hannah. She was wearing a plain but well-made cotton dress which was utterly spotless, a rarity in this place, where Hannah often believed (and said as much to Monsarrat) that she was the only inhabitant this side of the Indies with half a care for cleanliness. Clearly someone of means, then.

Hannah had already admonished one woman for failing to remove her bonnet inside, and now here was another, vastly elevated in comparison, keeping it in place. Perhaps, she thought, she’d missed a change in the rules while she was in Port Macquarie, where the proper etiquette for bonnet wearers was not a subject of regular discussion.

‘Well, I’m not sure how I can put you to use,’ said the woman, after Hannah had told her why she was there, ‘but I imagine a cup of tea will provide the necessary inspiration. Please do come in.’

There was a kettle already on the hob, with steam vines inching out of its snout towards the corners of the room. Beyond that, on a low couch in the corner near a staircase which might have led to a bedroom, lay another woman, snores leaking out of her. This woman had no bonnet, and the hair plastered to her cheek by sweat was light enough to conceal a small number of grey hairs, which were multiplying and threatening to crowd out the others until no claim to blondness could be made.

‘I shouldn’t worry about waking her,’ said the woman. ‘I doubt anything will for some hours.’ There was a cheerful clatter of cups as she got them down from the sideboard, and the swishing of the water in the teapot as she warmed it, poured it out and replenished it over a mound of fragrant leaves.

Her name, she said, was Mrs Rebecca Nelson.

‘I’m on the Ladies’ Committee, you see. Well, at the moment I am the Ladies’ Committee. Charlotte Bulmer had been running it, but her husband doesn’t want her mixing with convicts – he fears moral contagion. My husband fears moral contagion too, of course, but he takes the opposite view – he believes corruption sets in when one makes no attempt to help others. Mind you, he prefers to help from a distance. And I do believe he likes to think of me as the leading lady of philanthropy here, especially since they moved the native school into the bush. Dear Bessie Evans, she does such a remarkable job with those savage children. And now that she’s doing it well away from here, there are so few other ladies with the inclination to help.’

She was, she said, the wife of a Quaker merchant. ‘Have you seen the store a street back from the river, the large one? Nelson’s. His name is David Nelson, you see. Tea. Cloth – the kind you can’t get here, not that rough, coloured calico they make these poor girls wander around in. China and glass and cutlery. A bit of silver plate, but he tries to keep stocks low – thieves, you see. To be expected, here, I suppose.’

‘I’m sure it keeps him very busy, missus,’ said Hannah. Odd statement, she thought. Even by her own standards. But she had to admit to a level of discomfort, sharing tea with this bright creature while the shade breathed in the corner. ‘I am to be at your disposal, I understand, while my employer is engaged in the business of helping discern the identity of Mr Church’s killer.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Mrs Nelson. ‘I haven’t liked to leave poor Mrs Church, you see. Not that she would notice, I don’t think. And I do still have a few tasks to complete here, which I’d as soon attend to before the end of the day. May I ask, would you be kind enough to sit with the poor thing? Just have some water at the ready in case she wakes. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.’ And off she went with elegant, seemingly unhurried steps.

Hannah did not like sitting still. Particularly not now and with a woman she didn’t know, who might awake at any moment in an uncertain state.

Mrs Nelson had not even left her the solace of tidying. The windows set into the brown, rendered walls had been flung open, presumably to allow the sour vapours wafting off the sleeping woman a means of exit. The table had been scrubbed, recently and thoroughly if she was any judge. The hob was clean, as was the china. And the floor had been swept. A small pile of dust and detritus lurking in the corner was the only oversight Hannah could see, and she dealt with it immediately.

She picked up a cloth from a hook near the sideboard. It was unwashed – presumably Rebecca Nelson’s powers of domestic reorganisation extended only so far. Hannah dipped the cloth in some water and walked over to the form on the couch, recoiling slightly as the smell of rum hit her. Bending down, she used the coarse fabric to smooth the grey, crinkled hair away from the woman’s cheek. She got no response.

She washed and put away the cups she and Mrs Nelson had been using, and poured some more tea into a tin cup she found relegated to the shadows in the corner of the sideboard – she preferred the use of her own china and didn’t like to impose on anyone else’s. Such things mattered.

The elegance with which she’d departed had deserted Rebecca Nelson when she returned, ramming herself back into the kitchen, racing to a seat at the table as though there were others competing for it.

‘Mrs Mulrooney, I have the most marvellous idea!’

Hannah glanced over at Mrs Church. She had not moved, and it was highly likely that slamming doors were common enough in her waking life to provoke little response even when she was conscious.

‘I mentioned, of course, that I’m the sole representative of the Ladies’ Committee here at the moment,’ Mrs Nelson went on. ‘We do what we can for the girls. Of course, some are more deserving of help than others, but we try not to discriminate. Certainly one of my objectives is to equip them for life once they eventually leave this place. A smattering of letters – sewing and needlework, that sort of thing. But there are more than two hundred women here, and with only one of me, well … I’m sure you can see the impossibility of the situation.’

‘Certainly. It must be very difficult.’

‘It is! It is. That may change, however. Your employer is here, yes?’

‘Yes. Mr Monsarrat.’

‘Just so. I met him, you see, crossing the yard, and asked him if I could make use of your services during his future visits to the Factory. Wonderful man that he is – five minutes’ acquaintance is plenty of time to take someone’s measure – he agreed. So you shall be helping me here, on occasion, with these unfortunates. Assuming you have no objection to working with convicts?’

‘None at all, Mrs Nelson. I was one myself, for a time. So I’m hoping you’ve no objection to working with former convicts. I’ve been ticketed for … Well, nearly twenty years now.’

‘Even better! You will have so much deeper an understanding of them than my own. I feel for the poor wretches, but of course I couldn’t begin to understand them. Perhaps you can school me. In the manner of thinking which comes with bondage. It might enable me to help further. It changes one, I suppose. Do you not agree?’

‘If one is weak-willed enough to let it do so, perhaps.’

Mrs Nelson laughed, slapping the table in a most unladylike fashion.

‘And you are one with the strength to prevent it, yes? Like myself, or so I fancy, anyway. Do you not think, my dear woman, that we might benefit from shoring up the characters of those here?’

She fidgeted with her hat as she spoke, to the extent that Hannah wanted to swat her hands away from it. Her fingers continually sought escaping strands of hair, pushing them back inside the bonnet, which was drawn tight down over her forehead. She seemed insensible to the fact that her probing would draw out more hair in the process. An impossible task, anyway – the strands of Mrs Nelson’s hair were so startlingly red that they made the light straw of her bonnet, to which they adhered, look like the veined cheek of a drunk.

‘It will be wonderful to have someone … effective. Poor Mrs Bulmer. She is unavailable due to a nervous complaint, apparently. The kind of complaint I imagine would afflict anyone with a husband like hers, although she doesn’t, at least, take solace in rum.’

Hannah had heard the name Bulmer before, and not only from Mrs Nelson. Presumably there were not many of them here, and the only one she was aware of was the vindictive preacher who had ended Monsarrat’s first stretch of freedom. If he was the woman’s husband, Hannah thought a nervous complaint was the least of her problems.

‘Now,’ Mrs Nelson said, patting her bonnet as a reward for its efforts in constraining her hair, ‘you are a competent needle woman, I judge.’

‘Well, yes, as it happens. Having not seen my work, though, how are you able to judge it?’

‘Your skirts, dear lady. Patched several times, I see. Please don’t worry – done in such a skilful way that few people would notice. Only those with an eye for such things, like me, would have any inkling. I hope you’re not offended by the observation.’

Hannah couldn’t help drawing her shoulders back just a little, drinking in praise which was rarely a feature of her conversations with those higher up in society. Odd, though, that a woman of Mrs Nelson’s station would notice patching on skirts – most of those with money wouldn’t think of it.

‘So I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it’s not good for the character of the ladies here to be wandering around in the clothes they were supplied with, little more than rags held together with rough stitching,’ Mrs Nelson said. ‘No finesse to it. Perhaps I might be able to impose on you to pass on some of your skill to these women.’

Hannah was not sure that she liked Rebecca Nelson’s assumption of her agreement, but it had been a long time since she had been able to impart any skills of any sort to anyone, much less been given the opportunity to show off. She decided to let Mrs Nelson assume her consent until she could see where the woman’s plans were leading. ‘I will of course be delighted to be of service in any way,’ she said, with the automatic but shallow deference the Irish had a lot of training in.

‘Of course you will! Stout person such as yourself. I shall expect you, then, shall I? At nine o’clock on Monday morning, or as close as you can manage. You and I, I feel, are going to give these ladies something which the recently departed superintendent tried to remove. We are going to give them hope.’