Chapter 7

‘She denies it, of course.’

‘Naturally,’ said Eveleigh. ‘And I’d assume she was telling the truth if the security of the Third Class penitentiary was as it should be, but I’ve gathered it’s not.’

Monsarrat decided not to tell Eveleigh about the unlocked door. Even though he wasn’t sure whether he believed Grace, he did feel there was scope for further investigation.

‘She told me she had written to the governor about Church, sir,’ he said. ‘If you can spare me, perhaps some time in the cellar might prove illuminating?’

‘Hmph. Not just trying to escape the heat?’

The cellar had thick stone walls surrounded by earth, and in Eveleigh and Monsarrat’s estimation was the coolest place in Parramatta aside from the river itself. But it was the administrative version of the Augean stables. Monsarrat had only been down there for a short time, so had only briefly been able to assess the state of the shelves, with ledgers and scrolls jumbled together, many of them wearing a fine coating of dust. The place also housed all the correspondence, files and documents that nobody had got around to organising yet, some of which dated back to the previous decade.

‘Certainly not,’ Monsarrat announced. ‘I thought I might be able to locate her letters to the governor, if we still have them. I also think it would be wise to acquaint myself with the details of her original offence. It might provide me with some idea of how to approach her when I’m at the Factory nETX.’

‘She’s hardly likely to have confessed to a murder she hadn’t yet committed,’ said Eveleigh. ‘And your work is complete, Monsarrat. You have her statement. Send it to Daly and we’ll be done.’

‘Yes, but it simply occurs to me, sir, that her correspondence might touch on other abuses going on at the Factory, which might in turn lead to other lines of enquiry. We want to make sure the right person pays for the crime, as you said.’

Eveleigh sighed. ‘You know, I always complain about time-serving clerks. Those who simply do what I ask of them and not one iota more. Those who never show any initiative. Oh, how I wished for somebody with a bit of spark, a bit of willingness to look further, do more.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘It is not a compliment, Monsarrat. Now that I have you, I’ll take the time servers back any day. Very well then, might as well see what you can find. But please don’t act on the information without telling me first. We don’t want to embarrass the management committee. At least not without a plan.’

‘Ah. Speaking of the management committee – there was a man at the Factory, sir. The guard on the gate told me he was on the committee, but he didn’t introduce himself and I got the strong impression he would have been offended if I’d asked who he was.’

‘Describe him, if you please.’

So Monsarrat did – the flamboyant clothes, the crenellated hair. He left out the poetic mouth and cruel eyes.

Eveleigh said something under his breath. It sounded like a more ETXreme version of the curse used earlier by the penitentiary guard.

‘You, Monsarrat, have had the honour of making the acquaintance of Socrates McAllister. Not a man whose attention you want to attract.’

Something in Monsarrat’s stomach decided, then, to slither and turn. McAllister he had heard of. McAllister was dangerous. McAllister was a magistrate. But he wielded more than judicial influence. His uncle, Philip, was the most powerful landowner in the district, a grazier whose profitability dwarfed that of surrounding farms.

Philip McAllister, not one given to sparing the feelings of others, made no secret of his disappointment in his nephew’s business skills, and Socrates, who had once had a place reserved for him at the centre of the growing McAllister empire, was now relegated to managing one of his uncle’s smaller farms. The McAllister name was sufficiently respected to procure him not only a seat on the bench but also on the boards of various civic institutions, including the gaol across the street and the Factory. So while Socrates was the least of satellites to his uncle, he still wielded considerable power. And in the absence of the governor, all of those with at least some power were stretching and flexing, testing to see how much influence they could appropriate before the new man arrived.

Respectable though McAllister looked, there were rumours, if one cared to listen – and Monsarrat always did, prided himself on being a silent receiver of information – of under-the-table deals involving rum, fabric, wool. Suggestions of usury. Rumours too of threats, and beatings administered at arm’s length – in this place where the majority of the free folk used to be otherwise, it was not hard to convince a man to accept a monetary inducement for bringing street justice to another.

There was even talk that a particular man known to be late in his payments to his creditors – and whether those creditors included McAllister could only be guessed at – had returned home one evening and found the structure which had housed him until that morning had been pulled to the ground.

‘Well, I shall make sure I stay out of his way then, sir,’ said Monsarrat.

‘You might not be able to. If he takes an interest in you, you will suddenly find him around every corner. Let us hope he’s decided you’re not important enough to be bothered with. Especially since he’s become an ally to the good reverend now.’

Monsarrat had heard that the Reverend Horace Bulmer had achieved his long-held ambition of a seat on the Parramatta bench. An alliance between him and McAllister, especially one directed at Monsarrat, was not one he wanted to contemplate.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Eveleigh, ‘if you can stay out of his way, it will be all to the good. There have been … consequences … in the past for those who haven’t.’

Monsarrat wanted to ask what those consequences were, and on whom they had fallen. But Eveleigh held up his hand. ‘Enough of that for now. You have my permission to spend one hour in the cellar – God rot you and your cursed luck, getting out of this heat – however, if you’re unable to find anything in that time, that will be an end to the matter.’

Riffling through the papers down there, Monsarrat tried to find Grace’s transportation records and any letters she might have written to the governor. He didn’t know when Grace would have written the letters, which was just as well as the documents weren’t organised chronologically. Nor by surname, he discovered when he went to look for Os and found them scattered between Ws, Qs and Bs.

After a while a rudimentary system of organisation began to emerge. The documents relating to the Female Factory appeared to have been jumbled together on one section of the shelves. He got them down, one by one. The ledger which listed women transferred to the Factory had Grace’s crime as ‘stealing cloth’. Hardly surprising when the overwhelming majority of the Factory’s residents were transported for crimes committed in the name of survival: a great many women had stolen at the behest of an unforgiving hunger, particularly in the summer grain-for-cash season, only to find that hunger had followed them here.

The records shed no light on the details of Grace’s crime, but they did note that she was 5 feet 6 inches – tall, very tall – with brown hair and blue eyes. That her occupation was seamstress. That she was tried at the Galway assizes and was sentenced to transportation for seven years. And that when she was transported, she was 27 years of age, unmarried and childless.

Monsarrat ignored the rest of the ledgers and concentrated on the loose documents, looking for her name. When he saw it, he stopped. Flipped through the pages, seeing how much was there.

There was letter upon letter. Ten, twelve, fifteen pages’ worth. All addressed to his Excellency the Governor. And no note had been made on them as to whether His Excellency had replied. Monsarrat thought it unlikely.

‘I was transported for a crime I did not own,’ Grace wrote. Of course you were, thought Monsarrat. Weren’t we all.

And since arriving here, many other women and I have been punished twice – once in being transported, and a second time by being assigned to the Female Factory, where our rations are kept so short that one of our sisters has recently expired.

The superintendent, meanwhile, visits the most degrading and depraved abuses on the women, particularly the younger ones. I have attempted to prevent this on numerous occasions and have paid by being beaten, deprived of food, and with other punishments.

If women are to help build this colony then I despair, for they will be in no fit state to do so with the current hard treatment they receive.

I beg Your Excellency to intervene, to turn out the corrupt and brutal administration of the Factory so that those of us who wish to make honest lives here once our sentence expires can do so unimpeded.

Grace had been protecting the younger women, then. Or trying to. Had been punished for it, and kept doing it. Monsarrat couldn’t help but admire her. He asked himself whether he would have the courage to do the same in her position but decided he did not wish to know the answer.

She was more, though, than an instigator, a stirrer of pots. She had used the language of her rulers in that letter. To be able to do so, after a relatively short time in the ranks of writers, showed a nimble mind. It was possibly a symptom of her Irishness, as he knew from Mrs Mulrooney that the Irish could show an eloquence more marked than their education might warrant. It was also, he thought, evidence of a finely honed protective instinct. She, like he, was prey adopting the coloration of the predator.

Judging by the date on the letter, it was sent before Eveleigh took up his post. And in any case the documents dated after Eveleigh had arrived were in meticulous order. He wondered if his employer would know whether the letter had been replied to. There were more, too, detailing beatings and head shavings and rapes and starvation punishments – a parade of horrors. Whether or not Grace had received a reply from the government, through her letters she posed a question for Monsarrat. Had she, in her attempts to protect the women, taken subsequent steps to ensure they would never be molested again?