Chapter 8

Sophia Stark had remained lodged as a hazy though promising presence in Monsarrat’s mind during his time in Port Macquarie. It was the sort of remembrance that took grace and beauty for granted, in a way which might not be credible in a relationship with a real woman daily encountered. Sophia radiated even more lustre when compared with Port Macquarie’s prostitute Daisy Mactier, whose ageless and flat face had defined Monsarrat’s dull existence while Sophia decorated his dreams.

He had called on Sophia a week after his return to Parramatta. The shrubs which guarded the small pathway leading to the front door of her guesthouse were as neat as he remembered them. He had chosen a mild evening. The unnatural daylight which persisted beyond the dinner hour was beginning to fade, and flights of white cockatoos were trailing the tips of their wings across the sky and rousing the bats. It would probably have been more convenient for Sophia had he knocked at the door of the Prancing Stag during the day, when the majority of her guests could be relied on to be out. He couldn’t countenance it though. Midday’s enveloping heat would have called forth a slick of sweat he did not want her to see. He feared it would remind her he was a beast of burden, even if his tool was a pen rather than a hammer.

He had been imagining her reaction when she set eyes on him. A gasp, colour rising at her throat. Perhaps a tear. Most certainly an embrace.

‘Oh,’ she said when she opened her door to him. ‘I thought you had another year.’

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to keep any peevishness out of his voice. ‘I thought it might be longer, in point of fact. I had made myself rather indispensable. But I did a service to the commandant, who procured me a ticket of leave. I am now as free as you.’

She was looking at him oddly, her head slightly to the side as though she was trying to see whether he was in fact there and not a shimmering falsehood. She seemed, after a few moments, to have satisfied herself of his solidity, and she opened the door wider and gestured him inside.

They went into the parlour, passing a small sitting room swamped in opulent swagged curtains, with fussy, flocked wall-paper and inexpertly stuffed with cheap furniture modelled on what Sophia believed one would find in a country house. A neatly dressed man sat there with a copy of the Sydney Chronicle on the table in front of him.

Sophia’s private parlour was small and tidy like everything else associated with her, though slightly cramped. They sat on opposite sides of the table at which they had once drawn the chairs close together, shoulders and elbows touching.

‘Have you employment? Now that His Majesty has ceased feeding you?’

‘Well, His Majesty has contented himself with paying me rather than feeding me. I am clerk to the governor’s private secretary.’

Both of Sophia’s eyebrows shot up, but her mouth did not share their surprise, her lips pinching into a sceptical moue. There was a sharpness to her that he didn’t recall, a jagged quality which she had tried and almost – almost – succeeded in sanding away.

‘The governor’s secretary,’ she said. ‘But we’ve no governor, do we?’

‘We do, in point of fact. He just happens not to have arrived here yet. He will, however.’

‘And when he does, you’ll be working for him?’

‘Well, for his man, yes.’

‘And do you intend to make yourself as indispensable to him as you did to the commandant of that place they sent you to?’

‘Certainly. It is the only path to safety.’

Her mouth relaxed, and she attempted a ladylike smile which hid her teeth. She rose, then, as did Monsarrat, unfolding his long legs from the small ornate chair he had been sitting on, unwilling to stay seated while she was on her feet.

She walked over to him and slowly, as though performing a ritual which depended on absolute precision for a successful outcome, reached up her arms and put them around his neck, drawing his head down towards her.

‘Welcome back, governor’s man,’ she said.

*  *  *

The luminous Sophia who had lived in Monsarrat’s thoughts in Port Macquarie could not, however, coexist with the hard-edged, pinched woman whose eyes constantly slid to the side. He tried, with increasing desperation, to call the angel back. She must surely have existed. He would not have risked his freedom for her otherwise. And if she was there once, she might be again. A few nights a week he tried – arriving after dark and leaving before dawn to avoid Bulmer’s maniacal surveillance – to excavate her, visiting the bedroom which had once sent him into a fever but now had little more allure than Eveleigh’s office.

While the night-time visits were only just beginning to feel like a dry duty, Monsarrat would have done almost anything to avoid Sunday mornings.

The stroll with Sophia down Church Street was pleasant enough, as one was never frustrated by unmet expectations of transcendence on a stroll to the Sunday service. The church was a serviceable building, the genteel sandstone of the main building flanked by two towers made of bricks shaped by convict hands. There had been no attempt to make the spires on these towers conical, and certainly they lacked the flourish of the stone spires of his boyhood, rising in unapologetically flat, triangular planes to meet at the crosses that topped each one. Even the church had its guards, its overseers.

Monsarrat’s freedom brought with it the right to occupy one of the pews to the rear of the church, looking over devout heads towards the box pews reserved for Parramatta’s first families. He would have been happy, actually, not to occupy any part of the church but he was still a man on the margins, and chipping away at the walls that separated him from the Eveleighs and McAllisters required visible attendance. He told himself it was necessary to give him access to the people and places he needed to reach to carry out his duties, on which his continued freedom depended. He did not like to stand directly in front of another possibility – that he hungered for the approval of those who would never give it, who viewed him as irredeemably corrupted.

The walk to church with Sophia had, however, become less agreeable over the past few weeks, it had to be said. Sophia’s conversation had previously ranged over a wide landscape, from politics to art to the doings of the local worthies. But now her focus was becoming increasingly restricted. She wished to know when they would marry.

Monsarrat had no objection to the idea of marriage. The respectability he had hungered for since his days posing as a lawyer in Exeter was very possibly closer than it had been since his arrival in the colony, and a wife would do no end of good in enhancing it. But, he told himself, he wanted to be more settled, more assured, before he married. He ignored, when it insisted on presenting itself, the image of him and Sophia in her cramped parlour, silent, joined by God but separated by a slab of polished mahogany and a wall of mutual disappointment.

In Port Macquarie, he had mapped the invisible traps, the people who could be engaged and those best avoided; he had constructed a barricade of words and become adept at changing his form to meet each circumstance. That place, hemmed by mountains and sea and river and containing 1500 souls – and only a few dozen who had any power over him – had been easy to negotiate once the pitfalls had been identified.

Parramatta was a different proposition. An outpost, certainly, but one with far more people, and closer to the seat of power. And the greater the proximity to power, he had learned, the greater the danger. Six weeks had been barely enough time to identify the most obvious of pitfalls, let alone to intuit the hidden traps and construct a way to bypass them. Then, of course, there were the traps laid by those who saw no benefit in approaching things obliquely, the people whose antipathy was easily won, and worn like a cloak. And chief among them, alongside Socrates McAllister, was the Reverend Horace Bulmer.

Bulmer had very firm views about the nature of convicts, their character and whether it could be improved. He was of the belief that a criminal gene existed, and those unlucky enough to receive it from their parents were irredeemable, doomed to bring to life the criminal acts which were already engraved on their souls.

Monsarrat would very much like to ask the reverend one day how this belief sat beside the assertion that God gave man free will. That would have to wait, though, until his position was unassailable. Bulmer, like the superintendent of police, felt that those who had had the benefit of education should know better, and that someone who could take their advantages and turn them to evil ends was dangerous enough to deserve the noose.

Monsarrat was exceptionally grateful that Bulmer was not in charge of convict punishment. But he was in charge of St John’s Church, and he used that position to ensure Monsarrat got at least a little of what the clergyman felt he deserved: the clerk had been the framework upon which the reverend had laid the fabric of a great many of his homilies. There had been two alone since Monsarrat’s return, since his presence in the church, seated and free, had caught Bulmer’s attention and inflamed his indignation, never far from the surface at the best of times.

Monsarrat saw no sign that the reverend was tiring of his subject.

‘Much will be expected from those to whom much is given,’ Bulmer had screeched last Sunday. ‘But what can be said for those who take those gifts and instead of dedicating them to the Redeemer and to the service of man, dedicate them to sin and Satan? Are they not more culpable than those who were given no gifts to begin with?’

The reverend said this while looking directly at Monsarrat. It was the chief reason the clerk didn’t sit beside Sophia – there was no need to present Bulmer with another target, as well as a reminder of the sin of fornication. Sophia was probably grateful for the distance, too. She emerged after Bulmer’s first homily with a thunderous face, refusing to glance in Monsarrat’s direction until Ralph Eveleigh greeted him warmly. ‘I’ve come to rely on him, you know,’ Eveleigh had said to his wife. ‘It will be quite an adjustment if they take him away from me.’ Suddenly Sophia was at his elbow, with the tentative smile worn by those seeking an introduction.

This Sunday, however, was one of the first during which he had not given the reverend a moment’s thought as he and Sophia walked to church. He was thinking of Grace O’Leary. Grace’s punishment would have been far more distressing for someone like Sophia, he thought. Sophia had always equated cleanliness with wealth, and hoped her attendance to the former would hasten the appearance of the latter. Grace didn’t seem to care all that much about such things, unless her seeming indifference was a self-protective ruse. He was adept at constructing those, and liked to think he was equally skilled at spotting them in others.

If Monsarrat was astonished to realise when they arrived at the church that he had forgotten all about the reverend’s impending homily, he was equally astonished, half an hour later, to find that he was not its subject.

‘There are those among us,’ the reverend said as he poked an invisible sinner with his finger, ‘who feel education entitles them to subvert the will of God and the King.’

The words could easily have applied to Monsarrat, but the reverend’s gaze was directed somewhere over Monsarrat’s left shoulder. He was tempted to turn, but he kept his own eyes down as the venom skimmed the back of his neck on the way to its target, and he was grateful for the reprieve.

‘There are those who feel justified in filling the hearts and minds of men with poisonous fantasies of universal suffrage, of spreading the notion that voting, a say in the workings of government, is a natural right.

‘Like the most effective works of Satan, their argument seems reasonable – reasonable enough to lead many a sensible man down a dangerous path.

‘But these clever men, the ones who preach evil disguised as good, know the truth of it. They know the ridiculous, obscene and un-Christian concept of universal suffrage will lead to chaos. They know there are those whom the Lord has equipped to govern, and placing that burden on others will lead to ruin.’

Monsarrat discovered the identity of Bulmer’s victim after the service. He came upon Dr Homer Preston outside the church, clapping the shoulder of another man. ‘I hope you don’t feel too neglected, Monsarrat,’ Preston called when he saw him. ‘I’m sure the reverend will return to you next week.’

His companion was replacing his black cloth cap, having removed it in church – probably more out of respect for God and convention than Reverend Bulmer. Small, wiry and constantly in motion, waiting for Monsarrat to join them he shifted from foot to foot.

‘Now, even someone as recently returned as you cannot have failed to hear of the Flying Pieman. You know this fellow runs into the mountains and back in a single week, with that ridiculous hot box of his,’ Preston said, indicating his companion.

Monsarrat shook the man’s hand. ‘Yes, I believe we met outside the Female Factory. I’m not clear, though, whether it was pies or ideology you were selling.’

‘More of the former than the latter I’m afraid, though I wish the quantities were reversed,’ the man said in a clipped accent. ‘And while there are some excitable souls who refer to me as the Flying Pieman, I much prefer the name that God and my parents gave me, which happens to be Stephen Lethbridge. At your service, naturally.’

‘Well, Mr Lethbridge, I am in your debt for drawing the hellfire of the reverend away from me. It won’t last, I fear, but a Sunday’s respite has been delightful.’

‘I am sure. When that man warms to a topic, he rarely lets go. Quite a feat to become the focus of such attention, especially for one so newly arrived.’

‘Newly returned would be more accurate. I have enjoyed his attention before, when last I lived in Parramatta. A convict with an education, you see. He could not resist.’

It was Bulmer who’d had a geographic restriction placed on Monsarrat’s first ticket of leave, preventing him from seeing Sophia in her Parramatta bedroom. It was a restriction he had ignored, at her urging, and Bulmer had taken great delight in reporting Monsarrat to the magistrates when he was caught on the road from Sophia’s bed. Sophia must then be more than she currently seemed, he thought. It would be an unbearable cruelty if he sacrificed his freedom for one whom he did not have a hope of loving.

‘I may be able to provide you with more relief next Sunday,’ Lethbridge said. ‘I will be staying in Parramatta for two weeks, and I have no doubt that in that time I’ll manage to do something to offend the man’s sensibilities. I’ll consider myself a failure if I don’t, actually. Especially as there are so many who are eager to escape condemnation from the pulpit by placing someone else in front of the man.’

‘I see. And who do you believe placed you in front of him?’

‘Well – when I triangulate my location on Saturday, and recall the man within the Female Factory that morning, I come to a particular conclusion.’

Monsarrat looked confused.

‘I understand it has been some time since you have lived here, Mr Monsarrat. So you may not have had the pleasure of hearing the reverend on the subject of immorality at the Female Factory – he’s on the management committee too, so I’m not entirely sure he should be drawing attention to his own failures, but still. Half the windows on the second floor are broken, which forces the women to huddle in one corner of their rooms, which, to hear the reverend tell it, urges them to acts of depravity that defy description. And of course there is Church’s well-known liking for female convicts, and his wife’s well-known liking for rum. All of which, to Bulmer, could have been prevented by the oversight of more effective management.’

‘Well, it seems Socrates McAllister is managing the place at present. I thought Bulmer and he were on friendly terms. They are on the bench together, are they not?’

‘They’re friendly for as long as it benefits both of them. But what if the new governor decides to look at the Factory records and finds certain irregularities during the late superintendent’s tenure? What if he decides to call the management committee to account? Well, then the reverend can point to his continued warnings from the pulpit, say his push for reformation in the committee room was ignored.’

‘Why does he not simply leave the committee?’ said Monsarrat. ‘Why risk soiling his cassock with the muck of the women?’

‘He’s an evangelist,’ said Lethbridge. ‘He feels divinely directed to bring the word of his vengeful God to the wretches. Do not make the mistake of thinking Horace Bulmer is motivated entirely by the pursuit of earthly power. He is a zealot, and that makes him dangerous.’

‘Well, whatever drives the man, hopefully he and McAllister will make a better selection this time around. The committee does not seem to be mourning Church.’

‘Possibly not. And nor are the innkeepers who have been receiving watered rum of late, so they tell me: I stop at a lot of places between here and Blackheath, and people seem to trust me – I’m familiar, but not around all the time to cause embarrassment.’

‘I see. And are any of your confidants significantly more aggrieved than the rest?’

‘Not as far as I can tell. But some are closer than others. Michael Crotty, now – he owns a shebeen nearby, and he’s losing customers over the rum. He’s not philosophical about it in the least.’

Sophia, having finished a discussion with the wife of a less prosperous farmer in the district, was employing one of her more disconcerting strategies, standing at some distance and staring, silent but eloquent on the fact that she felt it was time to leave.

‘Mr Lethbridge, I should be glad of the opportunity to sample one of your pies before you leave. Are you selling them this coming week?’

‘Indeed. On Thursday I plan to be at the crossroads. A wonderful place for the curious, Monsarrat – all kinds of people and information wash up there. And people do seem to enjoy discussing scandals there while they eat. The superintendent’s departure from the world is being feverishly dissected at the moment. Whatever crimes the man committed in life, there’s no denying that in death he’s been awfully good for business.’

‘I hope to see you on Thursday, then.’

‘And I you, Mr Monsarrat. In the meantime, mind yourself. The ruts in the road are the least of the dangers for those who don’t watch their footing here.’