Chapter 14

Hannah didn’t tell Monsarrat of the magistrate’s bedroom. Of the kisses, or of Colm’s red-gold hair.

‘Colm died on the same day as my father. Before we got the chance to marry,’ she said. ‘Padraig is his son.’

It had been a long time, in such a far-off place, but whenever she gingerly prodded those memories, they rose up and snapped at her. Colm was no longer on this earth, and he had died unmarried. That was all Monsarrat would be told.

She would not, ever, speak of Vinegar Hill, the battle where Colm was taken, or of returning to the house to find her father piked through on the doorstep. Of watching Colm’s execution weeks later, and not recognising at first the man they’d shot in the back of the head, his scalp ruined from pitch-capping.

And she would certainly not be telling Monsarrat of giving birth in the cell where she was taken after she had sold stolen butter to the wrong person.

Monsarrat was silent for a long moment after he had heard the story. Too long, probably. Hannah had risen from the table, started towards her sleeping room to pack.

‘My God, but you must hate us,’ he said.

‘Us?’

‘The English. You are a remarkable soul, Hannah, to still be speaking to me after what was taken from you.’

‘Why shouldn’t I speak to you? Did you do the taking? No, you’re a victim of the same people. The ones who look at us and see a disease to be cured, rot to be cut out.’

‘Still – I don’t think I could have done it. The hatred would have destroyed me. How has it not done so to you?’

‘For a time, I wanted it to. But why would I let them take my soul, when they had taken everything else? And I had Padraig to consider as well. That whole voyage – we buried a few babes at sea, you know, and when they slid the little bundles into the ocean I always imagined it was Padraig. Everything, everything I did or said was to help him survive. When we got here – well, I thought, this is his chance. His chance to live without the old hatreds glowering over his shoulder, forcing him to take up a pike. And my chance, too. The hole I left in Enniscorthy after I was transported would have closed over quickly, no one left to miss or mourn me. So if I was to vanish, why not reappear in a guise which would help me navigate this place, that of a married woman rather than a fallen one?’

‘You are not fallen, Hannah. Far less so than me, at any rate. Please, reconsider your resignation. I’m sure you would get on perfectly well in another household, but this one would fall apart without you.’

She stared at him for a moment, but said nothing and went to her room. Monsarrat did not know whether his words had had any effect. But when the next morning brought tea, and there were no signs of possessions being bundled together, he began to hope. And when she scolded him for spilling his tea on the kitchen table – ‘I’ll be scrubbing that for the next week, eejit of a man’ – he knew he had succeeded.

As relieved as he was that he had managed to talk her out of leaving, Monsarrat couldn’t help feeling a little bit offended. He made a scowling progress along the riverbank, having decided the water might restore his equilibrium, as he paced his way towards Government House, past small, low houses with mean windows, modelled on English houses that were designed to keep out the cold of English winters, and unequal to the task of catching a river breeze in a strange summer. They stood on land which had been pristine, untouched by anything other than a native’s hand or the pad of a kangaroo, just a few decades past.

Monsarrat had forgotten about the smell of the bats, dripping now in their thousands from the branches of the river trees, wrapped in their own wings like fat black flowers, insensible to the pique of the man who, for once, was making no attempt to avoid the muddier parts of the bank as he chewed at his irritation. The bats’ stench climbed down through the air to meet the smell of rotting river plants, set free by the low tide. The stink was not helping the state of either his mind or his stomach, which had not yet finished complaining about last night’s rum. And when he tripped in a hole dug by a bandicoot – odd little animals, grey dollops of fur with the nose of a rat, but three times the size – he decided to try out the word he had heard one of the convict women use on the overseer.

Why would she think such a history, in this place of unfortunate histories, would matter to him? And why hadn’t she confided in him earlier? He had saved her, after all, from the gallows, even though at the expense of someone she loved. And while it felt awkward, sometimes, to have stepped into the role of her employer, he had thought that they were both becoming accustomed to the arrangement, and that their friendship had survived the transition.

Still, this was a place where pasts became smudged. Usually either over-dramatised or underplayed in the retelling. And who was to call out the teller of the tales, when the stories – factual or not – were generated by events which had happened in a place of different seasons, different livestock, different lives.

He would get over his offence, he knew. Especially as he had secured continuing access to her company, her intellect, and her tea.

Getting over Sophia’s role in the revelation – that was far less certain.

Sophia knew, of course, that he was anxious to sand down the jagged edges of his own past, eager for a reputation which would insulate him from pulpit salvos. She must’ve presumed that he would distance himself from the Irishwoman should anything stain her reputation. In this, she was catastrophically wrong.

He intended to call on her later. Ask her what she thought she was doing. Listen to the answer, make a decision.

Now, though, he had a more important task. One given to him this morning by his servant.

‘Don’t you go thinking that this tea comes without a price,’ Mrs Mulrooney had said, her small, scurrying steps propelling the rest of her, and the tray she was holding, into the parlour.

‘Good morning, Mrs Mulrooney,’ he said. He had known she was up, of course. Had heard the creak of the pump in the yard, the bucket being dragged out from under the drip stone – a large granite bowl on a stand that purified the water poured into it. Monsarrat sometimes thought the fluid which worked its way slowly through the granite was the only thing here to become more pristine with the passage of time. The water that had recently dripped from the stone into the pail below was now in the teapot.

Monsarrat frequently offered help with the heavier tasks like pumping and carrying water, and was always glared at as though he’d offered insult. ‘Sure, you couldn’t be trusted to do it properly,’ she frequently said. ‘You’d galumph around and spill it all, big streak of a man as you are, and who cleans it up then?’

This morning, he’d made no such offer. He understood her well, or fancied he did, and guessed she would use the domestic rituals of the morning to calm herself, take an inventory, make sure each part of the contraption which made up Hannah Mulrooney was in working order, if not spotlessly sparkling.

‘As for the price,’ he’d said, ‘one might remind you that one pays considerably more than one can afford for the excellent tea and the pleasure of your company, as well as the occasional swat with the cleaning cloth. I know, I know, it’s a bargain, but still – it isn’t nothing.’

‘A small step up from nothing, I suppose,’ Mrs Mulrooney said as she laid out the tea things on the table in front of him. ‘But it’s not more money I’m after.’

‘No? What may I do for you, then?’

‘Pens, paper and ink will do for a start.’

‘Of course. But I do recall giving you a quantity of paper very recently. You must be writing letters to Padraig several times a day.’

‘Not for me. For the women.’

‘The women? Which ones?’

‘Now you can’t expect me to know all their names, not yet. It will be at least next week for that. But this Mrs Nelson, you see, is very keen on teaching them how to read. And I have found that the best way to learn to read is to write.’

‘Have you indeed?’

‘I have,’ she said, with all the authority of a professor.

‘So you would like me to procure pens and paper for Mrs Nelson’s use in teaching letters to the women of the Factory.’

‘Did I not just say that? Are you still drunk?’

‘I don’t believe so, but my head is nowhere near as clear as it usually is, a situation which I am relying on your tea to alleviate. Can Mrs Nelson not get the items elsewhere? I am not sure Mr Eveleigh will give me leave to make off with his stationery, and David Nelson – I have passed his house a few times – is more than wealthy enough to spare a few writing implements.’

‘I’d agree with you there, if I did not think that procuring them myself would provide us with certain advantages.’

‘I see.’

‘I very much fear you don’t, Mr Monsarrat, if you’re asking questions like that. You want me to listen, keep an ear out for notes which sound a little off. It’s far easier to listen if people are talking. And far easier to get them to talk when you’re teaching them something. And far easier for me to convince Mrs Nelson to allow me to assist her if I am making a contribution myself.’

‘Ah. You are right, as usual.’

‘Of course I am. So you will do as I ask?’

‘My dear lady, despite your assertions to the contrary, I am not an eejit. Therefore I may be relied on to accurately assess where my interests lie, and at the moment they lie in fulfilling your requests in the hopes you will continue to help me.’

*  *  *

‘I certainly don’t think we can rule out Crotty,’ Monsarrat said, hoping he did not still smell of grog. ‘I found his belief that his problems with watered rum are over rather interesting.’

Eveleigh got up from his desk – an unusual move in itself – and began pacing the perimeter of the office, head down, carefully measuring each step.

‘Monsarrat, do you know how I felt when I was told you were coming?’

‘No, Mr Eveleigh.’

‘I was delighted. I thought to myself, how remarkable, someone with investigative instincts and clerical skill, so rare to find in one individual. It should simplify matters greatly, I thought to myself.’

‘And now?’

‘Well, I can’t say I regret your arrival. But I was certainly mistaken with regard to your ability to simplify things. You seem instead to be making them rather complicated.’

‘I assure you, sir. They are complicated without my intervention. I’m simply thinking to untangle them.’

‘And there are those, Monsarrat, known to both of us, who would say that no disentanglement is needed. That the guilty party is obvious, and that nibbling around the edges is wasting time.’

‘Is that your view, sir?’

Eveleigh sat back down, rather heavily for such a slight man.

‘I don’t know, Monsarrat. I just don’t know. I do know, however, that the superintendent of police – and others who, shall we say, believe they have a role to play in secular society – are very anxious to proceed to the trial of the O’Leary woman, and would be alarmed by your activities of last night.’

‘But surely, sir, you would not wish to see an innocent woman hanged?’

‘No, no of course not. But I do want to see this business dealt with. Tidied away. It’s interfering with the efficient running of things.’

Monsarrat knew that interference with the efficient running of things was in Eveleigh’s view the worst crime anyone could commit.

‘So, Mr Monsarrat, I feel that we do need to set some boundaries. You are not – absolutely not – to investigate this or any other matter outside of official hours and without my express permission. You will not involve any third party in this investigation. You will inform me of your intended course of action each day.’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘And, Monsarrat, one more thing. You have until the end of next week. Should you fail to discover anything germane, I will depose the O’Leary woman myself and prepare a brief for trial. And your status in this office will be less secure than it was.’

Monsarrat felt something inside him wake, shiver, stretch. It was a short step from losing his position to losing his ticket of leave. And he firmly believed a third penal stretch would kill him.

‘Now, Monsarrat, if there’s nothing else, I suggest you go and talk to O’Leary one last time, to see if you can find a hole in her story.’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Monsarrat, standing. And then swallowed. If he were to have a black mark against him anyway …

‘Sir, if I may have one more moment of your time. An acquaintance of mine is engaged in some charity work with convicts. Promoting literacy. I wondered, if it’s not too much trouble, would this office be able to spare a few sheets of paper?’