Jessie Knight was not my friend. I had thought her so once, for her demeanour was very sweet and insinuating, so that I was initially deceived. She had mastered the kind of subtle malice so freely employed in certain metropolitan drawing rooms, where ladies are brought up never to speak their minds, but to smile on their enemies, and use their tongues as double-edged swords.
I myself was not acquainted with the technique. My mother was always frank—even blunt—in conveying her impressions, and I had inherited this trait. It was therefore some time before I realised that Jessie Knight’s intentions were purely spiteful when she let drop her careless little remarks, for all that she did it so innocently. In opening her eyes very wide, and seeming quite astonished that offence had been taken, she was merely attempting to disguise her true nature—which was wholly ill disposed towards everyone and everything.
She was vicious, but did not appear so. With her golden ringlets and bird-like voice, she seemed more angelic than otherwise. Indeed, she was much admired by the younger girls, who would often compete for her attention. And she in turn was a capricious friend to them, sometimes offering and sometimes withdrawing her favours. I can only assume that she was practising upon these hapless creatures the various stratagems with which she would have preferred to ensnare young men. It surprised me that she did not exert herself more to captivate some of Mr Rennie’s male scholars. But I am persuaded now that she thought them poor things, callow and lumpish compared to the gentlemen who seemed to move through her mother’s drawing room in waves.
She was the daughter of a merchant. Yet she gave herself such airs, and seemed to think herself better than anyone, if only because she lived in a fine house, wore beautiful clothes, and was connected in some remote way with Sir Thomas Mitchell—whose property at Darling Point she had visited on one occasion. No doubt she was jealous of my own, more respectable ancestry. At any rate, she did everything possible to denigrate it. I remember her once asking if Mrs Atkinson, who conducted a Ladies’ Academy on the premises of the old Australian College, was perhaps an aunt of mine? And why, in that case, was I not enrolled there? (‘For the poor soul must be desperate for business.’) On another occasion, she questioned me about A Mother’s Offering to Her Children. Why, she asked, had it been dedicated to the Governor’s son, Master Reginald Gipps? Was my mother perhaps acquainted with His Excellency?
No, I had to admit. She was not.
Then she must have written to him, seeking permission to dedicate the book to his son?
I believed so.
‘Ah,’ said Jessie Knight. ‘How enterprising. And does Mrs Barton receive a portion of the six shillings charged for every copy? Or was the money paid to her in one sum, before publication?’
I confessed that I did not know.
‘No, of course not,’ Jessie said sweetly. ‘Who wants to bother with all the dull details of a mercantile transaction?’ Thereby implying that my mother, in earning her money, was no better than a common woman with a grog-shop licence.
My only defence against this sort of thing was rudeness. Not being able to reply in kind, I would ignore Jessie, or tell her to shut her mouth. My true revenge was to outdo her in almost every branch of learning offered to us. It irked her horribly when I received the first medal for general superiority at the end of the year. I know this because of the clumsy way she tried to insult me after the presentations, when Mr Rennie announced that a prize would be given, at the commencement of the next school term, to any pupil who spent a portion of the holidays writing a set of books by double entry, consisting of a Day Book, Cash and Bill book, journal and ledger, accurately balanced.
‘I suppose you and your brother will be entering that competition,’ my foe declared meanly, ‘now that Mrs Barton has started to earn a good wage.’
It was a stupid remark, which did not endear her to Miss Rennie. Our teacher promptly declared that if Jessie had a mind to be unpleasant, she could go straight home and miss all the dancing. This was in December, long after the death of John Lynch—whose trial took place in March of the same year. Jessie and I were still on speaking terms in March. We had little choice, since Mr Rennie favoured the modern system of ‘pairing’ pupils. If the system does not seem so modern now, back then it was the latest thing: senior girls, or ‘monitors’, would correct the production of those who were younger and less able. Jessie and I were both monitors, along with Mary Mullen, and a handful of others whose names I forget. Therefore we were thrown very much together. Often we would sit beside each other at the front of the room. Sometimes we were asked to check each other’s work.
It therefore required no great ingenuity on Jessie’s part to address me in a low voice one fine March morning as we prepared for class.
‘Tell me,’ she murmured, ‘did you ever personally know the murderer John Lynch?’
I dropped my books. The noise of it resounded throughout the high-ceilinged chamber, making everyone turn with a start.
Everyone, that is, except Jessie. She just stood there smiling.
‘Papa was reading from the Gazette,’ she continued, ‘and it said that John Lynch, who is being tried for murder in Berrima, was tried once before. Back in 1835, for killing a man called Smith at Oldbury. Oldbury is the name of your father’s estate, is it not?’
I gaped at her, unable to speak. Then Miss Rennie came to my rescue.
‘No gossiping, if you please,’ she warned. ‘Attend to your work, Miss Knight. If you wish to discuss vulgar subjects, kindly do so outside the school premises.’
As you may imagine, I could scarcely concentrate on the task at hand. There was a little girl—Isabella—whose stilted reading I was required to correct, and I am quite sure that many a gross error slipped by me unperceived, since I barely heard her. As a result, I was unprepared for the exercise that followed. Our textbook contained a series of questions relating to every extract included therein; I found myself asking ‘Why was not Jane happy while taking care of the baby?’ and ‘What kind of persons are not happy?’ without having the least idea whether Isabella’s answers were correct or not!
Jessie did not approach me again, that day. Yet she watched me closely, delighting (no doubt) in every mistake that I made as a result of my preoccupation. It was a dreadful experience. The strain was immense. And at the close of the final lesson I hurried out to meet my mother in a state of extreme anxiety, hardly able to contain myself.
My mother, I should tell you, unfailingly caught the omnibus to town so as to escort her children home from school. At least that was her professed motive. I sometimes wonder if she did it partly in order to exchange a few words with Mr Rennie, who was always very polite to the parents of his pupils. But if she did, I cannot blame her. I would probably have done the same myself.
He was an extremely personable man.
‘Mama,’ I said, without sparing a thought for James or Emily. (Louisa had been left at home, on account of her poor health.) ‘Mama, John Lynch is being tried at Berrima! For murder, Mama!’
We were walking south, towards Market Street. My mother stopped in her tracks.
‘Who told you so?’ my mother demanded.
‘It was in the Gazette. Surely the Gazette could not be wrong?’
‘Is it true, Mama?’ James blinked up at my mother in alarm. ‘Is it the same John Lynch?’
‘It must be,’ I interjected. ‘For the newspaper said that he was tried years ago for the murder of a man named Smith at Oldbury—’
‘Hush.’ My mother made an abrupt movement. ‘Not here, if you please.’
‘But—’
‘Hush. There is no need for concern. John Lynch is in custody at Berrima. He will not trouble us here.’
‘But Mama . . .’ I could not believe her obtuseness. John Lynch was the least of our worries. ‘Mama, where is Mr Barton? He will not be testifying, will he?’
My mother took a deep breath. She looked about her quickly, her lips pressed tightly together.
‘Mr Barton is in Berrima also,’ she replied. ‘He is undertaking an action against Mr Humphery before the local court. Now stop fretting, and show a little self-respect. We are on a public thoroughfare, Charlotte. This is neither the time nor the place to discuss such matters.’
I should perhaps explain why we were so nervous. You must already be aware that any mention of John Lynch had a bad effect on George Barton. You will not be aware, however, that the state of George Barton’s temper was still of some interest to us. Having been forced to surrender Oldbury to the new tenant, my stepfather was often in Sydney, making legal claims against Messrs Humphery and Berry with equal vehemence. He felt himself so ill used that he would drink himself into a frenzy, and would sometimes appear on my mother’s doorstep, crying out for vengeance. It had happened thrice since our removal to Sydney. Indeed, his conduct was such that in early 1841, my mother had applied to the magistrates at the local Police Office for protection.
That was after he had smashed a window and vomited onto our only surviving rug.
It was partly on account of George Barton that we had vacated our house in Rose Bay. With her husband about, my mother felt safer at an address that was closer to town. And her instincts were good, because we had so far received no unexpected visits from my stepfather in Darlinghurst.
Nevertheless, we could not hide from him indefinitely. And we all of us knew that, if anything was bound to inflame Barton’s drunken temper, it would be public mention of Thomas Smith’s death. Especially in connection with a new murder. As the days rolled by, and the details of Lynch’s crimes became generally known, we grew more and more alarmed. For we could easily imagine what was being said in Berrima. Years later, Mr Roger Therry said the very same thing: he declared that, had Barton not been drunk at Lynch’s first trial—thereby aborting it—the carnage that followed might never have happened.
And what carnage was this? Here I had better break off to describe John Lynch’s terrible career of slaughter, for there are not many nowadays who remember it. You will recollect that in 1836 Lynch went to Newcastle, where he subsequently concocted a false accusation against certain fellow convicts. Shortly afterwards, he was sent to the barracks in Sydney, from which he escaped in November 1840. (This event was not widely reported at the time.) From Sydney he headed straight back to his old haunts, around Berrima and Sutton Forest. According to his confession—which was published in newspapers and broadsheets after his death—his intention was to approach one John Mulligan of Wombat Brush, who owed him money. You may well ask: how is it possible that an assigned convict should be owed money, when he could have possessed nothing to sell? The answer is that he simply made off with the possessions of others. Lynch himself admitted that Mulligan had served him as a ‘fence’, disposing of property purloined by Lynch.
Upon learning this, it occurred to me that the property in question had almost certainly belonged to the Oldbury estate. In fact the oft-blamed bushranger gang may not have been responsible for all the flour and sugar and sheep that went missing from our stations, back in 1836. I said as much to my mother, who was poring over the dreadful details of the confession. Whereat she looked up, almost despairingly, and said: ‘It is worse than I ever imagined.’
It was very bad, in all truth. For Mulligan, when applied to, would not pay John Lynch for the articles left with him. So Lynch stole eight of our tenant’s bullocks. His intention was to sell them in Sydney, where they would not be known or recognised. But on Mount Razorback he encountered a certain Mr Ireland, who was also heading for Sydney. Mr Ireland was in charge of a dray belonging to Mr Thomas Cowper. It contained a large quantity of bacon and other produce destined for the Sydney market. Lynch decided to abandon his bullocks in favour of the dray and its contents. He therefore killed Mr Ireland, and the black boy who accompanied him, with an axe. He then concealed the corpses under a pile of stones, and proceeded on his way to Sydney, taking Mr Ireland’s dog with him. But here, I adjure, is the remarkable thing: he was not far from Sydney when he encountered Mr Cowper, the owner of the dray.
Did he kill Mr Cowper? He did not. Rather, he calmly and genially explained that Mr Ireland, having fallen ill, had asked Lynch to take charge of Cowper’s load. Inexplicably, Mr Cowper believed this. Instead of summoning the police, Cowper arranged to meet up with Lynch in Sydney. And thereafter the dray’s owner went happily on his way, very fortunate indeed that his head was still on his shoulders.
It has been mentioned that Lynch was transported for the crime of ‘false pretence’. I believe that this incident, as much as any other, displays his peculiar genius. The man was utterly convincing. Whatever he did, and whatever he claimed, he never failed to impress his interlocutors as amiable, intelligent, and thoroughly good-hearted. Why, even Mr Ireland’s faithful dog was won over! At Lynch’s trial, moreover, the defendant never faltered once. I myself read in the Examiner—an English journal which concerned itself with the case—that ‘the man’s appearance and manner on his last trial is described to have been . . . not of a forbidding, but of a mild and prepossessing character; and, though undefended by counsel, he conducted his own defence with self-possession and coolness, as well as with remarkable ingenuity’. Yet beneath this pleasant veneer lay a soul bereft of any human spark—a great, black hole wherein dwelt some kind of monster which hardly resembled a man at all. It is this that I found most frightening. For it begs the question: whom may we trust, if God allows such creatures to roam the earth? How are we to find our way, if we cannot rely on our own instincts?
It need hardly be said that Lynch disposed of his goods and was gone from Sydney long before Mr Cowper ever returned there. Even so, Mr Cowper moved quickly. By the time Lynch regained the Bargo Brush, its constabulary had been alerted to his theft of Cowper’s dray. They were actively spreading word of it—to the eternal misfortune of Lynch’s next victims. These unfortunates were Mr William Fraser and his nineteen-year-old son, also called William, who were heading down the Old South Road.
The Frasers had been entrusted with a horse-team, and a dray loaded with valuable goods. Yet they were unaccustomed to such work, and were making a pretty mess of it. Upon meeting up with Lynch near the Stonequarry, they must have congratulated themselves on their good fortune—since John Lynch, in his own words, was ‘clever in the management of draft cattle’. He professed to have wished them no harm, at first, though confessing to have ‘managed to get from them an account of the whole of their and their master’s concerns’. Together the three men had travelled on to Bargo Brush, where they were joined on the second night by another party. All save Lynch were asleep by the fire when a stranger rode up and proceeded to make inquiries about Mr Cowper’s dray. In the darkness he cannot have seen Lynch, who lay very still; Mr Fraser the elder, as he conversed with the mounted man, was ‘between asleep and awake’, and only answered ‘something at random’. Yet after the rider had departed, Lynch said to himself: ‘This is sharp work—this will never do—I must get rid of this dray, and obtain another somehow’.
Thus was poor William Fraser’s fate sealed.
Now—observe the ice-cold intellect of John Lynch. He knew that Mr Fraser might at any moment connect him with Mr Cowper’s dray. He also knew that both Frasers were keen to stay in his company. So at daybreak he went off, pretending to search for his bullocks but in reality driving them deep into the bush. He then strangled Mr Ireland’s dog, and stayed away so long that the companion party—two men and one woman—had left before he returned. The tale he told the Frasers was, as usual, completely convincing. He claimed that the bullocks were nowhere to be found, and had probably returned to their home beyond Berrima. It was agreed, therefore, that he should leave his empty dray at Bargo Brush, and accompany the Frasers to Cordeaux’s Hill.
It was here that he killed them, the following morning. Though Mr Ireland had been dispatched while he slept, the Frasers received no such mercy. Lynch first accompanied young William ‘over the ridge’, ostensibly to help fetch the horses. Instead, he struck the poor boy on his head with an axe. (‘If people knew how easy it is to take away life,’ Lynch here commented to Mr George Bowen, ‘things of this kind would happen oftener.’) The unfortunate father was dealt with in a similar fashion soon afterwards, whereupon John Lynch buried the bodies.
The following day, he arrived at Mulligan’s farm.
It must be clear by now that John Lynch felt defrauded by Mulligan. I myself believe that he always intended to kill the man, though he never said as much. He merely remarked that he spun his old friend a tale about being hired to deliver a dray, before sending to Gray’s hotel for rum. By the evening he and his hosts had ‘got very sociable’, though he himself took care not to overindulge. I should tell you, at this point, that Mr Mulligan lived with a woman, Bridget Macnamara, who was not his lawful wife. She had one son, a boy of eighteen, and a daughter four years younger. These are the people whom Lynch resolved to murder that cold, windy night in August of 1841.
Here is the account he gave of himself.
‘I looked up at the bright moon and I prayed to the Almighty God to direct me. I said to myself, I am an injured man, and the Mulligans have defrauded me of what I perilled life and liberty to obtain. That fellow, when I was starving in the Berrima Iron Gang, has often passed me by without as much as giving me a shilling, when he had many pounds that were justly mine in his hands. And now, wouldn’t it be right that they should lose all they possess as a judgement upon them for withholding his own from the poor prisoner? Heaven guide me and point out to me what to do.’
I can hardly bear to contemplate what happened next. After taking up an axe, he offered to go and chop some wood if the boy, John, would help him. Lynch claims that, as soon as they were alone together, John spoke roughly of Mulligan, saying that God would soon take the man away and if He didn’t, John would ‘give him maybe a helping hand’. Whether this is true or not, only God Himself can judge. But Lynch made it his excuse for smashing the boy’s head with the axe. ‘Ah, John,’ he remarked, ‘you shouldn’t speak that way; you don’t know what may be in store for yourself.’
Lynch then returned to the hut. He told Bridget that her son was busy with the wheelbarrow, and they shared another glass of rum. This I find more terrible than I can properly convey: to kill a mother’s only son before drinking with her, calmly, knowing what he knew . . . it is past belief. Lynch told Bridget that John had gone into the bush to check the horses, but the woman soon became restless. She spoke of a dream she’d had the night before, in which she had been holding an infant child, horribly mangled and covered with blood. ‘I hated this old woman,’ Lynch observed, ‘for she used to toss cups and balls, and could foretell things.’
Not her own death, however. If that had been so, she would have seized Mulligan’s gun. Instead she went to the door, and ‘coo-eed’ for her son—without result—until Mr Mulligan finally rose, and took up his gun, and said: ‘Perhaps the lad is lost in the bush.’ He was about to fire, so that young John might hear the sound and find his way back in the dark, but Lynch prevented him. ‘You’d better not fire,’ Lynch said. ‘People will come—perhaps the police; and if we’re to deal, it won’t answer that the dray should be seen here.’
I do not know why Mulligan should have agreed. Lynch had told him that the dray was not stolen. Yet the fool obeyed Lynch, folding his arms as he stood outside in the moonlight. Though Lynch was with him, the murderous fiend still had his eye on Bridget, inside the house. He saw her take out a large knife and conceal it in her clothes, before changing her mind and passing it to her daughter. I wish that she had run at him with it. I wish that she had trusted her Second Sight, and killed him then and there.
But she did not. She waited. So Lynch pretended that he had to tie a troublesome dog to the wheel of his dray. While occupied thus, he concealed his axe beneath his thick coat. Meanwhile, Bridget had taken matters into her own hands. She had left the house, and was moving like one bewitched towards the very spot where her son’s body lay, concealed beneath a pile of wood. ‘Now or never,’ thought Lynch. He saw Mulligan’s head turn, and struck the man down. Then he proceeded to meet up with Bridget, who had found her son’s body and was returning with all haste to the house. ‘Lord!’ she exclaimed in desperation. ‘What brings the police here? There are three of them getting over the fence!’
Alas, however, she had met her match in cunning. Lynch killed her there, in the dark, with his axe—after which foul act he returned to the house, where Bridget’s daughter was waiting. ‘Now, my little girl,’ he said to her, ‘I will do for you what I would not for the others, for you’re a good girl; you shall have ten minutes to say your prayers.’
It is many years since I first read of this abomination, but still I have to wipe away tears. Lynch, it seems, was similarly affected. According to Mr Bowen: ‘Lynch paused, as if he had a difficulty in going on. I suppose it might be a feeling of remorse, and I could easily imagine that the scene of the child begging for her life must have been a most pitiable one.’
I shall pass over this event. It is far too awful. I shall say only that Lynch decided against burying the bodies in such a well-frequented neighbourhood. Instead he burned them. It troubled him to do so, he said, but he concluded that it mattered not to the deceased whether they were burned or buried. He also confessed himself surprised at the way they were consumed, flaring up ‘as if they were so many bags filled with fat’. By the morning there was nothing left but a heap, ‘like of slacked lime’, which he buried in another part of the paddock.
He then proceeded to dispose of the family’s clothes, and pass himself off as the lawful owner of Mr Mulligan’s farm.
It was done very cleverly. First he read through Mulligan’s papers, and gained a complete understanding of the man’s affairs. After that, he went to Gray’s hotel, where he asked the proprietor what kind of a man Mulligan was. When inquiries were made of him in return, he replied that he had come from Sydney, and had concluded a bargain with Mulligan, who had failed to deliver his side of it. To others he acknowledged that Mulligan had borrowed a valuable mare from him, and pretended to be shocked when told that he might never see the animal again. ‘Some of them seemed to look down on me as a kind of flat,’ he remarked in his confession—and I can almost see the glint in his eye as he spoke.
Lynch subsequently returned to Sydney, where he called at the offices of the Gazette, pretending to be Mulligan. He paid for an advertisement in Mulligan’s name, declaring that, Bridget having absconded from his home, he would not be answerable to her debts. Furthermore, he wrote to several persons in the neighbourhood of Wombat Brush about Mulligan’s affairs, signing Mulligan’s name instead of his own, before returning there in the guise of Mulligan’s victim. He even wrote a letter to himself, which was purportedly from Mulligan. By these means he secured the dead man’s property. And he proceeded to farm it, with great efficiency and expertise, for all of six months.
He called himself Dunleavy, and employed an immigrant couple to work for him. (‘I told them that Mulligan and his wife had had a row,’ Lynch related, ‘and that he had turned her out, and that he had been obliged to go to the Five Islands and hide, on account of a horse found in his possession which was all wrong—that is, stolen.’) Such was the respect felt for him by his neighbours that one of them pressed Lynch to marry his daughter. The landlord of Mulligan’s farm was not so easily gulled. But Lynch was ‘as deep as he’, and managed to arrange matters to the satisfaction of both. I can easily imagine the scene at that farm of an evening, after Lynch had bidden his servants a pleasant and cheerful goodnight. I can envision the way he must have sat at the table, listening to the wind, his pale eyes reflecting the firelight as he planned and schemed, and tried to keep the ghosts at bay.
Had he been a man in truth—a human being, with a human being’s heart—he would still be living. For what had he to do but work diligently, and enjoy his ill-gotten gains? The Devil, however, is not easily quelled. One day in February, he was returning from a trip to Sydney when he camped on the north side of Razorback. Here a man named Kearns Landregan accosted him. Kearns said that he wanted to head off, without anyone knowing it. ‘Why?’ asked Lynch. ‘You do not look like a bushranger.’ No, Kearns replied, he was not; but he had quarrelled with his wife, and never wanted to see her again.
Lynch needed a man to do some fencing. So he agreed to hire Kearns for six months, and together they travelled towards Berrima. During the journey, Kearns told Lynch that he and his wife had earned a large sum during the last harvest, which he had kept for himself. ‘And can you,’ replied Lynch, ‘defraud your own lawful wife of the money she has hardly earned by the sweat of her brow? I would myself take a musket and rob upon the highway sooner than be guilty of such cruelty.’ He argued with Kearns about this (or so he said), and turned against him as a ‘selfish and hardhearted man’. But I do not myself believe that Lynch killed Kearns Landregan out of disgust. I believe that he changed his mind when Kearns began to show himself far more cunning than he had initially appeared. ‘On getting better acquainted with him, I found he was by no means simple, as I at first supposed,’ Lynch admitted. ‘If I took this fellow with his law to the farm with me, it would certainly be my ruin; for, after using his wife as he had done, he would not stop at informing against me.’ Even if Lynch told Kearns to be off, the sly fellow would take him to Court for breach of agreement, and questions would be asked. Or at least that was Lynch’s perception.
Therefore he killed Kearns Landregan. He did it with an axe, while they were breaking camp near the Nattai Bridge. Then he stripped the body and hid it under some bushes, where it was discovered the next day. A series of clues led the police to Lynch’s farm; Landregan’s belt, which they found there, was all the proof required. And so, at last, the monstrous career of John Lynch came to an end.
It seems to me odd that Lynch had kept the belt. He told Mr Bowen that he had at first thrown it into a waterhole, which was not deep enough. Seeing that it protruded from the water, he had retrieved it, tossed it into the back of his dray, and ‘never thought of it’ afterwards. Yet he was generally so careful and so clever. Why this stupid mistake?
Perhaps, as he said, his time had come. ‘I can see the hand of God in my detection’ was how he put it. Or perhaps he simply no longer cared. There was something lacking in him; he seemed not to accord life any more importance than a good dinner, or a well-trained dog. The newspapers reported that he had met his fate ‘with the same reckless indifference about his own life as that shown to his defenceless and unsuspecting victims’.
Knowing all that I know about John Lynch, this does not surprise me in the least.