PUBLIC WORKS

The long game tested even Mr Macarthur’s patience, for the governor went on resisting all pressure to grant land to the officers of the New South Wales Corps. But a year after the marines sailed home he followed them. No new governor had yet arrived, and until then the role would be filled by Mr Macarthur’s greatest admirer, Major Grose the Dear Dunce.

It was not a matter of the long game now, but of speed. The new governor might arrive at any time, and overnight the DD’s power would evaporate. The Auld Salt’s ship was barely out of sight when the DD signed the paper Mr Macarthur had been pressing so relentlessly for: a grant for the chosen hundred acres at Parramatta, plus convicts to work it. At one stroke of a compliant pen, Mr Macarthur had what might have taken him a lifetime to achieve back in England.

But the difference between Mr Macarthur and other ambitious men in the colony was that, as soon as one of his ambitions was realised, another formed.

– The ink was barely dry on the grant, he said. He was still blotting his signature when I played my next card. The idle fellow did not take much convincing that a man was needed to take into his own hands all the pettifogging details of his new position. Inspector of Public Works was the title I suggested.

What would Mr Macarthur have done without a wifely audience to nod agreeably at his triumphs?

– He leapt at the idea, he said. Saw himself free to lie on his sofa all day—I saw his eyes go to the cushions. Until with a grand show of grief I mentioned how unfortunate it was that the post could not be remunerated without sanction from Whitehall. Poor fellow, all was woe-is-me!

Mr Macarthur had not forgotten how to mimic another man’s weakness. There to the life was the poor major, his face furrowed like a bloodhound’s in deepest dismay.

– Then, with becoming diffidence, I offered myself for the post.

– Without payment, I said. Then what is the advantage?

It was like a game of shuttlecock: he lobbed me the shuttle and was waiting as I lobbed it back.

– My dear, he said. My dear clever wife.

He was taking his time, enjoying himself.

– Whitehall cannot refuse once the work is being done, he said. The post will be handsomely remunerated in due course. But it is not a matter of the money. Can you, my dear, name a single action in this place that does not come under the heading of a public work? Any permission to own, or clear, or build, or assign, or reward, or punish?

He was right, I could not name one.

– Governors may come and governors may go, he said. But the Inspector of Public Works is a fixture beyond the reach of their whims.

The Inspector of Public Works lost no time in assigning himself ten, then twenty, then thirty convicts victualled by His Majesty, and set them to work clearing and planting his land. The Inspector of Public Works was also in a position to allocate bricks and timber towards his own farmhouse. Six months after the governor sailed away, enough land had been cleared for a promising crop of corn to be growing. Six months more and the house was ready to live in.

By then I had been safely delivered of a daughter. Like her brother she was a sickly babe, and for many months I feared my second daughter would go the way of my first. I held her to me as I had held Jane, this time without hope. I could not bear to hope again, was reconciled to this one making her little whimperings, puckering her little mouth, and fading as the other had done. But she clung to life. Every day there was the surprise of her continuing to breathe, and her stillness was more like a person husbanding her few resources than someone easing her way into the hereafter.

Mr Macarthur insisted that she was named Elizabeth. I would have chosen a different name. She was herself, not a copy of her mother. But Mr Macarthur was determined—it seemed to tickle him to be surrounded by Elizabeths—and what could it matter what she was called, as long as she lived?

She was eighteen months old, Edward a lad of four, when at last we removed to Parramatta. She was still not a strong child, would have looked puny beside Daringa’s robust princess, but I hoped the move to Parramatta would give her new strength, and I had begun to trust that she was with me to stay.