It was one of the perquisites of this place that an officer might be assigned convicts as servants clothed and fed by His Majesty, and once we had a bigger house, Mr Macarthur took full advantage of this privilege.
On our arrival we had been assigned a grizzler called Sullivan. He was a young man but wore on his body the marks of a hard life, his face worn like an old shoe and his mouth full of gaps. Mr Macarthur told me he had been caught with the candlesticks poking out of his pocket while he stood there denying all knowledge of any such thing as a candlestick.
Some woman had given birth to him and had chosen what he should be called, but the only forename he would admit to was Smasher. He never met your eye. It was a habit they got in the way of, the felons, not to meet your eye. If you met the eye of your master, it could be that you considered yourself as good as he, and that would be insolence, and insolence was worth a dozen lashes. Sullivan always called Mr Macarthur squire, grinning a nasty knowing grin.
But when the Atlantic arrived with a fresh load of felons, Mr Macarthur was Johnny-on-the-spot down at the dock. An officer who cherished his position would not make do with one worthless idler.
William Hannaford was a big fair man with a frank open face. You could see the farmer in him even after the months in the hold of the Atlantic. Could see, too, that he was a cheerful person who would not go under, no matter what life threw at him.
– A sheepstealer, Mr Macarthur told me. But avoided the noose, God only knows how.
That first day, Hannaford was standing with Sullivan, talking away, and I heard the shape of words I knew to be my own. It was easy to picture him leaning on a stile in Devon with his neighbour, talking on and on, up and down the hills and dales of a conversation, the way Grandfather had loved to do. Sullivan looked around at me, and that made Hannaford look too, and get a fright when he saw me listening, Mrs John Macarthur in her good bonnet.
– I think you are from Devon, I said, trying to find the right tone to take with a servant who was also a felon. But the sound of those familiar vowels woke a longing in me to speak of the place we shared.
– Now which part, exactly?
This emerged somewhat more inquisitorial than I intended, and he looked wary. When I smiled—not too much!—I saw him ease.
– Well, Mrs Macarthur, he said, my farm was out of Bradworthy a piece. But an out-of-the-way place, you may not have heard the name.
– Is it over Milton Damerel way? I said. Or more towards Kilkhampton?
Seeing it all in the eye of my memory, the high-hedged lanes.
– More the direction of Sutcombe, Mrs Macarthur, he said. Solden Cross, then Honeycroft, and then my place in the elbow of Beckett’s Hill.
A silence fell then, as we each saw those places in our mind’s eye. He pressed his lips together and I could imagine the pain of regret. He would have lost whatever few fields he might have had, and perhaps a wife and children, and all the future that he would have planned, when he had put his hand to the horn of a sheep that was not his own, and been caught in the doing of it.
I saw too late that it was no kindness to exchange the names of places that had been his home, and bring to his mind the picture of them. With time and good fortune, Mrs Macarthur would return to those places. William Hannaford, transported for the term of his natural life, would not.
What was it like to make the decision that changed your life? To lead that sheep out of its fold, knowing that in the moment you put your hand to its horn you were a dead man? Was it despair, or a gleeful throw of the dice? To end here, standing on foreign dust, avoiding the eye of a woman who had the power, if she chose, to send you to the chain gang?
I might as well have asked aloud, for he launched into his story. I felt he had already told it many times, to anyone who would listen, as if telling it often enough might make it end differently.
– I had need of a ram, you see, Mrs Macarthur, he said. My sad little flock. I could see how to go forward, if only I had a good ram. Just the one.
He gave a rueful laugh.
– Other men had rams they wasted, rams they did not deserve. In my view.
He glanced again, as if to be sure I would not turn into someone who would have him whipped for taking liberties, but he saw that I had no wish to be that person.
– I’d learned from my father, you see, he said. What to look for. Got my eye on a fine ram at Crawley Fair. Far enough from home, and I had a cart and a thing on the back of it to keep him hidden on the road, had a story for the neighbours, a sad story about a fellow selling it off cheap, his wife had died. Oh, I had it all laid out. Have you ever, Mrs Macarthur, seen a thing in your mind so clear and strong you believe you have the right to it?
He did not want or wait for me to say if I knew that sense of right, but I did. It was that short time behind the hedge when I thought I had a right I did not turn out to have.
– How could I have been such a fool, he said in soft wonder. No matter how many times he had told the story, it still sat in him undigested.
– But lucky, more lucky than a fool deserved, he said. To have in my hand the beast that belonged to General Watson, and him a good-hearted gentleman, he came to the judge, told him he forgave me and would not for the world see a man hang for the sake of one sad sorry foolish mistake.
See a man hang. His story made me see New South Wales in a new way. William Hannaford should be dead, and yet he was alive. But only here. The innocent body of England would not allow the canker of a sheepstealer to go on living in it, and without the fact of transportation, General Watson’s pleas would have fallen on deaf ears. New South Wales was a prison from which William Hannaford would never return. But the very distance of this place, its very strangeness, even its unpromising aspects, might reveal itself as a door rather than a wall, and offer Hannaford a future.