A Treacherous Country Read online

  Here was a necessary pause in our conversation, for two red-coated soldiers threw open the door and stood surveying the room in the imperious way particular to coarse young men in smart uniforms. They were large men, broad-chested and daunting, especially in the rifle-guns slung over their shoulders. I sat very still, but the woman served them gamely; they ordered beer, and drank it with accomplished speed, while Mrs Nancarrow chatted to them about the State of the Judiciary System, on which topic they held no opinions. They departed, wiping their mouths.

  As if there had been no interruption, the old farmer observed, ‘Wheat farmer has no need of harpooning, in general.’

  ‘Well, as to your guess,’ I said, ‘you are partly right. My father is a farmer, and my eldest brother will inherit it—the farm—when he—my father—dies. I am quite free of the obligation of farming, being the third son, which suits me well, as I did not take naturally to it. That is the extent of it. I do not wish to buy any land, I am afraid, nor wheat. I am going north-east to a whaling-station—which I also do not wish to buy—to perhaps at last divest myself profitably of these harpoons.’

  ‘It seems an awful lot of trouble for what may be little reward,’ said Mrs Nancarrow. ‘Although I do admit I do not know anything of the price of harpoons—or irons, as I believe they are sometimes called.’

  ‘An awful lot of trouble, Mrs Nancarrow, you are right,’ said the farmer, Mr Green.

  ‘I do not suppose you are acquainted with any whalers?’ I asked them, with the presupposition that they might help me find a buyer and save me the onward journey.

  Mrs Nancarrow laughed. ‘No! No. Not acquainted. We have the odd seafaring sort through here, on his way north, or south, but no, my dear sir—we do not know any whalers here in the fields. And—you say you did not take to farming, but neither are you a whaler. That is clear to me, even with your harpoons.’

  ‘You are entirely right in that, madam. And it is true, the harpoons are incidental to my true Purpose here. I am looking for a woman.’

  ‘Yes, that is a difficulty still, although I hear the Government is taking measures. There are ten men to every woman here, and fifty to every honest one.’

  ‘No honest men, though,’ said Mr Green.

  ‘Yes, that is true,’ said Mrs Nancarrow. ‘It is only fair of you to make that observation.’

  ‘No, madam, forgive me. I am looking for a particular woman, some years my elder, I believe, and not for the purpose of … matrimony. She is the Relative of an elderly lady I know, Mrs Prendergast, who is herself a Relative of a young lady who is very dear to me—although there is no relation between the young lady and the woman I seek, for they are from different branches of the elderly lady’s family—and the elderly lady has given me some money to cover my expenses, and it has been intimated to me that, if I am successful, and return successfully, then perhaps I may hope to be nearly worthy of the young lady’s hand, or at least slightly less unworthy—’

  ‘Stop! Sir, you are quite confused.’

  I did not know if there was anything much that passed for gentle society in Van Diemen’s Land, although I supposed the Lieutenant-Governor and Lady Franklin must have had someone to talk to. Perhaps it was only that it was so new for me to be solitary, without even a servant, and to be mixing with people so very different from me, but I felt refreshed by the naturalness and frankness with which people spoke to one another. The society—rather, Society—I was accustomed to is a discreet Mechanism, and the difference between a pair of white shoulders angled ever-so-slightly towards one and ever-so-slightly away from one can spell triumph, or ruin. Not so in that place!

  I had become quite red: I could feel it in my cheeks. ‘Yes. Do forgive me. That is too much. Allow me to put it plainly. On behalf of her Relative, I am looking for a woman called Maryanne Maginn, who was transported here as a young girl some thirty years ago or more, from England.’

  ‘From England? She has not an English name.’

  ‘I believe she had some family connexion to Ireland.’

  ‘And transported thirty years ago. How old would she be now?’

  ‘Oh, in her middle forties.’

  ‘So she was young indeed when she was transported. I do not think they ought to transport any soul, boy or girl, below the age of twenty-one,’ Mrs Nancarrow said. ‘It is not right. They are too unformed to endure the hardships of the sentence and emerge bettered, or, at least, not broken.’

  ‘Wrongdoing is wrongdoing, and better to be sent here than to be hanged,’ said Mr Green. ‘Or would you have them hang more children in England?’

  ‘I would not, no,’ said Mrs Nancarrow, and was quiet for a moment, but was evidently unable to present a solution to the problem of the injustices of the transportation system. ‘I wonder how many Maryanne Maginns there are in Christendom?’ she said.

  ‘But are we in Christendom?’ mused the farmer.

  ‘I should say! Have we got churches or haven’t we?’ Mrs Nancarrow said, and, ‘I cannot say I have heard the name precisely, but it sounds just such a name as any number of girls might have. There is Maryanne O’Connell, the midwife. How old is she, would you say?’ she asked Mr Green.

  ‘I shouldn’t like to guess,’ said he. ‘I have a granddaughter called Maryanne,’ he added, to me. ‘But she is six, and was never a Convict, so that is no help to you, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps you might try the Police Magistrate’s office, down in Hobarton. But how you will get an introduction, I do not know. Or—where do they keep records?’ she asked Mr Green.

  He intimated with his shoulders that he also was not in possession of that knowledge. ‘Record house?’ he suggested.

  ‘Well, I do not know. Meanwhile, there is a drop of rain,’ Mrs Nancarrow said, and indeed, there was the peppering of raindrops against the glass, and the shadows of the drops speckling the floor. ‘Will you be going on this afternoon, sir, or stopping here to-night?’

  ‘Rain will set in,’ said the farmer. ‘The clouds this morn.’

  The farmer had a little of my Cannibal’s opacity about him. I had forgotten my Cannibal until that moment, and the thought of him walking north, with his hairy face, alone and in the rain, made me miss him rather.

  ‘I believe I will be pressing on, madam. Although your Establishment is homely—in the best sense—I have a wish to find my companion.’

  ‘The road is quite treacherous, you know, sir, and it is perhaps unwise to continue to-day. We have charming bedrooms furnished with every necessity. Many have a prospect of the river which brings peace to the very Mind. Why do you not stop here to-night, and make a good start to-morrow morning, with plenty of daylight ahead of you, and finer weather (I imagine—Mr Green can tell you for certain, if he will be so good as to cast a glance at the sky), and perhaps company, if Bobbin and Clark are riding north to the labouring for McNamara as they told me they might?’

  ‘Are they whalers, madam?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no, they are men. I mean farmhands. Mr McNamara runs cattle some way past your whaling-station.’

  This information did not move me. ‘You are exceedingly kind to think of my safety, madam, and for that I thank you. But I am resolved. Let me make payment, and thank you again, and be on my way,’ I said, standing.

  Mrs Nancarrow and the farmer exchanged an inscrutable look.

  Mr Green obligingly gazed out of the window, and said, ‘The rain will worsen to-night, and grow finer on the morrow, although there may be a little cloud to the south.’

  ‘Will the rain become heavy enough to flood the road?’ asked Mrs Nancarrow. ‘For the road does flood, you know!’ she added to me.

  ‘No, not quite so heavy as that,’ said the farmer. ‘But heavy enough.’

  I have always been fond of rain, and bad weather, although I confess I like it rather better when I am warmly indoors, and it is out. I shall never forget the afternoon I rushed Susannah Prendergast and my cousin Charlotte Oxford into the little white summerhouse by the lake as g
igantic drops of rain pelted us from a clear sky. We stood beneath the stone portico, gazing up at the storm roiling towards us from behind the hills, the black clouds eating into the blue. Charlotte and Susannah had been gathering violets, and they had made garlands for their hair, that regal purple against the golden head and the dark.

  Charlotte said, ‘If you are to stand with us, it is necessary to wear a flower in your hair.’ And she pulled a damp and wilted bloom from her head and tucked it behind my ear. It was sisterly; the understanding was that she would marry Freddie.

  Susannah said, ‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’

  I had thought this a pretty line of verse, and had discovered later, from Mamma, that it was Shakespeare, and therefore I had carefully read the play in question, and came away quite horrified.

  Now, I said, ‘I am a farmer’s son, as I have said. I am not afraid of a little rain. The weather, at least, in this England of the Pacific, does agree with me, however strange it is here in other ways.’

  Mrs Nancarrow said, ‘Well, I do not wish to be Mrs I-told-you-so, and therefore I wish you a safe journey.’

  ‘Thank you, madam.’ I paid her the price she named, which seemed on the expensive side of fair—ah, the Economy!—and I gave her a coin or two more, which she told me she could not possibly take, while stowing them in her apron pocket.

  ‘Where did Beasley go?’ she asked Mr Green, as a by-the-way.

  The farmer said, ‘He went off, is all I could observe.’

  ‘A-horse, are you?’ asked Mrs Nancarrow.

  ‘Yes, I have a good horse. Good enough. Well, she will do.’

  ‘Very well, sir. You are a man grown, and I have done my duty,’ she announced, and took my dish and empty glass, and sallied away behind the bar. Mr Green returned his attention to his own glass. I tipped my hat to the room at large, but I had already been forgotten.

  PERHAPS I AM AN HONEST VANDEMONIAN

  A deep cold rose from the river’s unhurried surface, flooding me, as it were, with sensation from a place that truly was Elsewhere. What huge and sinuous bodies might live out their life-spans at the bottom of that dark river, untroubled by man or tiger-wolf? I fancied my eyes were harpoons and shot them fathoms below my feet to a great water-snake with scales like drifting lace.

  A dark-haired woman mounted side-saddle upon a pony meandered towards the village, idly dragging her switch against the low stone wall of the bridge. She was bare-headed, but wrapped well about the shoulders against the cold. A dull and unrhythmic thudding sounded in the air around us. I looked at her with the resigned acceptance of one locked in a strange dream.

  ‘How deep is it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Oh, deep enough that you would drown if you cannot swim,’ she said, from within a dream of her own. ‘But not so much deeper than that. Why do you ask me?’

  ‘I was imagining to myself what queer creatures might live within.’

  ‘Well, there are minnows,’ she said, gently.

  The little pony carried her away. The thudding continued in her absence, and the bridge trembled.

  I felt some urgency in finding my Cannibal, and yet I found myself rather transfixed by the river. The rain had stopped as I left the Royal, and now it began again. Little glassy rounds sprinkled the river’s surface. Tiny black fish with eyes like pricks of light pirouetted in long columns across my mind’s eye.

  ‘You told me there were seven bald patches on her, sir,’ the little Urchin had said when I re-emerged from the hotel. ‘But you see there are nine. You did not see behind her ears, I fink. Two pennies is the balance.’

  Now that the Urchin had showed them to me, I wondered how I had missed the half-moons of bald skin behind her ears. I imagined nine bald patches dripping from Tigris just as the boot polish had, and dropping into the water, and swimming away, and leaving me mounted upon a perfect black horse.

  The wish for a little boat arose in me, that I might set it upon the water and drift in it gently out to sea, or to whatever place this river would deliver me. I let Tigris move where she would, loosened my hold upon the reins, and slipped my feet from the stirrups. Further compounding my desire to rather abandon solid Earth and float away was the terrible sight upon the road ahead of me and the source of the thudding. This I had seen, but pretended I had not seen, lest I accidentally meet somebody’s eyes: a dozen men, dressed in the felt brown-and-yellow of the Unfree, chained one to the next at the ankle and digging in motley disorder by the road on the opposite bank. The red-coated soldiers from the Royal leant upon their weapons in rather an uninspiring manner and watched. Another man patrolled the line—indeterminately Free or Unfree, as he was dressed in neither Soldier nor Convict attire. He was, at least, clearly a finer class of person than the unfortunates in the Chain-Gang, for he wielded the twin distinctions of the whip and unfettered ankles. This individual shouted such encouragements as You Fucking Dogs Dig Faster This Road Will Flood and Honest People Must Travel It—I merely report. The words skimmed across the black satin of the water, rebounded in my ears and had the effect of putting my feet back in the stirrups. The dark-haired woman had passed this scene unperturbed and unmolested, and I must do the same.

  The grimaces of the thralls were pitiful to see. The bored attitudes of the soldiers were somehow as melancholy. They gave no indication that they recognised me from the Royal, nor indeed that they saw me at all.

  One of the chained men had been lashed very recently. Dark stripes of blood had seeped through the felt of his back. Tigris and I went by with our heads down, the steady thud of pickaxes trembling the ground.

  ‘Afternoon,’ the supervisor called to me, with an insouciant glance.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said I.

  ‘Enjoying the vista?’

  ‘Ah—yes, it is a fine … vista.’

  ‘And that big-titted piece on the pony as went by. Bouncing merrily along.’

  I ignored this coarse remark.

  ‘What did you say together? I saw you talking.’

  ‘We talked briefly of the river. I asked her how deep it was, and she told me it was deep enough to drown in.’

  ‘All water is deep enough to drown in,’ said the man. ‘That is the nature of water.’

  ‘I do not know much about the nature of water.’

  ‘Well. You cannot disagree with me.’

  I could! But I did not.

  ‘Fine enough day for it,’ he added, grinning, as the rain pattered upon the brim of my hat.

  ‘I suppose it could be worse,’ I said.

  The moment came when I had to choose to halt Tigris, or allow her to walk me away from the scene, and, with an unreasonable pang of politeness, I stopped.

  ‘Sorry lot, ain’t they?’ The man surveyed the men of the Chain-Gang with a proprietorial air and cracked his whip against the ground. Tigris had neither the spirit nor the brains to shy away.

  ‘There but for the Grace of God go we,’ I said.

  ‘Certainly, if by the Grace of God you rape or murder, or attempt escape from Her Majesty’s good justice,’ he said. ‘And where are you off to?’

  ‘I am a simple Farmer’s Son, travelling north,’ I said, for I did not wish to give too much away to this disgusting fellow.

  ‘Simple Farmer’s Son, my arse.’

  ‘How dare you,’ I said, agog at my own daring.

  He laughed.

  ‘Shut your fucking gob, Biggins,’ said one of the soldiers, with an air of some affection—and thus our niceties ended. This Discourse had not bettered me, nor informed, nor entertained, nor united me in sympathy to my fellow man, these being the four purposes of talk amongst people, according to Dainty Conversation for the Drawing-Room: a Guide for Young Ladies and Gentlemen. This was a book my mother had given me some years previously, before she was gently detained in the attic for her own good, and I wished I had had it to give the man with the whip. I imagined him reading it by candlelight in some mean accommodation, taking
notes on the backs of the salacious drawings that circulate amongst such men, and practising his pleasantries upon the Convicts. Why, Horsham, might I compliment you upon your pornographic Tattoo? It should make a striking Lamp-shade, after you are hanged. If you wish, I might refer you to a good Tanner I know—or perhaps I will refer your Executioner.

  There was some undercurrent of meaning in that place that I was unable to fathom. There seemed a mode of being that everybody, perhaps from so high as the Lieutenant-Governor to so low as the lowliest thrall, understood. Everybody but I! I had the notion that my Cannibal might be the Bridge between my reasonable, English self, and the unplumbed depths of uncanniness of the local people, hidden behind the thin and unconvincing face of Normality. Or was he a bridge over the unplumbed depths? I supposed that was more logical. But a bridge to where?

  I reckoned I had passed perhaps two hours in the Royal. Therefore, if I urged Tigris into a faster gait than my Cannibal could walk, I would necessarily meet him in less than that time. My Cannibal had said we would reach the station that day, and therefore I would find him some time before the station, while it was light (as I judged the sun would set in a few hours), and we would proceed onwards together to our destination. Was that how time and distance worked? And did they work in the same way here as at Home? It seemed correct, but I had not done well at such problems at school, and I did not know if Newton’s Laws applied in quite the same way in the Antipodes. And was this all the domain of Mr Newton, in any case? He had to do with prisms, hadn’t he? Perhaps I was attributing to him a greater field of knowledge than he had truly commanded because he was the only Scientist whose name I could remember.

  Nevertheless, I called to mind the clear arc of my apple core that morning, from my hand to the ground, and the amused common-sense of my Cannibal, and felt assured that things would be well.

  It took Tigris more than one attempt to discover a trot, and then a canter, but once comfortably settled in that stride, we made good time. The road was wide and quite well-kept, following the river as it wended northwards. The trees on either side grew deeper, and the last few holdings fell away, and the cold became keener, and the rain fell harder. The sun sank, as it ought, towards the Western Horizon, and the shadows reached out across the road to nip at Tigris’s heels.