The Governor's House Read online

  This legend said that the crown had not vanished but gone into hiding and would reappear at a time of national crisis, when a descendant of the last sultan would use its power and wisdom to reclaim the lost throne of his ancestors. The story had particular significance today. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Spice Islands had united in a single nation under Dutch control. At the time the islanders had gone along happily with that, as they had when the Dutch pulled out in 1949, but recently there’d been stirrings. A small extremist group – the Gerakan Kemerdekaan Muar, or Muar Independence Movement – had sprung up, dedicated to returning the island to the time when Muar had been known as Pertama di Kalangan Sama. First among Equals.

  ‘The crown has enormous symbolism,’ I said. ‘The separatist movement would love to get their hands on it as a first step towards gaining independence. If the authorities can find it first they’ll be able to keep it away from the independence guys.’

  Dick winced; guys was not a word he favoured.

  ‘So both sides are after it?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But the legend is nonsense,’ Dick said.

  ‘Not if enough people believe it.’

  ‘And we are caught in the middle,’ he said.

  ‘You got it. And with neither side willing to face the truth.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That no one, us included, has a clue where the crown is.’

  ‘We haven’t heard from the independence movement, have we?’

  ‘Hang around. I’ve got a hunch we soon shall.’

  His expression showed what he thought of that. I wanted to tell him if he hadn’t made such a big deal of publicising the discovery of the journal none of this would have happened. After all, the journal was only Cat’s story, propped up by a few quotations scattered at intervals through the text that on the face of it had no relevance to anything. Okay, it gave a picture of what life had been like for a kid of seventeen transported for a crime she almost certainly hadn’t committed – that would make the sweetest-tempered antisocial, right? – but no one but a historian was likely to get too excited about that.

  ‘I am beginning to regret that journal ever came to light,’ Dick said.

  ‘You and me both,’ I said.

  Although when it was first discovered I – like everyone else – had been over the moon.

  It had been a Tuesday, the day after the Australia Day long weekend. I had been standing at my office window staring down at the yachts moving on the blue shimmer of Sullivans Cove when the telephone had rung.

  ‘Who is it?’

  Our previous switchboard operator, sixty-year-old Miss Hildegard, would have been calm in the unlikely event of God phoning the university. Her replacement Stacy was forty years younger and more easily impressed. Now she sounded breathless.

  ‘It’s the governor,’ she said.

  ‘The governor?’ I was a little taken aback myself. ‘You’d better put him on, then.’

  In fact the call was not from the governor but the Governor’s House.

  ‘My name is Marcus Smeeton.’ He might have been royalty, the way he spoke. ‘The governor’s private secretary.’

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Smeeton?’

  ‘I have come across something that might interest you.’

  Marcus Smeeton was a new boy. While clearing out the offices he’d inherited from his predecessor he’d come across a book.

  ‘A handwritten journal,’ he said. ‘Quite old, I would say. Two hundred pages plus.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s exciting.’

  Joanne the queen of BS. People were always coming up with so-called old papers. Usually they turned out to be the adolescent ramblings of some teenage kid written in the nineteen-sixties. I watched a yacht tacking in the river off Battery Point, sails trembling as she came about. Tim was out there somewhere. That’s where I should be, I thought, on the water with the wind in my hair. Not listening to this crap.

  ‘No indication of the period it covers, I suppose?’ I said.

  ‘There’s something about bringing trout eggs into the colony,’ Marcus Smeeton said. ‘A business venture, by the sound of it. And there is mention of a missing treasure ship.’

  Well hello. I was listening now, all right. Fertilised trout spawn had first been brought to Tasmania in 1864. And six years earlier had occurred one of the enduring mysteries of the sea, a three-masted barque laden with silver coin that within hours of its arrival had vanished out of the Derwent River.

  ‘No mention of the author of this journal, I suppose?’

  ‘Not by name but there is a rather odd-looking inscription on the first page. A sketch of what looks like a possum with underneath the words I wrote this. I don’t know if that is supposed to tell us anything.’

  A possum? Or possibly a cat. Thomas Jefferson had said it: like a firebell in the night.

  ‘Cat Haggard,’ I said.

  ‘And the ship was called Antares. If that means anything to you.’

  Oh boy. It surely did. It meant a three-masted barque with treasure on board. No more wishing I was on the water with the wind in my hair.

  ‘When can I have a look at this journal, Mr Smeeton?’

  ‘I’m just going into a meeting with the governor,’ he said. ‘Four o’clock this afternoon, perhaps? How does that suit you?’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

  ‘I shall be delighted to make your acquaintance,’ he said. Starch on starch, that was Marcus Smeeton.

  I looked at my watch. Twelve o’clock. With four hours to kill and nothing to fill the time I grabbed a sandwich from the canteen and walked down the hill to the wharf. I passed Tim’s terraced house where he and I had spent many happy hours but I wasn’t thinking about that now. Instead my mind was churning over what Marcus Smeeton had told me. The years were right. But…

  Don’t start thinking it may be genuine, I warned myself.

  Because if it were it would mean that Catherine Haggard’s long-lost journal, mentioned in several of her letters, had come to light at last. A rare insight into what life had been like for those poor wretches sent out in horrible conditions in the first days of the great country Australia had become. A first-hand account. And of the time that was my especial interest. Oh boy. It was every historian’s dream. If it were genuine. The possibility made me sweat. Truly.

  I stood and looked at the Derwent’s shining waters. Cat Haggard, they’d called her. Born to be hanged, as the saying was. Twice she came close, twice lived to tell the tale. In later years verses were written about her and her exploits; a wonder they hadn’t called her Wildcat, because that was what she’d been from the first. Cat the convict, the bushranger, the constables’ enemy.

  And yet…

  Catherine the philanthropist, the entrepreneur and one-time resident of the Governor’s House.

  All these things were documented. I knew them as intimately as I knew myself because I was not only dean of Historical Studies but – as the vice-chancellor had been kind enough to remind me – Cat Haggard’s direct descendant. Legend said she’d been a whore, a villain, terror of the wealthy and all the rest of it, the penniless convict kid who’d ended up owning half the colony. Now maybe – if the journal was the real deal – we might be able to find out whether she’d really been all those things or whether, like Ned Kelly, the image had outstripped the reality. I wanted the stories to be true, of course I did, but truth had the first claim.

  There were days when the voices of the past were so insistent they deafened me.

  TWELVE

  Cat

  In the Cascades the weeks passed as slowly as years but even there winter came to an end eventually. It still rained a lot but there were also intervals of blue skies, puffy white clouds and sunshine. Sometimes there were days with no rain at all and the spirits of the convicts began to revive at last.

  Cat Haggard was declared fit to serve. Spring flowers were blooming along the roadsides when she was
taken under escort to the house of Benjamin Byfield, a senior government official, his wife Arsenia and their teenage son William.

  Rolling the dice, Emma Larkin had said. Cat reckoned she must have made the worst throw ever because Arsenia Byfield was as nasty a woman as any in the colony. Cat was expected to be on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She was not to leave the house except in Mrs Byfield’s company. Talking to the other servants was forbidden except in the course of her duties. Since Haggard had been convicted of theft she would be strip-searched every day.

  ‘I shall not tolerate the theft of my spoons,’ said Mrs Byfield.

  Cat could not believe she had heard Mrs Byfield correctly. ‘What?’

  Mrs Byfield stung Cat’s knuckles with the edge of her ivory fan. ‘You will not speak to me like that! If you are too stupid to understand you will say: “I beg your pardon, Mrs Byfield. Would you please repeat what you just said?” Is that clear?’

  Cat held Mrs Byfield’s eyes just long enough for her defiance to be plain, then spoke with an exaggerated deference that came dangerously close to mockery. ‘Oh yes, ma’am. That be very clear. Very clear indeed.’

  ‘Then repeat what I just said!’

  Cat said: ‘You will not speak to me like that. If you are too stupid to understand –’

  Mrs Byfield’s cheeks were mottled red. ‘How dare you? How dare –?’

  ‘You asked me to repeat what you said, ma’am. That were what you said. Word for word.’

  Mrs Byfield’s nostrils flared. ‘Do not think of playing games with me, Haggard. You hear?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Byfield.’

  That evening and for several evenings afterwards Mrs Byfield made a performance of checking the silver. ‘Once a thief always a thief,’ she said.

  There was no more mention of strip searches.

  Weeks passed. One day her son William came on Cat as she was hanging sheets on the line, her hands entangled. He lifted her skirt and ran his hand between her legs. She turned viper-quick, her foot lashed out and it was Arthur Dunstable all over again. William’s mouth opened. He clutched himself, expression agonised, and sank slowly to his knees.

  Cat disentangled her hands and ran, calling. ‘Mrs Byfield, Mrs Byfield…’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Master William were trying to help me hang the washing, so kind of him, but he slipped somehow and I fear he done himself an injury.’

  Cat didn’t think he would want to admit to his mother what had really happened. She was right. Mrs Byfield suspected but only Cat and William knew the truth. Two days later he was still walking stiffly when he came on her again.

  ‘You’ll be sorry for that. I’ll see you swing.’

  ‘Lay your hands on me again, you won’t be around to see it,’ she said.

  Yet somehow Mrs Byfield must have guessed what had happened. A week later Cat was sent back to the factory. She was lazy, Mrs Byfield said. Insolent. The last straw had been the vile words she had used – Mrs Byfield would not sully her mouth by repeating them – when her son had caught her stealing coins off the table in his bedroom.

  ‘Lies,’ Cat told the matron. ‘I never went near his bedroom. And they never paid me none of my wages, either.’

  Mrs Conroy heard but did not hear. The word of a felon against that of a senior government official’s wife?

  ‘Seven days’ solitary confinement,’ Mrs Conroy said.

  But did not order Cat’s head shaved, which was both a blessing and a wonder.

  There was no light in the solitary cells. The hours ticked by. The days, the nights, with no way to measure them or know which was which.

  I shall be strong.

  Bread and water. Stale-tasting water; bread so hard it bruised her gums. The toilet bucket stank. No matter. The cell was so small she could move no more than a pace or two in any direction. No matter. Sitting on the cell floor in the dark she was far away. The grey-blue waves shook the air as they came crashing down. The sudsy water licked up the stones, bathing her feet in ice-cold kisses.

  The hours ticked by.

  She walked strong-legged across the moors. She smashed Obadiah Gregory’s knees with his poker, fought off Arthur Dunstable and his friend, aboard the St Vincent protected Martha Brimble from the vicious Maria Hack, they consoled each other in the only way they could. She heard the thin cry of buzzards, circling against the blue.

  I shall be strong.

  She spent hours squatting and standing erect, squatting and standing erect. When she left here she would walk on her own strong legs, not crawl as she had seen others do.

  The hours ticked by.

  Mrs Conroy liked compliant attendants and had picked Martha Brimble to help her.

  ‘Why didn’t she cut my hair?’ Cat asked Martha when she was released.

  ‘She’s had trouble from that old witch before. Everyone here knows what she be like.’

  ‘She still locked me up.’

  ‘Mrs Byfield’s husband is a top official.’

  So she could lie and walk free. Cat had done nothing and been locked up. No point looking for fairness: life was the enemy. Money and power were the only things that mattered.

  She looked up at the mountain rising beyond the perimeter wall. I’ll get them, she thought. Somehow I’ll do it.

  A week later Martha said: ‘There’s a Dr and Mrs Morgan looking for a new maid.’

  ‘More like that Arsenia Byfield? You can keep them.’

  ‘Don’t go looking no gift horses in the mouth.’ Martha had discovered that authority suited her. The cringing girl Cat had comforted aboard the St Vincent would never have spoken so boldly. ‘Them Morgans is different. No children. Dr Morgan used to be a medical superintendent on the transports. They got a place just north of town.’

  ‘Why do they want a new servant?’

  ‘The old one got married. I heard they give her a wedding gift, too. Mrs Conroy likes me so I can probably arrange it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You let me love you on the way over. Now it’s my turn.’

  ‘If it’s such a good place, why don’t you take it yourself?’

  Martha gave her a look. ‘Like I said, Mrs Conroy likes me.’

  THIRTEEN

  Joanne

  There was a do at the vice-chancellor’s house. One of our colleagues from the Chemistry Department had been invited to give a series of lectures at Yale University. The senior academic staff had been summoned to celebrate, as Dick put it, the signal honour that had been paid to the university and, by implication, to its vice-chancellor. It made him humble, he said. Proud but very humble. Quite a trick when you thought about it.

  I got there too early, which was not my plan, and with Tim Luttrell in support, which was. I had expected to mingle at once with those who, like ourselves, had come to bid bon voyage to Andrew Carmichael, Yale bound, of whom Great Things were expected.

  Tall, forbidding and moustachioed, Mrs Boss opened the door. She stared down at us from her great height like one of Napoleon’s cuirassiers. There was only one word for Mrs Boss, otherwise known as Amaryllis Cottle, she who unkind witnesses, me included, called the throne behind the throne. Horrendous was the word, which didn’t get close to how I really felt about her.

  Behind her the living room was like the Gibson Desert on an off day. ‘You’re early. But I suppose you had better come in.’ She stared at us, dislike rumbling like thunder on the mountaintop. ‘And this is?’

  With Mrs Boss rudeness came with the territory.

  ‘You’ve met. Let me introduce you again. This is Tim Luttrell.’ I twinkled at her. ‘My significant other. And this,’ said I, turning to Tim, ‘is Amaryllis Cottle, wife of our vice-chancellor and an inspiration to us all.’

  She certainly inspired the worst in me.

  ‘Delighted,’ Tim said.

  ‘Mr Luttrell,’ said Amaryllis, determined to parade her broadmindedness, which these days was so much in fashion. ‘I believe you are a jo
urno?’

  She handled the slang word with tweezers to demonstrate her with-it-ness, something else that was in fashion.

  ‘I pen the odd column,’ he said.

  ‘Journalists like to drink, I hear.’ She made it sound a moral affliction, like sin.

  Tim smiled easily. ‘From time to time,’ he said.

  ‘Scotch will suit you?’ Her tone made it plain that saying no was not an option. ‘I am afraid we have no cigarettes.’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  She fetched Tim his scotch. She brought me a glass of white wine. Warm, sweet and with the undeniable subtlety of keg.

  ‘I seem to remember you like wine,’ she said.

  ‘I certainly do.’

  Some wine. This one the Hobart Public Health Department should have condemned at birth. I looked around for a plant or other object where I could dump it but saw nothing. I hung on to it, smiling bravely as the wine grew warmer.

  Other guests dribbled in. Half an hour later, chewing a limp sausage roll, as cold as the wine was warm, I was bailed up by ferrety little Pete Poxon of Ohio, London and Turin. An opinionated five foot three in his socks, this poisonous dwarf was a notorious lecher, also a reputed cipher expert who had been adviser to earlier Aussie governments. He didn’t have a position with us but liked to drop in from time to time; occasionally he’d even snowed Dick Cottle into giving him specialist assignments. Anecdotes about Statesmen I Have Known were very much his stock in trade. He was known to me from previous encounters and was now, as before, trying to get me into bed with him.

  ‘Alas, I am committed.’

  I might have known that wouldn’t put him off.

  ‘Aren’t we all, doll?’

  He gave me a winsome smile – designed to distract – as he turned casually, hoping for a sneaky feel of boob, but I managed to fix him. If you want to calculate the loading pressure of a stiletto heel on a sandalled foot you’ll have to ask the engineering department but his face turned as grey as a dirty sheet, his mouth opened, his eyes stood out inches in their sockets.

  ‘My dear professor, I am so sorry…’