Bettany's Book (23 page)

He tells me: But yes the murderess. She is they reckon insolent and thus they have put her in the asylum for now. My own patrol took her up the river to the madhouse, and I told the warden that she was calm in the boat. And she was exactly calm. It is loss of hope I believe.

But I knew they had put her amongst the lunatics, I told him. It happened as we parted at the Dock Yard. They called it hysterics and all the knowing women about the place said she’s for Tarban Creek.

Long nods and says he was there again lately and looked in at her hut and let her write a note for me. He says: She is apart from the murder a better class of woman.

I ask him how he remembered who I was.

He says: Oh I remember you. You said to me as we loaded you – you said you were a very dangerous woman. You see you thought I might do you harm and wanted to frighten me.

I say: I do not remember saying dangerous. It was a foolish thing to say.

He says: In my own way I am dangerous myself. Though innocent too if judged by the court of heaven.

He hands me your letter then. The letter of my Alice. It is written on medical orderly book paper. You tell me in it you do not know why you so acted up – a sort of rage – you looked at the strange place and felt that rage. You do me the honour to say I was the last certain thing you had and were being taken off you. You say: Have no doubt you are much thought of by this girl. Not everyone wants to know a Prussick Acid poisoner reprieved from hanging but you never held back from being my dear friend.

I look up aching from your good letter. Constable Long tries not to look keenly at me but is looking so.

I ask him: When she comes here will they let me see her? I ask him though I know he has no power.

He tells me: The rule says no – they want to save you from the influence of bad women.

So I argue: Her husband rushed to poison her too. He took arsenic for his health. He was a being of poison. He was embalmed in his own poison. And – and on top – he fed her on nothing and upbraided her like a child and flaunted his ratty old will at her to show how he would forget her in death.

Long says in conviction: It is always like that in murder. The world just does not know how it is.

It seems he had once thought of murder. He looks away.

If I murdered someone – I tell him – they’d surely hang me. I look capable of it – though I’ve never had occasion. But they could not hang a sweet thing like Alice.

That’s right he said and with a slight smile. They could not hang her.

And what about you then? I ask him growing bold. Your soul? How does it stand with what you did?

Oh I sit pretty quiet on what I did. Threatening notice against some hound of a landlord. Hammered it to a door. Life sentence. And now I’m seven years in and have a ticket to seek employment.

I tell him: How I desire a ticket of leave. But tell me! Threatening notice does not sound like a life sentence.

Oh it might be in Ireland. If you put the notice on the door post and broke the door in.

Whose door then?

The Marquis of Sligo! But not in that county. At his door in Westport Mayo.

His air of freedom shines for a second in his eyes. I want that thing –
to catch it as a person catches a disease. To be scratched on the arm with it and a sore to grow. A scar to form over this part of me named the Female Factory.

He tells me: You are a decent woman. I intend to press on any master of mine your merits as a housekeeper. For I am sure you possess them. I will if adequate be overseer at a homestead. But you could be its mistress of management.

He did not dare look at me and was half-ashamed of drawing up his simple plans so boldly in the Factory yard. But it was no place for them. They hung above the weeds like redeemed Christ and his saints in glass hanging above our heads at Saint Anne in Manchester. There I first began at the urging of my father my inspections of religions and I think that he and I both wanted Christ to see me as a true English girl and not a girl of the shul and synagogue. Yet though I loved the Church – people whispered but they did not sniffle and rage at God as if he was a customer in some little shop – though I loved St Anne I saw the eye of Christ had an absent look. I was not in his schemes. He was concerned with bigger fish. And the plans of Long had the sniff of plans meant for bigger fish too. A sprat such as me would not be dragged up in that net of glory!

Says I: I wish to breathe any air but this. I wish Alice to breathe too.

Oh may that day come for you Alice and for your true friend

Sarah

Letter No 2, SARAH BERNARD

Marked by her: A LETTER NOT TO BE SENT

My dearest Alice

I write to you but also do not write to you. For this is not a letter I wish you to read, but I cannot prevent writing it or thinking of you as the being I would best like to receive this catalogue of miseries. As his last act before he goes to the west and over the mountains – lucky fellow – to what must be better country Long the convict constable has said he will see you get a scribble from me. But not this scribble.

The little red mother Carty gives me more time of day than previous. She tells me something of the time when the Visiting Justice had the Pallmires thrown out of this post and pious people named Mr and Mrs
Chapman from London put in their place. But the Irish women – the big red woman and the little one and all the rest – did not like the pious people since they tried to wean them of their superstitions such as Rosary beads and all that magic. Those women – including my little mother who sleeps at my side and whose baby girl I sometimes comfort at night – would rather have their superstitions than fair and just treatments. Or else they simply do not believe anyone can give them fair treatment and prefer the devil they know. Many of these women find it easy to be loud and to profane and utter divine names raucously. Even now I hear them yell Thundering Jaysus, Jaysus Mary and All the Saints. They put the Chapmans to flight with such roaring of the name of the Christian Messiah. And whether or not they had a beloved sister amongst their fellows they played nonetheless at prison caresses and flash speech just to scare the Chapmans off. The pious two told the Governor that the women of the Tories were depraved beyond uttering and unredeemed. The Governor sent them away to find work in a better place if such exists here or anywhere else. And Mr and Mrs Matron Pallmire – being at the least used to the Factory – were put back in the post. When I observed her upon coming here Mrs Pallmire looked as if she had been here forever since Pharaoh’s days. She carries the air as she enters – a plump and pretty woman though nearly fifty years – that she knows every twitch of this place.

These Irish girls take me by surprise by being content with Mr and Mrs Matron’s old tricks – the boiling down of the beef into a soup so we cannot measure what we have eaten. Tricks of short-weighting with the baked loaves. The reddish women tell me Mr and Mrs Matron supply some beef and baked rolls to hotels and a dining house in the town of Parramatta. Perhaps the Governor dining out in his solitude as a widower eats our bread at his table. But the Pallmires remain so forward and confident about their crimes – it is as if they were free of inquiry.

Why do I not now want you to come here and yet at the same time wish it? I do not want it since you are too lovely. Though I am pained to think that similar things might occur in your asylum on the river. Wrongs might be done there without any hope of complaint or redemption – for how easy it is to discount the wrongs of the mad.

There has been a recent night when after dinner and the locking of the Tory Mrs Matron let herself in again with a key. She peers about amused and her plump features look roundish and kind. She sits on the end of the bed of the large brick-red woman who has always guyed me and
begins chatting with the girls about. Her voice is low – as if she doesn’t want infants woken. Some of the women rise and go looking for pannikins for Mrs Pallmire brings forth from under her petticoats a stone flagon of rum. She begins pouring the rum for this and that woman – the little mother too – and all the time she is saying I hope you are well ladies. And they joke back boldly. As well as you let us be Mrs Matron. Mrs Pallmire murmurs: Don’t be saying that girls for you’ll have me and my big man in strife. She pours a very heavy pannikin and offers it to me. A quarter as much might have been to my taste and good health. But so timid does the convict state leave all but the best that I meekly resolve to take that much and then to offer the other half to the Irish girl or to an ill old woman – Annie Hamilton at the end of the Tory. For you know I am not a drinker. I remember a Passover at my father’s uncle’s little hovel in Manchester when they had Jewish wine at the table. I was a little girl and before me this glass of wine which I drank not as the uncle told me but as one might cherry water. Now I also had to hide this small piece of the unleavened bread – the Afikoman I think it was called – the youngest at the board is meant to take and hide it. And my great uncle was crying out: Who has the Afikoman? Who has the Afikoman? He had a penny in his hand to pay me for it – such is the Israelite custom. So I walked towards him hiding the bread in my hand and before getting to him I vomited from the wine. Oh she is no Gentile they laughing told my father. She cannot drink wine!

Hence now I am willing to give away this killing dosage of rum to the Irish who are good at it. I rise to do it and Mrs Matron cries out to me to hold hard and where do I think I am going? I tell her to Annie Hamilton to give her a sip or two. Mrs Matron says: That woman is a malingerer! That woman Hamilton would be happy to give me and my big man an evil repute.

But I know Annie has no malice – her mess prefect who is a London woman gives her less than a ration. Annie has limped to the nurse and the nurse told her: If you go into the hospital you will have solely liquid rations. This Annie – Yorkshire and a very simple woman – did not want liquid rations being hungry enough on full. So Annie stays wasting in the Tory.

Mrs Matron Pallmire orders me to drink the lot up and I stare at the dark syrup surface of that Indian rum and stare and stare. I think if I swallow this then I have no watchfulness left. Some of the Irish girls start laughing. Worst of all some turn their heads as if for pity. It seems all
at once that they are not for all their talk bosom souls to Mrs Matron but that they know that they are without power and shrink from her.

Giddy and choking I drink the burning mug at her urging and am pleased to be done with it. I feel it like a hand in my vital organs and a hand across my sight but at least it is done. But she tells me: Have some more, and she pours it full again for me though not for any of the other women who are about. There you are – she says – you have no jollity. We will get you back to the jollity you had in your patch at home with your husband the soldier. So she knows my husband McWhirter was a soldier. So she has studied me when earlier I thought she had not noticed me. Excellent Jamaica says the big red woman Connolly who wishes she could be in the same relation to the full pannikin as I am. They have all finished drinking in quick order. It is true these Gentiles I see have a great facility with liquors.

Then the women go back to their business – the talking and packing of pipes with tobacco and the coddling of babies. The little mother Carty is crazed with rummy affection and kisses her baby with great flourishes not two yards from where I sit though she might as well be in another room. Mrs Pallmire considers me as I choke the stuff down and get silly. It is nothing like your suffering dear Alice but her gleaming eye which is now to my view tiny and fierce as a parrot’s is awful. I know it has no love for me and I am afraid.

She says to me: You are a learned little troll aren’t you and dark as a gipsy. Are you an Assyrian or some such or are you a Jewess? So this McWhirter of yours? Uncircumcised? That must have been in the nature of a novelty for a Jewess.

I must stop this account for the moment – I write it in the corner of our misgrown Factory garden with women looking at me sideways for writing fluent. It is as if my quick writing backs up all the ill they might have heard of me.

I have taken six days of misery to write this far on the paper Sean Long gave me and soon I shall need to start using the pages I tear from between the covers of tracts left by the Reverend Arnett. Just now Mrs Matron can be heard from the Tory again but without a bottle. She is ordering women to set out the cots at proper distances for the Visiting Surgeon. Good order she cries. And proper space. And cleanliness.

At this point Sarah Bernard clearly ceased writing for a time, but soon resumed.

I continue my awful news – Alice – addressed to you but kept a secret to myself. For if you think of the Factory as a harbour to be reached and if you knew it was not you might in your hut and mad dormitory at Tarban lose all hope.

As related I was under the urging and pouring and pouring and urging of Mrs Matron Pallmire to drink pannikins of tar black spirit. Soon I suffer that prickling kind and unsureness which I most hate in the bottle and which best ensures I am no toper. The other women have left the awful merrymaking and swung away to other conversations and here we are a drinking party of two – private in a crowded loud place.

She tells me: I must have someone to set the table. Her table–I had never seen it – is in a stone apartment of two floors away from the Tory but reached by covered walks. The floor below is their offices and a dry store. Some women have been there to the Pallmires to work and sew and do not seem to like it on reflection. The Irish point them out and nod with that old knowingness they all at least pretend to! These women who have worked in the Pallmire apartment are treated with respect and distance but it seems they have been returned here to enjoy less of a future than ordinary girls of the Tories. Hence there’s a quandary knotted between the eyes of such women. Where to now?

I wonder now if when Mrs Pallmire urges me to swallow more and then more tarry spirit I obey her from a weak and lost souls desire to cloak oneself in unknowing? I cannot say. Imprisonment clogs up all the usual exercises of the spirit. So when I believe I have reached the limit where I cannot safely stand she stands up with her bottle still in hand and in a way signalling that I am to follow her which I do and go out a door she unlocks for me with perhaps every woman in the crowded Tory knowing she is leading me out but no woman turning her eyes to us. She pushes me out the door in the Tory and into open air which turns me giddier still. Then one more door is unlocked and up the steps and over the bridge to her home above the store. In the dining room with three windows I begin to set the table and she tells me to lay places for three. She tells me as I stumble and drop things that I am well-trained and it is good to see. Some Irish and the Scots she says have not seen so much as a spoon before. When the table is ready in the best Tib Street Manchester form – and she does not have bad china but very good – we sit down at it and she pours more rum for herself and me but does not touch hers. I can scarce remember the entry of Steward Pallmire her husband. He has his strong shoulders and wide throat. And this short
but very burly fellow comes up the stairs yelling: Dove who have we got from the Tories?

He smiles at us both as he sits down at the table where rum and water have already been set. I am taken to the kitchen where a pot of split pea soup sits on the fire. I am to serve it even to my own place at table. Such a disordered world is that of the Pallmires and the Factory that a meal I would dream of as a meal in a thousand can only be taken in a fuddled state and in a mad scene where I am server and guest of these two very strange souls. If I am to pour and serve soup then why must I be tipsy? I bend to lift the soup pot. The heat of my fear meets its heat. In serving I make many slopping errors which do not cause them anger but laughter. They have eight hundred women to wash their tablecloth and scrub their board. There were Kings of Poland who did not live like them.

I have no memory of the serving of beef and potatoes. I awoke in near naked disarray in the half light – in a great blazing pain of head and limb and yet colder than a corpse. This is in the corner of a room. A bed sits like a bark high above me and I struggle up and find Mr Pallmire neat as an old Greek under opossum skin rugs. I can hear from another room Mrs Matron Pallmire snorting in sleep and I know that they have a madness in place of a scale which I have no experience of. Not only all my joints are so hard put upon by the bare boards but I have a sore memory as well. I remember his strength on top of me but it was not the strength of a hero – it could have been pushed away I believe. I did not push him away. I thought: Oh be quiet and let him be done. I am dumb earth that lets itself be taken and trespassed on. I think: Oh this madness of the Pallmires piled on top of their power without limit – this is too much to fight against. I remember he called me a dry Puritan. Now of course I want the hour back to fight in. Yet it contained all that was of bad order and all I least wanted to look at.