Bettany's Book (57 page)

Glancing back to the
rakubah
, Prim caught a glimpse of the baroness pulling green rolls of American dollars out of her satchel.

It seemed the business part of the affair was done, and the baroness crossed to the ragged line of children and began to stroll amongst them, lifting a chin here, prying a mouth open, inspecting eyes, in some ways the very model of an assessor of slaves. She asked them in Arabic to please sit down. They did so and their Arab guards towered above them.

The baroness addressed Prim, ‘I’m sorry we cannot go yet. To seal the arrangement we must drink tea with both the Arab and Colonel Along. Leave the water canister here for the boys.’ Prim followed her to the brush shelter. ‘Don’t,’ the baroness murmured, ‘be influenced against our friend, the Rizeighat colonel, el Zubair. He is not the only one who benefits from my satchel of notes. Companies of the SPLA are not so well-provided. Along must scrounge ammunition, bandages, drugs. He will be taking a quotient to his war purse.’

‘This is an astonishing arrangement,’ said Prim.

‘Come,’ said the baroness. ‘It will be a rare experience for el Zubair. Drinking tea with women.’

And the baroness strode off in her Hapsburg manner to the
rakubah
brush shelter to which some of Along’s soldiers were already delivering once more a great tin pot of tea, and anodised cups, and a plate of wheaten bread.

The party sat a long time with Colonel el Zubair, a man in his mid-forties, Prim guessed, and a lively conversationalist. There was leisurely tea drinking and discussion of the war to which they were all in their way party. The colonels, El Zubair and Along, seemed to think it a not totally crazy concept that they should take refreshment together and make slighty remarks about the regular army and the government in Khartoum.

Given that it seemed a Martha and Mary relationship between the baroness and Connie, Connie became restless to be either flying again or housekeeping. Since the former was impossible, she touched Prim’s shoulder and asked her to come to the plane with her and break out some high-protein biscuits for the kids who, she told Prim, had probably travelled all day without food. Connie and Prim were still passing out
the thick, grainy slabs to both Rizeighat guards and boys when the high-level tea party beneath the brush shelter came to a close.

It was a curious cargo now. Twenty-five boys fitted into sundry seats, without the restraint of seat belts, which dangled disorderedly around the seats. Compared to the perils these children had encountered, the threat of air turbulence seemed minor. Though some sat, others – those by windows – stood bolt upright, their shoulders trembling to every vibration. They had entered the furiously heated aircraft with awful obedience, though they had by then begun to talk sparsely, watchfully, to each other, and seemed composed once altitude and the engines drew cool air into the cabin. There was still by Western standards, and by the standards of the cheeky
shamassa
children of Central Khartoum’s streets, an abnormal lack of conversation, as if these arts had been quenched in them. Amongst them Prim and the baroness moved like flight stewards with more high-protein biscuit and water. In her high, musical voice, the baroness told the boys, ‘
Dohret el mye-yah
’, enunciating exactly and pointing to the toilet aft. Their work done, Prim and the baroness sat at last in the back row of seats.

‘I understand now,’ said Prim, ‘that I barely know how you operate. You were expecting some twenty boys, Connie said. Twenty-five turned up.’

‘Exactly,’ said the baroness. She laughed briefly. ‘Strained the exchequer. Our friend the militia officer el Zubair excelled himself. Of course, a man of authority, a Rizeighat sheik of a considerable village. Perhaps as many as two or three of these kids were in his own possession. Then at an invitation to sell, sent him across the lines by Along – if indeed there are lines – el Zubair has gone around amongst his neighbours in the Arab quarters of the towns and on the farms collecting Dinka boys, promising people a good price. So then he contacts Along with a progress report, they organise a meeting place, an airstrip. Next, Along faxes the professor and lets Connie know the approximate number – but it’s often more, let me tell you.’

‘They’re all boys.’ said Prim. ‘Why no girls?’

‘El Zubair said it would be boys this time, and we can’t argue. His decision may, charitably considered, have been based on the reality that boys are most at risk of bloodshed – due to conscription by some commander less urbane than Colonel Along.’

For a while Prim contemplated in uneasy admiration the deft process of deliverance the baroness had devised. Such a brave endeavour! She felt churlish to question it, but she did.

‘Forgive me for raising this, but have you ever suspected this man, el Zubair, or others like him, might be tempted to abduct more and more boys, purely for the potential cash reward? I know you told me your critics make this claim.’

The baroness nodded, raising her eyes, her chin pointed towards the juddering roof of the plane. ‘For one thing, if it were so, why does el Zubair stop at twenty-five? Believe me, my dear girl, there are adequate numbers already serving in slavery to supply el Zubair’s side of the market a thousand, two thousand times over.’

‘But then, I can’t help thinking,’ Prim persisted, wishing that for the moment she could let the question rest, but as unable to do so, as desirous of teasing out the issue as when in Adi Hamit she first heard the word ‘slave’, ‘if there is such a massive trade – and I believe like you there is – isn’t a flight like this a mere gesture?’

‘Dear girl,’ said the baroness, with the most oblique trace of annoyance, ‘you speak as if we were indulging ourselves, liberating some, ignoring the rest. You must think of the evidence gathered from these boys, names, histories. These will be sent to the UN Human Rights Commission, the UNHCR, the State Department, the British Foreign Office, and on and on, until the reality cannot be any longer denied. These children, processed and then returned to their families, are worth more than their individual weight, as precious as that might be.’

Prim looked out across the sea of children’s heads, some quiescent, bobbing to look out windows. Conversations had started, larger boys talked over raised chins to smaller, and Prim could not help hope that something normal, some schoolboy cuffing, pushing, scragging might break out as a sign that these ageless children had been restored, at a cost, to their boyhoods.

Letter No 14, SARAH BERNARD

Friend Alice

We are in the town of Goulburn – we came down to it from the last ridge aboard the furniture wagon of the Scot Tolhurst. We walk to the
centre of the town past road gangs who yell at us in the usual way. In the barracks we find first a constable and then a solid young police magistrate in his navy blue coat who was just sitting to his luncheon. So we stand together in the yard and we all think how the Factory is behind and the magistrate is in front of us – he has come out to see us with a gravy catching square of good linen in his hand. So the system is here too. This fellow is the system in Goulburn and though he cannot be more than thirty two years he has that same air of being in command since ancient times.

He has us now follow him to his table and we stand by it – the little woman Carty holding her daughter tight to stop her wandering about the room and maybe upsetting a cruet and ruining her mother’s record as a fresh minted citizen of New South Wales. The big magistrate starts eating bits of mutton – he is delicate in manner and does not stuff his mouth – and at the same time asks: Do you have any complaints about your treatment during your journey? Did the wagoner chap treat you well?

Big brick red Connolly says: Yer Honner he had been warned off.

As he should be says the police magistrate. He then says to Carty without dropping his fork and nodding at the bundle held by her: That is a baby boy?

Carty says: It is my little Molly sir. She was famous in the Factory for saying it is my little Molly – the way someone might say: Here comes the Prince of Wales!

Well then the police magistrate says with some potato in his mouth now. Very well you have the option to mind her and raise her far from dens of thieves and whores. You can give her value.

The little red brick mother says all the while glowing: That is what I mean to.

He rings a bell and a constable enters. The magistrate says: Take these women to the nuns. To us he says: The nuns are better at keeping girls safe at large in Goulburn.

My Papist companions look at each other and halfway smile and halfway frown. They were as frightened as I at the idea of trading constables for nuns.

The constable leads us out into the afternoon warmth and says not to one but all of us: You’re a pretty parcel. What lucky old buggers getting you for a piece of joy?! Any of you interested in matrimony with a single constable?

Though he is sallow and nearly all his teeth gone yet he had firm wrists. He was not like solid Long but he was dressed neat.

The constable leads us with his shoulders all drooping with pretended loss through streets and to the gate of a little flat cottage like other flat cottages but with a cross affixed to the top of its gabled gate. Here right within the gate lies a garden of cabbages and potatoes.

Says the convict constable: Should you think you’ve met the full force of the Convict Department System you aint met Sister Ignatius yet. Iggy is behind the veil a true killer and a scourge of her fallen sisters.

His hammering on the door gets answered by a small woman wearing a high starched apron. She could have been a sister of our little mother Carty for she has that same look – the look of the convict ship and the Female Factory. Will you get the Head Missus? the ugly constable asks her. Soon a wiry little wisp of a woman dressed in nunnish brown garb arrives and the constable hands her our papers. This woman is about the age of Mrs Matron. She looks the papers over. She is full of business. She says: Ah Miss Bernard you have a little time to wait with us for the Nugan Ganway people will not soon be here. You Mrs Carty – we shall take you and your infant by wagon tomorrow to your place of employment – not ten miles from here. And you Miss Connolly we may well take you later today. But first let us drink tea like the very nearly free women we all now happen to be.

Rigorous as any warden she jerks her head and we follow her down a corridor.

I am chilled to find one door barred like a prison and behind it are cots and a scrawny badly used woman sitting in there yelling. Damn the scrodding Pope and damn you and damn Jesus who put me here! The nun tells us it is the cell for those unsatisfactories returned from assignment as servants for crimes committed against their masters. The young police magistrate Mr Purler – says the nun – trusts us better than he does his own convict constables to keep them guard. Mind you my ladies that woman in there is not a woman returned for being misused by her employer but for misusing. She thinks she can hurt me but I cannot be hurt easily. My four sisters and I have made the same journey you have. We have been cast on the water and reborn of it.

The big red woman Connolly asks her: You were not transported surely.

We were transported of our own will. I travelled on
Almorah
on the convict deck from Cork to look to the interests of my countrywomen.

All my sisters – all the four of them – did the same. And one of them murdered here by ungodly men.

Murdered you say? the little woman Carty asks. A nun murdered? A nun murdered? Murthered is how she says it.

Says the nun: We tested God perhaps too much by sending her unprotected into the wilderness. It was all a chosen task for this woman and we could not argue with it nor could we scorn. It was by our own choice that we tempted God by taking to the wide waters of the earth and tending the rope burned hands of the sailors and eating the same diet as prisoners and going down into the mad furnace of the convict deck off Africa.

We listened hard to her. The barrier we put up on hearing advice from most free women was that when they told us what to do they did not know. This woman with the name of a man – this Ignatius – she knows.

She sits us down at a big table and the woman in the high apron pours us china cups of tea on a table that smells of beeswax. Get them some currant cake too says Sister Ignatius who has joined us at the table. A slab of currant cake and a knife are placed in front of us. Help yourself and pass on – so Ignatius advises. Go on. You are ticket of leave women now and must get used to the normal doing of things.

It is excellent cake too and full of a kind of promise. It is sweet. Ignatius puts before us food and drink like good news. And this is a darling cake – the little red woman Carty said – feeding it to her child. We grind it in our mouths. It tastes of our new small but growing power and hope.

The tea and the cake are now drunk and Ignatius stands and says: Well we will all go and deliver Miss Connolly here to her employment at the chandlery. It is peculiar to hear the big red woman called Miss Connolly.

We all put on our bonnets again and set out with Ignatius leading us through the garden of cabbages and potatoes and through the sound of afternoon wood chopping. Carty carries her little freckled girl who is placid. We step aside meekly into a garden to let sheep be driven through a crossroads and we pass the Commercial Hotel. On its verandah men who would normally shout to us merely whisper to each other because – I am sure – of Ignatius. As we walk she is instructing the big red one Connolly – though her counsels are designed in a way for all three of us.

She says: If you have any torment at the hands of Mr or Mrs Schottfeld who own the chandlery you are not to abscond for that is the way to certain retribution. You are to come to me. But – mark you – no silly complaints. I speak of cruel blows or forcing liquor upon you or worse
things. It would be the very sin of pride she says to claim before the Lord I have the police magistrate in my pocket. But it is largely the truth. I do have that vain young man there.

The idea makes us all break into shared laughter. She seems to approve of that. We have not laughed such sincere laughter yet on our journey and now she supplies that lack out of her own invention.

The door of the chandlery with Schottfeld written above it is closed and we all peer through the glass and see that within there is some disorder. Barrels are overturned and rope snakes uncoiled everywhere over counters and heaps of coir doormats and jute sacking can be seen.

Dearest Mother! says Ignatius tightly and begins knocking on the glass. Now she tries the handle of the front door and it gives and the door opens.

We travel in a file behind Ignatius down the disordered corridors of the chandlery amidst the stands of picks and shovels and the savage blades of ploughs and axes. We can hear from beyond a half open door at the back of the chandlery the noise of crying and then considerable curses. Leave a bloody man at a time like this! cries – indeed – a man. And more: Travel all the way and nurse his cholera on board and then die on the edge of happiness. On the edge of bloody wealth. What sort of a woman is this? – so the voice asks. What sort?

This is from the storeroom and since Ignatius has emboldened us we step through with her into it. Everywhere are pieces of iron and beams of timber and a man of about forty five years by my guess sits on a stool in the middle of the floor. He seems even sitting to be drunkenly unsteady. From the rafter above him hang nooses in ropes of this gauge and that so that he has left himself provided with many choices for ending his existence. The man at the stool at last sees Ignatius and raises to her a face of ghastly torment.

She has left me – he says – my light and only recourse.

Mrs Schottfeld? asks Ignatius.

A fever two nights ago and then an onset of flux and at midnight last night a seizure. She is in her coffin at the Carberry undertakers. Where I seek at once to join her.

The many nooses he has made for himself show he is not fully decided on this but devoutly wants it.

Ignatius seems to think him undecided too. For, says Ignatius: Living blood cries out for life. The close comes quickly enough in this veil of tears without being rushed along with sundry thicknesses of rope.

The close cannot be quick enough – so says the man who is Mr Schottfeld.

But I have brought your new servant. You must meet Rose Connolly.

Rose Connolly the large red woman. Half friend and half mocker she bows to Mr Schottfeld who considers her.

He holds his head backwards for better viewing. There is nothing that that great lummox can do for me he says. Servants are for the living.

All the more therefore are they for you Mr Schottfeld. Naturally Rose cannot now stay on the premises with you but I shall leave her here each day under the care and supervision of one of my sisters. Ignatius then turned to Connolly. You must begin to prepare a meal for Mr Schottfeld. Look in the pantry in the cookhouse – there will be something for you to get ready.

The large red one looks stricken at this idea and taken with panic but moves off like a woman using limbs she has suspected to be damaged and has not tested again until now. At the same time Ignatius picks up the two thirds empty bottle of brandy by the chair and carries it to the window where she opens the stiff pane and pours the last of the spirits away into the open air. The little red mother licks her lips at such needless waste but says nothing.

The nun is commanding with Mr Schottfeld. You must for now take to your bed for a man must not make such an awful decision as this without rest.

And he goes and does it – this tear streaked unpretty man who was willing at least to think of dying for loss.

To my amazement Connolly obeys Ignatius as the man had and finds some smoked ham in the pantry. Under the direction of Ignatius too the little red mother and I mount ladders and untie the nooses and put the store in order. Then home we go amazed to tea which we eat at the big polished table with two other servants awaiting wagons to their masters and with Ignatius and two of her sisters.

I say at table: They call this a convent do they mother?

It is what I call a convent dear Miss Bernard. It is not what one of those English Benedictine priests in Sydney would call a convent.

I could join Ignatius willingly and at the expense of believing anything and might have done so except that I would need I suppose to take back my pledges to my sweet Alice.

Whose friend hereby for now signs her name

Sarah