Read Online The Soldier's Curse by Meg Keneally - Free Book Online

of their second offences. The governor’s instructions to the settlement’s first commandant still hid amongst the ribboned documents on Monsarrat’s shelves. The governor had told him to keep the convicts’ ‘minds constantly employed and their bodies inured to hard labour … they are always to be kept at work from sunrise to sunset, the whole of the weekdays, allowing only a reasonable time for their meals’.
    Monsarrat had read these instructions as he had read most documents in the office, aware of the irony that the leisure time which enabled him to read them contravened the governor’s instructions. The reality was that some of the convicts had far more free time than Sydney would have been comfortable with.
    Diamond had now put his own stamp on the settlement by imposing extra work on a great many functionaries, like Springin the stores and Dr Gonville, who had been asked to compile a list of all the dead for the past year, together with the cause of their death.
    Monsarrat saw little point to this busy work, as such events were covered anyway in the reports to Sydney, and was grateful that Diamond had not yet got around to him, probably thanks to his relative unimportance. So once his copying was done, he availed himself of another aspect of the major’s room, a collection of histories and biographies of great men, arranged in two bookcases either side of the sea-looking window and designed in their grand leather to intimidate visiting officials, soldiers and convicts.
    Under Major Shelborne, tasks were only assigned which could be completed by mid-afternoon, leaving convicts with some free hours before night descended, even in winter. So once three o’clock came Monsarrat would stop for a meal, his rations cooked by one of the women and eaten off a tin plate in a mess reserved for those Specials who had proved themselves trustworthy – the convict overseers, Spring’s assistant storekeeper, the coxswain, the surgeon’s assistant.
    Then he’d be back, read a little Roman and Greek history again, or alternate the gossipy Seneca with the fact-obsessed Tacitus (the man would have made a good clerk), or some Catullus, the Roman poet he loved. The only version in the study was in Latin, which was just as well, as some of the Roman’s work made even Monsarrat blush. But he would have dearly loved to see how Catullus would have fared as a clerk – the man’s habit of issuing insults, invitations and even recalls of debts in verse would have made for some interesting dispatches.
    On this morning, Monsarrat took the proposed dispatches to the Colonial Secretary which were written in the major’s fast hand before his departure. He went to the outer office, locked the major’s door again, and sat down at his own desk, in front of his brown earthenware inkwell and the selection of pens which sat beside the great sheet of leather-bound blotting paper.
    Monsarrat had also picked up reports which were to go with the major’s dispatches to Sydney, standard monthly documents: receipts and issues, labour performed, infractions and punishments, convicts received and discharged.
    The most notable case of the month was a man who had absconded unsuccessfully southwards, trying to walk to Sydney, but had returned himself after ten days, looking skeletal. Why do it in winter? Monsarrat thought. Surely better to wait for October, with its milder temperatures. The man deserved punishment for idiocy if nothing else. He copied the major’s sentence – thirty days in the gaol on bread and water, along with the thirty lashes he had already been given.
    The first commandant of the settlement had been urged by Governor Macquarie to use the lash only as a last resort, and then only up to a total of fifty lashes. He had been instructed to err on the side of mercy where a crime was uncertain. The current governor, Brisbane, had done nothing to countermand this,