The Convict's Daughter Read online

  When she woke the following morning, Mary Ann felt a little lighter. A few hours later, however, she was out on that dashed road again. Once more towards Parramatta in that coach with her parents. She should have been married by now, enjoying the fresh pleasures of a good dress while sitting in a handsome gig with her new husband on their way to the races or some other fancy. Instead, here she was. Still Miss Gill. It also looked like Mary Ann had little choice but to give evidence against the man she had hoped to marry. The situation was sickening and, what was worse, it was in large part all James’ doing.

  The welcome Martin Gill received as he stepped through the doorway of the Parramatta Police Office on Friday, 26 May 1848 was a source of considerable surprise to both his daughter and his wife. Having been detained overnight in the very same station only a few days ago, both women assumed that Gill would receive a measure of cool contempt from the sergeant on duty. But instead, it was ‘Mr Gill’ this and ‘Mr Gill’ that. ‘Allow us to find a seat for your wife’ and ‘Is that to your satisfaction, sir?’ Gill was obviously enjoying himself and at the very least this allowed Margaret some respite from the grim mood that had descended upon their relations. She had decided it was in her family’s best interests to back her husband, but she was not going to roll over easily. Gill had been a fool and she was not going to let him lord it over her, as he was wont to do.

  Mary Ann, however, was completely taken aback by the behaviour of the policemen. Since she had been in James’ company she had taken to looking at her father as she imagined that men of James’ class looked at all ex-convicts—although James had not used this particular term nor schooled her in this matter. She couldn’t make sense of what was going on. Were the policemen mocking her father perhaps? Was this a set-up before they pulled him down in a final humiliation? Whatever was going on, it soon became patently clear that she was not in favour. When the family arrived, two policemen came and stood at the desk in front of her, one with his arms folded tight across his chest. Both men sized her up and muttered under their breath before turning to her father. ‘There you are then, Mr Gill,’ the elder of the pair said breezily, ‘I see you have brought the serpent’s tooth with you.’ Gill cast a cursory glance at his daughter and then nodded before pointing to the room off to the side. ‘Would you like us in here, for the questions?’ he asked. ‘Quite so, Mr Gill, if you don’t mind,’ the podgy constable answered lightly, beckoning the family through.

  Mary Ann was made to stand throughout the proceedings, which took the better part of the day. While her parents were served tea, she was deliberately ignored and given no option but to stand in silence. And that was not the end of it. While her mother’s evidence had been reasonably straightforward and received without query or qualification, every sentence of Mary Ann’s statement was subject to scrutiny. The recorder questioned the time of events, made her spell the names of each person and the places where things had occurred. He then went back and double-checked each fact. ‘And Kinchela wasn’t there when you got to Henry Webb’s?’ the balding policeman asked. Mary Ann shook her head. ‘And then the next morning, when you went to the track, he weren’t there neither?’ he continued, squinting up at another policeman who suppressed a smirk as Mary Ann shook her head no.

  This went on all afternoon, and neither parent came to Mary Ann’s assistance. She was almost faint, but somehow she remained composed until it came time for her to read over her account before signing it. ‘No,’ her father insisted after she had looked over the written document, ‘you must read it out to us, girl, so we are all satisfied with the truth.’ He gestured to the four policemen who were leaning against the wall, each with their arms crossed. Mary Ann looked around desperately but her mother’s gaze was fixed upon the floor. It took Mary Ann twenty horrendous minutes of starts and stops to read out the written account to her parents and the four policemen, and when she was finished she was most efficiently apprised of what a fool she had been.

  But still her father was not done. Gill leant forward, ‘No, girl, that is not the way it went,’ he said, pulling her wrist up sharp while he gestured with his chin to the recorder. The policemen helped Martin Gill tear up the first of Mary Ann’s evidence and then waited as the girl swallowed and started again. Once more she recounted the hateful events, this time altering things so that James appeared the protagonist, and she, significantly more modest. When Mary Ann had finished this second testimony, her father made her read the policeman’s written account out loud again. Then he signalled to give the girl ink and pen with which to sign her name.

  Mary Ann knew she was condemning Kinchela and the better part of her was aching with it, but there was now another part of her that wanted him to suffer. He had led her on, made her make a promise to him even after she had warned him about her father. She had gone out after him and trusted him, just as he had asked, not once but twice, and both times he had failed her. Now she would suffer shame—not only behind closed doors but also in court and in the papers. Where once she had hoped to be the envy of her friends now she would be reviled. Where she had wanted to prove her grandmother wrong now she would have to swallow her pride and think Ellen Hanley lucky to be free of such shame. Where she had planned to make a better life for herself now she would probably die a spinster. Worse still, a nursemaid to an old woman. And before then she would be confined to years of hard work and humiliation in her father’s home.

  Still she was torn. There would be no recovery from such a betrayal, as her father knew. This would spell the end for James and all she had dared to hope for even after she had returned home in the policeman’s cart. But with her father bearing down upon her, it was impossible to think straight, let alone know her own mind. Once more, the fifteen-year-old girl began to sob and as she put her shaky signature to the hateful legal document a flurry of tears dropped onto the parchment leaving three inky blotches where they fell.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  To Court

  There were cows and sometimes even a few goats milling about the new Darlinghurst Court House. It didn’t matter much to them that the building was a superb example of Greek Revival or that it housed the supreme court of the land. They were looking for respite from the ferocious winds that blew about Woolloomooloo Hill during the winter months, and the imposing Doric columns and masonry of the colony’s first purpose-built courthouse offered refuge. It was just like the gospel parable, Lowe mused as he picked his way up the stairs, tapping his trusty crop against his thigh along the way. ‘We are assigned the task of separating the guilty from the innocent, the sheep from the goats.’

  While it was still being built in the early 1840s, the new courthouse had been a site of churchly activities and numerous other celebrations. A few fairs had been set up there during that time and the earth outside the building had been quickly trampled flat by the colonists and their cows. Margaret and Martin Gill had been among those who had come to the new courthouse on one of those more joyous occasions. They had set up a stall at the Saint Patrick’s Day ball that was hosted on these grounds when Mary Ann was no more than eight. Margaret could still remember the lanterns lighting up the sandstone edifice that night and how the building seemed to shimmer and float high above the town. Mary Ann had been with them that night, helping her father with refreshments. She had behaved so well that towards the end of the evening her father had taken the girl for a stroll among the stalls scattered about the fair. The girl had been mesmerised, Margaret remembered, as she watched the pair slowly weave their way through the crowd, with Martin pointing out things to his daughter that reminded him of home. After a time, father and daughter had stopped and leant against the court wall so they could watch five or six boys dancing to the pipes—their sharp kicks flouncing high into the air as the music grew wilder and faster.

  They were happier times, then. That night it had been splendid to feel the green flowing through your veins. It was not, however, always so easy and some of the new Irish coming to the colony certainly ma
de matters worse. Of these, it was generally agreed that the girls were by far the worst. Their filthy dress and strange talk seemed abhorrent to just about everyone and the colony was soon referring to them in a certain way. Margaret and Martin heard enough to decide it would be best to keep their own apart. Particularly Mary Ann. She was Irish, of course, just as her parents were, but she was growing up somewhere else now.

  James Butler Kinchela had been at the ball that night in 1840, too, but only for half an hour or so, and all that time he had remained tucked inside his mother’s tilbury, shaded from the falling cool and the cruel scrutiny of colonial eyes. It never paid to be seen looking poorly, his brother reminded him, especially not in town. ‘There are too many who will take you down for your weakness,’ he had cautioned. Nonetheless, Kinchela’s mother had insisted that her two sons go and take a look. James had been cooped up in the house for more than two months, as she nursed him back to health after his shocking return from Adelaide.

  By early March there had been signs of improvement but Anne Bourne had detected a cooling between her two sons, particularly since John had lost all the money he had borrowed from Mary’s husband and James had come back from Adelaide with little to show for himself. They needed something to lift their spirits, she decided. ‘A bit of dancing is not to be missed. But mind, you two,’ she said, checking John’s necktie as they stood at the threshold of Ormonde House. ‘Be gentle with yourselves and go easy on the whiskey.’

  In 1840, the Darlinghurst Court House had been no more than a façade emerging out of the great pit that the convicts had dug for its foundations. It looked, James thought, like an ancient ruin. ‘Quite impressive,’ John agreed as they sat in the confines of the family vehicle, looking out at the crowds threading their way through the darkening evening. Convicts had dug the guts of this building out of the earth, that was true, but it was said to be one of the first where there would be no chained men involved in the laying of the bricks. No wonder it was taking so long, James thought to himself. Although he also remembered his father’s satisfaction that the time had come when the colony would finally be free of the shame of white slaves.

  That night Kinchela had also seen the boys dancing to the pipes but, for him, the familiar strands of those well-known songs had caught him in the shadows of his gig and filled him with a strange jerky melancholy. Perhaps his brother felt the same, for after a time the elder boy turned his face to the side window and mumbled as much to himself as to his brother, ‘We won’t be lifting our heels tonight, J.B.,’ before tapping the carriage door twice with his ring so the driver knew it was time to head for home.

  About eight years had passed since then. Now, once more James was sitting in his mother’s gig as it pushed up Oxford Street towards the courtrooms, although this time, his brother was elsewhere—preoccupied with certain affairs in the Orange district, no doubt. Winter was shaping up fast and the few trees that punctuated the distant paddocks had only a few leaves and most of those were already curled brown and ready to fall. James felt forlorn. He had read the papers: it was going to be a hard case. It was not going to be like his brother John and Major Mudie. The mood was different. Things were against him. He wasn’t too sure about his lawyer either. Arthur Todd Holroyd was a smart man, but he would need to be formidable to take on Robert Lowe, Kinchela thought.

  As Robert Lowe prepared his argument for Regina v Kinchela he found himself thinking back to the Shrigley abduction case from the 1820s. He had been a boy at the time but it had been impossible to live in England and not know something of it. Lowe had kept an interest in the events as a way of distracting himself from his gruelling life at Winchester College, where he was subject to incessant attacks from the older boys, who found his splayed hips, white wispy hair and tiny, flickering eyes detestable to say the least. What was crucial to that abduction case, Lowe recalled, was the way the girl had conducted herself. Certainly the accused, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, had been a villain and something of a dandy, too, but if the girl had been ‘on-the-nose’, the public would have turned on her.

  Those proceedings had been carefully staged, he mused, and it was a tactic that ensured the case had been won in the press well before it even entered the court. It had all come down to questions of dress. Of this Lowe was certain. While Wakefield and his simpering brother had paraded the streets of Manchester in the latest styles from Paris, his victim, Ellen Turner, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl and the daughter of one of England’s wealthiest silk manufacturers, had been the very model of modesty. She had arrived at court on the first day of the trial dressed entirely in black with a thick veil obscuring her face. Indeed, the way the press wrote about it, there had been no flesh showing on the young woman at all, other than a sliver of skin on her wrists where her tailored gloves gave way to the cut of her dress. As she stepped from the carriage on the first day of the trial, Miss Turner had been escorted by her father, uncle and three servants. This party formed a barricade that made it impossible for the huge crowds that jostled about the carriage to catch more than a fleeting glimpse of the girl. The shock of the great outrage had confined Miss Turner’s mother to her bed and news accounts repeatedly updated the public about poor woman’s failing condition. The combined effect was that Miss Turner rapidly became a most compelling figure of sympathy and mystique. Throughout the trial, Lowe recalled, Miss Turner remained veiled, which the judge accepted because of the girl’s youth and evident distress. By the time it was her turn to take the witness box, three weeks had passed and the entire country was mad with fascination about the appearance of their heroine. Nor were they disappointed when Miss Turner finally took to the witness box and slowly lifted the dark netting to reveal a sweet, supple face with a most anguished expression.

  As Miss Turner’s star rose in the estimation of the public, Wakefield’s plummeted and each day the offending dandy looked increasingly crestfallen. By the third day of the trial, he and his brother had given up their afternoon promenades through town and by the beginning of the second week the defendant exchanged his outlandish Paris fashion for more modest English attire. As the press became more vicious in their condemnation of Wakefield and his family, the defendant seemed to collapse altogether, and by the end of the third week Wakefield simply slouched in his chair, head buried in his hands. His guilt was a foregone conclusion, the press concurred. The only remaining question was whether or not he would swing. When the verdict came down, the general opinion among the press and public was that three years in Newgate Prison was exceedingly generous and perhaps they were right. In truth, Lowe was less interested in the sentence than the stagecraft of the Wakefield trial and he passed his remembrances on to his client. ‘There are clues in this, Gill,’ he said airily, ‘so make sure your girl is dressed with discretion and that you come to court as a united but deeply slighted family of modest and honest means.’ Gill understood exactly what was required and as Margaret was now the only one who spoke to the girl he passed this advice on to his wife, word for word.

  A dress was organised for Mary Ann. This had been specially tailored for the occasion and was fashioned from a heavy dark blue silk with a thread of brown that gave only the subtlest of sheens. A veil was out of keeping, Margaret insisted, but a bonnet with a broad brim would serve the same purpose. Her costume included tight mustard-coloured gloves to match the ghastly bonnet ribbon that made her otherwise youthful skin appear sickly and sallow. The outfit was finished with a dark calico parasol, which Margaret instructed was only to be opened the moment she stepped out of the coach to enter the court. Mary Ann felt imprisoned in this dreadful garb and suffered even more when she thought of all the gay colours she had hoped to wear as the wife of a gentleman settler.

  This was but one element in the production that the Gills orchestrated under the direction of Robert Lowe. Lowe was looking for the sort of spectacle that would keep him in the public eye and ensure that his name was in every paper and on the lips of every man with sufficient property qualificati
ons to vote for him at the forthcoming election. He was keen to win the trust of the middling set, who might otherwise regard his cleverness with suspicion. Many would see this scandal as an insult to the colony and Lowe was determined to fashion events in a way that would make the girl the unfortunate victim of a careless wastrel.

  If all went well he might even be able to suggest that the innocent creature was as vulnerable to the wanton whims of these settlers as the colony itself. ‘Only decent men, such as those who do their duty as members of the jury today,’ Lowe mused to himself as he began practising his opening address, ‘might be brave enough to take a stand against those who have assumed the right to take whatever, whoever, whenever they wish.’ The words slipped effortlessly into place as the great demagogue stood before his mirror, imagined himself coaxing the jury first into a state of righteous indignation and then agreeable compliance. ‘Only sensible and solid men can resist those who think they have a right to rob not only a woman of her future and a family of their dearest prize,’ and here he imagined himself pausing before the jury and fixing them with a look that would allow his words to assume their full potency, ‘but also a respectable people of their hard-earned reputation.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Sporting Affair

  Arthur Todd Holroyd was a man with many interests. As a young lad he had studied medicine and quickly became prominent in several of England’s most respectable medical associations. By the age of twenty he had been made a member of the London Zoological Society and also married well. Upon settling into his London practice, however, he discovered that his prospects were less than he hoped. So Holroyd turned to the law and was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn. To temper the tedium of this period Holroyd undertook regular visits to Rome and Egypt, where he perfected his Italian and also became proficient in Arabic. These language skills assisted Holroyd during his tours to Sinai, Palestine and Syria, and before the age of thirty this promising son of a London merchant was celebrated as one of the very first Europeans to cross the scorching sands of Bayuda before arriving in Khartoum, just a few years after the town had become the capital of the Sudanese possessions in Egypt. The young explorer’s writings about this desert crossing and the disease-ravaged Sudanese capital were of great interest to the Royal Geographical Society, who promptly elected him a fellow. But within a few months Holroyd was restless again. A year later he embarked upon a new adventure, travelling this time with his wife to the infant colony of New Zealand. Affable and exceptionally well-educated, Arthur Holroyd was no slouch. Indeed, with his flourishing sideburns and sharp blue eyes, he was a worthy opponent for the remarkable Robert Lowe.