The Convict's Daughter Read online

  Manning looked as if he had been waiting all day to hear the opulent timbre of his voice resound from the Supreme Court bench. He delivered his summary recapitulating the evidence before severely rebuking Mr Kinchela and his counsel for what he considered a most ‘unmanly line of defence, particularly’, he added, ‘their attempt to impugn the reputation of the girl and her father.

  ‘To secure a guilty verdict,’ Manning continued, ‘the jury must agree that they have received sufficient proof to convince them that the defendant had taken the girl, or encouraged her to leave her family home. It makes no difference,’ he insisted rather primly, ‘as to the defendant’s motives—whether he wished to seduce or marry the girl or rescue her . . . the jury need only ascertain that this departure from her family home occurred without her parents’ consent. If they were confident that the proceedings of the day had furnished them with compelling evidence of these points, then,’ said Manning, ‘they must return a guilty verdict.’

  It took the good men of New South Wales less than fifteen minutes to drink from the clear waters that Manning had led them to. They shuffled back into court bleary-eyed and hungry, for it was now well past their supper time. The foreman was already dressed in his street jacket when he stood and told the court, quite matter-of-factly, that James Butler Kinchela had been found guilty of two separate charges of abduction. Bail had also been refused.

  The room erupted into life. Justice had been served and it was time to go home. Martin Gill leapt up and began boisterously shaking hands with everyone in the courtroom, including Robert Lowe who found the physical contact a little coarse. But, because the great man was rather pleased with himself, he indulged his client on this occasion. Holroyd scratched his whiskers and looked about the court with an expression of displeasure. He turned to Kinchela who nodded cordially at him. He was clutching his cane and looking about with a fairly grim countenance as two wardens approached him with a set of hand irons. He would have to wait in remand until his sentence was pronounced. That could take days, even weeks, particularly if they decided to mount an appeal.

  Gill watched out of the corner of his eye as the wardens cuffed Kinchela and confiscated his cane. He was crowing so loudly and patting his wife on the back with such vigour that Margaret found it necessary to step away. She turned to find her father and Mary Riley who were standing rather awkwardly at the back of the court, looking at their granddaughter, their heads together in quiet talk.

  Mary Ann had not moved in her seat, except that she had pulled off one of her gloves and thrown it at her feet where it lay with those mustard-coloured fingers thrusting this way and that. She was sitting as she had been throughout the day, sullen in shame, but now in the darkened courtroom something else seemed to possess her. She had known the moment was likely to come, but to see James in cuffs, his step heavy as he moved past her. It was truly awful. She wanted to look up and catch his eye, but her gaze stuck to the floor. Nonetheless, something was stirring within.

  She was incensed. No, more than that. She felt guilty, yes that was true, but she was also deeply furious. Flaming with it. She was bitter about the hold her father had over her and the cruel humiliation he had wrought upon them. She was also disgusted with her mother for allowing this, but most of all she was angry with herself. She should have been smarter, like the girl in the play at the Royal Vic she had seen as a child. She should have known how to charm everyone to her cause. But, Mary Ann thought with a steely fierceness, she would find a way to turn things around. She didn’t know how, yet, but she would. She tugged at the fingers of her second glove and as she did so her thoughts turned to the boy in the gallery and Rebecca seated next to him. Perhaps, she thought, remembering the ribbon and comb the girl had left on her pillow. Perhaps Rebecca would help her. Then she yanked at the fingers of the second glove and succeeded, after some effort, in removing the second one from her hand too.

  ‘Mind her,’ Mary Riley whispered when Margaret joined the elderly couple by the door. The two women looked in Mary Ann’s direction. ‘You would be wrong to think your troubles are finished there.’ Margaret watched her daughter and, for a moment, considered Kinchela. Yes, she had never liked him that was true. He was only a few years younger than her own husband, and not right for Mary Ann, but she had not wished this upon him. Yet again, her husband had taken it too far.

  There was something bad in all of this. Margaret tried to imagine what it might be like to act as her daughter had. Was it wilfulness or something else, she wondered, as she began to feel a universe of distance unfurling between herself and her eldest child. Margaret had a feeling she had lost her daughter, but to what, or rather to whom? The very sort of man who had got her locked up in Dublin when she was about the same age. The sort she had worked for all her life until she met her husband. The mother of six paused and registered her own sinking grief. I am to blame for my part in this, Margaret admitted, looking at her daughter sitting alone in the dark of the court. What had made Mary Ann bring the world upon herself like this? she sighed. Margaret didn’t know the answer, but she had a feeling, like Mary Riley, that there was more trouble to come.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Thoughtless and the Giddy

  Eighteen forty-eight was a honey-fall for the newspapermen of New South Wales. If 1847 had been something of a slow year and the year before that duller than flies on a wall, 1848 was a great outpouring of gore and glory for which many gentlemen of the colonial press were ill-prepared. How could they not be? A number of papers had only been around for a few years, if that, and had been put together by men on their tea breaks or in-between jobs, often with more opinion than experience. In their desire to satiate the public’s growing appetite for remarkable events and astounding personalities, several editors had succumbed to rather vicious partialities and as the date of the election for the Legislative Council drew closer, the colony seemed to grind into life, like a giant print machine, chugging and wheezing, spinning and spitting with all sorts of insults and innuendoes.

  Unpleasant personal attacks were fast becoming the order of the day, particularly when it came to the various candidates running for the two Sydney seats. Within town there were now approximately 4000 property owners with sufficient qualification to cast a vote, and the majority of these were self-made entrepreneurs and emancipists with little regard for the settler set. Already there was greater representation in New South Wales than England and certainly more than there had been in France until the recent winter of discontent. As May and then June wore on, it began to look more and more likely that the new ‘respectable’ working men of New South Wales were of sufficient number to put at least one of their people in the parliament. And if that happened, the old guard grumbled, heaven help the colony.

  News of European unrest, particularly in Paris, seemed to add further fuel to the fire. In France the new regime had given ‘the people’ the vote but no one really knew what the Second Republic was going to do with nine million votes. The mood was uncertain. There were still well over 15,000 people out of work in Paris and the majority of these were disillusioned with the recent revolution. In June a ‘vile mob’ of empty-bellied men and women tore through the government defences and into the National Assembly where they demanded yet another new government. No wonder that the National Guard now marched the streets with their bayonets at the ready.

  In Sydney both the conservatives and their counterparts were invoking Paris—either to educate electors about the evils of unrest, or to insist that the oppressors’ yoke of iron must be broken. Tempers were fractious, and all sorts lined up to crow in the streets and squares, only to find their self-aggrandisement cut to size with the bluntest of colonial slights. Such was the wild talk and high fancy that several editors had taken it upon themselves to salt the soup by following the British style of pouring scorn upon the entire notion of political representation. The forthcoming election was entirely preposterous to Charlie Nichols, chief editor of Bell’s Sporting Life and brother t
o Bob Nichols. Cheeky Charlie liked to think he was writing for the most manly of colonists—those with an appreciation for good play and fair sport—who also knew how to enjoy a droll aside over a bottle of something strong. He used his columns in Bell’s to convey his firm belief that the colony was best off in the hands of men of substance, not the shopkeepers and candlestick makers who were bounding about town daring to question the governor in a most impudent manner.

  Men from the good end of town were likely to lay the blame for this dangerous new mood on the insolvent soldiers and failed farmers, upstart shopkeepers and factory foremen, who had arrived en masse in the colony over the last ten years as ‘bounty migrants’. These sort were only slightly better, in the settlers’ opinion, than the convicts who had come before them. Even worse were some of the mad ideas the bounty migrants had been spreading about town like a contagious rash. From what the settlers had seen thus far, most of these new men could hardly manage their own affairs let alone care for their kith and kin. Parkes, for example, had been begging favours since he had arrived and there were rumours that his shop was so steeped in debt it would not make it over the threshold of the new year. As for those who thought they could scrape a living from the papers, they were surely lost to folly but would no doubt make a wild noise as they went down. Heaven tremble to think how such men might handle greater representation if they got it. For a long time the whole thing had been nothing more than a joke but it was rapidly becoming apparent that Parkes and his associates were growing in number and influence.

  While several papers took the settlers’ side, there were almost as many that went in to bat for the middling set. After all, this was where most of the newspapermen had come from and certainly where, in their opinion, the colony’s future lay. There was general consensus among a number of newspapers that New South Wales would be stymied as long as the settlers kept their stranglehold. This was something even the wayward Cabbagers and sullen currency lads acknowledged, although few were prepared to get in a pickle about it. Why would they, when so few had the vote to make it worth their effort? Even though all a man now needed to have his say at the polls was £200 in property or £20 in rental—this was still beyond most of these lads. So, it was up to the new men of property—regardless of how badly their pockets were patched—to ensure that liberty was wrested from the agricultural oligarchs. Certainly, this was where the momentum lay for Parkes and his ‘committee of men’ who were determined to push things as far as they could, particularly now they had Robert Lowe leading the charge, splendid in his florid waistcoat and flamboyant pinstripe suit, his great legal gown flowing behind him—that famous riding crop ever at the ready.

  Among Parkes’ like-minded associates were the editors of three local papers who shared between them an uncertain readership that required careful courtship. There was the recent Roman Catholic convert, Edward Hawkesley, who edited a relatively new paper called The Sydney Chronicle that spoke to the growing body of radicalised Irish poor who had arrived in the last ten years fleeing the Great Hunger. There was also a cabinetmaker named Benjamin Sutherland who edited The Sydney Guardian, and the young and rather dour Angus Mackay, who had grown up in Sydney after emigrating with his family from Aberdeen when he was no more than three years old. He had recently assumed the reins of Robert Lowe’s highbrow weekly, The Atlas, and was very keen to make his mark. Indeed, they were all men in a hurry. Men who wanted to see things done better and who considered it their right, indeed their duty, to use their papers to herald in a new and fairer world.

  If the settlers’ papers grew ever more cruel in their references to Robert Lowe’s ‘ferrety, microscopic eyes’, ‘splayed hips’ and ‘dubious gender’, the other news-sheets were expending considerable energy deriding William Charles Wentworth, who they considered the ultimate colonial turncoat. Their columns railed about the way their one-time hero had championed the native-born and emancipists but only until he had planted his posterior upon a parliamentary seat. As soon as he had got comfortable, they sneered, Wentworth had hoisted up the drawbridge and left ordinary men to fend for themselves. ‘Self, self, self,’ they fumed. Wentworth was only for himself. He didn’t know who he was. Except that he chose not to acknowledge those who were, in fact, his own.

  In this vicious tug of war only the rising colossus of The Sydney Morning Herald claimed impartiality and ‘wholesome restraint’. Within their lower George Street offices there were all sorts of commotions taking place but the two young ambitious Englishmen in charge, Charles Kemp and his mate John Fairfax, kept at it, determined to impose their professional expertise upon the colonial world. After taking the helm, they had made a slow but solid start, and within a few short years had become extraordinarily successful. While other papers flashed and fumed and quickly died away, Kemp and Fairfax navigated all manner of colonial battlegrounds, all the while taking pains to accumulate the best machinery and talent. They were now the most circulated daily among both the settlers and their adversaries and by far the most influential of the papers in the colony.

  It was The Herald where Martin Gill preferred to place his advertisements but he also tried to keep abreast of the other local press, just in case. While Gill was still riding high from his victory against Kinchela in the Supreme Court he also knew he only had a sliver of time with which to capitalise upon his position. He needed to make the most of the coming election season. He had played close to the wind the last time and after seeing what the mobs had done to the Donnybrook when he covered it with Wentworth blue in 1843, he thought better of getting too close to the action this time round.

  From what he could pick up from his various associates, there was growing concern about the market and one or two banks. He had heard certain men were in the habit of buying whole cargos of tea and sugar and keeping them in storage until they could sell them at grossly inflated prices. The shifting mood and volatile trading was creating havoc for many of the middling sort and there were also stories coming in from the Monaro and further north about how the drought was taking a toll. Even the extraordinary entrepreneur Ben Boyd was coming unstuck, Gill had heard, and if he fell he would take at least one of the banks and probably a good number of investors, too. Gill wanted to sniff things out for a bit. Elections could be lucrative but they could also run up costs. It was all about getting a sense of which way the mood was turning and to do that he needed to do as other influential colonists did: watch the papers closely.

  This was how Gill came up with the idea of making his daughter read the news-sheets to him each morning. She had done this from time to time ever since she began attending the school and was capable of stringing the words into sentences that flowed calmly and cleverly together. The girl’s reading was now more fluent than his own cumbersome attempts, which still had him pushing his finger along the page. Better than her mother’s, too, for while Margaret could read faster than her husband, she still stumbled over certain words and would not force herself over the rest of the sentence for fear of being caught mouthing the difficult words out loud. By her fourth season at school, Mary Ann had drafted a number of family advertisements. At first she wrote down what her parents concocted, but after a while the girl would come to them with her notions and they would simply add the various stock they wanted mentioned. ‘Don’t forget the turtle soup, girl,’ her mother had added more than once, for she was sure that was why a number of settlers favoured their establishment, that, of course, and their famous pastries.

  Gill was determined that this would be part of the girl’s penance. Mary Ann was to wake at dawn each morning and collect the papers from the back steps of the hotel. Then she would prepare her father’s breakfast in the kitchen downstairs before the staff arrived and bring it to his private quarters. She would take her place at the fire behind her father’s chair and read the election news and other important stories of the day. Mostly it was The Sydney Morning Herald, but on Thursdays and Saturdays there were other papers like The Sydney Chronicle and The A
ustralian Journal and once a week she also had the moralising Atlas as well as Bell’s more racy prose. It was her mother who explained what was required and instructed her daughter to avoid any columns concerning what were now described as ‘recent events’. ‘Keep away from the court pages and contain yourself to the election,’ she advised, ‘and don’t speak unless you are asked a question directly.’ Mary Ann nodded. She had no intention of doing otherwise and was already filled with dread at the prospect of being alone with her father. But as far as Gill was concerned he had well and truly won the war with his daughter and was now prepared to play the benevolent patriarch. Never again would he trust his daughter; never again would she be taken into his favour, but he had resumed his position in the eyes of the court and the colony. From now on he would keep her on a tight rein and all the while content himself with the knowledge that if he felt the need to reassert himself he would have no qualms about doing so.

  Gill had been having doubts about his legal counsel’s political partialities and had declined the opportunity to let Parkes and his men hold one of their campaign meetings at his hotel, particularly after he heard that Lowe was being described as a ‘radical of the deepest dye’. He was not prepared to show himself yet. He had not yet quite decided who he liked, but had a feeling that particular campaign might be more trouble than they were worth. Some of those men were even bold enough to be talking about universal suffrage. Martin Gill had earned his vote fair and square thanks to his own hard-earned money and he didn’t want to share that right with men who couldn’t manage their own affairs. On top of this, Gill had also received a bill for legal costs from Lowe and almost choked on his lunch when he saw the final sum. The cost of clearing his own name and tarnishing that of his foe was more than the quarter year’s rent on Pitt Street. He would need a pretty windfall over the election season to pay for that without feeling it.