The Convict's Daughter Read online

  That was 1820; seven years later Martin Gill was twenty-five years old and out of the gangs. Regular food, time working the roads and the audacious sunlight of a new country added almost three inches to his scrawny frame. He had had his run-ins—a stint on the treadmill for starting a fight on York Street and another for trying to steal a Spanish dollar from his boss while in government service. But after the Dublin thief had earned his ticket-of-leave he got a better sense of how things worked. He began to stand a little straighter and develop a way to him. Being a thief in the bleak of those early years had caused him to see things sideways and slightly upside-down. He even had a certain turn of phrase that made some fellows look twice.

  One of his first jobs was assisting the Barnetts of Pitt Street. They had a kitchen that backed onto their inn and the young ticket-of-leaver ran errands and helped with the fires. When the cook disappeared Gill got the job making pastries and it was not long before people were saying they were better than those of the old cook.

  He met Margaret the same year, just as he was starting to make a name for himself. She had come out on the boats, too, although they didn’t talk about it much. She was a domestic and one of her jobs was collecting supplies from the same store Gill visited. One time after work he spotted her standing with a man he fancied must be her father. A balding, burly sort of bloke with a scar under his right eye. Margaret was short and stocky but Martin could see that she knew what she was about and in a way that made it clear it was no one’s business but her own. He watched her eyes follow a half-dressed urchin weaving through the auction crowd, the lad no more than six or seven, testing pockets for loose tin.

  She knew. That was what it was like. You saw a lot but you didn’t say much. He liked her complexion, natural and fresh with a splattering of freckles across her broad nose. Margaret was seventeen and had only been in the colony for a few months after a stint as a hand to the Lord Lieutenant’s pastry chef where she had learnt the right way of doing things. You suffered if you forgot when you were in his kitchen, Margaret would recall, but it paid off in the long run. Even as a young girl she was proud of her craft and what she could do.

  Margaret had kept to herself when Gill first greeted her, but once he had told her what work he was doing at the Barnetts’ she had looked him up and down with interest. Over the next month or so she had come past his kitchen during the busy hours. Just outside the door, mind. ‘You need to fold the mixture faster,’ she had said when he spied her in the market one afternoon a few weeks later, ‘get it rolled and into the trays quicker, too, if you want to keep the lightness to it,’ she finished with a curt nod before moving off. Gill grinned, he liked the way she could tell him but not hold it over him.

  Margaret’s da had been a tailor, but he had had a thing for selling certain items that weren’t exactly his. When things had got desperate after the wars, when the prices soared and no one wanted to buy Irish butter or linen anymore, McCormick had little choice but to train his daughter up in the sly craft of fencing. They had done all right for a few years until she was found with a handkerchief from one of the ladies in the house. They were both sent out for that. First her father, and then when nothing came of the petitions from the local priest, Margaret had been sent out too. For some reason no one could quite work out, Dublin Castle allowed McCormick to bring his wife, Margaret’s stepmother. Not many got that chance, they knew, but that was the way with Mary Riley. She often had a bit of luck on her side.

  And so here they all were, the Dubliners. A girl with her da and a thin slip of a stepmother and a man who had never been a boy but was not much bigger than one, and who hadn’t known his own family since he was nine or so but knew how to make things go his way wherever he was and whatever was required. It made sense for them to throw their lot in together, Gill had explained to Margaret once he had made up his mind. But they had to do it properly, McCormick insisted when the young man sounded him out on the matter. ‘We are not like those slovenly Proddies, who slip in and out of each other’s huts, rutting whatever moves.’

  Martin and Margaret were married at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral in the spring of 1831. The first of their children came nine months later. Almost to the day. It was around dusk on the shortest day of the year, during a winter solstice that might have been a long balmy summer’s day back home, but was a wet whinge of a day in Sydney, with a cruel wind that blew right off the bay and straight into your bones. Margaret pushed and sweated with as much poise as a woman in her first birthing could, and eventually Mary Ann entered the world in the tiny back bedroom of the George Street confectionery shop where Martin and Margaret started their business life together. It was Margaret who decided on the girl’s name and Gill was happy to grant her that for he had been clear he would name the boys. ‘Who knows,’ the new mother said as she watched her stepmother wrap her newborn in a rough grey blanket, ‘she might get some of your luck, then.’

  From the moment Mary Ann gulped air into her baby lungs, she was about it. For Gill, the noise of her breaking into the world was unbearable. But, next moment—there she was—blinking back at him with unfocused eyes and a tuft of fly-away brown hair. Having nursed the bundle for less than an awkward minute Martin Gill handed her back to Mary Riley with a nod. He had no idea. He had never been around babies and could barely remember his own father’s face. He just knew that now he had a child of his own to provide for and he was going to do better than had been done to him.

  Fate was on his side in this matter, for now anyway. By the time Mary Ann was six months old the government bowed to pressure regarding the fact that George Street was barely fit to carry a coach on wet days. They paid a number of shopkeepers proper sterling pounds to move on until the street was fixed. With the flush, Gill bought a hotel on York Street, and named it The Donnybrook after the fight he had had there while he was still in government service. There were already too many squalid drinking spots about the town, so the Gills decided they would make their establishment more refined. That way they could bring in some of the better sorts about town. Margaret had firm ideas about how to fit it out and McCormick helped find curtains and such. Gill spoke to a mate down at Market Wharf where there were always good prices to be had. Soon the family were in possession of the types of goods they had once stolen from the big homes around the Green.

  From looking about and watching others, Gill quickly worked out that you didn’t make money by keeping it in your pocket. The opening of The Donnybrook happened to coincide with the Christmas season so Martin took his wife’s suggestion about making a splash. The pair worked in the kitchen for days putting together a gigantic fifty-pound Twelfth Night cake, thick with dried fruit and spices. They displayed it in the window on the night before Christmas Eve and raffled it for a good profit. Early windfalls like that helped the couple get a toe and then a foothold, and there were days when Gill thought that his wife and daughter were some sort of charm that had come to bring him his fortune. How could it be, he would ask himself as he stood across from his hotel admiring the solid shape of The Donnybrook, that a man had to steal to survive on one side of the world and could end up making cakes and selling them for a profit on the other?

  But with Mary Ann getting older and another baby on the way, Gill was going to need all the good fortune he could get. Luck and pluck, he thought. It didn’t take long for him to realise that the biggest part of making good here was bluff. His new hometown had just about as many people as the Dublin of his childhood, but the mood was something else. Here the air was thick one day but could then suddenly shift, just like that. Sometimes when things had been sticky for a few days the whole town felt like a keg of powder about to explode. Where the cold had made people tight and sharp in Dublin, here the heat made folks unpredictable—like the molasses Gill used to watch the old cook heat up to make boiled sweets. You had to have your wits about you in Sydney. Just about everyone was making and shifting. It wasn’t like home where you were told where you fitted and got wha
cked if you stepped out of line. Here, you had to be always on the move so they couldn’t get hold of you.

  It was McCormick who came up with the idea of placing regular advertisements in the news-sheets. He had done it in Dublin with his tailoring and it had served him well enough, for a time. His son-in-law took the idea further though. But he didn’t want meek supplications like the sort his wife read to him from The Gazette in her stop-start way. He was keen to impress the city’s better families as well as certain ‘gentlemen from the interior’.

  ‘Martin Gill’, the advertisements would typically announce in bold capital letters, ‘begs to inform his friends and numerous customers’ of the new ‘Genteel Parlour for Refreshments’ he has recently opened ‘opposite the Treasury’. In this new establishment, he boldly declared, ‘ladies and gentlemen’ will be pleased to find ‘a large and varied stock of bottled fruits: Lawson’s gooseberries, cherries and damson plums all of which have been recently selected for him from the first houses at Home’. If customers ‘called to the store’, he continued, often with Margaret chiming in her two bits’ worth, customers could also enjoy caraway comfits and, of course, Gill’s famous pastries. ‘Always baked twice a day to guarantee freshness.’

  ‘Those who continued to bestow their favours upon Gill’s Victorian Confectionery Establishment,’ another advertisement announced a few years later when Gill informed his customers of a new property he had taken up on George Street, ‘could be assured of fruits, confectionery and cake ornaments of a style superior to that which has been done heretofore in the colony.’ The proprietor and his canny wife, who was no doubt responsible for the finest of these sweets and treats, also hastened to reassure their ‘numerous friends’ that such provisions would ‘be suitable for all manner of balls and routs’.

  This was all flourish and pomp, sometimes so grand that Margaret would make a few subtle adjustments before her daughter ran the ad to the newspaper office. But Margaret liked a bit of flair, too. It reminded her of her days in the Lieutenant’s kitchen when everything was done right. Later the Gills opened yet another confectionery stall, announcing this with an advertisement that began: ‘Strictest attention will be given to those ladies and gentlemen who patronise the new and extensive premises of the Victorian Confectionery Establishment at the city’s new Royal Victoria Theatre, which the Gills have fitted up at great expense and in the latest London style.’

  But the Gills were not just solid buildings and sweets. Martin Gill was also around and about, busy supplying the very best private occasions in the colony, attending the Five-Dock Steeplechase and other races, where he was pleased to provide for his patrons in a ‘spacious booth and large marquee’ in which he served ‘excellent luncheons’ as well as a ‘generous array of wines, spirits ales &c.’. Gill discovered that if you became a regular advertiser, the press looked after you, and that could be handy. Having his name in print on such a regular basis also meant that people began to know who he was.

  These were years of expansion both for the business and the family. All up, Margaret gave birth to twelve children, although only six of these were to survive. Baby Margaret was born less than a year after Mary Ann but died two days later. Ten months after that came William. He survived, but was small and needed a nurse most of the time. Even as he grew and became a devoted companion to his older sister, the boy was thin with weak lungs that wheezed. William was followed by five more infant deaths before finally Isabella was born around the time the family opened The Donnybrook. After Isabella came Harriet and Thomas Edward. By early 1848 there were six dead and five living children with another due to arrive at any moment. Two of the dead ones were consecrated and put in a local churchyard but some of the younger ones, born and lost when money was tight, were buried quickly and quietly out the back of whatever house they were residing in at the time.

  In the early days the store had been most of what Margaret liked to talk about in the evening, but once the babies had started coming, there had been a stop to that. But that was alright for by now Gill had a handle on it anyway. He had staff in his employ, a number of establishments, and was looking at one or two bits of land down south. These days he was all for getting out and about with others of his sort. Men like him, who had come from grim circumstances and were now enjoying a much warmer reception than those who had once preferred to show him their whip or throw him in the lock-up. Many of Gill’s associates were men who rarely accepted a sideways glance and were quick to deal with any sort of slight, real or imagined, and they were also handy for teaching him a few new tricks.

  These were the sorts of things that helped the Gills close in on their most sought-after goal. It was something he and Margaret had needed to joke about when they first discovered they shared it. Respectability. And all that came with it. Not so much the money as the feeling. Although it was clear to them that you needed the former to secure the latter. They both knew that they wanted to be looked upon in a certain way. Spoken to and greeted with the right tone. Referred to in the papers as people of substance and colonists of standing. This was the high-growing fruit both husband and wife hankered after, and they had a hushed way of talking around and about it, trying to work out which branches might be easiest to pull down and where the fruit was ripest and ready to taste.

  But for now Mary Ann loomed large in Margaret’s world and her happiest times were taking the girl out to her father’s farm along the Punchbowl road. Once he had been freed from working for Major Mitchell, Surveyor-General of the colony, McCormick had put away the box of threads and scissors he had brought with him from Dublin. He even agreed to Mary Riley’s prompting and procured a patch of their own—something simple with a few pigs and one or two crops to keep the soil. It was manageable for McCormick and he soon discovered it could be more satisfying than the tailoring work. At least he didn’t have to get down on his knees before the high and mighty. ‘Your own land gives you dignity,’ Mary Riley insisted. He doubted they would make much money, but he liked it well enough for now.

  While her girl scratched in the garden with her grandfather, Margaret liked to talk about home with Mary Riley. It was a lighter world without the endless demands of the town and the sense of always being on show that came with living and working in the hotel. Margaret was often shocked at how big the plants could grow at her father’s. Some of them were so tall and lush that they looked vulgar. She wondered if it was the same with the people, too. Considering some of the big, red-necked men who came into the hotel. The southern sun seemed to be brash enough to make a mockery of them all. Even the young ones looked old and leathery to her. Not her Mary Ann, though. Margaret would keep her eldest apart from such things. Mary Riley was for the same thing, too. They wanted the girl to have things they had not even thought to dream of at her age.

  By the time she was ten, Mary Ann was well and truly the boss of her siblings and considered old enough to take on certain duties. She was sent to the small local seminary twice a week and sometimes, if she had done her writing for the day, was also allowed to accompany her father to the Royal Victoria Theatre at the top end of Pitt Street. Gill had recently taken a lease of the refreshment rooms at the theatre and had these fitted up ‘in splendid style, no expense avoided’, of course. It was the girl’s job to stack the confectionery boxes under the shelves, and Mary Ann loved to stay there in the dark below, peering out through the gaps in the wooden booth and watching the well-dressed couples choose their treats for the matinee performances. Sometimes she also caught a glimpse of the actors rehearsing on the stage in their street dress.

  The Vic was all gilt and velvet. She loved the way the actors tipped and bowed, flourished and fancied, although she was a little scared of the low-voiced men with coarse moustaches and claret cloaks. Most of all, she loved the well-dressed women. They were delicate and exotic like the birds that flitted about in the bamboo cages which hung above the doors of the George Street stores. She loved to hear them sing, for their voices transported her i
nto a world of pure enchantment.

  One afternoon she watched a boy in pantaloons and sailor’s cap make a pair of white horses dance backwards across the stage. Another time, men in chains and helmets thrust long blades at one another, forcing each other back and forward across the stage until an awkward-looking boy pulled something thin and gleaming from a papier-mâché stone and the audience exploded in triumph. Sometimes Mary Ann would tell William and the younger ones about the performances she had seen, although she knew that only William could really picture what she was saying.

  There was one play she never told William about, and which stayed in her mind much longer than the others. She had seen it one afternoon while she was helping her father set up jars of blackcurrant drops. Unlike other melodramas and burlesques from ‘home’, this rough and ready musical was a local story titled The Currency Lass. It was a frothy farce that seemed rather bold and at odds with the turgid melodramas most often performed at the Royal Vic. It was all poke-in-your-eye fun, too. Mary Ann was sure she could recognise the characters on the stage from the people who came into her father’s hotel and others from the streets and thereabouts. There was Harry Hearty, a thick chested, native-born hero who bounded onto the stage at the play’s opening boasting that the local skies and seas far outstripped all the beauteous lands of Europe. There was his best friend, Edward Stanford, a handsome but naïve new chum, who had fallen in love with his best friend’s sister, Susan Hearty, a fifteen-year-old native-born girl he longed to marry, but for a fat fool of an uncle, a boastful thespian named Samuel Similie, who had arrived from London, determined to stop his nephew’s match.