The Convict's Daughter Read online

  Will looked about, keen to ascertain the cause of his sister’s curious conduct. After a minute or two he found it. There, just a little way along the quay, leading a large, elegantly squared chestnut mare, was James Butler Kinchela. He must have just come off a steamer, the boy thought, for after a yard or so, the settler stopped and steadied his mount, casually organising his bags before hitching himself up into the saddle and weaving steadily through the rally crowd.

  When Kinchela first caught sight of them both Will was standing stock-still with Mary Ann crouched awkwardly behind him. He looked startled for a moment but then shifted in his saddle and grinned, before nudging his mount with his heel. ‘Miss Gill,’ Kinchela said with a nod as he brought Surus to a stop in front of Mary Ann. Brother and sister watched the older settler dismount and then gather his reins before looking them both up and down. ‘I am in Sydney to seek you out,’ he began when it became apparent that no one was prepared or perhaps able to reply. The young woman quickly bowed her head making it impossible for Kinchela to catch her eye. She appeared extremely composed, he thought, although he noticed the muscle along her jaw was working back and forth with tremendous energy. And this must be her younger brother, he thought, which would explain why he was fixing him with such a glare and clenching his fists.

  He would need to explain himself, Kinchela realised, and quickly. ‘Mary Ann,’ Kinchela began with a sigh, ‘there has been a world of confusion, that is true,’ he said shrugging his shoulders, ‘and much of the blame lies with me, although,’ he continued lightly wagging his finger, ‘not all of it, and perhaps not quite as you might assume.’ Will thought of taking his sister’s hand and leading her away, although he feared it might create a scene that would get back to their parents. ‘Well then,’ Kinchela continued, wondering how to proceed when he realised his affable approach was getting nowhere. He took a deep breath and looked about him awkwardly. A long silence ensued until he began again, this time a little softer. ‘You know, Mary, I’ve a mind that there might still be a way for you and I and,’ he said, tugging at his neckerchief, ‘I have been thinking it over,’ he said trying to catch her eye, ‘if only you might let me know that you would at least consider it?’ he looked at her hopefully. ‘You see,’ he continued, ‘I have come to Sydney to seek you out, and here you are, right in front of me,’ he added with a grin but yet again Mary Ann maintained her stony silence and kept both eyes fixed on the ground. ‘Surely such a meeting is no coincidence?’ he tried again. He stopped and pointed up Pitt Street in the direction of her father’s hotel. ‘You know this meeting is a blessing for me,’ he said playfully, ‘for I’ve been thinking I would have to climb up the drainpipe outside your window so I could ask you to come to California with me.’

  Will felt his sister start. He turned and reached for Mary Ann’s hand but otherwise brother and sister were silent as they tried to comprehend the audacity of Kinchela’s proposal. There was something thrilling about it, Will had to admit, but Mary Ann was having none of it. She shook her head and with her eyes still lowered, replied in a low and furious tone that was still loud enough for both to hear. ‘Not once, nor even twice, Mr Kinchela, have you subjected me to considerable discomfort. I was fool enough to trust you with my heart,’ she said, struggling to quell the tremor in her voice, ‘but now I find that after four humiliations,’ she shook her head indignantly, ‘I have nothing, absolutely nothing,’ she repeated, as she fixed Kinchela with a steely glare, ‘with which to ever trust you again.’

  And with that, Mary Ann Gill was off, picking her way through the crowd with such speed and agility that William had to run to keep up with her. Kinchela stood on the spot of green with Surus, watching Mary Ann push through the rally crowd with her brother trailing behind her. He shook his head, full of admiration and remorse, wondering how on earth he might possibly fix things now.

  In the place of the solid round tables and elegant horsehair-stuffed chairs that had previously graced the dining room of Gill’s Family Hotel, there was now a long, rough bench. On the wall above the table hung a large sign: ‘Private Agent: Robert E. Ogilby for San Francisco’, and behind the long table sat two or three men taking money from those who had come to buy their passage to California. When it wasn’t being used by the booking agent, other activities were also taking place at Gill’s Family Hotel, including several large meetings with the electors from Bourke’s Ward. Whatever Gill thought of men like Parkes, Margaret Gill was happy to take their money, particularly in the current climate. Indeed, despite the actual state of things, people were still coming to Gill’s Family Hotel, still using its well-known name in their advertisements and still recognising it as the grandest hotel in the colony. Even so, despite all this, the well-known Pitt Street hotel was now not much more than a façade.

  Margaret had been trying to manage the hotel while also looking to her long-term interests, as her father had advised. Just a day or so ago, however, she had told her two eldest children that they must make themselves useful. She was in no position to support two adults, she told them crisply as she packed a box of silver cruets she didn’t want her husband to spirit away. It would be best if William and Mary Ann found a way to earn some money, ‘That is what the family needs,’ she said, returning to her packing. And so, while Martin Gill busied himself loading furniture and other miscellanea onto George Page’s dray cart, his estranged wife was just as energetic in her own exertions regarding their shared property. She had wished it otherwise, and had done her best to see it that way, but once her husband began removing certain items from the hotel without so much as a word to her, the gloves were off as far as she was concerned.

  She had to think for herself, McCormick had recently reminded his daughter. There was word about town that Lewis Samuel was intent upon suing Gill for unpaid debts and had recently held a private meeting with several other men to whom Gill also owed money. He was determined to pursue justice and a fair return, Samuel had told those men and he encouraged them to do the same. It was then McCormick told Margaret that he was going to lease the Punchbowl farm so that he and Mary Riley could come into town, for a time at least. ‘We’ve always kept an eye out for each other now, haven’t we?’ he said, brushing away his daughter’s protests. ‘I best be on hand now, wouldn’t you say?’

  Mary Ann was now sufficiently well acquainted with shame to suffer the indignity of their current circumstances better than William. She was, nonetheless, still taken aback when one afternoon several weeks later she stepped into the hotel and discovered the fine claret drapes, which added so much to the formal dining room’s opulence, were gone, as were many of the framed sketches that had previously adorned the walls. Gone too was the fine piece of mahogany that functioned as a serving bench, which Mary Ann had helped polish during her childhood. The room seemed to reverberate with the absence of everyday objects and Mary Ann stood at the threshold, caught for a moment by the loss.

  By the end of the following week, when most of the big fixtures had been moved out to the auction rooms, Martin Gill sat down with his eldest son. ‘It is time to give it up,’ he admitted to William, ‘and it will be best to do so now.’ As Mary Ann and her father had not exchanged a word since the incident with Mr Samuel and the roast beef, it was William’s task to help his father compose the advertisements concerned with the sale of the hotel’s lease as well as all the remaining furniture and stock-in-trade. ‘There’s no point begging for mercy,’ Gill muttered when Will shook his head in dismay. ‘It has to be done,’ he said firmly, ‘but in a way that puts us in front as best as possible.’

  ‘The proprietor of this well-known establishment’, the advertisement began, ‘is obliged to retire from business on account of a family illness and is therefore resolved to part with his very eligible investment, which offers not only elegant furnishings but also first-rate connections. The coming season promises a return of the numerous up-country gentlemen, who have long favoured Mr Gill with their support and’, the column concluded,
‘the future buyer can be assured of their ongoing business’. This explanation was followed by an extensive list of sideboards and eight day-hall clocks, hall lamps and superior paintings as well as handsome bedsteads, chests of drawers and washstands in each of the eleven guestrooms—all of which were ‘furnished in a most superior manner’.

  Throughout the last seventeen or so years, Martin Gill had also kept a ‘very desirable premise on George Street’, where he and Margaret lived when they were first married and where Mary Ann had also been born. ‘These will have to go too,’ Martin Gill told his son. So the pair bent their heads together and penned another costly advertisement that detailed the ‘commodious establishment in a central part of the metropolis’ that was sure to ‘prove a worthwhile investment’ for an ‘enterprising capitalist’. After much toing and froing regarding the glassware and dinner services in both establishments, Will showed his father the advertisements and then Gill instructed him to run both up to George Street so they could be published in the Saturday paper.

  James Butler Kinchela was having a time of it. He had been reluctant to return to his mother’s home in Liverpool. Nor did he fancy another run-in with his brother. He had, consequently, taken up residence in Sydney hoping it might somehow provide him with an opportunity to press his case with Mary Ann. While he was about he was also keen to pick up news about California, for after a few days back in town he had resolved that he must go. Any doubts he may have harboured on the matter were resolved when he realised he was only able to stay at any one hotel for a few days. His credit was fine, he insisted, when the first manager came to speak to him about the matter, but that wasn’t the problem. As soon as those in charge of whichever establishment he was residing in put two and two together—they really had little choice, they would explain. They could not afford such notoriety under their roof, particularly in the current climate, with guests able to choose among so many fine establishments.

  And so Kinchela moved on, from the Adelphi to Petty’s Hotel, then the Star Hotel and finally the Union Inn before finding one or two of the better boarding houses on the outskirts of town. By late July he was bunking down at Joseph Walford’s private dwelling rooms in Parramatta with the retired Major George Pitt D’Arcy from the 39th regiment of foot. The Major was no stranger to Ireland. Indeed, he liked to remind Kinchela that he had been in Cork in the 1820s when the Rockites were at their worst. Old Pitt D’Arcy was in the habit of recounting a story about how he had been attacked by a large band of Captain Rock’s men in Mill Street, Cork. Single handedly, he boasted, he had beaten off a ‘considerable body of insurgents’ and for his troubles, been promoted from Brevet to Major. Only, he would finish with a bemused expression, sometime after that, he and his regiment had received the dubious honour of a posting to New South Wales.

  But that was 1826; now the Major was feeble with gout. At least that is what Dr Stuart determined after he was woken up well past two o’clock one morning with James Butler Kinchela thumping at his door and asking him to come quickly. The settler had been reading on his bed that evening, he explained as the two of them hastened back to Walford’s, when the Major began complaining of a pain in his head. Next moment there was a great thump and Kinchela saw the distinguished military man writhing on the floor. He had settled the Major as best he could before rushing off to find a medical man. But by the time Kinchela and the doctor returned, Pitt D’Arcy was dead. ‘Gout in the head,’ the doctor told the coroner, ‘leading to apoplexy and then death.’

  The Major’s sudden death had been a nasty surprise for Kinchela and one that made him sufficiently wary of boarding establishments to resign himself to his mother’s home as well as whatever John decided to dish out. Fortunately, however, the Superintendent of Schools was in the Orange district, devoting considerable energy to the establishment of a new school. Anne Bourne had her younger son to herself and welcomed the opportunity to pet him without her eldest son’s disapproval. They were comfortable companions for neither found it necessary to inquire much into the other’s comings and goings. Kinchela was still musing over his meeting with Mary Ann at Circular Quay and drawing closer to the decision that he would have to visit Gill’s Family Hotel when a letter, in a woman’s hand, arrived at his mother’s Liverpool home.

  Mother and son had just come in from a spring stroll beside the rosemary hedges and Anne Bourne was removing her bonnet before the hall mirror when she noticed the letter on the stand. She picked up the envelope and turned it backward and forward before opening it. After reading the first two sentences, the elderly woman pushed the letter into James’ hand and then steadied herself against the hall-stand. James read the opening sentences: ‘John’s illness had been very sudden’, he stopped, feeling as if the wind had been booted out of him, ‘and also tragically short’. Breathing unevenly Kinchela took his mother’s arm and led her to the front parlour. He helped her to her seat and then poured two large glasses of madeira before sitting down next to her.

  John had been the woman’s boarder ‘for over a year’, James read out loud as he followed the woman’s flowery script across the rough parchment, ‘each time, indeed, your dear son visited the region, with the singular intention of improving the lives of the children in this district’, the woman explained. ‘During his most recent visit, he had been with the local magistrates, who were meeting to decide the location of a statue they wished to erect in memory of the Governor Richard Bourke, who played such an active role in this region.’ Anne Bourne fixed her eyes on the opposite wall as she listened to James read: ‘There had been a storm that night and on the ride home from the meeting John’s horse had been caught in a muddy patch along a narrow stretch of track. He had done what he could’, but after several desperate hours, ‘John had been forced to leave his mount and trudge back, more than three miles, through one of the coldest gales they had suffered in years. A day or so later’, the letter continued, ‘John came down with a fever, and a week after that he was unable to leave his bed.’

  Mrs Lynton had wanted to write earlier, she explained, but ‘John had insisted she not fuss—he would be up and about again soon enough. It all happened so suddenly . . .’ James stopped, momentarily unable to fix upon the page. He looked about the room, blinking back the wetness in his eyes and trying to restore his focus as he began to comprehend his mother’s and then his own great grief. He felt thick in the guts for the way he and his brother had parted. The things he had said and thought over the past few months—he was sick with the shame of it. After a moment, however, he remembered his mother’s presence and continued the letter. Mrs Lynton wanted the Kinchela family to know that ‘their beloved John had met his passing with the courage all who knew him spoke of so often’. The funeral had been arranged in some haste a day or two after his passing but there would be a memorial within a fortnight at which their presence was greatly desired.

  Enclosed with the letter from Blackman’s Swamp was a separate piece of paper upon which was written a rather florid elegy concerning the death of John Kinchela Junior, Esquire. Mrs Lynton had composed this humble poem herself, she wrote, and was deeply honoured to inform the family that the very same would be read at the forthcoming memorial. There was also talk that a stanza from this might adorn John’s headstone, if they were pleased for this to be so. Anne Bourne sat beside her younger son, shaking her head as James read the opening stanza of Mrs Lynton’s poem:

  Dear to my soul, too early lost,

  Affection’s arm was weak to save,

  The love of justice, friendship’s boast—

  Has come to an untimely grave.

  And then Anne Bourne placed her hand on her son’s knee and signalled for him to stop. ‘There will be a time for this,’ she said, but now she wanted only quiet and the comfort of knowing her last male kin was by her side.

  ‘Even the very worst of our convicts’, Earl Grey wrote in reply to FitzRoy’s detailed account of the Hashemy incident at Circular Quay, ‘could find something to learn fr
om the speakers at public meetings in despising truth and decency’. It was a sentiment shared by many of Sydney’s well-to-do. After the Waterloo celebrations, and the second rally at Circular Quay, the governor had packaged a collection of sympathetic newspaper articles to convince the Colonial Secretary that public sentiment was on his side. The protest meeting had been attended by ‘mere idlers’, he told Earl Grey, ‘only a few hundred at the most’ and none were men of ‘any real stake or influence’. Indeed, ‘the great mass of intelligent, right-minded, thoughtful and wealthy, who form the REAL people of the Nation’ thoroughly disapproved of such attempts to ‘foment disturbance and dissension’ and were also vehemently opposed to the ‘few intolerant and presuming demagogues’ who had rallied at Circular Quay on that day.

  Perhaps the governor was correct. For despite the fact that FitzRoy had ordered that the convict boat be discreetly removed from Sydney Harbour and those on board processed at Moreton Bay, the people’s victory was proving bittersweet. At least it was for Parkes and his associates. Instead of their defiant stand leading on to greater victories, the tide in the affairs of these men had stalled. And much of it was their foolish fault. The Constitutional Association had been responsible for successfully rousing the public against the Hashemy, but soon afterwards they had become so busy fighting among themselves that they failed to detect a change in the winds. Parkes and his men were suddenly decidedly out of favour. The people had gone back to their factories, furnaces and farms, and were irritated by any insistence from the committee that they should feel obliged to maintain an interest in the political future of the colony. Business was tough enough, they grumbled—who had the time, let alone the taste for such stirrings. And so, once more, the toyshop owner found himself not only on the outer of street politics but also subject to yet another snubbing from the Great Gyrator.