The Convict's Daughter Read online

  This girl, Susan Hearty, was a pretty and quick thing, whose vowels sounded just as flat and nasal as Mary Ann’s own. The audience cheered each time she appeared on the stage. She seemed to take particular delight in outsmarting everyone, particularly her fiancé’s uncle, whom she tricked and teased, coaxed and cajoled with dazzling song and dance routines. Susan Hearty reminded Mary Ann of one of the older local girls she sat next to at the school, the sort she hoped she might one day become. In the play Susan Hearty got into all sorts of larks with an Irish servant called Lanty O’Liffey who wore a green peaked cap and shoes with giant gold buckles. He made sly, funny asides similar to the ones Mary Ann had seen her own da do with certain customers from time to time. One minute Lanty played the humble servant to the fat old thespian and the next confounded him in such a way that made the audience erupt with laughter. He also danced the sorts of steps that Mary Ann had seen performed on Saint Patrick’s Day.

  For weeks afterwards, Mary Ann turned that play around in her mind marvelling at how much it was like her own world. The old fool of an uncle was like those guests who spoke in high tones when they first came off the boats and who made her ma sniff and mutter ‘airs’ under her breath after they walked away. Mary Ann rejoiced at how the young girl repeatedly thwarted the uncle’s attempts to stop her marriage to Edward Stanford and how, by the play’s end, she had so baffled and bewildered the old uncle that he had no choice but to surrender to her charms. Indeed, at the play’s end, the pompous old uncle had thrown his arms about the Currency Lass and declared ‘Advance Australia! Blessed be the Land who gives existence to so bright a gem’ before consenting to their marriage. Mary Ann wondered if one day she might have to sing and dance like Susan Hearty. She could be every bit as clever, and she hoped that one day she might also be as pretty as that girl.

  But that was a moment in time. The Gills didn’t keep the rooms at the Vic Theatre for long, and the sumptuous delights of that establishment dissolved like one of the greengage fancies her father sometimes gave her as a reward for a good day’s done.

  Next Mary Ann began helping her father at his various race meetings and private parties, for now Gill was not only running two hotels and a couple of stores, he was also judging flowers at agricultural shows, leaving little time to tend to his various businesses. Gill had a feeling that he was finally on the brink of becoming a person he most desired—a prominent colonist. Indeed, he was even described in this way when he was invited to join ‘a select number of well-known Roman Catholics’ who called upon the mayor. Thereafter, whenever his wife questioned certain decisions he had made or dared to side with her father over a business matter, Gill would remind Margaret, ‘Old McCormick is off playing in the mud while I’m shaking hands with the best men in the land.’ He would add, ‘This is your family now.’ To which Margaret would nod, then look away.

  By late 1846 Martin Gill was ready for his grandest ambition thus far, a highly respectable establishment where he could welcome the very best clientele in the colony. After months of looking about he finally found it, on the better side of the Tank Stream and no more than ten minutes from the quay. It was, in fact, the only three-storey hotel in town and this allowed it to perch above the other buildings on the street and to also command something of a view of the harbour, at least from the north-facing rooms.

  This solid Georgian mansion had been built in 1835 for Saul Lyons, the free brother of the wily old emancipist and auctioneer, Samuel Lyons. The ambitious free settler had lived in it for close to thirteen years until he finally tired of what was becoming an increasingly litigious life. By 1846, Lyons was so keen for fresh pursuits that he handed the matter of finding a tenant to his mercantile nephews, Saul and Lewis Samuel.

  It was young Lewis who took the matter in hand and he and Martin Gill soon came to a reasonable price. A few weeks later the Gill family were out of their York Street property and set up on the third floor of their new Pitt Street establishment, the lower floors being part of the main hotel and the second storey reserved for eleven large guestrooms. The move seemed to stir something in Margaret, who was determined to have a say in all the furnishings—not only in their own quarters, but the entire hotel and restaurant. What would it be like to be the mistress of a house that was every bit as fine, if not finer, than those around the Green back home? she wondered. The very sort of place where she had once been a humble employee and not allowed past the kitchen door?

  The truth was that the proposition made Margaret anxious, as if the family were pushing beyond their lot, and she wanted to be about it, keep things in check, so they didn’t stir up reprisals in this world or the next. She had a feeling that while they were going so big, they had to also keep things modest. More and more it looked like the wealthy in this town were splashing their fortunes about only to find themselves dragged into the debtor’s courts the following season. From what she had seen, the most powerful didn’t flash their money about. But if you looked closely you could see they had it in the way their coats were finished or how they held their knives when they were dining. These were the sorts she wanted in the hotel and to do that she needed to set the right tone.

  Both Margaret and Martin agreed that the kitchen needed to match their patrons’ growing expectations. It had to be bigger and better than anything they had known, as it would be the centre of all their operations within and beyond the hotel. And so it was. A huge spacious room with two long wide benches that ran along the whitewashed walls, where you could set up all sorts of dishes at different stages of preparation without worrying that someone might send the plates flying during serving time. The windows were square and wide and placed up high in the tall room, and when the cooking began in earnest each morning clouds of flour would float up into the shafts of light that slanted in from outside. There were two generous stoves and another section just for the fire so that there was little risk of running short of hot water during service. The kitchen also came with a separate pantry and a larder, both the size of the first bedroom the Gills had shared on George Street—where Mary Ann had been born. Once they had lit the huge kitchen fire a few times, the damp dried out of the upstairs rooms, which had stunk badly of old wet when they had first moved in. After a few more baking sessions, the upper floor seemed to lift with the sweet juices of baked ham as well as the sticky promise of Margaret’s much-loved pastries.

  The kitchen was the heart of the Gill’s Family Hotel. In fact, it was the centre of their entire lives. Often Margaret would get up first thing before the fire boy arrived and rub down the wood benches with walnut oil, while Martin liked to come in after his staff had finished for the day and spend the better part of an hour sharpening the carving knives and shelving the supplies. Margaret insisted on keeping all the trimmings in the new hotel within a certain range. The carpets and the curtains would be fine but not showy. The brass would be polished each day, twice, if there was an idle moment, and the wood panels around the bar and the dining room would be varnished at least once a week. Modest management was what Margaret was intent upon and it made her feel more in control of the grand mansion as well as the staff of sixteen she and her husband now employed. The only other indulgence Margaret was prepared to concede to her husband was something that they both felt certain would attract the right clientele. Running the advertisement down to the paper’s office on the morning before the opening of their new Pitt Street premises, fourteen-year-old Mary Ann had to agree: It was indeed a great luxury, particularly in summer, to have ‘a beautiful bath’ like the one which now adorned the second floor of Gill’s Family Hotel.

  For the adolescent girl, however, the best thing about her new abode was the fact that she had her own bedroom. It was still located next to the nursery but it had a door of its own. One bedroom window looked out onto the filthy Tank Stream on the western side of the building, but there was also a tall thin window that looked down the tail end of Pitt Street, out across the quay and over the harbour. Often, after Mary Ann had finis
hed her writing lessons for the day, she would sit in front of that window savouring the exhilarating snatch of freedom, hoping no one would find her.

  The window was her shimmering threshold. Directly below there was a line of cottages and office buildings that ran all the way down to the quay where she could just see the great expanse of glistening water and sometimes, early in the morning, also hear the chink of the masts. Here and there the horizon was punctuated with squat windmills, sometimes furiously spinning, other times listless in the still air. Mary Ann would watch the various carts and carriages pushing up and down Pitt Street as loose loud groups of women loitered about the gangs of men who slouched in the doorways, faces concealed by the broad brims of cabbage-tree hats. But it was the better-dressed folk, particularly the women, set up high in their phaetons and tilburies, who most captured Mary Ann’s attention.

  Tucked away in her third-floor bedroom watching everyday life from that tall, thin window, reminded Mary Ann of the times she had spent within her father’s confectionery stall at the Royal Vic watching the actors from her safe and invisible distance. Like then, she could see it all but she was not part of it. Sometimes she would catch herself leaning forward, as if she was on the brink of entering the scene. Other times, she realised she was talking aloud—caught in some imaginary conversation with one of the strangers on the street.

  A little time after her fifteenth birthday Mary Ann began to acquire a growing sense of curiosity about what it would be like to move around the town according to her own inclination and without any sort of permission. To be like the people she saw through her window. But how? Mary Ann’s life was insulated and defined by specific tasks and errands determined by her father according to her position within the family business. Recently, she had also heard her mother talk, more than once in fact, of putting her to work as a nurse for an elderly lady. If this happened Mary Ann knew there would be even more order and obligation. But home was no longer much respite now that her mother had given birth to yet another child, little Martin, who had been born in the first month of the year.

  Spun tight within this close domestic cocoon, Mary Ann came to savour the few tantalising moments she was able to snatch for herself. And that was how it was and how indeed it seemed that it might always be until one particularly sticky afternoon in the last week of summer in 1848, when a gentleman settler just off the Moreton Bay steamer arrived at her parents’ hotel, attracted, no doubt, by the promise of a soothing soak.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Decline and Fall

  There was a yellowness to the man’s eyes. Although he dressed with the right neckerchief, wore a well-tailored coat and carried himself like a gentleman, there was something in the lines on his 33-year-old face that spoke of sickness and disappointment. He could conceal his vulnerability with a certain turn of phrase, which sometimes made his brown eyes glint with wry amusement, but more often than not it depended on the audience.

  Others of his class were likely to overlook his deficiencies and cast forward to better times. They saw a man with a well-connected past and understood the need to keep his sort in position as a way of ensuring a stable future for their kind. But there were others coming up the ladder who smelt weakness and could barely contain the urge to attack. Out on their stations many of his sort had shown more compassion to the blacks than their own countrymen. That was probably the greatest insult of all. That and the fact that well-heeled settlers like himself had done everything they could to keep their grip on land grants, the justice system, in fact, the whole bloody colony.

  And so, most of the townies looked at men like James Butler Kinchela and saw the end of an era. They considered his sort as little more than relics who relied upon a set of increasingly implausible references to make up for a string of failed speculations that were longer, some said, than the southern road to Port Phillip. There was always a reason for these misfortunes. Some trick the land had played on them. A drought. A bad river crossing. Fires. The blacks. Or some blight that had ruined the stock. But the truth was—more often than not—it was the grog. Once it had been the only alternative to water, easier to find and more popular round the camp. They had all used it to assuage fear when they were out there the first couple of times, but it didn’t take long for it to become their consolation for every fear and failure and then, after a time, their only constant companion. Complexions ruddy, livers shot, hands unsteady, the grog had got many of his sort.

  The truth of it was that James Butler Kinchela, the gentleman settler of Moreton Bay, was not much of a hero. His liver was spent, his family were not as they once had been and nor, for that matter, was he. But for a fifteen-year-old girl, and one who had been watching life through her bedroom window, the well-turned, weather-beaten man with a nonchalant air was intriguing. He looked like he knew about life and even more importantly, for Mary Ann, about adventure.

  She watched him from just inside the kitchen. He was standing with his back against the bar resting one elbow on it. His hand was tucked into his kerseymere waistcoat and one of his riding boots was pushed up against the foot railing as he gazed out the window to where two men on fine geldings were making their way up Pitt Street. What was he thinking?, she wondered as he lifted the glass to his lips, then chucked back its contents with a swig before downing it on the bench. And then the gentleman settler turned his head and looked straight to where the young girl was standing in the gap of the half-opened door. ‘And what is your name?’ he called out, light and teasing, a slight lilt to his voice. Mary Ann was so shocked at being noticed, let alone addressed directly, that she darted behind the door and then bolted upstairs. Next minute she was back in her bedroom, fingers pressed against the windowpane, wondering what had just happened.

  Or should we say who had just happened? James Butler Kinchela was born in Dublin, around the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars, in one of the big houses on St Stephen’s Green. The very sort that Margaret had worked in and Martin Gill had stolen from. James had not lived there long. When he was still in lace tunics, Kinchela’s father, a man of the law known as the doctor, had moved the family back to his hometown of Kilkenny. There the family took up residence in a fine thatched house named Ormonde Hall, perched just under the shadow of the Duke’s great grey castle where they kept company with an extended family of millers and merchants.

  James was named after his great grandfather’s patron, the second Duke of Ormonde, a haughty-looking wigged and armoured Protestant who had been up to his eyeballs in Jacobean conspiracies when he became the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the early eighteenth century. A generation later, when the Protestants were securing their place in Ireland by imposing their ruthless penal code upon the Roman Catholics, another Duke of Ormonde intervened to change the fate of the Kinchelas. The family were old Irish and had been Catholic for centuries until they shifted alliances to suit the Duke in the mid-eighteenth century. There were still a few Roman Catholics in the family closet but what the Duke didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. ‘I’ll ask God to take care of my soul and not bother him about my land’, was the way converts like the Kinchelas responded to those who challenged them about their religious convictions. Whatever others might think, it had been the right choice for the family, for the Duke rewarded them by sending their second son, the bright one, to Kilkenny College and then, when he showed a talent for the law, on to Trinity. There he became part of a society of promising men and when he graduated Dr John acquired both a town house on the park and a wealthy wife named Elizabeth Thornton.

  The couple had a son together, who they named Lewis Chapelier. By the time their boy was in trousers, Elizabeth had died and John Kinchela married again. The doctor’s second wife, Anne Bourne, was all blonde ringlets and sweetness, and John Kinchela was devoted to her. She gave birth to their first child, John Junior, during the Napoleonic Wars, and Matilda the year that the British won. James came a year later and finally, several years after that, Mary was born. For a time the Kinchela family flour
ished on the fortune of the dead Elizabeth Thornton and when Anne’s two boys were both very young, Dr Kinchela was made mayor of Kilkenny, an event that was celebrated with a succession of banquets. Within a few years, however, the doctor had divested almost all of his first wife’s fortune upon friends and family. By then Lewis had been sent to Edinburgh to study medicine which was just as well, for the family situation was increasingly unstable. John Kinchela Senior was simply too kind and also hopelessly uncomfortable with his dead wife’s fortune. Whenever it was time to do the books, for example, Anne would find her husband fussing about, dashing his hands through his hair, claiming all was well before hastily handing out bank notes to the very next person who asked for them—and some who hadn’t.

  By the early 1820s things had got so grim that Anne told her husband he would have to petition the Duke for an appointment. It didn’t matter where, really, just as long as it would keep him from the debtor’s prison. It was during that dreadful year, while they waited upon the government’s charity, that the Kinchela family were compelled to open their home and witness their precious items being dragged into the town square and sold at public auction. So great was the shame that the doctor went to Dublin and didn’t come back until the business was done. Young John and James sulked about the house for a bit and then borrowed some horses and went calling. Anne took to the parlour with her two young daughters and refused to take visitors.

  When the Colonial Office finally sent news of an appointment, there was much relief but little excitement. The Kinchelas were to sail to the West Indies where the doctor had been commissioned ‘to inquire into the state of captured negroes’. To console the boys, who were now in their teens and particularly aggrieved by the family’s dwindling circumstances, Dr Kinchela promised the pair proper fittings with a London tailor. What with the collars and cuffs, buckskins and hessians, neckties and waistcoats, the pair ran up a pretty bill, but what was the doctor to do? In his youth, he had passed as a bit of a buck himself. It would have been wrong to deny his boys the same.