The Convict's Daughter Read online

  The factory and ship bosses were only marginally better. Most were canny and knew how to smell opportunity quicker than a change coming through the Sydney Heads. Many had come in chains themselves and were usually smart enough to keep the younger men and the troublemakers tight. They were wont to make a bit of a show of reading the paper aloud over smoko. As if to themselves, but always within earshot, so that those who wanted to could linger in the corners, slouched over, looking away, but still able to hear what was going on. That was Sydney all over. It was a town built upon unspoken assumptions and tacit agreements. You never asked a man about his past and you used careful courtesies to navigate certain embarrassments.

  Across the road, a good husband would be recounting the key points of interest from the news-sheets to his wife over supper, and in the hours after serving and before it was time to retreat for the night the better house staff would pass on certain tidbits to the less learned staff. Meanwhile, men from the clubs and among the legal fraternity had the papers as well as a host of other official and less official sources at their fingertips. They were well placed to keep abreast of all the news—local and abroad. And so it was, that from washtub to horse trough, coffee house to tanning room, the colonists of Sydney and its surrounds came to learn about the extraordinary events of 1848. The same papers also contained dire warnings about the weather, how drought was drying up the best of the country blocks and more and more men were being forced into town rather than watch the last of their wretched stock die. Things were looking grim and some of the townies were also starting to sniff the dry dust coming in on the city winds.

  Not a good time for a local election, but what could you do? It was all set to start in a month or so, and, being only the second election in Sydney, those in possession of sufficient property would have another chance to elect a few of their own men to the Legislative Council of New South Wales. Few wanted the date to change now. Well, not the townies anyway. Bit by bit parliament was being righted, they reckoned, and if those intent upon changing things once and for all played their cards carefully, this particular election might well prove the very moment that the people, or at least those who could vote, finally wrestled power from the governor and his landed associates.

  But there was also some anxiety, for five years earlier the first elections had been spectacularly shambolic, with mobs to rival the current European madness ripping through the streets of Sydney with their own idiosyncratic expression of colonial violence. All down George Street and across Hyde Park, gangs armed with whaling harpoons, sabres and clasp knives had charged through the campaign tents, burning down the blue bunting for that native-born turnabout William Charles Wentworth, before tearing along the Rocks, where they clashed with crews wielding barrel staves and fence palings. Shops were looted and innocent civilians assaulted before the mounted police finally thundered in and read the Riot Act to a brawling mass of Cabbagers and ex-cons.

  Thereafter, voting had been suspended and the town engulfed in a spirit of drunken carousing and wanton destruction. This not-so-distant memory meant that there was a fair bit of excitement about the forthcoming political contest. A chance to do it better this time, some of the new chums said, and in a way that would prove that the colony was ready for further freedoms. Others shook their heads and said the election wasn’t worth it. But for the emancipists and the bounty migrants as well as any others who had been desperate enough to arrive in the colony with insufficient capital and connections, these elections felt like their first real chance to break the squatters’ hold. And so, among the shop folk and the new men of town, people were holding their breath and waiting hopefully.

  The whole mood seemed to see-saw, this way and that, with old settlers stomping about in a stew and firing off verbose epistles to the papers and other officials while smart and shabby newspaper editors alike pandered to the artisan and emancipist set by publishing droll sketches about the various candidates likely to take a crack at an elected seat. One jolly spark was sure that it would be a case of the ‘bland leading the bland’ if Wentworth and the old fusty doctor, William Bland, teamed up to run for the two coveted seats of Sydney. There was also a lot of talk about Wentworth’s policies, but no one was quite certain either way. Sure he was a native-born, but he seemed to have foolish ideas about a local aristocracy made rich on the toil of government men. For that to happen the colony, of course, would have to resume transportation.

  Never again, was the hiss that followed any rumours the Colonial Office was thinking about sending out convicts again. As long as there were men in chains on the town streets, the colony was bound in servitude and no one back home would take them seriously. The presence of ‘white slaves’ had been a stain upon them all and it wasn’t until the boats had finally stopped in 1840 that Sydney-siders had been able to hold up their heads. Not long after that they had also begun to sue for more of a say in local affairs. And there were now plenty of vigorous musings from those who called themselves radicals. Men like Captain John Lamb, for instance, who had been talking about running for one of the Sydney seats, and who had wild stuff to say about Paris. Some down the tail end of Hunter Street, where young Henry Parkes ran a toyshop, were also murmuring about a possible partnership with the great demagogue, Robert Lowe, who had already torn strips off a few governors since arriving in the late 1830s. Quite a few were also wondering what would happen if Lowe did lie down with Lamb.

  There were, in fact, a lot of mixed opinions about the curious albino lawyer Robert Lowe. Indeed, it was fair to say that with his splayed hips, white hair and shaded spectacles as well as that vicious wit he was by far the most contentious figure in the colony, which was something considering the numerous crackpots and conmen, imposters and improvisers who had made their way to New South Wales. No one could quite determine the nature of Robert Lowe and, as he confided to his imposing and athletic wife, Georgina, one morning, he preferred it that way. He wished to function as a law unto himself and this is precisely what he had done.

  Without remorse the brilliant whirligig had taken on the courts, the newspapers and even a few governors. Despite his original sympathy for the settler set, he quickly decided he must undo the ‘squattocracy’ and he set to fearlessly clashing blades with several of the wealthiest families. Among that set much had been muttered about the lawyer’s ‘low’ methods. But the same victories had also seen Robert Lowe crowned the People’s Idol by the likes of Henry Parkes and his friends.

  Throughout the colony, the lawyer was loved and loathed, feared and admired and no one was entirely sure if he would actually run to become an elected representative member for the Legislative Council. He had already served a term on the Council as the governor’s appointment, but when he bit the hand that fed him by destroying the governor’s name and then refusing to present anything by way of an olive branch it seemed unlikely that he would receive another appointment that way. Rumour had it that Parkes paid a visit to Lowe, and the great man had told the toyshop owner that he was considering his options. They would make an unlikely pair, most speculated. The angular and incisive intellect that was Robert Lowe and the thickheaded, rocking-horse vendor with a propensity for insolvency and Chartism. But Parkes was intent on forging an alliance. With his florid waistcoats and striped trousers, as well as the riding crop he insisted on carrying with him everywhere, Lowe was not only eccentric but also a highly lethal weathercock. He could heap lavish praise one minute and then, depending on his whims and fancies, execute an exquisite humiliation the next. ‘Better to have him with rather than agin’ you,’ Parkes confided to one of the newspaper men, who called at the toyshop to discuss the current political climate. ‘He is the only one who can stop the squatters,’ Parkes added with conviction, even though he still found himself quaking before the imperious intellect each time he was permitted to visit Lowe’s Macquarie Street chambers.

  Those who preferred their news more bloody, skipped the news of trembling European monarchs, country drought and local
elections and turned directly to the Law Intelligence pages, where they could feed upon a feast of local felonry. As well as the sordid details of James Thompson, who had bludgeoned a man behind the ears on his walk home through Hyde Park, there were reports about William Woods who had a crack at horse stealing, and Timothy Duffy who was up for two accounts of ‘attempting to murder Aborigines’. There was also the ‘quiet and industrious’ Henry Porter, who had shot a friend named Daniel Budge in both wrists after he learnt the devil had ill-used his daughter.

  There, among the colonial carnage of violence and vengeance was our Pitt Street hotelier, Martin Gill, indicted for ‘unlawfully, maliciously and feloniously’ shooting at James Butler Kinchela with the intention of murdering him. Gill was also called to answer a second charge of attempting to commit ‘grievous bodily harm’ against those who apprehended him at the racecourse. The Gill case was stirring up considerable excitement, not only in the coffee houses and city hotels but further afield in the Maitland and Bathurst districts and even as far away as Moreton Bay, where James Butler Kinchela was well known.

  Some papers expressed sympathy for the thwarted lovers. That irreverent publication, Bell’s Sporting Life, was clearly amused by the guileless Miss Gill and her runaway romancer. Others expressed their astonishment at the ‘very frantic state’ of Martin Gill on that fateful morning when he had arrived at the Homebush racecourse with murder set upon his grim countenance. Many were appalled by the gall of an upstart emancipist taking on a gentleman, but already the majority had sided with the unfortunate father—a man who had only done, they asserted with indignation, what was required of any red-blooded fellow facing familial indignity. In this day and age, they fumed, fathers deserved to have their feelings and their property protected by the courts, whoever they were and wherever they came from, particularly if the offending party was a gentleman who should have known better.

  No lesser gentleman than the current Attorney General, John Hubert Plunkett, was representing the Crown in this case against Martin Gill, and to counter this threat, the ambitious hotelier procured none other than the Great Gyrator, Robert Lowe, to defend him. The white-haired toff was at the peak of his game, Gill knew that much, and commanding a pretty fee thanks to his popularity and the promise of the election close at hand. But Martin Gill knew that if anyone could get him off, it would be Robert Lowe.

  Gill certainly needed assistance, especially if word got out about his previous preference for resolving differences with his fists, or a crowbar as had been the case a few years earlier when he last stood before the criminal court charged with a serious felony. Back then he had got off due to a lack of witnesses, but this time the evidence was much more compelling. There had been many people at Cutt’s Hotel that morning and the Commissioner, Graham Hunter, had made the effort to send both pistols to a blacksmith to confirm that shots had been fired. The consequences of a conviction for Gill would be considerable, and with his background he faced not only the prospect of a stint in a local cell but perhaps even a term in one of the worst gaols in the colony, where it was rumoured men were eaten by the blacks or otherwise left to starve. It could have been worse, too. If he had done what he meant to do, Martin Gill would have ended up swinging in the breeze on Woolloomooloo Hill, with his wife and children watching as his corpse danced at the end of a hangman’s rope.

  Margaret dealt with the vexing circumstances in a spirit of irritated compliance. It was enough to be keeping an eye on a newborn and his wet nurse, let alone her disobedient daughter. Now she also had that matter of her husband’s criminal charges to consider. She was, in truth, furious beyond words, but Gill didn’t particularly care. He had a feeling—what with the election and the mood currently in favour of middling men of hard-earned respectability—that things would go his way. More and more the old set were on the nose and popular sentiment was with the enterprising middleclass and those intent upon improvement. He could feel it, whenever he made his way about town. In addition to that, most of the men on the jury were fathers like himself. There was even a good chance that he would know a few of them. No one wanted their daughters running around thinking they could do whatever they liked.

  Lowe suspected the same. Having finally relented to Parkes’ supplications and consented to run for one of the elected Sydney seats, Lowe quickly determined that the story of a father wronged would hold just the right appeal for those members of the voting public he most needed to woo. Given the pastoral activities of the defendant, this case could also be useful in his tug of war with the settlers and their upstart sons. So Lowe was relishing the opportunity for yet another stoush, particularly when he realised he would be able to fight this one out not only in the courts but also at the polling booth.

  He needed to make quick work of defending Gill if he was to have a crack at prosecuting Kinchela, Lowe decided. He needed the first case finalised so he could ensure that the much more interesting abduction trial coincided with his election run. If he got it right, Lowe smiled with satisfaction, he could be everywhere. In the evening he would entertain audiences in the city theatres as he expounded upon the abundant evils of the squatters, and during the day the lithe and limber legal wit would be able to regale the court with the wily antics of a certain so-called gentleman, who seemed to think he was fit to take whatever he wanted whenever he liked. It wouldn’t take much to ensure that both performances found their way into the papers, Lowe reckoned, and before long he would be lionised as the true defender of the public good. Or so he hoped. Much as Lowe held a certain disdain for the middling men of the colony, he shared with them a loathing for men like Kinchela. Those well-to-do squatters and settlers reminded him of boys from his school days who had considered it their right to menace and mock anyone they considered sufficiently feeble. They had certainly subjected him to diligent and daily persecution.

  And so the Modern Gloucester, as he was known in some circles, pushed on towards his prize, all the while delighting in what appeared to be a series of coincidences that gave him every confidence that providence was on his side. Lowe took pains to prepare his defence carefully and was pleased when he arrived in court with Martin Gill, who was reassured that the men in the jury were ‘his sorts’. ‘Enough said,’ Lowe said, brushing his client’s confidences aside and pretending not to understand. But he could see that circumstances were lining up for him.

  Lowe was deterred only by the fact that the prosecution’s key witness, the blackguard in question, appeared to have disappeared from the face of the earth. The police had, in fact, done the rounds of Kinchela’s favourite haunts, but it was not until Sydney’s beleaguered Police Magistrate, Captain Joseph Long Innes, went out to the home of Dr Kinchela’s widow in Liverpool, that anyone laid eyes on Kinchela for the first time in over a fortnight. Innes saw a man much changed. Kinchela’s usual affable disposition had been replaced with a truculent sullenness. He lurked in his mother’s garden and refused point blank to come to court when Innes asked him to do so. It wasn’t until Lowe’s assistant Bob Nichols called by a few days later that Kinchela finally agreed to do the right thing. He felt he could speak straight with the native-born lawyer, even if he was working for Lowe in this instance. Kinchela had never wanted Gill charged in the first place, he explained, and was done with it all. He began to realise, however, that as things stood he would not be free of the matter until it was sorted. So yes, he finally reassured Nichols, he would go to court, and no, he would not lay a trap for Gill.

  ‘Watch out there, though, James,’ Nichols warned Kinchela once he had the gentleman’s agreement on the matter. ‘Word is that once Gill is free he plans to come after you, and that he has paid Lowe to lead the attack.’ Kinchela shrugged, but he was a little taken aback. He had hoped that his absence would show the girl’s father that he meant no ill will. He was beginning to sense, however, that there might be no limit to the man’s vengeance. The whole thing was completely out of proportion with what had in fact been a rather tentative romance.
He hadn’t even kissed the girl, for pity’s sake. Such an interlude was common enough at home and should have been treated with even more lightness here. What a folly, Kinchela thought. He desperately wanted to head back to Hawkwood and get out and about on his prize stepper so he could forget about it all. That would fix everything, he mused, but as things were shaping up he could see that he would have to face the matter. Still, he knew his mind. He would not be part of that man’s conviction, and he kept true to this even when he finally stood in the infernal witness box, answering a volley of impudent questions with a quite deliberate, even taciturn, indifference.

  Lowe’s court performance was an exercise in political persuasion which Kinchela watched, gritting his teeth and loathing the wily cleverness of the man even as he admired his skill. Lowe coaxed and petted the jury of shopkeepers and middling property owners with such earnest respect that none but his own wife would have detected his veiled contempt. And then, when Lowe called the men of real position, such as Kinchela, the portly Graham Hunter and Jim Davidson, who was clearly put out by the proceedings, Lowe was sly and condescending. The jury lapped this up as if they themselves had inflicted the slights and insults upon these men.

  William Cutt, the Scotsman who ran the inn out at Homebush, was called to the box and stood firm in his boots as he answered both lawyers with an air of irritability. ‘Of course Kinchela was a regular customer,’ he replied tetchily. ‘Never once had he had any problems with the esteemed esquire, little trouble at all, in fact, at his establishment,’ if anyone wanted to know. ‘He had no business to know why Kinchela was there that morning, nor was he in the habit of prying upon his guests.’ Although he had a mind to suspect it ‘might be to attend the races,’ he finished, provoking a titter of laughter from those in the upstairs gallery of the court. He had ‘never seen Miss Gill before’. He had ‘heard, though, that she was something of a wee thing, even if she hadn’t yet learnt it was her duty to do what her father bid,’ to which there was another flurry of muted laughter from upstairs. ‘I did see Mr Gill that morning but I could not say for certain if the pistols were fired. I heard a crack of something, but while I did see some powder smoke the air for a bit, it is hard to say.’