The Soldier's Curse Read Online Free PDF

more boxes, so the female convicts might enjoy the experience without worsening their already degraded condition by bathing in plain sight.
    Mrs Shelborne and the doctor had also collaborated on another project.
    A Female Factory had been constructed earlier that year at Port Macquarie, intended as a place of both confinement and industry for the convict women. The major had informed the Colonial Secretary that he was now able to accommodate aroundfifty women, and asked for wool and carding supplies so that they might make themselves useful. The supplies had not been forthcoming, and neither had the women in any great number. So the inmates had been set to picking oakum – extracting fibres from hemp rope – and making nails for the settlement’s building projects from nail rod sent from England.
    But the settlement’s lack of women meant that there was demand for females in positions of domestic service – officers’ wives and the like would prefer to have somebody to help them with the daily necessities. So at Honora’s urging, the major had allowed some of the better-behaved women to take up posts in the homes of their free sisters.
    Those that remained, however, had to contend with the twin enemies of incarceration and boredom. They proved inept at extracting the oakum from the rope, and there were only so many nails a woman could make.
    Honora begged her husband’s permission to visit the women in the factory, and he allowed it as he allowed most things she asked, realising that she would get her way eventually so time might as well be saved through immediate acquiescence.
    Honora told the major after the visit that she was distressed to see these women sitting and doing nothing, without enough outdoor time or exercise, wasting away. One woman, she said, was looking deathly ill, and Gonville, who had visited with her, confirmed to the major that the confinement was doing the women no favours.
    Honora had timed her plea well – of those convicts who had managed to escape into the bush, a few had returned, reincarnated as bushrangers who had harried the settlement’s outposts, creeping in to steal food late at night, whereupon they had been recaptured. The Female Factory, she argued to her husband, might be better put to use as a place of incarceration for these men, who far outnumbered the handful of women who currently lived there at large expense.
    Wedged between Honora’s pleadings on behalf of her bonded counterparts, and Dr Gonville’s professional view as to the medical repercussions of such confinement, the major agreed to close thefactory, the remaining women to be found situations of employment with families of good character.
    Shortly afterwards, Monsarrat himself was called on to help Mrs Shelborne with another experiment.
    She came into the kitchen early one morning, dressed for hunting. Mrs Mulrooney, who had been preparing breakfast, jumped back from the stove. Monsarrat, on his accustomed morning visit, stood and bowed and moved into a corner.
    â€˜Good morning, Mrs Mulrooney,’ Mrs Shelborne said, smiling at the housekeeper. ‘I thought I would take breakfast in here this morning, as it’s on my way.’
    Mrs Mulrooney began efficiently assembling a table setting to go with the breakfast, inspecting each item more closely than usual in case it had decided to become blunt, dull or cracked overnight.
    Mrs Shelborne sat in the chair Monsarrat had just vacated. ‘Mr Monsarrat,’ she said. ‘Please, sit down.’
    Monsarrat was paralysed, both by the sound of the ‘Mr’ attached to his name, usually used by itself when uttered by the upper echelons, and by the offer to sit.
    â€˜Please,’ she said. ‘I have an enterprise in which I require your assistance, and I would rather not strain my neck looking up while we discuss it.’
    The kindness wasn’t lost on Monsarrat, who recovered some of his