Mrs. M

By Luke Slattery

From one of Australia's foremost journalists, Luke Slattery, comes a rich, intense novel of desire and dashed dreams, and one passionate, unforgettable woman - Elizabeth Macquarie. 'A richly evocative piece of historical fiction...beautifully written.' Good Weekend

Elizabeth Macquarie, widow of the disgraced former Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, is in mourning - not only for her husband, but the loss of their shared dream to transform the penal colony into a bright new world. Over the course of one long sleepless night on the windswept isle of Mull, she remembers her life in that wild and strange country; a revolution of ideas as dramatic as any in history; and her dangerous alliance with the brilliant, mercurial Francis Greenway, the colony's maverick architect.

A stirring, provocative and thrilling novel of passion, ideas, reforming zeal and desire.

'Moving, intricate novel ... Every love story has at its heart a vision of inherent human worth in the beloved; Slattery's achievement is to render, subtly and powerfully both a human love story, and a love story to the nation.' Anna Funder, author of All That I Am

'A remarkable early 19th century heroine comes alive for us in this story: we share Mrs M.'s thoughts and feelings in almost uncanny fashion. Luke Slattery's debut sets new standards for the Australian historical novel.' Nicolas Rothwell

'A richly evocative piece of historical fiction...beautifully written.' Good Weekend

'It is, at its core, the story of Slattery's most extraordinary creation: Mrs M, whose real-world counterpart was the wife of Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of the colony of New South Wales (1810-21). ... There is a kind of clarion certainty to her ... I think readers will be swept up by this creation. The narrative would grab me with moments of exquisite cadence and perfect emotional truth ... Told in Elizabeth's voice, and seen through her eyes, the sensuous descriptions of her Scotland and her Sydney - as well as her own inner world - rise off the page with a poet's perfect pitch.' The Australian

'Saul Bellow says somewhere that in fiction sentences should be 'charged' - something should quietly beat through them. When one begins reading this is what you should listen for - imaginative confidence, a sense of sureness. This applies to historical fiction as much as any other. You don't ask, 'Is this true to history?' You ask 'Is this true to itself?' Luke Slattery's Mrs M is imaginatively true from beginning to end.' Barry Oakley

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780732271817

Luke Slattery

Luke Slattery is a Sydney-based journalist, editor and columnist whose work appears in The Australian, The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review. Internationally he has been published at The New Yorker online, the LA Times, the International Herald Tribune, the UK Spectator, and the US Chronicle of Higher Education. Mrs M is his fifth book, and his first novel.  

Book preview

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I paid the boatman with a bag of fresh cherries this morning. I picked them myself from the sloping orchard beside Loch Bà. I need not give at all. He knows. Knows that I am married — was married — to Macquarie of Mull; that since his death last year there has been nothing from the crofters, not that there is ever very much.

The English butler left on Boxing Day with a tight smile and a portmanteau of suspicious heft and now there is just me and the young footman. The rascal drinks away every spare shilling and returns with an awful clatter each night to the cold house at Gruline lying deep in the shadow of Ben More. I am very near done with him.

The island of Mull is large and muscular, not entirely beautiful, though not easily forgotten, and the islanders clannishly tight when they are not at one another’s throats. They have all heard of our journey to Sydney Cove, so full of promise, and the calamity — at the very least the indignity — suffered there. They shook their heads at the journey out; doubtless they shook them again at news of our return and our ruin. They must think me cursed.

And yet I am born too high for their sympathy and their eyes cannot meet mine for long. The women turn away, or lower their gaze, as if I have suddenly become disfigured, which manifestly I have not because the men — the married men mostly — offer a dark, direct look: testing and very bold.

Not the boatman, who is to row me the short distance across the Sound to the little island of Ulva, my husband’s birthplace. He is at peace with whatever it is that I am, or have done, or have endured. He takes the milk-white cotton satchel plumped with cherries — a few crimson stains mark the underside where the split and wounded fruit have pressed. Stepping stooped and splay-legged to the head of the rocking rowboat, he tucks it under the gunwale and returns for me. Taking my hand, he leads me to the varnished bench opposite his own. He bends to take the oars, straightens as he pulls.

‘Apologies,’ I am about to say. ‘There is no coin about the house.’ But the words dissolve under his mild gaze.

Instead it is the boatman who speaks: ‘It’d be two hundred yards across. Not far enough from one shore to the other to raise a sweat, even on the warmest days.’

A crumpled grin spreads across his unshaven outdoor face as he tugs on the oars. ‘If I’m delayed for any reason — the nets, the crab pots, visitors to the boathouse — you need only whistle for Ben and he’ll take you on his back,’ he says. The smile broadens.

‘I would think the old labrador might take some convincing,’ I return. ‘He enjoys the sun — when there is sun.’

‘Aye, he does.’

A glass of port wine with this man at the Ulva boathouse, a wedge of cheddar shared between us, a few slices of warm bread, and these splendid cherries taken into the mouth one by one — the unyielding fruit tasteless before the crack of the flesh and the burst of juice. What bright conversation there would be!

‘I am grateful,’ I offer. ‘I will be finished by mid-afternoon.’

A final heave and we nudge the Ulva pier with a sweet hollow knock, quite musical. He tethers the boat to the bollard. Again, he takes my hand in his.

I join him on the pier. He pulls a weathered old parasol from beneath his arm, gives it a shake and opens it for me as we walk past the crab pots and the mounds of seaweed drying in the sun.

‘The kelp burning season,’ he says apologetically. ‘The wife,’ he shoots a glance at the boathouse to the right on the low rise, ‘she calls it the scent of summer.’

‘You must,’ I say firmly, ‘return the sunshade to her.’ I extract a light bonnet from my pocket.

‘It is kind of you ma’am. She will need it for the journey.’

‘What journey?’

‘No matter,’ he says and looks away.

The boatman’s hair is drawn back from his broad brow and worn at an unfashionable length. Age has him in its grasp. And yet the grey — a full head of it — is no dull absence of colour but a bright weave of charcoal, steel and mica. He wears a moss-coloured waistcoat and the billowing sleeves of his once-white shirt are long, unbuttoned, a little frayed at the cuffs.

We stroll towards a fork in the path. ‘You still know the island well enough for this?’ he inquires as we pause beside the track to Ormaig. ‘Alone, I mean.’

‘Yes, of course. I have walked this path with Macquarie, and walked it alone. Do you not recall? I plan to walk it every summer until age renders me lame, halt or blind. Or until the house is sold.’

‘Surely it will not come to that.’

‘Already I have several bidders, or so the attorney from Oban tells me. He suggests I slice the Macquarie estate into portions, as if it were a wedding cake, and sell it — well, this is how it seems to me — for little more than such a cake would fetch at market.’

The sea breeze stirs. I reach for my bonnet.

‘Then he is not acting in your interests,’ he says, with a rasping rub of the chin. ‘They’d be hoping you’ll walk away. Start again on the mainland somewhere.’

‘And they expect me to leave with little more than my sorrows?’

‘It is enough that . . .’ He pauses. ‘Well, it angers me. You know a commission will come his way.’

‘Most likely. He is of the new dispensation. A speculator.’

‘The age,’ he mutters. ‘Surely it is out of kilter.’

As I take my leave a dark inward look steals across his agreeable face. There is something he knows, or thinks he knows, about what is, or is to come. And yet he will not say.

His lips part, though nothing but a dull muffled sound, such as a mute might make, issues from them. I plead with my eyes but he lowers his, turns and walks away. I watch his heavy, even tread as he returns to the boathouse with his gift of cherries freshly picked.

CHAPTER TWO

The path through the heart of the island is firm and dry and the weather is fine. I tramp through a cool beech forest in full leaf, the treetops teased by a mild wind driving a few dry white clouds. I take my time.

Columns of sunlight plunge through the tree canopy, all apple green, dappling the grass below. The glistening shoots grow tall in the warming earth. Through them spreads a lovely filigree of purple wildflower.

At this time of year Nature takes as much pleasure in her own abundant beauty as she gives to her admirers. She is Flora, gorgeously attired, triumphant — Queen for a time and Queen for all time.

A thin brook trickles into a shaded pond lacquered at its rim with a black stillness. On that other island, so very far away, the skies are home to quarrelsome birds that screech and squawk, and others that roar with a laughter that would be truly diabolical if it were not so comical. Here the birds circling above flute sweetly. I have not heard true birdsong in a long time.

Higher up the forest gives way to a bare, almost ashen landscape of basalt and mountain heather. The path here twists to face the southwest and from its summit a view unfolds of a cold ocean very like that deep celestial blue of early evening. To the west lies a flotilla of islets scattered like chipped shillings: Little Colonsay, Inch Kenneth, and Staffa with its organ pipes of stone. I see how patches of ocean are scuffed by the breeze. The waves battering the rocks are a broiling acid green.

On the way to the village of Ormaig below, I pause to take in the sight of the sea reaching into lochs, sounds, narrows, channels and, finally, little rills veining their way across the marshes. Quite suddenly I am struck, swept up. Transported.

Here at the fringe of the island, with a fine view across Loch na Keal towards the cliffs of Ardmeanach, I could so easily be standing at the mouth of that grand Antipodean harbour flowing between one mighty buttress of sandstone and another, barely a mile apart. There is the same broad sweep of seawall, a land edge that will not surrender easily to the elements but rather rises proud and strong against them. The same pure lonely air.

Why has it never registered before, this echo of one world in another so far away? But I see it now. See it clearly.

I look about me for a place to rest. The stone wall beside the path is low enough to serve as a seat. Removing my bonnet, I turn towards the sun. I close my eyes.

I am standing on a bare headland in the New World gazing at a rippling sheet of sunlit sea. A man stands further out, towards the weathered ledge. He keeps a spyglass fixed to his eye. ‘It is the French,’ he says, lowering the instrument and turning to me excitably. ‘See how quickly they sweep in.’ The wind tugs at his shirt. He pays it no heed . . .

The same man stands before me, visible yet dimly so in the gloom. It is wet. Cold. We are alone. He offers me his forearm. I take it, rolling the sleeve above the elbow, running my fingers over a red welt — serpentine, meandering — branded on the pale, tender underside . . .

The taste of sea salt powdered on skin . . .

I walk proudly arm in arm with my ageing husband, a tall man, though a little stooped with care, towards a meeting of natives. The air buckles with their chant. I comprehend nothing of its meaning. But this I do know: it is to two of these natives — one elderly and bearded, the other known to me by the plaited band about his crown — that I owe my life . . .

I exchange pleasantries beneath a blazing sun with a small athletic Englishman whom I know to be an assassin . . .

There is a subtle shift in the wind direction, and a quickening. The slight chill stirs me from my memories. How long have I been here, yet not here at all? An hour, I would guess. My left index figure has reached for my upper lip, pressing gently there as if sealing in a secret. I am not ready, I decide, for Ormaig. Now is not the time. So I raise myself from the stone wall, smooth my dress, and retrace my steps.

The boatman is waiting for me. He stands hinged forward from the waist, one foot planted on the bench beside a rough outdoor table of broad planks painted a cheering blue. In his right hand, forearm across thigh, he holds a pipe; in his left a wad of tobacco, which he rolls gently in his palm. He, too, is lost in thought.

‘I see you have been busy?’ I inquire as I draw near.

‘You mean the bench,’ he brightens. ‘Yes, a few months ago with the first true signs of spring.’

There is time then for a cup of tea at the blue bench, even if the boatman’s society is not as lively as I had hoped. Instead it is taken in companionable silence. Between drinking his tea and drawing on his pipe, he casts anxious looks towards the boathouse on the rise. I catch sight of a nimbus of blonde hair filling the kitchen window, spinning away sharply from my gaze.

How jealously his wife looks on.

* * *

When I step onto the rickety pier on the Mull side of the narrow Sound the boatman returns the milk-white satchel with the crimson stains.

I take the bag by the shoulder strap and, unable to resist the temptation, steal a look inside.

Yes, it is there!

The weight of the letter in its envelope is imperceptible, and yet I sense it as if it were a clay tablet or missive in stone.

‘It is kind of you to return the bag,’ I say, masking my anticipation with a bland courtesy. ‘Of course — the stains. A little unseemly.’

‘Not permanent,’ he says with a deepening of those pleasing creases beside the mouth — a little like brackets — that a lean man will likely acquire with age. ‘Nothing that can’t be removed with a good scrubbing. And a little time.’

He is once again my old friend. But a friend with a secret. In this he is, I decide, much like me.

He takes his seat, picks up the oars, and gives a most solemn nod of farewell; quite unnecessary in the circumstances. Surely he understands that I mean to return the next fine summer day. With the weight of only one the boat lurches with his first heave of the oars. They dig into the water, churn and stir. He is enjoying his power now; I am enjoying it, too.

I wave and loop the bag over my shoulder.

‘We will see one another again soon,’ I call as he glides across the narrows.

The boatman is silent for a few strokes and his answer, when at last it comes, is lost on the breeze.

He is Charon and he ferries me between the lands of the living and the dead. How handy would a coin have been, for that was Charon’s customary payment. I shall return to him. I shall rejoin the living.

The black mare I have named Gooseberry after a fondly remembered notable of Sydney Cove stands contented beneath the thin shade of a willow, her fine head buried in a stand of long grass. As I approach she raises it, shakes her mane, stamps and snorts approvingly. Before mounting — they will think me wild and headstrong to ride astride her — I take the envelope from the bag. The word Elizabeth has been written in his distinctive hand, a lavish scroll beneath it.

CHAPTER THREE

There is such a thing as fine summer weather in these parts, though rarely does it last more than a fragment of any day. A mild dawn will give way to rain by mid-afternoon; a clear afternoon will succumb to storm by sunset. Today, by some providential magic, the weather has been golden from dawn to dusk.

I had laid aside my widow’s garb this morning when I saw the sun and felt a little of its heat. Perhaps it was an error to step out in a sky-blue cotton dress over a pair of stout brown shoes. It will have been noticed, this want of plainness. But I felt drawn, summoned — stirred — by the warmth. And how long must this severity last? I was not made for pilgrim dress.

Now, with a twilight sky clotted by cloud and a sliver of moon hanging askew above Ben More, it is very gloomy in this house. I light the lamps and a candelabrum, of which there is one fewer since the departure of the English butler. And while there is no human warmth but mine within these walls, the hearths and the kitchen stove, at least, throw out a plush heat.

The footman is more like an errant son than a domestic; I never see him in the evenings. He returns between midnight and dawn, sleeps in and wears a complexion of parchment until mid-afternoon, when he takes his first restorative dram. It’s only then that the colour returns to his cheeks. His greedy nights steal all the goodness from his days. But if I were to assert what is left of my authority over him I would, I fear, have no footman at all.

The woods wrap around one corner of the house, and it is here, in my bedchamber, that I have my walnut bureau. I call it mine, though it was Lachlan’s a year ago. By day the window frames a view of a glorious green world: moss carpeting rock and trunk below, an arabesque of green leaf spreading and deepening above, and the air between as still and syrupy as a fishbowl.

Some of the trees have been allowed to grow too close to the house and on nights like this, with a north wind stirring the forest, branches scrape and tap their bony fingers on the windows as though soliciting entry.

My poor husband lies in the cold earth sheltered by a plain tomb of rosy sandstone — not Sydney stone but a good likeness of it — and a roof of slate quarried from Belnahua across the Firth of Lorn. I had work begin on the mausoleum as soon as I could muster the funds. Plans for this simple structure — in appearance much like a poor man’s Gothic chapel — were delivered to me within the month. Stone was quarried, cut and dressed; labour hired; and the forest cleared at a place close enough to serve as a memorial, though not too close. The winter here is bleak enough. Work on the Macquarie mausoleum stalled in the hard months, resumed in spring, and hastens towards completion beneath this summer sky.

If he had died suddenly in the colony from disease or misadventure it was his wish that his body be packed in salt and returned to Mull for a burial such as this. And if not his body he requested that his heart be returned in its stead — a grim task that would have fallen to William Redfern, the colony’s surgeon. In time I will lie here too, beside him, though I never really understood the fierceness of his feeling for this place above all others. His heart was always returning. My own heart, well, it has a tendency to wander.

On the journey out to Sydney, we lost a deckhand of just eighteen years from Cork. Young Benjamin Quinn plunged from the topsail and, cracking his skull, was dead in an instant. No stone mausoleum; we buried him at sea. A mute uncomplaining splash and his stiff corpse was plucked by the swell.

A dreadful thing an ocean burial. To end one’s life as a ragged fish-pecked skeleton shifting indolently this way and that on the ocean floor. To be denied a simple plot and a bare headstone; a place to which some loved one, or even a childhood friend, might come with a poesy, or a few jewelled tears, and the benediction of kindly words. To not have such a place in death, a resting place, a marker to speak, however perfunctorily, to future generations — well, it’s to have never lived.

Every few weeks a life was taken by typhus or dysentery or the meanness of the diet. Seven months at sea, three thousand leagues, thirty souls lost. At least Benjamin Quinn was dispatched to the next world with a tawdry ceremony; many a dead convict was discarded late at night with only a cold moon as witness.

By the time we appeared off the Heads with our colours raised the ship was pestilential. Later I would learn that the citizens of Port Jackson claimed to have caught our stench on the breeze that swept us in. They pressed their cotton kerchiefs, or folded napkins, over their noses. And they gagged and they laughed at the unfortunates rolling and pitching in their own filth. They were not to know that the source of their mirth was the transport that would bring their new governor. ‘The Father of Australia’ they call him now.

I gather in these spinning thoughts. Each night this past week I have dressed for bed, thrown a shawl over my nightdress, and sat with pen and ink by my side, staring vacantly at a book of smooth vanilla-coloured octavo sheets as one stares into a mirror.

In a week’s time the priest will need the words for the inscription on the rose granite panel rising some six feet from the ground to the lintel. ‘Just try to distil the essence of the man,’ he tells me, ‘and I will turn the phrases.’

No. The phrases will be mine. I will not have some clerical unguent poured upon them.

I live with this story — have lived it. I must now tell it and in the telling hope to find some peace, or at least a formula for it. So I will stand strong, as formidable as the cliffs of Ardmeanach or South Head, against the gusts of memory. I will let them come.

My hope is that when the storm is spent, the right words for Macquarie will be there, the fine public words, lying like cherries on the grass after a gale: precious, if a little imperfect. And true — as he was.

CHAPTER FOUR

By birth I am a Campbell, a Hebridean at heart. I grew straight and tall from my tenth year and by my thirteenth had reared to five foot eight — a giantess for my age. I gained another two inches before the age of fifteen and then my growing ceased. All these years later I remain that proximate height: tall, for a woman, or statuesque, as I’m often called. A mystery, this precocious spurt of growth, like a brass tap turned on full in one solid wrench of the wrist and closed off again just as swiftly.

And when I began to flower again it took another form. The boyish girl had reached the verge of womanhood and, with one leap, vaulted right across. I could intuit from my side of a closed door when the conversation between adults had turned to the subject of my welfare. The two words I would most often catch from my listening place — words uttered always in a brittle tone — were developing and maturing.

At school in London I won the respect of my classmates, though not, I think, their affection. By temperament I was singular, held in and set apart. I craved the affection of my instructors and spent hours in the company of the French mistress, Miss Fullerton, at her small, cluttered apartment in Marylebone. She had lived in France — precisely why, with whom, or in what circumstances she never cared to divulge — and seemed greatly affected by that nation’s tumult. She had seen, she said, the promise of the revolution fade into a cavalcade of death. She stressed, blinking as she told the tale, that she had really seen it. In consequence she was, I believe, as alone as I was in London: to both of us, in different ways, a foreign city.

She had a long face and a prominent yet finely modelled nose; a handsome rather than a pretty woman, with large restless hazel eyes. We would take tea in her drawing room before a window overlooking a green and leafy — almost rural — park. Gazing over the treetops and, beyond them, the roofs and chimney pots, we would drift into our private thoughts. When the silence was broken, we would converse in French. I was, in truth, more audience than companion. I was compelled to train my ear to the fluvial subtleties of French — a skill that has served me well on my journeying.

Airds, the Campbell estate on the mainland at Appin, sprawled from a two-storey temple front with Grecian pilasters. As the youngest of five children, I was oftentimes little more than an extra serving girl in that house. My three sisters married young and bred tirelessly. On their visits home with their broods I fell into the role of maid to mistresses who were my own flesh and blood. I believe I developed, at an early age, a powerful instinct towards flight.

On school holidays at Airds I would flee the stir of society whenever I could. I was very much alone. But I was never lonely — never that. I managed with a degree of native guile — a good Scottish trait — to orchestrate my absences so that they were noticed only when I had been a long time gone. I was forever tramping the high ground that hemmed the estate on three sides or combing the shore of Loch Laich when Connor, the cook’s boy, was sent to reel me in, cupping his hands and calling in his clear silvery tones, ‘Liiii-zzeeee!’

In those years I would ruin a pair of boots in a summer. But my pretty dress shoes I would outgrow barely worn at all.

My father, John, tall and thin, wealthy yet frugal, was a somewhat rigid man who on all subjects held the opinions of others. ‘The child is destined for the Edinburgh Circus,’ he remarked more than once to visitors drowsy with cake and biscuits. ‘A proper monkey. She vanishes before one’s eyes, materialises whenever food is set upon the table, and disappears along with the plates.’

I had a favourite place — what solitary child doesn’t. It was a perfect little stone bridge thrown over a rill. In my wild imagination I gave it a Roman provenance — across the stone bridge tramped a legion bristling with standards and spears. And when I was told that no Roman legion ever came this way my fancy simply altered course. Over the bridge, in a procession of images possessing the vividness of memory, came knights in shining armour, riding richly caparisoned horses bound for a tourney.

The lichen-covered stones of various sizes were wedged haphazardly together and the masonry was so touchable, so varicoloured — almost alive — that the feel and scuff of it on my young palms has never left me. In winter the old arch was powdered with snow; flowers carpeted it in spring; drying weeds by late summer; fallen leaves in smoky autumn. Barely wide enough for a traveller and a dray to cross, and then only at their peril, it was rarely used.

From my earliest years I would spend lazy hours there in the gentle months, planted on the arch, legs dangling in the air as the glassy stream slid below, feeling as if I