The dream was in place, the new life begun, and Mary's great good luck had persisted. In the gathering darkness she could only just make out the frosted top of the mountain.
'Thank you!' Mary whispered, clasping Ikey's Waterloo medal tightly to her breast.
Chapter Twenty-eight
It is one of the great paradoxes in human migration that new beginnings often take with them old and often undesirable social customs. Those fleeing affliction or a hierarchical system for a new and free environment soon develop tyrannies and pecking orders of their own. Though in a penal colony one might expect a clear distinction between the convict and the free, the dichotomies of class in Van Diemen's Land were far more complicated and carefully graded. The relationship Mary enjoyed with Mr Emmett was all the more remarkable for this.
The first two great class distinctions were, of course, the free and the prisoner populations. This was a divide so wide that it was almost impossible to leap, even in exceptional circumstances. Mary had never been inside Mr Emmett's home, nor had she been introduced to his wife, Lucy. Occasionally they would meet in the garden, but Mary would stand with her head bowed and hands clasped in respectful silence while the grand lady passed by.
Lucy Emmett's pretty daughter, Millicent, had once stopped to talk with Mary, who was pruning and shaping the standard rose she had given Mr Emmett for his daughter's tenth birthday.
'Why! That's my rose!' Millicent exclaimed. 'I had quite forgotten it. Will you shape it well and make it beautiful again?'
'Yes, Miss Millicent, it will be perfect for the summer to come. It be robust enough and not much neglected.'
'Good! It was a present from Papa and grown just for me by a drunken wretch in the Female Factory!'
'Is that what your papa told you?' Mary asked softly.
'No, Mama told me that! Papa said there's good in everyone. But Mama said the women in the Female Factory were too low to be included in everyone and were long past being good.' Millicent tilted her head to one side. 'I think there is, don't you?'
'Is what, Miss Millicent?'
'Good in everyone.'
Mary gave a wry laugh. 'I've known some what could be in doubt and they didn't all come from the Female Factory neither.'
'Millicent! How could you! Come along at once!' Lucy Emmett's cry of alarm made her daughter jump.
'Coming, Mama!' Millicent called back. She cast a look of apprehension at Mary and fled without saying another word.
Mary could hear Lucy Emmett's high-pitched chiding for several minutes afterwards. Some time later Mr Emmett's wife entered the garden and passed by where Mary was weeding. At her approach Mary rose from her haunches with her hands clasped and head bowed. Some paces from where she stood Lucy Emmett halted as if to admire a late-blooming rose.
'You will be sent away at once should you venture to talk to Miss Millicent again,' she hissed. She did not look directly at Mary and it was as though she were talking to the rose itself. Then she turned abruptly and left the garden.
Because Lucy Emmett's husband worked in the government, she was considered a 'true merino' by the free inhabitants of the colony – that is, they were among the first in point of social order. This circumstance was considered sufficient grounds for keeping aloof from the rest of the community. In fact it was considered degrading to associate with anyone who did not belong to her own milieu.
The government class were somewhat jeeringly known by the next order as the 'aristocracy'. This next, or second, order, more numerous and certainly wealthier and more influential in the colony, were the 'respectable' free inhabitants, the merchants, bankers, doctors, lawyers and clergymen who had no connection with the government above being required to pay its crippling taxes.
Below them came the free persons of low station, clerks and small tradesmen, butchers and bakers, who serviced the daily lives of the first-rate settlers. They had little chance of rising above their stations in life and were collectively possessed with an abiding anxiety that they might, through bankruptcy or some other misfortune, sink to the lowest but one level, that of the labouring class.
Below even the labourer was the emancipist, though this group was perhaps the most curious contradiction in the pecking order. Emancipists could, and often enough did, rise through the bottom ranks, past the labouring class and into the ranks of clerks and tradesmen.
The sons of emancipists, if educated in a profession and if they became immensely rich, could rise beyond even the third rank. Daughters had greater opportunities, if they were pretty and properly prepared. That is to say, if they attended the Polyglot Academy, where French, Italian and Spanish were taught by Ferrari's Comparative Method. They would also need to have been instructed by Monsieur Gilbert, a Professor of Dancing, before being considered sufficiently 'yeasted' to rise upwards.
No young woman, even if she was exceptionally beautiful and possessed the most elegant manners, could think to enter society without a comprehensive knowledge of the steps in all the new dances being practised in the salons of London and Paris.
Only then, and only if she should bring with her the added incentive of a great deal of money, was it possible to rise in due course to the ranks of a first rater. But even when the children of a successful emancipist achieved such Olympian heights, their flawed lineage remained and the whispers of the crinolined society matrons would continue for the next two generations.
The bottom station was, of course, the prisoner population and it included the ticket of leavers such as Mary. Between this class and all others, a strict line was drawn. In the presence of any free person in the community, prisoners were as if struck dumb. It was considered correct, even by the lowest of the free orders, to regard them as invisible, ghosts in canary-yellow jackets who laboured on the roads or at tasks beneath the dignity even of the labouring class. And, of course, if they were assigned as servants in a household, they were expected to exercise the minimum speech required to perform their daily duties.
Mr Emmett's courage and generosity of spirit can now be properly appreciated. He, a member of the first station, not only acknowledged the existence of Mary, a convict, but consistently helped her. Emmett was also something of a dreamer for supposing that Mary might be accepted by even the lowliest of government clerks had she taken up his offer to work in his department.
The marked contrast of Lucy Emmett's attitude towards Mary should not be drawn as an example of uncharitable behaviour. To speak to a prisoner, albeit a ticket of leaver, was beyond the imaginings of a pure merino woman, a nightmarish confrontation not to be contemplated even in the most unlikely social circumstances.
Thus, the likelihood of Mary securing a billet as a clerk in Hobart Town was very much in the order of impossible. Not only was she a woman, but such a position lay strictly within the precincts of the third class whereas she was condemned to work within the lowest of the low, the sixth class. It can only be supposed that, in bringing about Mary's appointment, Mr Emmett had favoured Peter Degraves with a government contract, or perhaps waived some building dispensation for the construction of his new brewery, or even invoked a Masonic rite in his position as Grand Master of Hobart's secret order of Free and Accepted Masons.
The gamble Peter Degraves took on Mary soon paid off. She was quick to learn, arrived early and worked late, and took no nonsense from the men, who eventually came to call her, with much admiration, Mother Mary of the Blessed Beads.
It was not only Mary's skill at bookkeeping that impressed her employers, but also her plain sense mixed with some imagination. Mary was soon aware that pilfering on a building site by the labourers was costing the owners a considerable amount each month, and that the men regarded this scam as their natural right. She requested an appointment with Peter Degraves at his office higher up the slopes of the mountain, where he and his brother-in-law owned the concession to cut the timber right up to the rocky outcrop known as the organ pipes.