The Story

Based on true events, In the Company of Madness is a fast paced novel set in Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s. Crime and punishment define the lives of soldier John Cuthbertson, prisoner Alexander Pearce and priest Phillip Conolly. By fate, choice or circumstance these three men, born 18 miles apart, are transported to Van Diemen’s Land where they act as captor, convict and confessor to one another. Each of them attempts to carve out lives that make their arduous journeys to Australia worthwhile. Alas, the New World looks remarkably like the old one, and in the process of seeking promotion, penitence and peace, they must confront the forces that have brought them together, and yet set them so far apart.

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PEARCE

Hobart-town, 1820 A.D.

Alexander Pearce has five sisters. He figures their faces like oval plates of pipeclay with dull impressions for eyes and pallid mouths. He remembers the gutter where they stood in a line, waiting to be rid of their only brother – a cobbled drain decorated with the slag of butcher’s offal and beaded with puddles of brown water. The tallest stood in the middle like a cold wax candle. He knew then, as he stepped free of the county gaol in Monaghan, their hollow faces would linger with him – it was the weird assortment of their heights and their drawn, colourless cheeks and the absence of his mother, the shortest of his family’s women. The dank smell of butcher’s offal tied the memory together. He remembers them this way, even now.

Alexander remembers when his youngest sister was born. He was eight or nine then. It was a terrible year, and he would rather not remember it, but he cannot avoid the vivid uninvited sight of a baby’s purple head sticking out his mother’s gowl which brings it all back. He sees his mam’s narrow eyes steamy with tears; his father’s dark brooding face and reticent arms straight against his sides. His father was seldom home in the light those days and only returned when the sun was down. He smelled of soil and smoke and gunpowder, and sometimes all three things at once, which had the effect of green dung on the nostrils. Alexander knew what powder smelled liked at that age because Paddy O’Neil’s father had a cache of it at their farm. Paddy once shoved his hand inside and pulled out a fistful of black grains which sieved between his fingers like flour. Alexander thinks if there is an age where it is a crime to know what gunpowder is, eight or nine might be it.

His father’s caustic face was often, late at night, streaked with broken cakes of mud. He would check his face in a piece of glass and take care to scrub it clean. This happened more than once which made Alexander believe his father had dirtied his face on purpose.

When he learned what his father was doing, his father brought him into it. It was as though, once he knew, he could not carry on being a child anymore. Alexander wishes now his father hadn’t. He might have become a different person.

He was given errands, which excited him as a boy. He had never worked before, except to watch his father’s sheep. He had often wondered if he would ever be anything more than a shepherd’s boy, and when his father had given him work he thought it was his famous day. His mother, Bríd, even kissed him on the forehead and called him her little man. It is something Alexander has never forgotten.

It was his job to travel from place to place collecting pieces of iron. His father stressed the importance of the errand. He told him a child would not be suspected walking from home-fire to home-fire, bothy to bothy, where smithies were hidden and strange pieces of curved iron cooked and cooled. He was given a few pieces at each place in little black bags with draw-strings pulled tight. Sometimes the women gave him oatcakes and pieces of fish in cold clay dishes, but the men were awfully serious when handing across the bags.

Those days taught Alexander the fear of the quiet country. As a little boy he had thought any place touched by sunlight a good place. Now he learned that day might be as menacing as the night. He and Paddy looked at rooves of keef the valley over, suspicious of who lived in them. They crept through prickly rows of furze and whins on county borders; walked with pace, but did not run, through the smut of diseased cornfields. They saw fences which his father’s friends had pulled down. There were smouldering heaps of crops in places, which was queer to him because he was often hungry and he thought his father would be better to steal the food of rich protestant houses rather than burn it. Once he saw a houghed cow limp across his path and die in the ditch below the road. Its leg was tragically maimed. He asked himself then what these pieces of metal he was collecting were used for. He had seen them strapped to long poles. And when his job was done he saw his father hold one up to inspect its straightness. His face was black with mud so that only the whites of his eyes showed. His hair was cropped close to his scalp. He had a green coat on. Alexander was frightened by his own father then.

He was not alone in the way he covered his face. There was not an inch of bare skin on the face of any man or woman when Alexander and Paddy brought in the last pike heads. Alexander thought of the limping cow and the smoking crops and believed the perpetrators kept themselves hidden by muddy faces. All the men wore their hair cut short too. It was some argument against the long wigs which judges wore, judges who threw catholics in prison. Alexander did not say a thing, thinking his squeaky voice might show his fear.

The people at the meeting lifted Alexander and Paddy into the air on their hands. Alexander wanted to be put down. They were all so happy and he could think only of the limping cow. He felt rotten. He wanted to go home to his sisters. But the friends of his father cheered and called them heroes. They carried them to the end of the meeting house where they were put down on the earthen floor.

In front of them the ground was packed into a pale mark as if pressed by many knees. Above them on the rude plaster wall was hung a wooden work-piece in the stain of its own shadow. It was made in the shape of a cross with a writhing body stuck to it, both arms spread out as if illustrating the length of a certain thing. A little wooden face was panicked and desperate, its fine wooden cheeks carved with tears. The carpenter had taken great care to show racks of ribs against a meagre belly. The whole contorted body was indivisible from the cross, however sorely it seemed the little wooden man wished to be rid of it. Pity filled Alexander’s stomach. It was only wood, but he felt damaged by the sadness of the little snared person, stark black against the bare plaster wall.

Pray to Jesus, boys, one of the adults instructed, staring with haunting insistence at the wall. And pray to His Father what sent Him, and the good Holy Ghost.

Alexander tried to pray but he and Paddy’s small voices were interrupted by a broad man with a calming tone. He said they had done the Defenders good. He crouched in front of them, obscuring Alexander’s view of the tortured figure. That was what the adults called themselves – Defenders. He gave each of them a small brooch. Alexander thought his brooch was a seashell. He touched it with all his fingers and felt small ridges on it. Paddy told him it was a loaf of bread made from clay. It had on it the words liberty and death. Alexander wondered what bread had to do with liberty.

It is decades later now, and Alexander still has five sisters, if they yet live. He feels in a very deep place at the back of his chest that his mother has not passed either; he says her name often in prayer. His father is no longer alive. Ballinamuck took him away.

They have not written him. He could pay a literate person the shilling piece of a Spanish dollar to write a letter to his family, but there are better ways to spend a shilling piece. Why would he write them when he does not know if they even want to hear from him? They have probably forgotten him. But he cannot forget them.

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