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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PROLOGUE

Macquarie Harbour, 1823 A.D.

There is a body on the sand beside the sodden ashes.

The estuary is silver, wrinkled only by the wind. The beach on the far side is brown, a thin hem between the shimmering river and the rising heads of trees. The trees are the colour of lead. Alexander does not know if the sun is rising or going down. He cannot see it. He is not even pretending. He does not know; however hard he tries to know. He cannot see it.

He can see the sky, which is filled with rapidly changing colours. The sky bruises. It makes the deep bush deeper and more frightening. Alexander does not know where the sun is. He does not know if it is the cold or sight of unknown country that makes him shake.

The fire is forgotten. It is now a damp soup of ashes. Alexander cannot call it a fire, because the fire is not there. It is ashes without fire. He calls it fire anyway.

The fire’s gone out, Cox, he says. Cox does not answer.

Alexander looks up to the sky for the sun but it is not there. What brought me here? he asks himself. He has to ask himself, because Cox is not at hand. He does not know where Cox is.

There is a body on the sand beside the sodden ashes. It is garnished with grains of sand. He cannot call it Cox because Cox is not there. It is a body without a person. He calls it Cox anyway.

I feel like a thread, Cox. A long thread wrapped around a bobbin. The bobbin is spinning. It is spinning so hard I might fall off.

He looks at Cox, lumped in bald and grey pounds of flesh on the sand beside the ashes. Alexander does not know the hour, but he knows where Cox’s head is. He turns around to look at the hollow of the dead tree.

He cannot see Cox’s eyes but he can see a round white chin and gaunt white cheeks and flat white forehead. The forehead possesses a dark cut in it, filled with blood which dried black long ago. The face is white enough to form shadows in the dim hollow.

Where is the tomahawk which he crowned the boy with? Blood, viscous as pitch, had crawled over Cox’s face, eyes stuck together, mouth open. It looked like tar pouring over Cox’s head. Alexander remembers someone dying of that trick once, tar over the head. What a dreadful trick it is. He does not like to think of it.

You told me you could swim, you fool, Alexander speaks to the hollow tree. Cox does not answer but Alexander is used to his silence now. Run up the coast, says Cox – Alexander is chattering to himself – We won’t go inland like you did with those other lags, we won’t do that ’cause you don’t want to. Not to worry, Alexander. We’ll do as you like. I can hold my own in deep water.

Alexander looks upon the silver estuary and thinks of how Cox confessed that he could not swim. The cur had waited until the very last, until they were well away from settlement and married to the escape and pursued by soldiers and all. Only then he told him he could not swim. He had crouched at the fire and cussed at Alexander. He called him a Mary and said there was nothing to be afraid of, walking inland. Alexander had done it before. What did he have to be afraid of?

It was more merciful to kill Cox than to take him inland, although Alexander did not kill him for mercy. He killed him because he was upset. Cox had lied. How could he keep company with a liar? Cox asked him what he was afraid of. Alexander could not tell him. He would not understand. Cox did not know what he was asking for, walking east. Even the word east makes Alexander shiver like cold or the sight of foreign country. It is foreign country, the east, and it has taken away a part of him he cannot get back.

You done it before and lived, was the last thing Cox said.

Alexander has done it before, but did he live?

Alexander hears another voice. It is not his and it is not Cox’s.

We won’t walk out ’is country wiv’ our lives. Least wiv’ our minds.

Alexander walks towards the famished tree.

What brought me here? he asks.

He is close enough to the hollow that he can see the eyes inside it. Their look brings on a sudden illness. He is suddenly, violently ill on the sand.

On hands and knees he looks to the river and into the sky that weighs on the mountains. He decides it is evening. A faint yellow oil spreads in the west. He crawls to the edge of the water to get a better view of it.

He sees memories in the sky as a man sometimes sees in flames or clear liquid. He thinks of Ireland, far over the sea, and the gaol at Hobart, far over the mountains. Somehow both strands of his braided life have brought him to this brown beach where he will never father children, never lie with a woman unpaid, never again be drunk or merry. He would probably cut off a finger or two for an ounce of tobacco, and he means it. Of course, he would need a pipe to smoke with, and he has lost his pipe. It is a tragic loss.

Alexander looks at the river, now charcoal, its folds beckoning him in. What has he to lose by swimming across? He looks at the body of Cox, which has abandoned all its humanity. He cuts away the fleshy part of one arm. This he slips into a pocket of his jacket. He has other food, but it is rotting fast. He will only touch Cox when the pork and bread is spoiled. He has done this before.

He takes off all his clothes, holds them above his head and wades into the gelid water. Cold pinches his breath as water gropes the matted hair on his shrunken chest. It reminds him of Kelly’s Basin, where he and other loggers were sent every day but Sunday to cut timber, up to their throats in dark water, bejesus. He knows he can bear cold water.

If he can bear cold water, can he bear another flogging? It is the reason he joined Thomas Cox in the first instance. Another prisoner had stolen his shirt and Alexander did not wish to be punished for missing one of his articles. What petty things he has been punished for. For the theft of half a dozen shoes he was sent to Van Diemen’s Land. Is there a difference between stealing shoes and stealing lives? Alexander carries so many floggings on his back for minor offences he thinks not. He has been made a greater felon than he is. He knows there is no crime too meagre to condemn a person to life in the empire’s hell. He wonders, as he drags himself through the water, if the small crimes are as bad as the large. It is a question worth asking God, if God lets him speak in the end: Was half a dozen shoes vile enough to deserve all this?

Alexander crawls into the mud of a retreated tide. The world is filled with the sound of his breathing. His blue hands fumble at the buttons of his clothes. The coarse dry wool clings to wet skin. Dressed, he pushes into curtains of reeds which rise in bushels before him.

A spangled blue liquid reaches across the bruising sky until everything is dark. The stars remind Alexander of a sailor he once knew. He escaped with him the first time. The sailor said he could navigate with the stars. Alexander sobs. He cannot read stars.

Alexander lights a feeble fire. He has failed at enough fires to know how to light a small one. He broils a piece of pork until it is black to kill whatever sickness has festered in it. It makes him ill regardless. When he wakes at daybreak he can only walk doubled over, like the hair of a hand which is blanched and curled by flame before it dissolves.

Alexander limps in the direction of mewing gulls. He can hear them, and imagines them whirling in an ocean zephyr, but like the sun the day before, he cannot find the sea. Its sound washes over everything but it is lost in the tall swaying grass.

He comes to an inlet which is studied by quiet black swans. For miles beyond he can see only bush. Alexander has felt this peculiar brand of freedom before. It is not liberty. It is a feeling like imprisonment.

It rains at night, the second night since Cox was killed, and the burnt rag does not take flame. Alexander sits under the limp hands of a fern. He can feel the impression of the piece of Cox inside his pocket. He strokes it. His mind wanders: What use is being free if a body cannot feed his self? Bejesus.

How man lived in this country before the coming of Europeans Alexander cannot tell. There is fowl on the water, but a prisoner without powder and ball may as well cut off his arms. The same is true of the game in the bush. Man is smaller than God’s beasts in the bush.

They will be in the harbour looking for me. They will be scouring the coast, Alexander says to Cox. It went that way last time. That was when the sailor said we should go east. You do not know what demons are east of us here, Cox. You do not know.

Alexander looks into the rotting night sky which is darkest upon the face of a nearby mountain. He has climbed that mountain before and not come back. Now he knows what he will do.

Alexander walks to the edge of the inlet and follows its round sands back to the mouth of the river. He takes off his clothes, keeping Cox inside his pocket, and holds the dry garments in a fist in the air.

As he sweeps the water behind him with one slow arm he thinks of what will happen when they find him. The flogging will hurt for three days, then it will be over. The prison’s commandant will ask what has become of the other prisoner. Drowned in the river, Alexander will say. Then he can eat proper. He will still have to face cold water six days out of seven, and the lash now and again, but at least he will not know hunger so bad; of all pains, hunger is worst.

He may never leave Macquarie Harbour, but he has tried to leave twice now and regretted both escapes. This is not to say he will not consider escape again, but he tries to tell his future self that this is folly. He knows prison is wretched and it makes a man want what he cannot have, but as he swims he tells himself, again and again, the following things:

This cold and biting water is as bad at settlement—but the fires do not die what warm me there. There is that nasty high frown on the mountain which we once climbed and I did not come back from. And there is the shape of Cox here in this left hand.

He seizes the imagination of water and mountain and flesh. He tells himself to remember them when the pig’s fat cools his wounds and the pain of flogging fades and he thinks once more escape is good.

Alexander is distracted by these thoughts and drops his clothes in the water. When he scoops them into the air again he feels the bit of Cox in both palms, wrapped inside wet wool.

Yes, it is mostly Cox you should think of, he says to himself.

He is in the middle of the river when he feels the prick of another insistent thought: What if commandant does not believe you were drowned, Cox? Then I will hang. Are you better off dead, are you, Cox?

There is no answer.

Alexander doubts Cox is hungry, wherever he is. But how much can a man really enjoy death? Alexander could drown himself in this river. He knows he could. But he has come so far – to take his own life would be a waste. The suffering would be meaningless then.

Alexander crawls up the beach and spreads his lank garments on the sand. You have not been wasted, he says to Cox as he strips the body of its dry black and yellow coat and trowsers. The shoulders of the coat are stained with blood, so Alexander tears a strip of it for tinder and keeps his dripping jacket on; he will not be flogged twice for losing his articles.

He takes Cox’s shirt with Cox’s convict number sewn on the breast. Cox’s shoes are ruined as Alexander’s are but they are dry, so he takes those too. Without clothes the body looks much decomposed by the passing of days.

If you will not be wasted, Alexander says feeling his dry trowsers, then neither will I.

The bush behind the hollow tree has shallow, sandy roots. Alexander limps into it and comes out the other side on a rocky point. It gestures into the open harbour. He takes his flint and calico and starts a fire on the rocks. When it is high and hot he casts his jacket onto it; smothered, putrid billows choke him. There is a schooner on the water, not quite on the horizon, but close enough to it. The wind pushes satin creases of smoke across the water in the direction of the boat. The sails cut in half and the booms turn. Alexander sits on the rocks and waits. Whatever has brought him to this shore, he decides that it will carry him no further. This next path will be made by his own hands.

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