Bryce Courtenay - The Potato Factory

Mr Emmett always came upon her in the same way. As though to dispel any anticipation Mary might have at his approach, he would precede his arrival by shouting the selfsame words. 'Not much luck, my dear. If I may say so, no blasted luck at all!'

Mary would look up from where she was working and attempt a smile. 'I am much obliged to you, sir,' she would say, standing up at his approach and trying not to show her disappointment.

Mary took two hours each day to try to secure a position on her own, trudging into town if she should see an advertisement in the Colonial Times. This was the only money she spent, sixpence every week to purchase the newspaper. While there were vacant positions aplenty, none of those advertising for a clerk bookkeeper required a female bookkeeper who was a ticket of leave convict. Mr Emmett's letter was beginning to look weary at the folds and greasy at the edges, as though it too was possessed of a forlorn and hopeless disposition.

Mr Emmett tried again to get Mary to join him in the employ of the government but she would not surrender.

A month passed and Mr Emmett's garden was now well prepared for winter. Neat rows of winter cabbage and cauliflower seedlings filled their beds in the vegetable patch. The soil around the standard roses and young fruit trees had been dug around, aired and then bedded down with straw and the garden was now completely cleared of summer's dead leaf. Mary woke one chilly morning and went to the door of the potting shed. The grass outside was silver with hoar frost and, as was her habit each morning, she looked up at the great mountain. Snow had fallen during the night and had turned it into a veritable Christmas pudding. Above it an icy, cobalt sky stretched high and, though she could not see them, she could hear a flock of cockatoos in the trees near by.

'Please, mountain, let something happen today!' Mary appealed to the snow-covered monolith towering above her. 'The work be done in Mr Emmett's garden and I cannot accept no more charity.'

'Mary, Mary! Come here, girl!' She could hear Mr Emmett's excited voice before he reached her. It was just before sunset on the same day and Mary was planting lemon grass. 'Mary, where are you? It's good news at last!'

Mary stood up at Mr Emmett's approach.

'Good news, my dear!' he said a little breathlessly, flapping his arms as he came up to her. 'Mr Peter Degraves the sawmiller is building a brewery at the Cascades and he needs a clerk!'

Mary dropped the trowel she was holding and looked querulously at her benefactor. 'A woman, sir?'

'They'll take a chance on a woman… on you!' Mr Emmett laughed, well pleased with himself.

'Have you told them I be ticket o' leave, sir?'

'Yes, yes, everything! Do not fret yourself, my dear. Mr Degraves has been in debtor's prison himself. He sees nothing to harm him in your past.' Mr Emmett grinned at Mary. 'I daresay those silly Chinese beads of yours will be just the very thing for counting bricks and timber eh?'

'A brewery is it? Will he keep me on when the building is complete?'

'If you serve him well, I don't see why not.'

Mary, unable to restrain herself, burst into tears and Mr Emmett, no taller than she, even by an inch, stood beside her. He patted her clumsily on the back. 'Now, now, my dear, it isn't much, an outdoors job with winter almost here, among crude men loading drays, I doubt it will exercise your skills to any extent.'

'Gawd bless you, sir!' Mary whispered, her voice choked with relief.

'Tut, tut, you have little to thank me for, Mary Abacus. My garden is splendidly prepared for winter and I reward you with nothing but the smell of hops in your nostrils and the cussing of rough men in your ears. I think it a poor exchange indeed!'

'Thank you, sir, I will not forget this.'

'There is little for you to remember on my behalf, my dear,' Mr Emmett said gently. 'You are worthy of much, much more, Mary Abacus.'

The chief clerk of the colonial secretary's department was not to know that on the brisk autumn evening in late May 1831, he had watched a small woman with large green eyes, bright with recent tears, take the first tentative step in what would one day be a vast brewery empire that would stretch around the world. Mary Abacus had discovered the commodity men could not live without and yet was not condemned or forbidden by society.

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.

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.