Bryce Courtenay - The Potato Factory

'Come and see, my dear, come and see what Ikey has brought for you!' The excitement was apparent in his voice as he took three paces towards Mary and then, like a magician at a country fair, whipped away the cloth from the top of his tobacco basket.

Mary reeled backwards, dropping the spoon, her hands clawing at her breasts. 'Oh Jesus! Oh Gawd! What 'ave you done?' she cried.

Ikey laughed and took another step towards her so that Mary now looked directly into the basket. 'This little one be Tommo!' he said, pointing to the tiny pink creature in the basket, then his long dirty index finger moved to the opposite end. 'And this big little 'un be Hawk! A black child to bring you luck and great good fortune, my dear!' Ikey turned and placed the basket on the table. 'What say you, Mary Abacus, my dear?'

The names of the two infants had come to him without any thought, though later he would congratulate himself at the clever notion of splitting the word tattooed on Marybelle Firkin's breast.

Mary was not naturally given to panic and now she again placed her poor broken hands on her hips and looked most sternly at Ikey. 'Ikey Solomon, I hopes you has a very, very good explanation!' she shouted. But while her expression was grim, her heart was beating fast as her mind raced to embrace the notion of keeping the two infants. 'Dear God, how could such a thing be possible?' she said inwardly, her thoughts a whirl of confusion and hope. 'Where? How? Whose be they?' she demanded of Ikey.

Ikey placed the basket on the table and calmly breaking a piece of bread off the stale loaf popped it into his mouth. 'Why, they's yours, my dear!' he said, beginning to chew. He explained to Mary what had occurred. 'Nobody knowed that Sperm Whale Sally were pregnant, my dear, it be possible that she herself did not know,' Ikey concluded.

'Ha! When they find her they'll know!' Mary replied, now somewhat recovered, then she added, 'What about the afterbirth?'

Ikey swallowed the crust he was chewing. Already the terrible private grief he felt at Marybelle Firkin's death was hidden completely from view. 'Rats, my dear, there be scores o' rats by the fish pipe. By now there will be precious little o' the birth bits left. They'll think she been gorn an' haemorrhaged, you know, internal like, and that be the cause o' her death. The coroner ain't going to look too close, she were a whore after all! Natural causes, my dear, that be what he'll say. With twice as much government money to be spent on a double-sized pauper's coffin he won't want no further complications or expenses!'

'She'll be buried proper, Ikey, in St David's burial ground. You'll see to that!' Mary instructed. She ran her hand across her flat stomach. 'But it don't solve nothing. How did I give birth to twins overnight when yesterday I weren't even pregnant?'

'Left on the doorstep, my dear,' Ikey said blandly. 'The men and young Jessamy, they'll stay stum, or even believe it if you say that be how it happened! Plenty o' whores don't want their newborn brats.' Ikey shrugged his thin shoulders. 'You are well known for your charity at the orphanage.' Ikey paused and looked directly at Mary, his scraggy right eyebrow slightly arched. 'O' course, my dear, if you don't want them two, I could always take them off to the foundling home and tell them there what happened this morning.'

Mary gasped. 'You'll do no such thing, Ikey Solomon! That be a death sentence – more newborn brats dies in the Foundlin' than lives to see their first week!' This was true. The first hour of almost every day saw Reverend Smedley officiating at the burial of foundling infants who had not survived their first few days at the home.

Mary had not taken her eyes off the two tiny babies and now she lifted the black one Ikey had named Hawk out of the basket and held him against her bosom. Hawk's tiny mouth, feeling the skin of her neck against his lips, started to suck. That was all it took for Mary to fall utterly and completely in love. 'Give me t'other, Ikey,' she begged, her voice grown suddenly soft. Ikey plucked Tommo from the basket and laid him against her other breast where he too started to suck at the side of her neck. Mary knew, with a sudden, fierce happiness, that she would let no one take her new-found children from her.

Mary looked up at Ikey and tears gathered in her eyes. 'Thank you, Ikey,' she said tenderly. 'Thank you, my love.' Then Mary kissed the fine, matted hair on the infants' tiny heads and started to weep softly. She carried Tommo and Hawk into her bedroom, wrapped each of them in a blanket and placed them in the centre of her narrow bed. She told herself she must prepare hot water to wash away the blood, and tie down their little belly buttons with a strip of linen, then find two good wet nurses from the Female Factory. But for the moment all she could think to do as she looked down at the tiny creatures wrapped in the blanket was to clutch the Waterloo medal around her neck so tightly that the edges of the small medallion cut into the skin of her clenched fist. She turned to the window where the early sun touched the craggy top of the great mountain. 'Please,' she begged softly. 'Please let me keep them! Let them be mine forever!'

After a while she stopped crying and released her grasp on the medal. In the centre of her misshapen hand was a small cut where the edge of the medallion had punctured the skin, and from it oozed a bright drop of blood. Mary, not quite understanding what she was doing, dipped her forefinger into the blood and then returned to where the infants lay on the bed and touched the tip of her bloodied finger to their foreheads, first Tommo, then Hawk.

'You be my life's blood,' she cried. 'You be my everything, I shall never let you go!'

For nearly four years Mary had been processing her own malt in her malthouse at Strickland Falls, crushing and preparing the barley mash using the power from the water mill she had constructed. At last she had the money to erect the first of her brewery buildings and to begin work on the chimney stack which would eventually be required. The chimney needed bricks and the skill of a master builder, so it could only be constructed a small section at a time as money became available. The other buildings were made of stone quarried on her own property. Mary's plan was that one day the quarry would become a small lake to store water for the brewery and lend further beauty to the woodland surroundings.

She still lacked the means to create a complete commercial brewery and it seemed unlikely that she would ever possess them. The steam turbines and huge fermenting vats and giant casks she required to compete against the likes of Peter Degraves' modern Cascade Brewery needed the kind of finance she could only hope to raise with a wealthy partner.

It was not a prosperous time in the colony. Several of the smaller banks had collapsed and more than half of the free colonists were insolvent. The Bank of Van Diemen's Land would not readily invest in emancipists, particularly women, unless they had assets to secure the loan well in excess of the amount they wished to borrow. While there were private investors which a sharp lawyer might find in England, they usually demanded a controlling interest and Mary was determined that she would never allow anyone to threaten her independence.

The new buildings gave her the capacity to make much larger quantities of beer using the crystal-clear water that flowed from the falls. Furthermore, using time-honoured methods, she knew she would eventually own a small complete brewery which produced ale of a very high quality.

Though Mary was not considered a serious threat to any of the larger breweries, her Temperance Ale and Bitter Rosella had earned a reputation in the colony for their quality and some of the public houses not tied to the mainstream breweries now accepted Bitter Rosie by the barrel, which was a major boost to her production. In the past she had relied on supplying her beer in jugs brought by the purchaser, or in bottles. This had severely curtailed her output, for glass was a scarce commodity almost entirely imported from England.