The Cellar Door
William Jeffries was sent to Van Diemen's Land in chains for a crime he had not committed, and decided in the convict hold that the world had used up its right to judge him. The rest was collection. He built an estate on the Derwent, married a girl who learned too late what she had married, and struck a bargain in London: young men, unmissed, for the wealth that bought his name. He ran a cellar door beneath his own house until the door took him, and died in the world he had been feeding, refusing to call it punishment.
The verdict came at twenty-two for a watch he had not taken, and in the dark of the convict ship he stopped expecting the world to be fair and began keeping accounts. Whatever came afterwards, the universe had already paid for.
Tasmania was a place where a man could become anyone if he remembered nothing. Jeffries Manor went up on the Derwent. The wife he brought back from Portsmouth was a line in a different ledger, closed without ever showing her the entries. The bargain in Mayfair — young men, unmissed, for the wealth that bought his name — was another column. The cellar door beneath his own house was where the column added up.
On the night the column went wrong, the door took him through. He surfaced in the place he had been feeding, kept alive by men who could not afford to kill him.
Stripped of the manor, the wife, the son and the name, he kept the ledger. Another woman, another son, the slow ruin of his mind — all of it went down as further damages, and the column on the credit side, never stopped growing.
