A Fringe of Leaves (44 page)

At once she grew ashamed of her thought and looked to see whether her nurse had intercepted it, but the room was too dark, and of course, both her attendants too innocent.

It only now occurred to Mrs Roxburgh that self-knowledge might remain a source of embarrassment, even danger.

‘More light, please, Mrs Oakes.’ It was evident that Lieutenant Cunningham was more at ease with older women and in giving orders to subordinates.

As Mrs Oakes pushed back a shutter the patient winced for the shaft of light which was aimed at her. She might have felt more exposed had she not realized that she must remain a mystery to them: her body, for which they were concerned, was the least part of her.

She lay passive, though one corner of her mouth twitched in the direction of a smile as the surgeon, assisted by Mrs Oakes, carried out his examination.

‘Ticklish, are we?’ The nurse laughed indulgently.

The doctor frowned. ‘Captain Lovell sends his compliments,’ Lieutenant Cunningham delivered the message with a formal earnestness not unmixed with personal goodwill, ‘and is looking forward to hearing your own account of your adventures as soon as your health is fully restored. I shall see to that,’ he assured her, knocking once or twice on her ribs to emphasize his authority, ‘and Mrs Oakes,’ he was polite enough to add. ‘We shall have you on your feet in no time, and bring you down to Moreton Bay.’

Mrs Roxburgh could not envisage it; she cowered. ‘My feet would not stand another journey. They are ruins.’

‘We shall send a carriage. Well, it’s not
sprung
! But the best we can provide.’

‘Surely we might be attacked by blacks—or worse, escaped prisoners?’

The lieutenant was amused. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll have a military escort.’

Mrs Roxburgh’s distress was not relieved. ‘Shall I have to listen to the prisoners’ screams as they receive the lash?’

Now it was the surgeon’s turn to feel distressed; he had never dealt with a similar situation. ‘You’ll find the Commandant’s a humanitarian, unlike his predecessor, of whom I can see you must have heard.’

‘What became of the predecessor?’

The young man had broken out in a sweat; his golden whiskers could not disguise it. ‘He met with an accident.’

‘Was he murdered? Or simply killed?’

‘Better if you don’t inquire into painful matters which don’t concern you.’

A pulse had begun fluttering in her throat. ‘It does concern me—why the good and the bad are in the same boat—and the difference between killing and murder. Until we know, we shan’t have justice—only God’s mutton for Sunday dinner—those of us who are lucky enough.’

Seeing that she was beside herself, he turned away.

‘Do you play at cat’s-cradle?’ she asked.

Instead of answering, the surgeon produced a selection of medicaments out of a valise he must have unstrapped from his saddle, and after taking the nurse aside, gave his instructions in a low voice.

Then again, in the louder, jollier tones intended to reach the ears of the sick, ‘It’s chiefly a matter of rest, Mrs Oakes, and nourishment. Mrs Roxburgh is lucky in having a very remarkable constitution. She’ll live to a ripe old age, I’d say.’

But Mrs Roxburgh whimpered back, ‘What shall I do with a ripe old age? Without my husband?’

Mrs Oakes sucked her teeth, and clucked, ‘Dear Lord, how pitiful! But it’s only to be expected,’ and the amiable young surgeon joined in, ‘You’ll change your mind, you will see, Mrs Roxburgh. Mrs Lovell herself is organizing a wardrobe. All the ladies are contributing. It will be that much easier now that we know your size and shape.’ He checked himself, again embarrassed, but hurried on towards his departure. ‘You can rest assured, ma’am, of a warm welcome. We had heard of the wreck of
Bristol Maid
and were shocked to think of what we imagined the loss of everybody else on board.’

‘How did you hear?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.

In the end, she could not trust (oh, she should have known!) this hitherto amiable, but too glossy, too fulsome young man.

‘We heard from the only known survivor. Of course there may be others still to be discovered, as you have been. I hope there are.’

She looked at him out of eyes which he afterwards failed to describe for the Commandant. ‘All dead. Some of them probably eaten. Only the condemned survive.’

At that the surgeon took his leave, but heard the voice muffled by the door which Mrs Oakes had closed behind them. ‘I ask nothing for myself. Only a pardon for my poor husband. I am the one who has committed the crime. I think he could not believe in me. For that reason, he ran back.’

It was something at least that stout Mrs Oakes was shaking the house in conducting him away from the sick-room, but the voice of darkness continued faintly pursuing the surgeon. ‘Even if Jack is not—destroyed—if he simply lies down and dies—I must give myself up as his murderess.’

That evening the nurse felt so ravaged and exhausted after her duty the night before, as well as the necessary attentions she had lavished on the patient during the day now past, she said to her husband when she had fed him, together with their three voracious sons, ‘I’d take it kindly, Ted, if you’d sit up with Mrs Roxburgh tonight. I do believe I’m at the end of me tether—temporary like,’ she hastened to assure him.

Ted Oakes, a large man, looked so alarmed his wife might have felt justified in congratulating herself had she been harbouring a grudge against him.

But Mrs Oakes was without malice even when he muttered, ‘I dursn’t, Emily. What would I do if she wet ’erself?’

‘You probberly wouldn’t know,’ she answered, ‘or if she was to tell you, well you’d only have to rouse me i’ the room beyond.’

Ted Oakes continued heaving and shaking his enormous form to signify his unwillingness. ‘And’, he said, ‘if she was to start quizzin’ me? I never ’ad no practice at conversin’ with a lady.’

‘Between ourselves, the poor soul may not be all that of a lady.’

Mrs Oakes did not elaborate, but after she had washed the dishes, and scoured the pan, and he had smoked his second pipe, and she had dosed the patient, and doused the candles, excepting one which she hid behind a little, hitherto useless screen embroidered by Emily herself during a slow courtship, she manœuvred her victim in the direction of the leather-and-horsehair throne. ‘There!’ she did not actually command. ‘’Tis no more than the edge of the battlefield, beside the doorway, hid behind this blessed screen, and call out to me if need be. She, poor thing, wouldn’ notice if Jemmy was in your place, she’s too heavy with the laudanum prescribed by Mr Cunningham.’

Without waiting for outright refusal Mrs Oakes left her husband to it.

It was an occurrence more alarming than any in Sergeant Oakes’s experience, worse even than mutiny at the prisoners’ barracks, or when some bolter or other ambushed the captain and they brought his body down from the mountain, the head all bloody where the eyes had been, the cock and ballocks cut off of him. Yet now it was but a still night, in which his son’s snores in the adjoining room competed with the stranger’s breathing the other side of the flimsy screen.

Were she to wake! Sergeant Oakes was running cold between his flannel and his skin. But might have dozed.

He was roused by a wind which had risen, and which was rustling round the eaves and under any shingles which happened to be loose; or no, it was this woman’s voice.

‘Is it you, Mr Roxburgh—Austin?’

The sergeant was too terrified to answer.

‘Then I know it isn’t. Mr Roxburgh had nothing against me. Or has he?’ she sighed. ‘It is hard to tell what human beings may have done to one another.’

The watcher’s flesh would have prickled without benefit of the horsehair with which his chair was stuffed.

‘I know who it is,’ the woman assured him. ‘It’s Jack. There’s no need to be afraid. Give me your hand at least, my darling. I’ll show you. I’ll put it where it will warm quickest.’

The watcher writhed to such an extent the flame leaped on the candle the screen was shielding, then subsided almost to extinction before recovering itself.

‘Jack?’

Sergeant Oakes cleared his throat. ‘’Tis not Jack. ’Tis nobody.’

‘Don’t tell me!’ She did not laugh; it must have been the sheet slithering.

When inspiration clapped the sergeant on the shoulder, and he lowered his voice into a whisper more determined than desperate. ‘’Tis not nobody, neether. ’Tis Mrs Oakes—your nurse.’

The patient seemed satisfied awhile, except she was for ever turning and fretting, and at last went into a lengthy, scarcely sensible rigmarole. ‘Poor Pa! I’d knaw your breathin’ anywheres. You always was more silence than words. You never knawed me like I knawed me father. Had time to, all they winters, all they sheep ’n teddy-hoen’. We should ’uv drove the few mile on to Tintagel, day we fetched th’ ’eifer to Borlase. So I never did see—Tintagel. It was Mr Austin Roxburgh who come. The gentlefolk! I was overlaid with pool de swa. I was plaised as puss for a season. Not the swans-down. That were black. An’ later. They nights were so cold we could ’ear our teeth chatterin’ to one another when we kissed. Poor Pa! I loved you too. If you knawed, you wouldn’ be skulkin’ behind th’ old screen.’

Forced to make water at this point, the watcher stole away, but when he returned to his post she was still at it, though less personal, so to say.

‘Gee op, Tiger! If you place. We’re not op the hill to Zennor.’

And again, ‘My ewes idn’t penned, and rain comin’ as big as cannon-balls by the looks. Shoo! For life’s sake, run!’

He shivered to feel it rushing past, the rain, the wool; there was one fleece had thorns in it.

‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘you have not filled the scuttle, Mattie, or built me a fire which will warm my thoughts.’

His head was near to busting with confusion and sleep.

‘Oh, Mrs Daintry, do you fancy chocolate? Or will it make us liverish?’

She would not let him be.

‘Mrs Oakes, your husb’n … My hubsand, Mrs Oakes ‘had a mole …’

Dang me, what will she come at next!

‘Ellen can tell a token when she sees one. This one is blacker than any face I ever see’d. The whole world will perish by it. Shut the window, won’t you? Oh, please … Sergeant … fetch your … pist-tol …’

It was Emily leaning over him. He knew her by the scent of her hair. The candle had fizzled out in the socket leaving a smell of cold wax.

‘Did she pass the night peaceful?’

He could not tear himself quick enough out of the tormented leather. ‘I couldn’ say. She slept, I reckon. We both did. But it was a sort of madness, Emily.’

He made straight into the morning he knew, and was soon wiping his hands on the rather greasy rag he used when he rinsed the cows’ teats before milking.

Mrs Oakes sent messages to Moreton Bay by one or other of her three sons: Mrs Roxburgh showed every sign of regaining health and strength, though still in no condition to travel. In any event, Mrs Oakes would have been loth to discharge her patient: they had developed a fondness for each other. Mrs Oakes could not think how she would spend her days if the object of her cosseting were taken from her and herself left with the company of men preoccupied with beasts and weather. She would dearly have loved a girl-child, but since she had not been so fortunate, here was this ailing stranger, not without her childish ways.

They were happiest sipping mint tea while looking at mementoes of the Old Country. The yellowed letters and locks of wan hair infused the farmer’s wife with a delectable melancholy. ‘Sad, isn’t they?’ She smiled and at the same time wiped an eye.

‘Do you regret your life?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked.

‘No. Why should I? This is where I belong now. It’s different for a man, perhaps. A woman, as I see, is more like moss or lichen, that takes to some rock or tree as she takes to her husband. An’ that is where we belong.’

‘I have no husband—no children. I’m in every respect free.’

Mrs Oakes made haste to encourage her friend. ‘But that needn’t be the end of the matter!’

Their discourse might have taken an awkward turn had Tim not arrived at the very moment from the settlement with a parcel of clothes sent by Mrs Lovell: ‘to try like, for size.’

‘Why, they’s lovely! Isn’t they, Mrs Roxburgh?’ Mrs Oakes could not give over rummaging amongst the garments. ‘You ’ave to admit people is good.’

There was everything from stays to petticoats, and two dresses one in black Paramatta out of respect for widowhood, and one less sombre, in garnet silk.

‘Now I don’t want to go against your feelin’s, Mrs Roxburgh, but this is the one which will suit your style of beauty.’ Mrs Oakes held up the garnet silk. ‘It’s real lovely, won’t you admit?’

Mrs Roxburgh laughed low. ‘I don’t know about my “style of beauty”, or what will suit it, except to be clothed, I suppose, now that I am returning to the world.’

For the present, she made no special effort to return; the clothes she had been sent she accepted out of necessity rather than with enthusiasm. Since finding her feet, she preferred the old homespun shift provided by the farmer’s wife. Clothed in its shapeless drab, she slip-slopped into most corners of this honest house, and was frequently lost in contemplation of a pan of milk or batch of bread, or feeling her way as far as the yard, took stock of whatever it had to offer, a hen for instance, her brood stowed away amongst her feathers, the silly faces of the poddy lambs. Over all, the sun, which she no longer knew whether she should love as the source of life, or hate as the cause and witness of so much suffering and ugliness.