Bettany's Book (43 page)

Every evening after Phoebe retired, Sister Catherine sat on a hard stool on my verandah and read from a black book with a gilt cross on its cover. ‘I saw the wild men here,’ I told her.

‘They wanted me to write to their mothers in Kerry,’ said Sister Catherine. ‘I tested the poor fellows. Surely, I said, they would soon have their tickets-of-leave and be able to go to Sydney and themselves write. But they said no, they were dead men under this system, their names were in the
Government Gazette
, and one day troopers would come for them.’

‘Perhaps you should also found a mission to the absconders,’ I told her. ‘They are greater savages than anyone else in this region.’

‘Ah,’ the nun sighed, ‘there are so early in the history of the place so many sadnesses.’

‘I must ask you again, sister, to reflect on my betrothed girl’s towering certainty; that this is the life for her, and no other will do! She has fought off a strong and wealthy parent to seize this pastoral poverty. I am not sure that when I am older I would wish such a place on a daughter of mine.’

I gestured for emphasis towards the darkness, full of the burr of late summer insects crying out for their lives.

‘What Phoebe proposes is Christ’s gift to you,’ the nun told me. ‘Receive it in joy.’

So I had confirmed to me from a vestal mouth what I already suspected: that through the scale of her acts Phoebe had earned a lifetime of my love.

I sent Phoebe and Sister Catherine to the Parslows in Braidwood in the care of Long. Long returned at last with a letter.

Mullambee via Braidwood
March 12 of Anno Domini 1839

My most darling Mr Bettany,

Do not be angry with Long, who is a decent fellow torn in two when Sister Catherine announced – just a little way beyond Treloar’s – that she must return to Goulburn, was needed by her sisters, would love to see me wed – though of course she would not be permitted to attend the ceremony – but feared such thoughts were all vanity, with so much waiting in Goulburn to be done. She was so insistent and so certain of
the Lord’s protection for herself, and of leaving me to Long’s guidance! And Long knew he must stay with me. I moved from the nuns’ four-wheeler to Long’s wagon and wept as we waved the good Catherine off. None of this is Long’s fault. She could not be dissuaded.

I am surprised to find that though I am of more than adequate age, the minister here in Braidwood, a fellow named Chenniger, delayed making a decision as to whether to marry us without my father’s written consent. He cites church law, but since I am eighteen I think it is pure old fear, and am very surprised that a man whose stock in trade – so to speak – is eternal truth and the love of Christ should be so scared by acreage and livestock in the quantity in which my father possesses them.

I went and found then with the help of my friend Cynthia Parslow a Wesleyan clergyman named Hollyhead who is a friend of Mr Loosely of Goulburn. He certified my age and said he was willing to perform the ceremony. I had a certain idea that you would prefer, as a man of promise, to be wed in the Anglican church, even though Hollyhead is a far more devout man than the Reverend Mr Chenniger, and is not a spare-time farmer like that gentleman but spends most of his week in the saddle, visiting settlers and convict shepherds and trying to protect the natives from such as Goldspink. If I cannot persuade Mr Chenniger, would you object to being wed by Mr Hollyhead, since I feel he is closer to the principles on which our marriage will, I trust, be founded? I would be very happy if you would permit this small departure from what you would probably find normal.

I would be very much obliged, if in the company of your best suit you arrived in Braidwood by December 10th. I am very happy staying at the Parslows’ here. They have a simple style of life and rejoice, as I trust we will, in their Australian existence.

Yours eternally,

Phoebe Finlay

This question of churches distracted me from concern for the headstrong nun and the unchosen responsibility thus placed on Long. If I had ever thought of marriage, I had imagined myself wed in the reasonable solemnity of the Church of England. My father sometimes complained, even in Van Diemen’s Land, that the sleek Church of England, unlike the fervent Methodists of his youth, rejoiced in the world as it was, and participated in its most immediate rewards. Yet that is why my mother and I preferred it.

I ordered from Kurntz Jewellers of Pitt Street, Sydney, a ring of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires to be delivered to me care of the Royal Hotel, Braidwood.

One of the most startling mercies of great civic and religious mysteries such as marriage is that they convince those who undergo the rite that for the moment they lie at the centre of nature and of God’s plan. The Anglican Mr Chenniger eventually consented to officiate at the marriage, a fact at which my mother, with her dislike of Methodists for what they had done to my father, later expressed herself by letter to be very gratified. But the Reverend Chenniger proved very dour about too much colour or excessive ritual in his church. He clearly thought the act itself, the ‘Till death do we part’, had sufficient grace and hope about it that the flowers, the silverware, the bunting and incense which Phoebe wanted (having got a taste for such things in Geneva) would contribute no more.

Before the wedding, at my rooms at the Royal Hotel, I was delighted to find that Charlie Batchelor had ridden all the way from Yass for this event, and had brought with him Miss Dines, the Australian-born young woman whose hand he had sought, and her Scottish mother. Mr Barley was also present with apologies that his rudder had not accompanied him from Sydney. And then on the verandah, in a dove-grey swan-tailed coat of somewhat better cut than the suit I had purchased two days before from a limited range in Mr Sutler’s, the Braidwood tailor, was my friend the Land Commissioner Peske. All these friends had been notified and summoned by energetic Phoebe.

‘I thought I might as well come,’ Peske told me, ‘and make a complete enemy out of Mr Finlay. Surely though those Finlays are coming to this?’

I told him I believed not, that there had been no answer to the letter I had been careful to send them.

‘Awfully difficult, my friend,’ he told me, ‘without the mama and pa, even though Finlay is such a thorough old brute.’

He laughed in a way I did not entirely enjoy. Fortunately we were joined by Barley and by Charlie Batchelor, and the three of them sat with me on the hotel verandah, smoking cheroots. Their job, they said, was to keep me calm. It had been a summer of low rain and that was a topic of talk, since rain was in all senses the fountainhead.

Peske said, ‘About your girl’s papa, I believe he has had a hard time.’

I had not heard anything of this myself.

‘Has the same problem I have,’ said Barley. ‘Got involved in wool speculation in Sydney, thinking he could be amply recompensed from
London. But London merchants have ganged up on us – had to happen! – and he bought at high price, sold at 7 pence ha’penny.’

I had heard, of course, something of the decline in London prices. The
Sydney Herald
in the parlour of the Royal made frequent comment on it. ‘You are not in trouble yourself, I hope,’ I told Barley.

‘I have a good banker,’ murmured Barley, unembittered by the shifts of markets. ‘But I have a great plan. I had let contracts for the building near Semi-Circular Quay of two large storage warehouses. I shall, if you like, hoard wool, and release it to London auction houses when it suits me and at my price.’

Charlie applauded this. And even in the blur of fear, the watchfulness for omens, the strange weakness induced by desire of the beloved, all of which I suspected was the standard condition of bridegrooms, it was a delight to see Barley’s eyes glitter. ‘I hope I am what you’d call a New South Wales patriot,’ he murmured to me. A little exuberant from brandy, he cast his hands up and said through lips clamped on a cheroot, ‘But we should try to call tune, not have tune called for us.’

At the marriage, these men occupied my side of the church, small as a Van Diemen’s Land chapel but, in a world of slab timber, built of red brick to convey its permanence. And on lovely, be-satined Phoebe’s side of the congregation were her friends Cynthia and Robert Parslow and their friends, who included the police magistrate. The absence of her parents seemed to mean little to Phoebe, but Peske’s barb was still in me and I wondered if her parent-less condition at the altar would be one of those shadows bound to grow with time and distance.

Afterwards in the dining room of the Royal Hotel, in the exultation of my new condition of marriage, in front of a feast I knew I could well afford and seated by my miraculously determined wife in her dress of white satin, I felt delighted to throw my arm round Peske. He was the only one to straddle in friendship all parties to this particular act of matrimony, since he happened to be a friend of the Parslows too. I felt uppermost a dazed delight that Phoebe and I now possessed the extraordinary authority of sitting together to eternity without asking anyone’s authority or pardon.

It was ten o’clock at night, but there was still pudding to be served, when Peske and I wandered, cigars a’mouth, into the hallway to find an outhouse, or what is more pleasant to men in our condition, the edge of an expansive paddock where, shoulder to shoulder and reflecting tipsily on the splendour of the night, we could ease ourselves. We did not get
that far, however. In the corridor, at the table where the maid normally sat arranging accommodations for guests, a woman stood forlornly. Peske performed his version of a gallant British officer, in so far as he had learned it in the militia in Van Diemen’s Land, and cried, ‘Madame, could we find you a seat?’

The woman raised her face. It was Mrs Finlay, in a handsome brown riding dress, its hem smeared with wet clay from the harsh road she had travelled, and holding an oilskin coat in one hand. I rushed to her, full of concern to make her welcome. Behind me Peske said, ‘Oh, I see. Forgive me. A fellow should now vanish.’

Mrs Finlay’s head quivered involuntarily. ‘I had meant to be here to speak to you before your marriage. But I wasted too much time and was too influenced by my husband. Then, when I did decide to come, a wheel came off the trap as we crossed over the Gourock Range, and now of course it is eternally too late, Mr Bettany.’ I felt no great threat from her words, and as she shook her head, she seemed weary and philosophic rather than absorbed by either active anger or dread.

‘Come in,’ I pleaded, gesturing towards the door through which we could hear the noise of our guests laughing and a Braidwood ticket-of-leave man playing the fiddle. ‘There is still plenty of food.’

I was thinking that a brandy would do this stranger, who happened by sacramental mystery to be my mother-in-law, even more good than food.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come here for this ill-advised festival, Mr Bettany. This …’ she gestured towards the door I had pointed out earlier, ‘is the product of both foolishness and unworldliness on the part of many, including you, Mr Bettany. My husband, too, made his contribution.’ It was the second time she had said something disapproving of Mr Finlay, and I found that astonishing in a woman who had been tight-lipped on her husband in the past. ‘I can tell you I am here in defiance of him, and this is the first time in twenty years that I can say that. This is the character of your proceedings. In making your heedless marriage, you may well have destroyed my own.’

I made the best defence I could. ‘Isn’t all marriage heedless by nature? Can it ever decently be like the ordering of provisions?’

Naturally she showed a weary contempt for these trite arguments. ‘There is a parlour in there,’ she said, pointing to a small room off the corridor. ‘I’ll wait for you there.’

‘But let me bring you something to eat and drink.’

She told me she would order her own refreshments. ‘Don’t tell Phoebe I am here,’ she said. ‘I am not equipped to face her yet.’

‘Your own daughter, Mrs Finlay.’

‘Yes, but she has scorn for me as yet.’

Leaving her, and abandoning Peske to his solitary relief in the outer dark of the stableyard, I returned to the banquet room, where I kissed a dew of sweat on my wife’s forehead and smiled and made much of her. While she was talking to three young married women at one end of the table, I slipped away to meet her mother.

Mrs Finlay was seated waiting for me, her face still abnormally pale in the lamplight, and her clothes unchanged, but opened at the neck. She had a teacup by her. A sweet odour emanated from it, and there may have been some rum in there too.

‘Your daughter would be so pleased to see you here, Mrs Finlay,’ I began.

‘I fear I might see her soon enough in any case, Mr Bettany. You are the beneficiary, I hate to tell you, of a persistent novel-reading by my daughter. In a novel, a marriage is not a marriage and love is not love unless it is preceded by prohibitions from fathers, and the threat of disinheritance. Even the mother of the tale, though sometimes depicted as understanding, is meant to be a disappointed crone in whom no blood flows, and a witch on the matter of her daughter’s desires. In such books, marriage is always of this nature, a dangerous compact worth dying for in the teeth of an angry world and angrier parents.’

I could not help but feel a little pulse of anger. ‘It seems to me your husband may have read some of those books too. He was very ready to see me as the man of bad family who wants to corner a fortune.’

She shook her head and turned her face away into the dark. ‘It is his politics, not novels, which produced such beliefs. Also, may I say, a certain wisdom?’

‘But not in my case,’ I told her tightly, well settled in my anger now that it had begun to flow. ‘He tried to have me pitched off my country. And my country is the limits of what I desire.’

‘Your country and my daughter,’ she murmured. ‘The point is that novels are all she knows about marriage. She knows nothing of other matters, of what a man is likely to demand of a wife.’