Bettany's Book (58 page)

I
RECEIVE A FIERCE LETTER

I told Phoebe that as well as writing for a housekeeper I would write to her parents with the good news of our impending parenthood. I was always left uneasy by her indifference to her mother and father. I did not doubt her love, but she seemed to think she had centuries and not simply fragile years to make peace, to find a place for them in the tale she was living.

‘Write to my mother,’ she told me knowingly. ‘She will be edified and even a little surprised. But don’t write to my father. He is not ready for a letter yet.’

I had by now had definite news of Mr Finlay’s present problem: he had needed to sell some land at Yass and the brewery in Goulburn, and in a falling market. The air of respect with which these transactions were reported in the
Sydney Herald
and even in the very different and more rankly populist
Goulburn Herald
indicated that these were temporary stratagems undertaken to buttress an inherently robust fortune. Towards other men desperately selling assets they were not as kind.

The autumn rain made me more hopeful for the lambing, yet it was about lambing-time that I got a fierce answer from Finlay concerning Phoebe’s pregnancy.

Dear Sir,

I am appalled to find that you should have imposed a child upon my daughter, no doubt with the intent of claiming my property through it. I take it this infant is designed to produce appeasement, since what brute could oppose the claims of blood and grandchildren! I love my lost daughter and await her return, but in the meantime am left to assure you that no shift, no device you can think of, no felon cunning available to you can make you or your succession welcome to me.

I do ask you to desist from imposing any further contact upon me.

Happily, Mrs Finlay had somehow got control of the envelope and enclosed an imperious but more welcome note of her own.

Please give all my love to my daughter and use her well. When she knows where she will lay in, if it be with the Parslows of Braidwood, I would use every endeavour to visit her there.

I showed Phoebe her mother’s note as if it had been the brisk extent of the letter. The father’s letter I destroyed, not forgetting to make a copy for my journal however, as if that were some sort of vengeance, or a little trap which would one day spring on him. I knew once and for all not to go near the Finlay house, for whatever my demeanour might be, I would be greeted with the standard insult.

M
Y NEW HOUSEKEEPER

The price of wethers had crept up a little thanks to the autumn rain, and so I took some to Goulburn with Long and my drovers. Phoebe, who was beginning to thicken with child, came with me, saying this was the last excursion she would be able to make for some time. We scudded along royally in our phaeton, in front of the dust of the herd. The men pitched a tent for us each night, and laid out our swags, buttressed by the upholstered green cushions from the phaeton.

I had raised with Phoebe the invitation of the new minister at Cooma Creek, Reverend Mr Paltinglass and his wife, that she should have her lying-in at the little brick vicarage in Cooma, to be delivered there with the help of a midwife and the young Scots doctor Alladair. But when again I suggested that she write and tell her parents that she would have her child in Cooma, she became very short with me, and it was only after we were settled in our tent with a lamp hanging from its central pole that she told me, ‘You might tell my mother if you wish. As for Father, he is still playing at his game of having begotten an ungrateful child.’

I kissed her but it did occur to me that she too was still engaged in a game of vengeance. If Phoebe had a fault, I concluded as we conversed, it was an innate intolerance of her parents. She was dismissive of her brother, George, too. He had gone to Harrow and was now about to enter Oxford. Perhaps as a reaction to his father’s sturdy sense of the material world there was a presumption that he might become a minister of the Church of England.

Other than getting a not-so-bad price at the saleyards of 9 shillings per beast, and sending a man to deliver a note to Mrs Finlay, I had two duties to attend to before Phoebe and I left Goulburn. I had been disturbed by Mr Loosely’s air of wistfulness the last time I visited his Academy in Grafton Street, and wished to see how Felix and Hector
were. As I approached the gate of Mr Loosely’s admirable experimental school I saw disturbing signs of decay. The academy’s front gardens, where the pupils were put to work learning botany and primitive agriculture, looked – with the hard summer long over – unwatered. Stakes designed to hold up vines had collapsed, and amongst the withered stalks sat a half-caste child of about six years of age, attempting to extract a little bell from inside a ball made of raffia. He wore only a faded blue shirt and the poor child seemed to be myopic, barely able to see the glint of the blue bell within the strands of wicker.

I rapped on the door, and a desolate-eyed convict maid opened it. Behind her I could hear a hubbub of children which sounded disordered, not at all like the unleashed voice of native Australian scholarship which had been Mr Loosely’s objective.

‘Is Mr Loosely well?’ I asked the convict woman.

‘Not on your oath, sir,’ she told me. ‘Not so lively at all.’

She put me in the parlour, where I sat facing the wall where Loosely’s map of China was crookedly hung. Little, wispy Mrs Loosely hurried in at last. She wore a grey apron on which some stains, perhaps of modelling clay, showed. She made no attempt to explain the turmoil of children I could hear from the yard. ‘Mr Bettany,’ she said. ‘Did you read that the Governor of New South Wales has withdrawn his grace from us?’

I admitted I had not.

‘So we are without support. Our black children are to go to Blacktown, our white to the Devil. This is Mr Loosely’s reward.’ Her face quivered. ‘How easily he could have founded another sad colonial grammar school for the children of the moneyed class … Or he could have been a master at the best British school, if his angels had not driven him here. And the stipend he sought in place of the affluence which could have been his has now been cut off.’

‘I had no idea. What reason did His Excellency give?’

‘There have been malicious rumours concerning beatings, and our enemies have not omitted to throw in slanders about the drinking of hard liquor.’

‘By Mr Loosely?’

‘That in despair he gave some to scholars too. To children.’

I shook my head. No wonder the wife seemed so beset, so worn to a wire. As I wondered what to say and do, the door was pushed open and Mr Loosely was there, wax-pale, unshaven, wearing only his nightshirt
and showing gingery straggles of whiskers. Having thrown the door wide, he entered normally, like a schoolmaster in august possession of all his appropriate weeds and wits, and closed it quietly. Then he came across to the table, sat down opposite me and gathered himself as if to be frank.

‘Mr Bettany,’ he said, ‘that second child you sent me is a failure. He has not proven to be a primal well of yearning waiting to be undammed. This child, unsullied with the blood of the European Cain, this child from that supposedly limitless mine of the intellect’s longing, is a cretin, an utter idiot. I expected the fullness of raw intelligence. I got a fool. I became a fool myself for having held out such a vision to the Viceroy. On his last visit His Excellency was acutely disappointed to behold the place and to quiz the children.’

‘You are not well, my friend,’ I said.

Poor mad-eyed Loosely shook his head. ‘I don’t know what is happening to me. I have interminable flux.’

As he sat trembling in his nightshirt and complaining more to God than to me, his wife reached for his wrist and turned her pale eyes to me. Loosely gathered himself. ‘The power of the child Hector’s ignorance is what oppressed me. I had set tasks in ciphering and copying. He failed once, and again, but – sir – I was patient, waiting for that mighty serpent of knowledge to arise. But whatever I asked, at each turn I might as well have been asking him to translate the Rosetta Stone. I brought him brandy and said, ‘Drink that, you oaf. Your mind is incapable of being rendered less prehensile than it already is.’

‘You forced brandy on Hector?’ I was beginning to see why His Excellency might have been shocked. ‘That child is my ward.’

An acute and childlike alarm rose in the faces both of Mr and Mrs Loosely. Mrs Loosely raised both hands. ‘It was unwise. But Mr Loosely had not slept. He was so disappointed, you see.’

‘But how can that excuse such an act?’ I asked.

Mr Loosely fibrillated his hands madly in front of his face. ‘How indeed, sir? How indeed? But doctor has given me opium for the pain of that bare ignorance …’ He gestured towards the noise of his residual pupils from the yard. ‘Their ignorance is a spike in my flesh.’

He lowered his head on the table then and Mrs Loosely explained, ‘He thinks they have made him sick because they can’t do long multiplication. He has encountered but one gem, your boy Felix. Apart from that, it is barrenness …’ She gestured towards the air.

‘My dear sir,’ I told Loosely, ‘you must see a really good physician.’

I was stricken for him, and for Hector. He had suggested this vain experiment but I had gone along with it, delivering poor Hector to him like an amateur botanist bringing some rare vine. I took a £5 note from my pocket and passed it with minimum gesture to Mrs Loosely.

‘You must both look after yourselves,’ I said.

‘What will become of us?’ she asked.

‘I will write to His Excellency and urge a government pension,’ I told her.

But she seemed to think that was not likely to work. ‘I have, praise God, a well-to-do family in Abingdon on the Thames, and will need to apply to them for great help.’ She took the £5 note nonetheless.

Poor Mr Loosely rose and put the back of his hand to his forehead. ‘Oh the old grief creeps on me,’ he said, and walked out.

Mrs Loosely went running into the corridor behind him. ‘Winnie, Winnie, put Mr Loosely into his bed.’

Naturally, on her return, I asked her if I could see Felix and Hector. She took me to the back door, from which we could see the yard where perhaps twenty ill-clad children were making the noise of two hundred.

‘I shall stop here. I am the matron indoors, but Felix is the only one they will obey outdoors. He is the monitor for the open air.’

I saw them both at once, Felix standing and holding apart a white urchin from a black one, Hector. Hector was bare-bottomed, and they both wore threads and had no jackets despite the advancing New South Wales winter.

Mrs Loosely said, ‘We have cut down on clothing since Mr Loosely’s dosages became so expensive.’

It struck me then that of course he was deranged. Because some fool of a doctor had told Loosely to consume laudanum, his judgement had vanished. Hence the pin-point eyes, the bloody flux, the craziness of forcing brandy upon poor Hector. Even the idea to force grammar and geometry on Hector may have been opium-driven. Yet I had been persuaded to go along with it.

I went down into the yard, and Felix saw me and gave up with a grateful sigh all efforts to mediate between Hector and the other child. He was now a handsome boy of nearly ten years, and stepped towards me and said, ‘Mr Bettany, could you take me away from here? I have learned enough.’

‘I think I will take you away,’ I told him. ‘I had no concept …’

A number of the yard urchins, the children of convicts, drew close to listen.

‘I will work very hard as your stockman.’

‘Mr Loosely says you are too clever to be a stockman.’

‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘I am a stockman here.’ And he looked around the churned, unruly yard.

‘But don’t you have loyalty to Mr Loosely?’ I asked him. ‘Now he is ill?’

He did not answer.

Hector now took my hand. There was wariness in his eyes. What was to be done with him?

‘Can you ride?’ I asked Felix. I had a clear image of the two of us, riding with vast flocks beneath snowy escarpments.

‘Yes,’ he told me, and indicated an old nag beyond the yard fence, grazing in a paddock.

‘I think I could put you on a better horse than that one,’ I told him. ‘And the tongue you spoke as a child … you remember that? How to talk to the Moth people …?’

‘
Utique, domne
!’ he told me in classroom Latin. Yes Master. A child pitiably trying to show he had studied dutifully.

I went therefore and made it finally plain to Mrs Loosely that I was taking both boys. I told them to go to the resident children’s dormitory and collect what they owned. They came back still without shoes or jackets. Felix carried a Latin Primer named
Liber Primus et Secundus
, and Hector a top, which he held close to his lips, as if to say, ‘No books for me.’

Behind me Mrs Loosely cried with a fluting voice, ‘We intended to buy more winter clothes before too long, Mr Bettany. But tradesmen are not very understanding in this town.’ By that she obviously meant that they wanted to be paid.