Bettany's Book (65 page)

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘she will keep you honest, O’Dallow.’

‘Sir,’ he assented. And then released an extraordinary quantity of news. ‘She comes from the one county as me, sir.’

‘You were not married in Ireland?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I have long since had the sad news. My wife is dead.’

He took from his pocket a letter and handed it to me. The envelope had a Listowel, County Kerry postmark. Its contents were from a man who called himself ‘Tomas’, and was O’Dallow’s brother-in-law. The letter broke to O’Dallow the news that his wife Bride had perished of ‘the choler’ and died with the sacraments and in the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Tomas mentioned that O’Dallow’s sons were now close to grown, were in good health and had borne the loss bravely, in certain expectation of the Resurrection. All in the village of Knocknaboulna asked after him, O’Dallow, and would never forget him, though they knew they would not see him in this life.

I had never read such a heartbreaking letter, not even the one I had read at our first Nugan Ganway Christmas to Long. I held it out towards O’Dallow. ‘My dear fellow. You bore this with such fortitude.’

He looked away, the only gesture of overwhelming regret.

‘So,’ I said more cheerily, ‘since you are still serving time, you need only the permission of the Colonial Secretary. And of God, of course.’

‘That’s right,’ he told me.

Even in this discourse I suffered from an irksome suspicion that he – like all the men – saw through me. Now that Eros, the god of love, rather than Ceres the goddess of husbandry, seemed to have undertaken to rule Nugan Ganway, I felt that all flesh was transparent.

Beyond the little town of Yass, where I had let the men visit inns in two watches, we left the track and came down to the homestead at Inchecor, in a valley somewhat narrower than the great plain in which Nugan Ganway stood, but with plentiful kangaroo grass.

As our flock neared Charlie’s home, a hessian-booted stockman, holding a carbine as if it were a crutch, strolled up from the stockyards to meet us. ‘Thou be early, zur,’ he told me in a gargling voice. A Devon man. A plump woman bearing a shotgun also emerged from under the shade of the Batchelor’s verandah. I asked the man why everyone was armed.

‘Well, it be some native trouble,’ he told me. ‘Mr Batchelor himself’s off after them Myall blacks who caused us trouble.’

‘Are there sufficient yards for these sheep of his?’

‘When he gets back, Mr Batchelor and the men’ll be ’recting ’em, I’d say.’

I broke the news to my men and told them there had been trouble, and we set up our camp quite contentedly on a slope. I gave directions that two of us would ride the edge of the flock at all times, and the dogs, watchful even in their sleep, could be depended on to stop heedless rushes and to marshal strays. That arranged, I rode down to Charlie’s place. As I approached, the armed housekeeper, still waiting on the verandah and darkly regarding me, reached her carbine back indoors as if to some hidden recipient. I would have said that I knew everything there was to know about the sort of house Charlie might run, but the housekeeper’s gesture made it seem a household of mysteries.

I dismounted and tied my horse at the yard rails and walked across to her. I asked her could she tell Mrs Batchelor I was here. She nodded and went to do it. She was a time about it, and at last I settled myself in a wooden chair placed outside, in the winter sun. I was drowsing off when the housekeeper came back with a tray, laden with a tea pot and cup and some cake, somewhere between old English fruit cake and damper with mixed fruit.

‘Mrs Batchelor said for you to have tea.’ She laid the tray down, poured a cup – there was even milk there, which I declined. ‘Some of my bush duff then?’ the housekeeper asked me, and I took a slice of the stuff, though without appetite. As an afterthought, she wrenched a piece of paper from the pocket of her apron and gave it to me. ‘Dear Jonathan,’ it said, ‘I regret the indisposition of children prevents my welcoming you indoors. Best you camp out pending a conversation with Charles. Yours, Julia Batchelor.’

I believed from its tone I was fortunate that I got away with being called ‘Dear Jonathan’, instead of ‘Mr Bettany’.

So I would camp with my men, and what was most vexing was that Clancy would secretly make jokes about it – ‘Batchelor don’t want the boss in the house while he’s away.’

By the next afternoon, having had in our stock camp on the slope above the homestead no further approach from Julia Batchelor, I was considering losing patience with Charlie, leaving the sheep in the care of the West Country man, and returning to what was, after all, my own business. I set my men to work cutting brushwood hurdles, a skill associated with their servitude. We had erected the first yard and driven perhaps 1500 sheep into it when further down the valley I saw a party of horsemen. I could see Charlie amongst them, in his wide-awake hat.

‘At last,’ I intoned, and got on Hobbes, irritated, and rode down to greet him.

Closing on him, I called with apparent lightness, ‘Mr Batchelor, my friend!’

He glanced up and saw me but made no answering greeting. Naturally enough I felt foolish, but wondered if it was a matter of hearing, eyesight, or even a sad experience on his chase of the natives. I rode a little past his group of seven men and wheeled and caught up to his side. He, and the entire party, still looked grim.

‘Charlie,’ I said. ‘Trouble with the sables?’

‘Speared one of my shepherds, killed one hundred and fifty sheep, all for nothing.’

‘My God,’ I said. ‘Did you catch up with them?’

‘Two,’ he said. ‘Old man and boy. Left their bodies as a warning to the blackguards.’

It was true the natives could reduce one to shameful practice. But there was also something directed at me in his bluntness. He said no more, but a man riding on his right in a large straw hat nodded down towards
two small objects hanging from his saddle by twine. ‘Drying them out, sir,’ this man told me. A cultivated felon by the sound of him. ‘It’s excellent standing for a fellow to have a nigger baccy pouch.’

I understood the hanging objects were the scrotums – or would my father have it
scrota
? – of the men they had caught. Could Charlie let this thing be done and talked about without some comment? It seemed so. An altered Charlie!

He saw the hurdles my men had made on the hillside. ‘There is no need to trouble your men further,’ he said briskly. ‘Perhaps you could go and tell them to break camp.’

I was by now thoroughly hurt, and said that if that was what he chose then … But I could not finish the sentence, and so turned Hobbes away and rode back towards my men.

‘Bettany,’ he called. ‘Be sure to inquire of your father.’

‘My father?’

‘Meet me by the yard in half an hour,’ he shouted, and it was all he said by way of clarifying things. ‘Before you leave.’

I told my men to abandon their work on the hurdles and to break the camp. ‘Had trouble with natives,’ I said, nodding to the homestead. ‘Not a good time for frivolity.’

I felt Felix’s handsome eyes on me. But what a good lad – he had ridden and stood watch like a man.

‘Would have thought he’d be glad to have bloody people round,’ said Presscart.

My men began to gather themselves. We would want to be well on the road beyond Yass by dark. I sat and drank black tea, peering at the homestead. In a while, I saw Charlie emerge, coatless, and pace by the yard, smoking a pipe. By now of course he had spoken to Julia and the housekeeper. He knew I had not been inside the house. Perhaps that was the crazed idea he had had in the first place. That I might offer some affront to Julia! If so, what did he think of my honour?

I had intended to take my good time, but could not sit watching him for more than two minutes, and so, with a ‘Keep at it!’ to my men, I mounted and rode down the incline to join him. When he saw me coming he began knocking out his pipe against a railing.

I dismounted near him.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘didn’t you think the tone of our last exchange a little cold?’

‘If so, it will not much improve,’ he told me. He considered me.

‘I don’t know what in God’s name you mean, Charlie,’ I said, softening towards him, because in his reserve I could see some acute pain.

‘It is all over Van Diemen’s Land and you do not know? Of course, everyone does Mother the honour of pretending not to believe it and never mentioning it. But the knowledge is universal, and Van Diemen’s Land is a closed place to me now!’

‘Is your mother ill?’

‘No, but I wish so. I wish she were dead.’

‘Dear Charlie!’ I said.

‘Never
dear
, and never
Charlie
again! Your mother is the wife of a scoundrel, though herself a victim of his easy charm. You’re the spawn of a scoundrel. “It was a mistake of youth,” my poor father said of his crime. What about this crime? This one?’

‘These are very appalling things you say, Batchelor,’ I told him. ‘What crime?’

‘Just that my father’s house is disgraced. My mother is disgraced by your father, and it is the gossip of Van Diemen’s Land. And you have not heard, you say! It is inherited in you – the air of hurt and blithe innocence!’

‘You be careful!’ I roared, pointing at him. It was the subject on which I had least composure.

‘Drop that idiotic, stage-gentleman finger of yours, Bettany. While your father was teaching us the politer lines of Horace, he was applying the more tempestuous ones to my mother. “
… nunc et campus et areae lenesque sub noctem susurri composita repentantur hora,
” and so on. “Now in the fields is the appointed hour for night time whispers …” It seems he knew too well what such sentiments meant.’

I uttered the normal outrage and denials, then said ‘Dishonour your mother if you choose, but do not dishonour my father!’

‘But you always thought him better than he was. You thought him a statesman because your mother pretended so. But he was always a plausible scamp. Go to your brother! The story is he has known of the indecency for some time and sought out a station on the mainland just to get away from the shamefulness of his father. Or else, more son-like, go to your poor dishonoured mother, who still has to ride into Ross in a cart and listen to the whispers, while your father stays safe in the degenerate port of Hobart.’

Hence I heard from Charlie that my family was in ruins, and it seemed at once that my unfaithful yearnings for Sarah Bernard had somehow
infested the past and undermined my family’s honour in reverse. Yet I could not picture my father in my situation, as the besotted adulterer. My brain ached with the task of imagination.

Charlie stopped leaning on the rail, put his pipe away, and prepared to go inside. ‘I know you have a competence for grazing,’ he told me. ‘But you will never become more than a low-bred fellow. And you will never have any honour.’

This statement terrified more than offended me to the extent that I grabbed his shirt collar. But he looked at me with such a calm contempt that I let it go again. Nothing he had said could be amended by blows or even the infliction of wounds. Perhaps in punishing the Myall blacks, he had also been punishing the Bettanys.

‘I wish to see all of you off my land before dark,’ he said and went inside. I could not follow. I walked back to my men with a pretence of dignity. I was reminded of the night when, after two rums, my father had said, ‘There is no charity which is not the Master and Servant Act.’

I had not known then what he meant. I knew now. The Batchelors had mimed fraternity. Had my father thus been encouraged to punish them?

Phoebe was the first to mention Alice Aldread to me.

Sarah had told her story to Phoebe, describing her as a woman who had more played at murdering a tyrannous and aged husband than killed him. The victim himself a man who believed in taking arsenic and mercury for his health.

‘She’s a sad case,’ said Phoebe, with that beautiful obdurate light in her eye, reciting lines which I believed had come from Bernard. ‘She was locked in amongst the mad at Tarban Point, before languishing in the Female Factory. She has also been much weakened by some consumptive illness. It would be wonderful if she could live out her time in this country, which would be very tonic for her. She might be useful for lighter duties too.’

‘But does she have her ticket-of-leave?’ I asked.

Phoebe was busy at needlework but reading at the same time. I so admired her simultaneous talents.

‘It should be possible for you to get her one by writing,’ said Phoebe. ‘She has a champion in Sarah, and I think we should be her champion too.’ We had, she pointed out, been more than fortunate in our convict
servants, our record was good, and so a letter to the Colonial Secretary petitioning for this Aldread’s release and assignment should be successful.

How cruel it was of me that I could listen apparently lightly, seemingly half-jokingly to my generous girl-wife as she asked me to pursue a kind impulse at the urging of Bernard. In fact, so far was I from being easy and indifferent in doing Sarah Bernard favours that, with dinner ended, after engaging in pleasantly deceptive conversation with Phoebe, I excused myself to smoke my pipe. Hidden like some morbidly observant and moonstruck farm boy beneath the overhang of my bark verandah, I watched the light from the mutton-fat lamp glint through the woolsack curtains of the kitchen. This was the same light by which Sarah Bernard worked. I looked for every subtlety of that dull, muted beam and–Iam ashamed to use the word –
trembled
when her shadow, generated by a step forward, fell across it. Then the light was quenched. Envy the lamp, for it had shared her breath, Horace might have said.

Then, in a wind which sharpened itself against the great boulders of my pastoral country, she appeared by cold and partial moonlight and walked out towards Long’s hut, the blast flattening her dress against her shins. Her gait was leisurely, but the wind and I urgent. By now my pipe was snubbed out with my thumb and resting cold in my pocket, and I was at the one time raw and glowing.