Bettany's Book (73 page)

I was again for a moment envious of the much-travelled corporal.

‘One day Miss Duncannon entered the kitchen while Corporal McWhirter and I were engaged in the quite normal endearments of married people, an innocent embrace. Since I lived with the Duncannons six days a week, and Corporal McWhirter was not permitted to remain there overnight, Miss Duncannon should not have been surprised to see an exchange of caresses. But I saw that Miss Duncannon was unused to seeing such displays. There was certainly none between her parents, and to the preachers of her Chapel this would have been seen as a flippant embrace or even an evil one.’

How I cherished and feared her bluntness, but also her occasional elegant phrasing. Like Phoebe she had caught the desire to talk like novels and not like felons. Speaking in the tongue of angels must have brought her some abuse from hard Londoners on her ship.

‘So she was jealous, this merchant’s child?’ I asked.

‘In her innocence, she thought the kiss was a betrayal. She had believed McWhirter’s teasing of her, and his compliments, had been love. And
she could not imagine a more intense connection than a kiss. So it seemed to her an insult to her feelings for the corporal.’

This assessment of Miss Duncannon was redolent of what my mother-in-law had once said of Phoebe.

Bernard continued. ‘I knew there would be trouble. It was as if she was the wife and I the seductress, and I thought, “What will she tell her father?”’

‘Did she have such power over her austere parent?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps she did not, since it wasn’t to him she took her anger. But she did acquire all the cleverness of a rejected and jealous soul.’

‘Oh,’ I uttered, delighted that she again delivered the sort of sentence you got from novels as published in newspapers.
My
seductress educated by her own strong will and vigorous memory.

‘Do you know I am Jewish?’ she asked me then.

‘The little nun in Goulburn told me,’ I said. Indeed the fact had added to the sense that I had been engaged in a desperate Old Testament struggle, and was following a pillar of light to guide me out of desert places.

‘My father was a tailor to the poor,’ she continued. ‘But he was learned and read to me and sent me to Christian churches. He wanted me to behold what the English believed. I could make my way if I knew that. “Do not be afraid of Christ, because he was Jewish yet these millions of Gentiles honour him!” he said. Now he went to the synagogue in Bootle Street, but he made sure I went to St Ann’s and the Cross Street Chapel which the Duncannons themselves attended. He did not want me to be a Christian but to become learned in their ways so that I did not have the hard life he had even from other Jews. There was a German Jew clothing dealer by the name of Reichman who helped my father have a hard life. My parents had known him since they came to Manchester. My mother had collapsed in his warehouse before she died. I was a seamstress in his repairing shop from the time I was five. All the poor Jews from Poland and Russia bought their clothes from him, or sold them to him, and as they did it he would mock them, crying, “So here they come, I smell them, the Russians and the Poles, the Tsar’s outcasts who know not soap.” Statements of that nature amused him. Even when I was a child this Reichman was as good as blind, but he would feel fabric with his fingers and say, “That is a good one, that is good worsted.” He could tell good cloth even if he could not swear as to who presented it to him.

‘My little Miss Duncannon gathered up some of her best church clothing and delivered it to him, and he approved wonderfully of it and
gave her a price of perhaps a third of its value, and she signed his receipt with my name, and answered to my name in a voice which, it must be admitted, was not a long way removed from mine, the voice of ordinary Manchester, which Mr Duncannon had brought with him from his childhood on his way to riches. She placed the money in a hole under a commode in my room, and then cried that her clothing was gone. Mr and Mrs Duncannon, who believed in their daughter’s innocence and redemption above their own, called the constables, who were delighted with their cleverness at discovering money and the receipt in my damp room beside the coal hole. It was the sort of room of which a policeman might easily think: the person who lived here must have a grievance.’

‘And this chapel girl,’ I asked with a childlike awe, ‘who believes vigorously in hell, would perjure herself?’

‘She would also be believed in preference to a daughter of Russian Jews. In any case, girls don’t believe in hell as strongly as they do in revenge,’ said Bernard, and then, ‘You don’t believe this. I can tell you do not believe this as more than a thief’s version. However, I don’t require your belief.’

I did my utmost to reassure her. She smiled distantly, into a shadowy corner, and said, ‘Women not equipped as I, and shipped as I was shipped on the transport
Whisper
, died of sorrow and the bloody flux long before they landed.’

‘Equipped as you?’ I asked.

‘Equipped with that in my blood which makes me expect torment.’

‘Do you expect torment from me?’

Again the smile, as if to an invisible audience, with more history to them than me. ‘No, for in my blood I expect joy in the end.’ I kissed her, but then recklessly set a test, one which she was entitled to resent.

‘Your friend Alice Aldread however? She did kill her husband?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Mind you, he had been poisoning himself with arsenic for years. But yes, she speeded the end. She filled his tea with poison.’

For some reason she began to laugh, and I joined in, and all at once we could not cease.

To me, as very distant thunder, came from Mrs Finlay a letter, sent from England, with the news that Mr Finlay, distressed at having neglected to become reconciled to his forthright daughter, and burdened with debts
which, while not murderous, forced him to an agonising reappraisal of his place in the world, had perished in his sleep. A month after Phoebe’s death, Finlay himself went into the bitter ground. Mrs Finlay was selling the pastoral station they had owned at Yass, had retained the house where I had first met the child Phoebe, but had closed it down while she visited her son George and other relatives in England. Her tone was anguished and consolatory. I was pleased she would have left Goulburn before news of my supposed disgraceful betrayal of Phoebe was likely to have reached her.

I did not grieve for Finlay, except for my mother-in-law’s sake – though I foresaw that she would make a very successful widow and perhaps be happier in that state than she had been married to her acidic and self-important husband.

Phoebe had been some six weeks gone when I saw a spring cart crossing the ford of the Murrumbidgee down the long slope from our stockyards. I recognised as the driver of the cart the new Cooma Creek magistrate, Bilson, who had attended George’s funeral. He was with a woman. His wife perhaps? The cart was attended by two border policemen, and a native tracker, his feet bare in the stirrups. It was possible the magistrate had been sent to chastise me on behalf of the colonial gentry, and the possibility gave me a strange, angry interest in his arrival. But as he swung the cart into the yard before the house, he had a grin on his face.

The woman beside him, whose nose bone and cheek points seemed at first to dominate her face, had eyes which burned with a notable fury of interest. Was this Bernard’s friend, the murderess? I asked myself. It seemed to be. She wore the sort of cap and apron which came from the Female Factory. I signalled Felix, who was combing a horse in the yard, to come and help the woman down.

Landed on Nugan Ganway, Alice Aldread leaned fully and breathlessly on young Felix’s forearm. The ghost of what had once been a splendid smile rose to her lips.

‘You’re a lovely boy for that,’ she said, and her voice, though not refined, was melodic. Her praise for Felix had no archness but was authentic, and the boy blushed for that reason.

I presented myself and told her that I was Mr Bettany. And yet I felt a little like an impostor. It was an earlier and redeemable Bettany who had applied for her. The one who claimed her now was a different fellow.

‘So,’ she said, ‘if I had the physical strength to kneel at your feet and
rise again, I would do that. Since I was first in this colony, you are the only one to have treated me to the credit of being sane and able to be decent employed.’

I told her that bendings of the knee were not necessary on Nugan Ganway, and that her friend Sarah was here. ‘And your wife?’ she asked. I told her Phoebe was dead of diphtheria. She coughed and could merely shake her head in condolence. I instructed Felix to lead her inside.

Later, when I went indoors myself, I heard Sarah and her laughing from the cookhouse, and thought it a splendid sound. They might go, I thought, into my wife’s room and convince her unreconciled ghost with their gaiety. Then I heard Sarah say, in a way I knew at once she would not say to any man, ‘So I’ve brought you out of Egypt, Alice, as I promised.’

Bernard, the universal saviour. For she had brought me out of Egypt too, even though she was a rescuer held at a distance from me by layers of statute, of Home and colonial ordinance, and of universal pretensions of respectability. But it was, above all, with someone who had shared the stink, peril and bafflement of the convict deck that she could plainly say, ‘I’ve saved you!’

I soon found that Aldread, though consumptive, had none of the earnestness of Bernard. She was what would be called a jolly woman, with a greying fairness to her hair and complexion, the flaming red of her disease in her cheeks, and its frenzy in her eyes. She was eager to help in the kitchen with Bernard, but her occasional coughing fits became so intense that Bernard and I devised a way to keep her busy with needle and coloured cottons, and she worked on my clothes, on Bernard’s, ultimately even on Long’s, Maggie Tume’s and O’Dallow’s, with the speed and delicacy of a true craftswoman.

Tume being quickly with child by her new husband O’Dallow, and breathing hard over her work, Aldread ran up nightdresses for her laying-in, and a christening robe for the unborn child. In the yard a few days later, I saw these items blowing in the wind from a rope, for Tume had wisely chosen to boil all traces of Aldread’s breath out of them.

Despite her condition, Aldread was partial to rum in the evenings, sitting by the fire with Bernard and me. Perhaps it might hasten her disease, but it eased her breathing. From these conversations, I learned amusing facts such as, for example, that during their transportation, other women called them ‘the miseries’ because of their superior height. I heard a great deal darkly narrated of the Pallmires, the Steward and
Matron of the Female Factory. Bernard clearly did not wish to tell as many stories, nor make as many jovial asides, as Aldread. Her eyes reflected the fire flatly.

The Pallmires, according to Aldread, took women on drinking expeditions into Parramatta. Even in the early stages of her illness, Aldread had been required to travel in Mr Pallmire’s wagon for such an event, though, unlike the women from amongst whom Bernard had been assigned to me, Aldread was meant, as a life prisoner, to occupy the factory’s cells.

‘The fellow liked to be utterly fenced with women,’ said Aldread, ‘and his wife, unlike a normal wife, liked to see him so fenced. They were a most rum pair, and thank God they were taken off through you, Sarah.’

‘Through you?’ I asked Bernard.

‘Why Sarah watched them, all their dodges, and made a record.’

I knew that Bernard had been taken on such degrading excursions, for she said nothing, and said nothing in a particular way, a knowledge-is-dangerous sort of way. It was clear to me that to talk of the Pallmires was for Bernard an acute pain. She had suffered, I could tell, in other ways she did not want to detail, and with her immutable air of privacy, I understood with a pang that I might never hear of them. Even the outspoken Aldread could tell Bernard was ill at ease and retreated from the subject, letting her anecdotes die in a series of discreet coughs.

As at some periods in the past, after four in the afternoon, Felix began to come regularly to the door and, if it was convenient, was admitted to the corner of the parlour where my library was. He was the most advanced scholar of Nugan Ganway, and combined learning with skillful riding. His studies had, of course, been interrupted by our recent tragedies and by my reluctance to open the door to him, in case I read something in his eye. But now that he returned he brought back with him a book on surveying which I had bought to equip myself against potential disputes over boundaries. He had, on his own initiative, fashioned a device like a quadrant, involving two lengths of stick screwed together, with a peg glued to either end of the stick. By using this he could measure distances between landmarks.

He liked to sit and study in the presence of women. In a quiet way he even enjoyed an applauding audience. Alice Aldread regularly rose from her sewing table to make a fuss of him.

‘My heaven, but you’re a clever fellow. I guess you could even teach a fool like me some of that.’

‘Trigonometry is difficult,’ said Felix, politely closing his book. ‘But I could teach you Euclid.’

She pulled her chair closer to his and, while searching for the page in Euclid, he motioned her to come even closer.

‘No, I would cough all over you,’ said Alread. ‘You can show me from a distance.’

He held up the appropriate page. It was Pythagoras’s Theorem. He pointed to the crucial elements. ‘See this? This is your right angle. Straight up, straight down, no deviation. This one here is your hypotenuse.’

‘Why is it called such a silly name?’ asked Aldread.

‘Oh, Aldread,’ he told her, laughing. ‘It is not a silly name. It’s just from the Greek – ‘to be opposite to’ – you see, it is opposite.’

I thought that Pythagoras couldn’t have put it better himself.

For six weeks or so, Aldread slept in the kitchen, from which, in Bernard’s arms in the room built to honour George’s unachieved boyhood, I heard her occasional paroxysms. One night they were so regular that Bernard and I lay awake waiting for the next.