Bettany's Book (81 page)

Returned to the manse, I found Long looking hollow-eyed and waiting by the gate. He must have risen at three o’clock to be here now, and he had just heard from young Mrs Paltinglass that I was out but expected back very soon.

‘You must have some tea,’ I said, greeting him. He said he had been offered it. Treloar, he went on urgently, was at Nugan Ganway, had arrived the previous evening and been very disappointed to find I was not there. One of the shepherds who had sat in Goldspink’s rejoicing at the man’s demise had ridden behind us and reported the death to Treloar. Treloar was determined that action must be taken. He had come to my place with a notary from Goulburn and two servants, and he intended to take affidavits from all his men at the Suggan Buggan River. He spoke to Long and half-suspected him. He said significantly, ‘If my men might
be hanged for removing the sable nuisances from the country, someone should certainly pay for the death of such a good servant.’

Bernard had made up the room for Treloar and the notary, said Long. And Long had left at an early hour to prevent Treloar, who was resting in preparation to ride forth into the mountains that day, from seeing his departure. Treloar’s intention to see punishment had impelled dear Long across frosty hills.

‘You must get him away, sir,’ Long told me. ‘Treloar has very firm ideas. If his concepts come to nothing, we can fetch the lad back.’

‘Away? What is “away”?’

‘If perhaps you had friends in England.’

‘But the priest here, Paltinglass, has seen him. If we got him away, Paltinglass would know that.’

Long stood frowning and we took thought.

‘Then,’ Long told me in a harsh whisper, ‘it must seem that he has fled us too. He did so down at Goldspink’s, didn’t he?’

I found a ten-shilling bank note in my pocket and gave it to him, telling him it was best he not come in now, but take refreshments at the Royal Hotel, a long brick and plaster public house in the town. He turned back to his horse. ‘Tell the boy,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘that Sean Long says he’ll be a great man.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said. ‘If he can be saved now.’

‘If he had only waited an hour or so,’ said Long, ‘I might have found the means to do it myself! Finish that murderous Goldspink is what I mean.’

‘Oh Sean, you would know as well as I that these things are always the matter of an hour. It is the hours which determine how we travel through the years.’

He got into his saddle and said, ‘That’s exact right,’ and rode away.

Paltinglass, at his breakfast table in the parlour, was nourishing himself to ride out to visit the sickbed of the wife of Treloar’s new overseer at Mount Bulwa. This English convict woman had cried out, according to a message he had received, that the sins of her London girlhood sat on her heart and oppressed her breathing. That being so, he wondered if it would be necessary for Felix and myself to enjoy his ‘sanctuary’ – again he made it a pleasant joke – during the day.

He clearly did not want to ask me explicitly to leave, yet he would be embarrassed for his parishioners if the scandalous Bettany stayed in the house alone with his wife! The truth was that I did not want his parishioners to know I had even been there. He offered me food, his faith strong
enough to accommodate the presence of a sinner. But his near-departure was very handy for my purposes. I found Felix in the kitchen drinking tea with Paltinglass’s old servant, a woman named Amy. I dragged him away, with Amy crying in outrage, ‘But the boy has not even eaten his breakfast, sir!’

I took him anyhow and had him gather his few things. When he came back from the room we had occupied, carrying only the greasy and stained coat he had inherited from Goldspink’s hut, I told him to wait in the corridor at the back of the manse, then went to the stables and told the parson’s convict groom to saddle Whitey and put my team in the shafts of the phaeton, and after that go inside, since Mr Paltinglass wanted to see him. When the man had shambled inside, frowning his way past Felix to answer his master’s apparent inquiry, I rushed the boy outside to his horse. I told him to ride fast out of town. He was to speak to no one and wait for me where Cooma Creek met Middle Flat Creek, some fifteen miles north. If he saw people, he was to conceal himself and Whitey.

Felix mounted and went off on his own at a discreet canter which became a near-gallop as he passed the gate. He was still cautious though. He did not wish to attract any inquiries from constables. Going to the front of the manse where I had once celebrated George’s birth, I was delighted to see him, across some fenced paddocks, safely veering north past the police magistrate’s and Land Commissioner’s offices, and disappearing at pace over the hill beyond the north of the little town.

Happily, and as I had half-hoped, the pleasant Paltinglass had forgotten he had not summoned his groom and indeed engaged him in conversation for at least ten minutes. Towards the end, I knocked, strolled into the parlour, and said casually, ‘Excuse me, Mr Paltinglass. I must go. For some reason Felix has ridden off.’

‘Your way?’ asked Paltinglass. ‘Or towards Goulburn?’

‘The latter, I think. But I shall track him. I must thank you for your Christian kindness and tolerance, sir, and hope you will pass on my regards and appreciation to your splendid wife.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, standing, and ordering the groom, ‘Stay there, stay there!’ he followed me into the hall.

‘Please don’t trouble yourself. I shall go straight to my vehicle,’ I told him.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I wished to say – – my Heaven, I must be a failure as an Evangelical minister, since I still have great regard for you, Bettany.’

I thanked him, though the compliment was very mixed.

‘I ask you as your pastor. Do you hope to marry this Bernard woman?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He touched my sleeve in a kind of relief. ‘I am no social arbiter, and I leave you to pay the social price. It is the moral price which is my concern.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I understand.’ I wanted to be gone. I must meet with Felix and then trail him by a mile or two all the way to that paradisiacal stew of a town, Sydney, a supposed chase and a weary one, which would take me away from what I needed, Bernard and Nugan Ganway. As Barley would say, away from my rudder.

At our meeting place at the confluence of Cooma and Middle Flat Creeks, I was careful to instruct Felix that if stopped by constables, as might happen to a half-caste boy, he should speak quietly and reasonably to them, and should mention my name. If that failed, he should show them a letter I had written on paper I had begged from Mr Paltinglass. It advised whomsoever that he was carrying a message from me to Mr Barley. I did not like to embarrass Barley by invoking his name as a ploy, but in any case he would need to be asked to help me even more concretely than that.

On another sheet I wrote a note to Bernard, and sealed it, and as I set off after Felix, gave it to Long, who had just finished breakfast at the Royal. I had utter confidence in all parties to the arrangement – in Long, in Bernard, even in my flawed self. A half-embarrassed tone had until now, I saw, marked my discourse with Bernard. Bernard herself had that reserve as well. So I was suddenly determined to alter things with a very heated letter, which the time I had now spent away from Nugan Ganway and her gave me the authority to write.

My most remarkable and beloved Bernard,

I must go to Sydney for reasons to be explained, but regret each mile that stands between and intend to be back with you in an unprecedented time. Hard riding is justifiable for the sake of the company of so incomparable a companion. Until then, retain a fond memory of me, since your humble supplicant and lover lives for the kindness of your eyes.

I have asked good Sean to deliver this.

Your loving servant,

John Bettany

Felix had his bed-roll and would sleep at night on the edge of bullock-wagon camp sites along the Sydney road. There were, of course, risks in that – brawls, assaults, shouted insults from ticket-of-leave wagoners and drivers who, from within the standpoint of their own flawed blood, were often willing to find fault with the blood of others. These taunts would be hard for Felix to bear, now that it seemed that the improbable truth was that his blood was half Goldspink’s, that half his cleverness flowed from the same tainted well. But I had to depend on Felix’s wisdom and physique to protect him, and also on the rough fairness of the sort of convict represented by Long and O’Dallow, the kind of men who would inevitably cry, ‘Leave the poor bloody boy alone!’

I stayed in inns, occasionally talking to the publicans about how hard I had travelled, and wondering had they seen a young, half-caste go by on a bold grey mare.

I had to change my team of horses at the town of Mittagong, renting new ones and leaving mine in stables there. A few of the grooms had sighted Felix and Whitey. In the warming air of early November, Felix rode in shirt sleeves, according to their fleeting memories, and ‘looked a handsome nigger’.

‘Did he steal from you, sir?’ they asked.

Felix and I were at one stage so close that I believe I sighted him from the crest of a long, low hill beyond the Black Huts and outside Liverpool. I had by then been chasing and not-chasing him for a week. It was the last I saw of him for the moment. I had told him to take a room at the Seaman’s Mission in George Street, to tell the good people who administered it that he intended to find a berth on a ship, and that he would like a bed in the coloured dormitory. There he would find himself surrounded by Malay, Kanaka and West Indian mariners and whalers, yet again I had no choice than to be confident in his reserve and aplomb.

Arrived in Sydney, I visited the Colonial Secretary’s Office in urbane Macquarie Street, where some very handsome residences of three floors had been built to look down, over the government’s broad botanical gardens, at Government House, the harbour, and the Sydney Heads. I consulted a number of Imperial Gazetteers, from which I discovered the names of the Senior British Resident in Singapore, Sir Baldric Thorsen; the Bishop of Singapore, the Most Reverend Edgar Hamer; and the Chief Agent of the East India Company, Cecil Plumley. At my hotel I wrote letters, as one Briton soliciting the services of another, recommending
Felix Bettany, my ward, to all these worthy gentlemen and (in case malaria had been unkind to them) their successors. I then asked a few people randomly had they seen a young man like Felix around the seamen’s boarding houses of Woolloomooloo, and in the dusk drove out along the South Head Road, seeing the early lanterns of convict night-watchmen at a sandstone quarry and by a timber yard.

At Barley’s splendid hearth, the nature of my recent loss was made bitingly apparent to me. The man stood by his mantelpiece, his wife sewing, and his ten-year-old daughter reading to both of them from Boswell’s
An Account of Corsica
. By the door, a Scottish maid was listening, holding in her arms the utterly sleep-limp Barley son and heir. It had come to a pass where I reminded myself for consolation’s sake he and his wife had lost a daughter in infancy. So he was no stranger to the breath of that great furnace.

‘Do you have someone with you, Mr Bettany?’ he asked me. ‘Someone to take to kitchen.’

‘No, I am on my own,’ I assured him.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Barley softly, ‘have the Sydney radicals succeeded to the point of punishing such a pastoralist as you that you have not a servant left to yourself?’

‘No, Mrs Barley, not yet. Mine are all scattered about the Maneroo, growing wealth for the Barleys.’

I said this with some urgency to lighten the tone, for I could see it forming in their throats to commiserate with me at my loss. I did not want them to, not least since they did not know that I had now been both lost and found. But Mr Barley came forward and laid a hand on my sheepskin coat.

‘We prayed that you might have fortitude, my friend.’

‘That is so,’ Mrs Barley confirmed.

The girl child observed me sombrely with Boswell’s book in her hands.

‘Thank you,’ I told the little family.

‘Oh please, my friend take up a seat,’ Barley urged me.

‘I would like greatly to sit at the heart of your family,’ I told him. ‘But there are some matters …’

‘Of course,’ he said, standing again at once. ‘You didn’t come up here out of your normal time, dear chap, just to see how well young Clara here is reading. No, of course, not even for such a wondrous performance!’

Mrs Barley and Clara laughed – there was a genuine amusement in
both – and I thought what a fortunate man Barley was to be so admired by both a wife and a daughter.

Soon we were in his study. ‘So, do you for once have time to visit my new Darling Harbour wool stores? I am out of dark woods, dear old Bettany, and into birdsong, absolute birdsong.’

‘I would be more than happy to have a friend in absolute birdsong,’ I told him, ‘though by the appearance of tranquillity I just saw in your parlour, you are already there. In any case, I have come for a great favour I have no right to ask, dear Barley.’

‘We are friends and partners.’

‘But you may now hear things of me … Not that the gossip of Nugan Ganway would be of much interest to Sydney-siders.’

‘Sir,’ said Barley, ‘only gossip I will countenance concerning yourself is gossip from your own mouth. I feel, however, there is something I might do for you.’

I told him how I had met the brilliant Felix a decade past, and that I wished for sundry reasons to send him out of the colony. ‘Thus,’ I asked, ‘do you have any of your ships in harbour at the moment?’

‘I have charter contracts with two ships in port at the moment,’ he said with a casual shrug, used to the habit of proprietorship. ‘
Hindustan
with wool for Britain, non-stop, in search of a Sydney to London record in fact, and a partial charter with
Goulburn
, which is for Liverpool by way of Singapore and the Cape.’

‘If you were to authorise the captain of the
Goulburn
to be of service to me, I would be very grateful.’