Bettany's Book (85 page)

When I said no, Bilson blinked and said, ‘That is indeed a pity, since he may have witnessed the killing.’

‘He was always sensitive to ghosts. The child, seeing a body, may have been put to flight in terror. He may also have had an irrational fear of punishment.’

‘Well, he need not have feared that, since your overseer swears the boy did not commit the crime, as convenient as it would be for him to swear the boy did.’

‘And what then does Long tell you?’

‘He says he was not at the killing. He raises the idea that one of Treloar’s stockmen did it. But there is no evidence of that. There is much evidence, however, of Long’s abomination for Goldspink, and evidence of past threats. Treloar is frantic to convict him, and the Crown Prosecutor, Mr Cladder, is anxious for Long’s head, to show the colonial Tories that a white overseer is worth as much as a native. The circuit judge, Justice Flense, however, is a native of Ulster and, though a Presbyterian elder, has shown himself lenient towards Pats like Long.’

Long, I soon found, occupied a quite spacious cell, one of three, in a free-standing stone building behind Bilson’s courthouse. He was let out under the guard of a constable with a carbine, so that I could talk to him in the police office which made the fourth room of this cell block. Not for the first time in his life, Long wore bracelets attached by a chain to anklets. The constable led him companionably into the office, and sat him down at a broad table, bare except for a lantern, where Bilson had already asked me to take a seat. Sean managed to seat himself by landing sideways on the chair and then heaving his chained ankles under the
table. The constable had a brand from the fire ready for him to relight his pipe. ‘Thank you, Mr Hewitt,’ Long told the man.

‘Let Mr Bettany talk with Long,’ Bilson told the constable, and waved him away through the door into the corridor by the cells, and himself walked out of the door to the yard and back to his office.

Sean Long craned his neck to look into the corridor and see if the constable was listening, was satisfied he was not, and then stubbed the light within the bulb of his pipe out with a great leathery wad of thumb.

‘Mr Bettany,’ he said softly.

‘Oh my God, Sean, what are we to do?’ I replied, slumping as if I were the prisoner. ‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘In careful tones, sir. Is the boy away?’

‘I found it impossible to catch him,’ I lied, knowing that I would never exceed or even recover my honour from this deceit.

‘Then he is well out of it.’

‘Sean,’ I said, ‘let us be honest men. You cannot be happy that Bernard turned her affections to me.’

‘Well then,’ he murmured, ‘it would not be right to think she had ever turned them to me. What was I to do? Rant? Fight a duel? Life has taught me to be calm, since I suffered greatly for what was done in fury. She is your woman, sir. It’s she who decided it.’

I was humbled by this dispassion. ‘I mean to get you an excellent defence, Sean.’ I lowered my voice further, and continued, ‘You must, if necessary, throw suspicion on Felix. He is, after all, the perpetrator.’

‘But the boy’s life will be poisoned,’ said Long. ‘I shall swear that I was not the murderer, and Felix was not. I shall tell of all the murderous things said to me by Treloar’s stockmen.’

‘You must play it safe, Sean. To swear falsely on a Bible, and before a court – that could complicate your chances.’

‘Oh, but I have the jump there, sir, since it has never been my Bible, nor has it ever been my court.’

‘We must think hard about this. To save you, I would confess to what I had done in all this.’

‘Oh that would be something of a folly, sir, after your trouble. Have you had enough of life? I have. I have had enough. I am composed, sir, I am reconciled, and trust my Saviour.’

I said he must not think like that, that his friends needed him, that I was his friend who needed him. I remembered I had brought him a gift, and I pulled from my pocket two quids of negro-head tobacco –
something to return him to a sense of the world of pleasures. ‘Some extra supplies,’ I said. Then I passed him too a flask of good rum. ‘Enjoy them in expectation of your release from this place.’

He said, ‘I am the man who lies in the sights of the musket. I fill the bill, you see. You may try to save me by destroying your life. But what’s the purpose? I am already aboard my boat.’

I put my forehead in my hands. ‘I shall return soon,’ I promised, ‘and see how you might be saved.’

He merely looked at me, and suddenly the constable was back.

To add to the already abounding disorder of my mind, there was a strange roan horse by the stockyards as I drove in on the afternoon of my meeting with Long, and a barefooted Aboriginal stockman in a kangaroo skin coat seated on the verandah with a pannikin of tea. I fancied I had seen this stockman at my brother Simon’s, and now I thought, ‘Oh God forbid it is Father.’ Whoever had come it was a welcome stranger, since I could hear Aldread’s lyrical yet strident laughter inside. Entering the house, I found my father and Aldread drinking tea by the fire, while Bernard occupied herself at the table trying to read Goldsmith’s
The Vicar of Wakefield
. By keeping pace with Felix, she had become a reader, but I could tell by her eyes that she was concerned for my reaction to this arrival, and to the way my father and Aldread conducted themselves.

There was in the way my father now rose from his seat the over-eagerness of a man who is burning with some cracked-headed views of universal brotherhood, the same fevered enthusiasm I’d seen in him at Simon’s place beyond the Port Phillip Gap.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘my son, my student, my friend. The women of this household have made me very welcome, while, I believe, your overseer is accused of murder. What an event!’ He held up his rum pannikin. He had not been like this in Van Diemen’s Land when I was a child, or if he was, I had never seen it.

‘Would you have a spare stockman’s hut for your old scribbler of a father? Somewhere I can lay my head and place my manuscript?’

‘But you must stay in the house,’ I said, yet feeling lost, for if he did he would know everything, and knowing everything, might take it as a licence to continue on his present drift.

To my ineffable relief, he said, ‘No. It is not a good policy. I lasted
only as long as I did at Simon’s through my insistence on my own quarters.’

‘Surely Simon has not ejected you, Father?’

‘I am not liked by the lady of the house,’ he told me, ‘who – being Australian-born – found the climate of England oppressive and wanted her station back. The result is neither her fault nor mine. I must say in pure honesty that one cannot win over a woman if she is set against it.’

And he actually winked at Aldread, who was overcome by coughs of amusement.

‘You would have always been welcome here, Father,’ I said with too much enthusiasm.

‘And there is the tragedy that your own dear wife is gone. Poor, poor child she was, by Bernard’s account.’

‘There was no justice in her death,’ I found myself saying. But dear Phoebe deserved to be more thoroughly bewailed than I could manage in front of my father in his new, rabid state.

‘There is never justice,’ said my father. ‘Hence, Stoicism! Join me perhaps,’ he suggested, tapping his pannikin.

Through all this Aldread smiled broadly, a handkerchief not far from her thin lips.

‘You could have my overseer’s hut for the present,’ I said. ‘When he is acquitted, some other arrangement might be made.’

My father found this hilarious. ‘If half humanity had their way, I should soon follow him,’ he said. ‘I would imagine a hanged man makes a jolly ghost.’

Bernard was crossing the room to bring rum to me. She did not drink herself, saying she hated it and had no head for it, as well as that it reminded her of people of less than solid character she had known. And so I found myself, sinner-with-sinner, invoking Bacchus with my father.

That evening, Father moved, as he had promised and without qualm, into Sean Long’s hut. Young Michael O’Dallow was, over the coming days, attracted to his company by the blazing fire of eucalyptus boughs he kept roaring. I called on O’Dallow. ‘Order Michael to stay away from my father’s company,’ I told him. ‘I do not choose that he should succumb to spirits.’

O’Dallow nodded. He had become a safe man to talk to, and as sturdy and reliable as Long had been.

As summer came on, Father settled in. He would write his book each
day from dawn until eleven o’clock. Then he would ride out for two hours, meeting my shepherds and conversing expansively with them. He ate a large meal prepared by Tume, slept, drank the dusk away, and frequently wrote again. Whenever I visited Long’s hut I hated to see my father’s pages of exact manuscript and their heretic ideas. If his prose were as disordered as his life, however, it must surely fail publication. His family would be delighted, but I wondered what next erratic level literary failure might drive him to.

It was in his favour that he liked to drink companionably rather than alone, and sometimes came to my homestead to be jolly in the late afternoon and to eat, according to his preference, a plain evening meal of soup, bread and cold mutton.

One evening I came in from a conference with O’Dallow to find my father and Aldread sitting by the fire with their hands linked. I looked to Bernard, who had a hunched and guilty appearance, as if she had not done enough to prevent this obscenity. My beaming father spoke.

‘Since I am without companionship,’ he told me, ‘young Miss Aldread here has done me the honour of agreeing to be my companion, for bush purposes.’

Aldread, to give her credit, told me with an embarrassed smile, ‘You must know that I am soon enough to die.’

‘And I reply,’ said my father, ‘that she is not on her own in that.’

‘Sarah, dear Sarah,’ Aldread continued, ‘knows that she is my truest and firmest friend, and has treated me with such kindness, as have you Mr Bettany. I would be pleased to stay in your house, a friend to both. But in this country a woman who lacks a man lacks all protection. Both Sarah and I have seen this, during our separate imprisonments.’ Aldread kept her eyes on Sarah, wanting her permission.

Though I was not party to the licences which were being exchanged, I believe Bernard did not yield. ‘You must make your own decision, Alice,’ she said, ‘in a lifetime in which the decisions have not always been fit ones. But you seem ever to need the company of a man.’

My father chuckled again. ‘I am content to qualify under that simple heading. A man.’

‘And so, it seems, I qualify too,’ I said, as if obscurely challenging him.

Bernard now performed what I considered one of the most gracious of gestures. She held out her hand towards me, to reassure me. I had a value for her beyond simple headings. I was so temporarily delighted by this that I felt my world was restored to me despite all.

‘You wish me then,’ I asserted to my lunatic father, ‘to condone a cohabitation of my father and an assigned convict woman while my very mother is still alive?’

‘Your mother will always be your mother,’ said my stoic, Horatian father. ‘But I have divorced her in all valid senses except the civil, and the latter is the least important of all, a mere description, as Horace’s republicanism was, for a time, a mere description. And if I have not divorced her, she has divorced me. And after all, I see my son has no aversion to an assigned convict.’

I could have strangled him.

‘But my wife, I’m afraid, is dead. Yours – who faithfully followed you to a remote and barbarous port – lives, and in the civil and sacramental sense is still your wife. I cannot countenance this association you propose because of the hurt it would do her. You may have learned cleverness, Father, but she has always been somewhat warmer and wiser. She has possessed purity and fidelity.’

‘I will not disabuse you on the question of purity, my boy,’ he said in a reasonable tone. ‘As for fidelity, it would be more highly prized if it was not so often the bedfellow of stupidity.’

‘Epigrams don’t save this situation. I intend to marry Bernard. You cannot marry Aldread.’

Bernard shifted in her seat.

‘Does the young woman herself know this?’ asked Father. ‘Do you Bernard?’

‘It has not been formally broached,’ I told him. ‘And it is not possible in the mourning period.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see how you weep.’ And he dared grin at Bernard.

I surprised myself by being almost numb to this insult.

‘If word of your living with Aldread gets back to Van Diemen’s Land, my mother will feel betrayed – not by you, for that has already happened – but by me. Her son.’

‘It will get back quicker to her if young Miss Aldread and I were to find a little house in Cooma, I should think. I shall write to your mother and inform her of this new shift of fortune, and I shall tell her how you ably and eloquently protested for her sake. But the point now is, she has expelled me, and an outcome such as the one I propose should not astonish her. Consider this! If you cast your father out, where do I go, and how do I live? At heart, your mother would accept the force of such questions. She is a Philistine and a Pharisee, but she is not a fool.’

And to clinch his arguments he began to recite his Horace, part to me, part, no doubt, to impress Aldread.

He was delighted with himself. ‘Thus Venus’s plan – she is pleased to put to her brass yoke pairs of bodies which make a good joke.’

I saw that Charlie Batchelor was right about the pernicious influence of the old Roman poet. But as if I could win this argument, I was quick to respond with another quotation, from the very next stanza of Ode 33.
‘Cum peteret Venus
… “When Venus sought me out with someone I remained with my freed woman, happily tethered, stormier though she may be than the waves of the Mediterranean battering the Calabrian coast.”’

‘Ah yes,’ he said, applauding me. ‘But you see, that’s the problem.
Libertina.
Freed woman. I am a
libertinus
, a freed man. Your mother, on the other hand, is a
mulier libera
, a
free
woman. The line between free and bond ran through our marriage, and your mother, may I tell you, was not always as merciful as the Convict Department or the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land.’