Bettany's Book (86 page)

‘You malign her!’ I said. ‘You malign her here at my fire!’

‘No, I am merely making my case,’ my father protested.

Bernard and Aldread looked amazed, as if they had stumbled into lines of battle in an unpredicted war.

But for Bernard’s sake I would not sustain hostilities, and sank into weariness. ‘You must make your choices, sir,’ I told him. ‘You are not a captive here.’

‘And nor are you, my son,’ said my father, his face bland, leached of all irony.

There was at this stage, Dimp could see from the documents Benedetto had given her, a final exchange of letters between Sarah Bernard and Alice Aldread, Sarah being too enraged to trust herself to converse with Alice.

Letter No 16, SARAH BERNARD

Thursday

Dearest Alice

I cannot pretend you have not made me look somewhat poor in Mr Jonathan Bettany’s eyes. This is all the more so at a time when he is distressed about the vanished boy Felix and the arrest of Sean Long. In silent moments too I am aware I have kept the memory of Mrs Bettany very poorly. Sometimes it seemed to me I was saving the living Mr Bettany and saving myself too. But at other moments I see clearly and in pain how I have disgraced my friend Mrs Bettany. So do not think I wag my finger at you from on high. I wag my finger in the same pit in which we all live.

But in the same way as Long spoke for me I had spoken to the late good Mrs Bettany about you. When I did so I could not foresee or would not have prophesied that you would move so quickly towards living in the same hut as the older Mr Bettany. If you did it only for the sake of having a protector then you should have stayed in the house with me. I could be your protector enough.

It is not worth pretending otherwise but that your lack of thought in this makes an uneasy household and an uneasy station. In spite of all your grief in Parramatta I might not have opened my mouth for you had I known. And I am not sure you have grabbed happiness by grabbing old Mr Bettany.

I speak as your friend

Sarah

Friday

Sar

Well! What a sour old thing you have become since Mr Bettany looked kindly at you! But remember you are not yet Lady Muck of the New South Wales bush. In your letter to your friend Alice you seem to be girding yourself for that! I wonder will you next give sewing classes to us poorer reckless creatures?

We both know how things work in New South Wales and how women are used. I come here to find that you have taken to Mr Bettany not long after his wife was laid in the earth! You and I have been taught at length that a woman cannot find a place on earth and more so on this earth of New South Wales unless it is by grace of that poor creature known as
A MAN. You bowed to that truth first Sar. I bowed to it only second. Is the young Bettany a fine choice and the old Bettany an evil one? My very illness disposes me for more tenderness and caress than I had in your parlour over there in the bark palace. And does it not make good sense that the older man suits me since a young man would outlive me by too many years?

I am pleased to be here, Sar. I say it is your doing. But do not expect me to say it on and on and on and to live solitary like a sick saint. That is not my way. You play Miss Scowl and pretend it is your way but you behave different. It is the old quarrel. We have – the two of us – each a different manner for making our journey. But we end at the same point. No more sermons sister Sar. And no more tracts. I have ever done what fate and my blood asked of me. And so have you. But you make a solemn play out of it.

Enough! I hope Long is not hanged. I hope Bettany marries you – old Bettany will not marry me. But I am not your fallen woman to be snarled at.

And I am still by the way your friend and

Your Alice

T
HE DEFENCE LAWYER FOR
L
ONG
, M
R
H
ANDLER
, arrived in Cooma Creek at the end of what was for him an unprecedented and wearying journey, some four days prior to the trial before Mr Justice Flense. When I came to town to meet him on the eve of the trial, I found a man barely older than myself. He had the same sort of dark handsomeness as Sarah Bernard, but a glowing, forgiving amusement shone in his eyes. We sat in a quiet parlour-cum-reading room, surrounded by racks of papers from all over the British Empire, many of them months out of date.

I knew at once he suspected some sort of collusion between Long and myself, but he was hard put to decide quite what it was.

He told me that since neither Long nor the native lad had battered Goldspink to death, it must have been one of Treloar’s stockmen. Did I believe that?

‘I was not present,’ I said, looking away. ‘But … yes.’

‘Now,’ he said, his eyes glittering in that alien, incisive way, ‘you pursued the native boy Felix all the way to Sydney. Did you think he was guilty?’

‘I think he was frightened he might be thought so. I think he was in a panic over the malign spirit of Goldspink too.’

‘When you searched for the boy, did you try to discover if he had stayed at any seamen’s inns or dormitories?’

‘I …’ It was the trouble with lawyers. They were cunning always, and we poor pilgrims only sometimes; we were dabblers at archness. ‘I had no need to.’

‘Well, I had my clerk inquire, and we discovered that a young Australian native boy who gave his name as Felix stayed at the Seaman’s Mission in George Street for three nights. One of the dormitory wardens told my clerk the boy was going to sea. There has been no other trace, and thus one presumes it is true.’

‘I hope he survives the adventure,’ I murmured.

‘But, sir, the point is that if people such as yourself and Long are concerned with protecting him, your concern should be diminished by knowing that he appears to be safe away. So there would be little need for Long to sacrifice himself, if that is what he is doing.’

I said nothing, and he leaned forward and murmured, ‘Think about it, Mr Bettany.’

I said, if Felix was at sea, I hoped he was well. But did he believe a boy of fourteen could have done such a murder? I said. ‘If Long says he did not do it, and Treloar’s stockmen say they did not do it, can it be proven either way?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Handler conceded. ‘Yet I do not know how strong a case of circumstance Mr Cladder, the Crown Prosecutor, might make.’

I was in anguish, but instead of twitching, I called for some tea and, while waiting for it, shook my head as if genuinely amused. I asked flatly but with a thin smile, ‘Am I to confess to this killing myself? Or that I know Felix to have done this, and to have helped him somehow to have escaped onto the ocean? Is that what is being suggested?’

I was hoping that cunning Handler would say, ‘No, no. No one would claim that!’ But he said nothing. His dark eyes lay on me, and his ear was cocked, as if he was open to just such a story as I had uttered.

At last he murmured, ‘Long is a deep fellow.’

Thus I was deftly persuaded to ask another question, ‘Could it be by any means suggested I had aided a witness, or perhaps a perpetrator, to escape?’ The man, after all, was counsel, for whom I was paying.

Handler said, ‘I am sure we could cast that story, if by any chance it
happened to be true, in a way which stressed your honest motivation and innocence of the facts.’

‘There will be no need,’ I said.

It was the sole interview I had with Mr Handler before the hefty yet delicate-featured Justice Flense of the New South Wales Supreme Court opened the trial in the diminutive stone courthouse at Cooma Creek. I had left Bernard’s protection before dawn to climb into my phaeton and get to the court when I saw my father emerge in flannel shirt and pants and boots, all inexactly put on, from Long’s hut.

He stood by the side of the four-wheeler.

‘I have been speaking with your man O’Dallow,’ he said. ‘It seems your friend Long is determined to be hanged. So O’Dallow says.’

‘I fear it may be the case,’ I confessed.

‘I would like to observe this fellow, should he be hanged. It seems he is a true Stoic by nature, experience and conviction. Stoicism is, in the end, a religion of but one sacrament. Suicide!’

I was so disgusted I left without a word, and made that by now habitual journey to the town not sure with whom to be most angry – my cranky father, myself or Long. By nine o’clock in the courthouse, there was barely room for the spectators, who milled outside in the sun, most of whom had to wait with the witnesses waiting to be called. The bench, the jury (made up of townsmen and settlers from Braidwood, Michelago, Bredbo, as well as Cooma Creek), the counsel, and Long in the dock, took up two-thirds of the available space. Treloar, with his determined, grim demeanour, seemed to take up at least a tenth of the courtroom – he was not an abnormally large man, but he had an abnormally large fixity of purpose. I nodded to him like a man with nothing to be afraid of, as we stood for the entry to court of the judge. Treloar frowned intractably and bobbed his head curtly at me.

When Long was brought in, chained as on the day I spoke to him, and placed in the wooden dock, I could not for a time catch his eye. He stood while the murder charge was read, and to those who believed in his guilt he displayed a commanding indifference, supporting his right chained wrist with his left hand. Some seconds passed before he saw me. He nodded very economically, raised his hand a little and then extended his fingers and thumb, like a man calming someone else’s outburst. But then of course I understood: though he did not know how cravenly I would cling to silence, it could only be inferred that he was absolving me from confessions and gestures.

I was nonetheless in predictable torment. To save him despite his wishes – that was what a true man should do. He pleaded ‘Not guilty’, which meant that the law would descend on him all the more severely if he were found guilty.

I was the first witness called by Mr Cladder, the small, flinty Crown Prosecutor. I took the oath on the Old Testament, but no sooner was it uttered than it seemed to fly away out of the courtroom’s opened window, like a bird too elegant and flimsy to bear the hot breath of equivocators like me.

There is time for truth, I assured myself. I might confess to subterfuge in the midst of testimony, to save myself from perjury, an evil crime in man’s eye, a worse in God’s. I began by explaining the circumstances of the snow storm, and of how I returned to Goldspink’s hut to find Long in the process of burying Goldspink. Cladder asked me did I believe the remains were being rushed underground, and I told him not at all, that Long was doing the right thing in view of the fact that we needed to move on
instanter
to my brother Simon’s station. As it happened, Felix had fled the scene, and there were many of my stockmen who could tell the court what a desperate search we had for him.

Mr Cladder asked me whether Long at Goldspink’s hut or Felix at the Reverend Paltinglass’s manse had said they had killed Goldspink. Neither of them, I said.

He said, ‘But wouldn’t it be the first thing you asked the boy?’

‘No,’ I said, in faked outrage. ‘The first thing I asked the boy was an inquiry after his health. Any other and he would have instantly fled.’

‘And,’ said Cladder, ‘he is what? Fourteen. You could not stop a fourteen-year-old boy from fleeing?’

‘I did not know he intended to flee,’ I said. ‘Having found him at last, I did not wish to do anything to make him take flight again.’

‘When you first met Long … did he suggest who might be responsible for the murder?’

I inhaled for a moment and pushed on into my perjury. The world was the same unsatisfactory place on the far side of my lie. The air did not alter. There was no immediate vengeance, as I told Mr Cladder that Long thought it was definitely some attack by one of Goldspink’s stockmen with a grievance.

‘You did not,’ said Cladder, ‘report the matter of the killing when you returned to your station here, Nugan Ganway? Why was this?’

‘I did not have time to report it either to the magistrate, Mr Bilson, or
Mr Treloar. I intended to inform both in due course.’

‘In due course? How long is due course?’

I told him I had had long experience of reporting crimes to magistrates and being told that no action was possible. As it turned out, I had not been put to that trouble, since Treloar had been told by one of his stockmen who galloped through from Treloar’s trans-alpine station, and Treloar had himself undertaken to pursue whomever was responsible.

Cladder now quizzed me on my chase of Felix, but I was inured, and survived that. Mr Justice Flense, humane-looking and of a scholarly beefiness, took serious notes of my prevarications, and continued to do so as Cladder sat and Mr Handler questioned me.

Handler asked me to affirm that I had intended to let the world know of Goldspink’s death.

I so affirmed.

Then I was asked to relate the escape of Felix from Mr Paltinglass, and what I told Handler and the Creator was a necessary and total misrepresentation. Handler reiterated that a native youth named Felix had stayed at the Seaman’s Mission in Sydney on certain nights. Could I swear to the court that I had not abetted him in this, or any other fugitive act? I assured the court I could, and did.