Sara Dane

by Catherine Gaskin

  Wilder flushed angrily. ‘You push this settlement as no gentleman would, Maclay.’

  ‘I don’t expect to do business in this colony like a gentleman,’ Andrew said sharply. ‘Have you ever noticed how very few gentlemen make money?’

  He flicked the cards with his thumb again. ‘Come, now ‒ take the offer or leave it ‒ I must go on watch.’

  Wilder glanced from Harding to Brooks, but their expressions gave him no help. He turned to Andrew. ‘Very well,’ he said sullenly, ‘I accept.’

  ‘Done!’ Andrew permitted himself a faint smile, reaching for more paper. ‘Now ‒ perhaps you’ll be good enough to sign a bill of transfer?’ He bent over the paper and began to write.

  Wilder’s lip curved contemptuously. ‘I see you don’t waste any time.’

  ‘No,’ Andrew answered without looking up. ‘I haven’t decided to settle here in order to waste time.’

  Wilder didn’t reply. The scratch of the quill then was the only sound in the room until Harding, after clearing his throat carefully, spoke.

  ‘Would you also be willing to settle for livestock for the amount I owe you, Maclay?’

  Andrew raised his head only for a second. ‘Certainly, sir.’

  Brooks pushed back his chair, and gripping the edge of the table, swung on the two back legs. It was a rocking motion which shook the table. ‘Well, it seems that I’m the only one with a debt modest enough to settle out of hand … I’ll see that you have it before you leave the ship, Maclay.’

  Andrew nodded. ‘Thank you, Brooks.’

  Brooks got to his feet. ‘Only once before,’ he said, ‘have I ever known anyone with such devilish luck at cards. He won himself a fortune, and drank himself to death with it.’ He leaned over towards Andrew. ‘I sincerely hope you may achieve the first, without the second.’

  Andrew stopped writing, and laid down the quill, staring up at Brooks. Suddenly Brooks thrust out his hand; Andrew took it readily.

  ‘Good luck to you, Maclay! I’m an older man than you ‒ and I couldn’t do what you intend doing. But I envy you your courage.’

  The bill of transfer was signed, and Andrew went to take his watch. Wilder, Brooks and Harding were left staring at each other; Brooks sat down again, and began to drum his fingers on the table. Wilder’s eyes ran over Andrew’s columns of figures for the second time.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he got a bargain on that deal.’

  Harding stirred lazily. ‘I don’t know that you’re right. None of us can tell what price the livestock will fetch in Sydney. It’s as much of a gamble for him as for you. Perhaps, after all, he’ll be the loser.’

  Wilder said, ‘I still think it was a shabby thing to do. He pressed an unfair advantage.’

  Brooks shrugged. ‘It seems to me he’s entitled to ask for gambling debts to be settled before he leaves the ship. After all, the livestock’s worth more to him in the colony than the money.’

  ‘Oh, you can be calm ‒ you haven’t lost much to him.’ Suddenly Wilder screwed up the paper petulantly. ‘I’ll wager she put him up to it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That woman ‒ Sara Dane. I know her sort well ‒ sharper than a monkey, and always with an eye to a bargain.’

  Brooks gave a chuckle. ‘Then they should be an excellently matched pair. It’s the sort of combination which makes wealth quickly.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll do that all right,’ Wilder said. He straightened out the paper, and was beginning to tear it gloomily into tiny fragments. ‘She’ll always get whatever she wants ‒ either by sheer greed, or by being suitably demure at the right time. Look how she got hold of Maclay himself! I wonder what story she told him to make him believe she wasn’t a thief.’

  Harding spoke; his tone was heavy and thick with the amount of madeira he had taken since supper. He gestured vaguely towards the door. ‘I’m sorry for Maclay. I think he’s ruined himself by this alliance. Supposing the farming fails, as it may well do? Can he bring an ex-convict back to present to his family at home? And if it succeeds ‒ can he mix with the sort of people he’s used to with her in the background?’

  Brooks yawned, and stood up for the second time. ‘I don’t profess to be a prophet ‒ but I’ve an idea that Maclay and the girl may surprise us all. That is,’ he added, ‘if we ever hear of them again.’

  Wilder said nothing. He swept the pieces of paper to the floor with a single, angry gesture.

  III

  While Andrew sat in the wardroom bartering livestock for gambling debts, Sara remained still and wakeful upon her cot. A feeling of disquiet possessed her; it seemed to chill even the blood in her veins. The sounds of the ship came to her ‒ the creak and strain of the timbers; wind, like a constant song up in the rigging, the patter of feet on the deck above her head. She listened awhile to the wind, knowing that this, more than anything else, was the reason for her disturbance; tonight it blew off the unknown shore that tomorrow would emerge into a land which was to confine her, possibly, for the rest of her life.

  All she was certain of in the future was her marriage to Andrew. Since the day in Cape Town when he had made his proposal, he had ridden coolly over any doubts she had. He wouldn’t even allow her to voice them. Everyone on board knew that they were to be married when they reached the colony. Few approved, but no one was wholly disinterested. But there was nothing she could do to alter their opinions; she had to accept the situation as it stood.

  Sara had no fears that she and Andrew were not well suited. They had spent many hours discussing the life they planned, the prospects of settling and farming in the great, empty land. She realized that he had no boldness of vision that did not meet an answer in herself; there was nothing he might dare that she was not prepared to dare with him.

  She stirred restlessly, suddenly impatient for the coming day. The excitement she had tried to hold down seized her; under the blankets she clenched her hands. She would make Andrew a good wife! She’d give him reason to be proud of her. They would have children who would grow up in importance and prestige in the new colony. He had promised her land and her own servants to fill the hungry need in her heart for respect. She knew that one day she would have dignity and graciousness in her life; she would wipe out the memory of the years of patronage.

  When at last she slept, her sleep was heavy and dream-filled.

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  The following morning the Georgette sailed through the heads guarding the entrance to Port Jackson, and dropped anchor in Sydney Cove. The sun was bright and hot; points of light glanced sharply off the waters of the harbour. Those on board rested their eyes gratefully on the soft colour of the trees that stretched their grey-green fuzz far into the distance of oddly-shaped inlets and bays. There was a quiet, aloof beauty about it.

  But the settlement itself offered no attraction. The convicts had built a town of mud and daub huts on the shores of Sydney Cove, with a crude, whitewashed Government House sitting atop a hill overlooking it. A few brick houses were dotted among the huts, but their harsh straight lines heightened the look of dejection about them. A barracks, a hospital, a public store-house, and a bridge over the one stream ‒ that was the extent of this newest of His Majesty’s settlements. Here and there garden patches were laid out, but they were, most of them, no more than hopeful gestures. The efforts to till and sow the land were half-hearted; the soil was poor. Drought withered the crop, then the rains washed it away. Food was the crying need, but the sunbaked earth did not yield quarter enough. The livestock were lean as they grazed on the sparse, spiky vegetation.

  Andrew Maclay found the Port Jackson settlement a place of misery. He was taken aback by his first sight of it. It was squalid in its poverty, and haunted by the now-familiar figures in their filthy rags. Here the constant threat of the chain-gang and the lash ruled; there was no law but that of punishment and hunger. Frantic for food, the convicts stole one another’s rations, and broke into the public stores ‒ in the famishe
d colony the theft of food was punishable by death. They were ill and weak ‒ and they died easily. Some, in utter despair, broke away into the sly, unfriendly forest ‒ and perished in the baffling, green maze, or staggered back, exhausted and starved. They muttered among themselves that only the naked black man, to whom this barren country belonged, could find a living for himself among those gaunt gum-trees and the hard, straggling foliage.

  The metallic clank of the chain-gangs greeted Andrew wherever he went. He hated the sight of the women ‒ haggard wretches, with hopeful eyes that followed him about. They prostituted themselves for food, and the dusty tracks between the huts swarmed with their illegitimate children. There was a certain charm about the children, vigorous and healthier, even under the starvation rations, than their counterparts in England ‒ but the thought of settling within sight of their squalid homes disheartened him.

  A week after the Georgette anchored he took a boat with James Ryder up the river to the colony’s second settlement at Parramatta.

  He found the beginnings of a planned town there. The land was more fertile than that at Sydney; the country around had a softer, kindlier appearance, laid out rather like English parkland. His spirits rose, and a fever of planning seized him. He listened to Ryder’s careful evaluation of the place ‒ it was a ready market-centre for three tiny outlying villages, Toongabbie, Prospect and Ponds, and it was only sixteen easy miles’ boat journey from Port Jackson, and the joining road improved with each year of the settlement. Together they watched the market-day barter between officer, soldier, settler and convict of the country’s few commodities ‒ fish, grain, livestock and clothing. It was a brisk affair while goods were available; a Government clerk registered all that was brought in for sale or barter, and chits from the Commissary served as currency. This small township had a feeling of permanency about it. Ryder wasted no time in his survey of the district. With an experienced farmer’s eye he examined the rich soil of the river banks, and was impatient to return to Sydney to arrange for a grant of land.

  But from the officers and settlers ‒ the settlers were mostly emancipated convicts working small farms of their own ‒ with whom he talked, Andrew heard tales of yet another river. This one, far greater than the Parramatta, rose in the mountains in the west, taking a sweep north-east to an outlet in Broken Bay, an anchorage eight miles above Port Jackson. Governor Phillip himself had explored it and named it after Lord Hawkesbury. Here, they said, the soil was richer than anywhere else in the colony, and Phillip had it earmarked for the free settlers he hoped would be sent from England. The vision of the great river burned like a slow fever in Andrew’s veins.

  He listened with not very great interest to Ryder’s planning ‒ the exact position he wanted his grant, how close to the river, how close to the road, which would take his produce either to Parramatta or Sydney. The days passed, and he made no similar plans himself. Ryder sensed that something troubled Andrew, and pressed him to talk. By this time the men had grown closer to each other, bound together by the strangeness and difficulties which surrounded them ‒ Andrew found himself talking wildly of his dream. He wanted to make a journey to the other river, to see for himself the rich, fertile land, the lush river-flats coated with the silt that the floods brought down from the mountains. He wanted, if it were possible, to settle there.

  Listening to it all at their camp by the river, Ryder shook his head doubtfully. ‘Perhaps you can do it, Andrew ‒ but they say the country is rough going between here and the river. If you settled, you’d have to make some sort of track to bring up supplies.’ He gestured to imply all that went with such a venture.

  Andrew protested quickly, ‘Yes ‒ but if the soil …’

  Ryder nodded, smiled secretly as he took out his snuff-box. It was always so with young men ‒ the land they couldn’t see was always richer, the river broader, the game better. He thought of his own choice, the gentle river, the peaceful acres which wouldn’t be difficult to clear, and he was glad that the dream of the Hawkesbury hadn’t smitten him also.

  Andrew stayed behind at Parramatta when Ryder went back by boat to Sydney. He turned with energy to organizing a party for the journey to the Hawkesbury, and he found himself unexpectedly helped by Subaltern Berry, a young man who confessed that he was dying from boredom, and had an itch for exploration that no one else would gratify. He belonged to the New South Wales Corps, a military force which had been specially raised in England for the new colony ‒ and he had friends among officialdom who listened with sympathy to Andrew’s plans, and helped outfit the expedition. They set off with a native as guide ‒ Andrew, Berry, three convicts and provisions for ten days. The country was wild and exotic; the warmth of spring had turned the pointed leaves of the gums red ‒ a fiery tinge that coloured the bush with fantasy. Yellow and white flowers mingled their scents with subtle, elusive smells of the trees, adding to their feeling that they were striking into a mad, new world. They followed the guide along tracks visible only to his own keen eyes. There was no trace of softness in all this beauty, there was no trace of bounty in it for man or plant which was not its native. The tall eucalyptus trees, barks shining white in the sun, were endless and aloof. The going was hard, and yet the fascination of the country compelled them to keep on.

  They reached Phillip’s farthest point of exploration, Richmond Hill, in a thunderstorm of sudden, tropical violence. The naked black man hunched on the ground; his face, hidden beneath a mane of matted hair and beard, was pressed into his knees while he strove to control his panic. A curtain of rain cut off the little group on the hill; long, brilliant flashes of lightning revealed for a moment the grey-brown waters of the river below. The storm did not last. It moved on abruptly, leaving them once more in sunshine. The mountain range, blocking off the west, seemed very close; the air was as sharp and clear as glass. The valleys were filled with grey mist and the rising smell of the trees and the rain-splattered dust. When the hush settled again, the guide rose and beckoned them to a descent of the hill where they would find level ground and make camp.

  Andrew lingered behind under the dripping trees, his eyes wonderingly on the flat land to the south and east. This was what he would describe to Sara, he told himself ‒ this lovely stretch of fertile, heavily-wooded country with the great river twisting down from the mountains. There were places here where he could already see his house built ‒ places on high ground where the floods, if they came, could not reach. With the land cleared, there was pasture richer than anything he had yet seen; as he stood there he slowly raised his clenched hand, opened it, and looked at the soil that he had scooped up close to the river bank. Soil like this would give him grain so heavy it bent with its own weight; he raised his head again and envisaged the fenced fields, with their crops ready for harvest. It was a silent, uninhabited world he gazed at, full of mystery, and perhaps unexpected dangers, and yet he knew that Sara, when he told her of it, would choose this green, unknown valley, rather than the subdued acres of the Parramatta district.

  He arrived back in Sydney exactly three weeks after the date of landing, and found that the Ryders were on the point of moving all their belongings by boat to Parramatta; they were going to a temporary hut on a fine tract of land just outside the township. Julia, he saw immediately, had got over her first dismay at the sight of the dismal settlement at Sydney Cove. With characteristic quietness and determination she had set about making the most of what the country had to offer. She behaved now as if feeding a family on salt pork had been a lifetime’s occupation.

  But the greatest change was in Sara. She had gained confidence in her position as the future wife of a free settler. There was a vigorous life in her he had never seen before. She was adapting herself well, and now, for the first time, he witnessed her personality flowering without the restraint placed upon it by the confines of the Georgette. Her smile of welcome caused the hunger for her to flare in his heart. He kissed her with such longing that the couple of weeks’ separation might easily
have been years. She responded warmly, and then held him away, demanding news of the trip inland. He told her of the valley he had seen, and the deep, curving river.

  She listened without interruption, and at the end she said slowly, ‘This is where you want to settle, Andrew?’

  He answered her fervently. ‘Oh, my darling, yes! Wait till you see it for yourself!’ He laughed in his excitement. ‘It’s rich land there, Sara ‒ rich and green! And it’s mine! I can have the pickings before anyone else even sees it!’ He demanded of her soberly, ‘Could you face it? You’d be there alone.’

  But he knew, even as he asked the question, that there was no fear in her eyes ‒ no hint of timidity about the desolation she must know she faced. Her calmness reassured him.

  ‘Perhaps Governor Phillip doesn’t want settlers there yet,’ she said anxiously. ‘Perhaps he won’t give you a grant.’

  He drew her to him, his lips pressing away the frown on her brow. ‘Phillip has a whole continent to give away,’ he murmured. ‘He won’t miss a slice on the Hawkesbury.’

  ‘You’ll see him soon?’

  ‘Tomorrow ‒ if he’ll see me.’ He had taken her in his arms. The warmth of her body excited him. ‘I want two things from Phillip ‒ a grant on the Hawkesbury’s banks, and a pardon for my wife. And then I’ll show them what sort of living is to be made in New South Wales!’

  He spoke recklessly, his emotions stimulated by the closeness of Sara. For a moment or two his desire for her mounted. He held her to him with his eyes closed. And then, as if she shared his emotion, her arms tightened about him.

  ‘Let it be soon, Andrew,’ she whispered. ‘If Phillip should refuse …’

  ‘He won’t.’