The Old Balmain House

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 6 - 1849 –Tragedy

  Though months had passed after Alexander’s birth Hannah was still tired. She had lost a lot of weight and was only slowly putting it back on.

  Her smile was as bright as ever and her face radiated joy whenever she saw the children or Archibald, but she now had a delicate look, almost like a porcelain doll.

  Archibald thought she was as radiantly beautiful as ever and, if he ever noticed anything was not quite right, he did not say so. But sometimes at night he said. “You gave me a terrible scare when our baby was born. For a minute I thought I lost you. I am so happy that you are still here with me.” Then they would hold each other very close and enjoy being together.

  Mary worried too she saw Hannah’s pale face, and was determined to feed her up and get her back to her former strength. Gradually the pallid skin bloomed and the hollows in her cheeks filled again. However, as her strength returned, so too did the demands of the dressmaking business. Soon every minute of each day was taken up again as she filled the orders that continued to mount.

  In late February a ship came into the harbour, looking weather-beaten after a long hard voyage. They said that a big storm had blown it off course, just after it rounded the Cape of Good Hope. It had barely made Madagascar for emergency repairs.

  On board many of the women and children were sick with fever and a bad cough and twenty had died. Mary and Hannah joined other women from the church in caring for them and, over the next two weeks, many recovered.

  But as these passengers recovered Hannah began to cough. Over the next week she developed a fever, though she tried to pretend she was fine. One day, working with Mary, as she went to stand up, her legs wobbled.

  Mary rushed over to her and put her hand on her forehead. It was burning. She took Hannah to the bedroom and made her lie on the bed. Then she sent the maid for a doctor, and asked the boatman to row over to the yard and summons Archibald and Tom, who was with him. By the time they came, an hour later, Hannah was barely able talk to them and her breathing was ragged.

  The doctor came a few minutes later. After one look deep concern was written across his face. He listened with his stethoscope to her lungs and felt the heat of her body. “It is very bad” he said. “She has severe pneumonia. We will do what we can, but it is not good.”

  Day moved into night as they passed their vigil. Archibald felt so helpless; he could see her slipping away. He held Hannah’s hand, and watched her face, flushed with delirious effort, with a great stone of dread sitting deep inside him. Mary had taken the children away and put them to bed. They were all very upset and worried about their mother, but finally they fell asleep as Mary held them.

  As the clock turned over to the new day it was clear there would be no happy recovery, her face had a blue pallor and her breaths were an endless struggle. Archibald tried to pray but the words ran away. All he could do was hold her hand and caress her face as he felt the life force slip away.

  An hour after midnight she opened her eyes clearly for a minute. “Oh Archibald, my life with you has been so good, I hate to leave you but I know what this is. Please ask Mary to bring the children in. I want to say goodbye.” With all gathered round she held each one for a second and said their name. Finally her strength failed and she fell back, barely breathing and, in a few minutes, she breathed no more.

  Archibald felt a broken sob wrack his body as his children cried with him.

  Mary cried too. “O my child, my poor wee child” she said, over and over again, stroking Hannah’s hair. “How I miss you.”

  They buried Hannah in the newly created little cemetery at the bottom of the hill, looking out east up the harbour, the view that she had loved best. A simple sandstone cross was carved to mark the place and each day over the next month they walked down the hill to put fresh flowers on the grave.

  Gradually life moved on. Archibald had much to do with his five children, though Mary was rarely far away, and often James now went with Tom to the yard to help. Little Archibald had become his Dad’s shadow. Alison and the two small ones would spend much of their days with Mary, who had taken over a mother’s role to them. Although he found he could say little to Mary he knew she understood and he valued her support.

  Many people in Sydney town were sick with the new flu that had come in on the boat. The graveyard, in the city, now had two new lines of graves, to mark the grief of many. Worst were the aboriginal camps where many died. Their wails echoed over the still night water. Since Hannah’s death Balmain had been largely spared.

  Each day Archibald, now nine, would walk up to the town, to school, with six year old Alison, while Hannah and Alexander stayed over with Mary and her housekeeper. One day, when Archibald and Alison came home from school, they told their father and Mary over supper. “We can’t go to school for the next week. A boy in Archie’s class got the flu. It was very bad, and they are scared it may spread. So we have all been told to stay away.”

  Next day Archie was coughing and his eyes were running. Mary put him to bed. However that night he had a fever and he coughed and coughed. The doctor was called and for two days he seemed to improve. But on the third day the fever returned and, like Hannah, his breathing became laboured.

  Archibald abandoned his work and stayed by his son’s side, talking to him and telling him the stories he knew he loved. Late on the afternoon of the third day he said to his father. Tell me about my brother John, the one who stayed in Scotland. Archibald told his son the story of the hard winter, with not enough to eat and that flu, like this, but with two babies only one year old. He said. “You both had it and we feared for you both. But you were stronger and got better, he could not. So we buried him in that field which looks out across to the loch, on a cold winter’s day”.

  Archie took his father’s hand. “Da, he is calling me and telling me not to be afraid, that we will both be together with Mum soon. Please don’t be sad but promise me that you will go and visit him and see your Ma and Pa to tell them too.”

  Archibald could barely see his son through his tears, but he held his son’s hand and stroked his hair like he had done with Hannah. An hour later he was gone, to be with his precious Hannah and wee brother John.

  They buried him next to Hannah and the following day Archibald booked a passage on the “Sarah”, back to England, to fulfil his son’s request. He could not take his children for the trip, and they were happiest with Mary and Tom. So, with an aching heart to leave them, he made his plans to sail.

  When time came to say goodbye, Archibald had a sudden desire to leave each child with a special memento. For little Hannah he placed her mother Hannah’s gold ring in her small hand. “This will be yours one day, to wear on your wedding day. For now we will keep it safe but you will have it when you are grown”. Then, as he cuddled Alison on his knee, he gave to her the silver blue perfume bottle that had come to Hannah from Mary. “This is your mother’s gift to you, to remember her by. It holds her favourite perfume. It came from your Gran Mary, a gift from her grandmother. It was your mother’s most treasured thing. Some day you will pass it on to your daughter or granddaughter to continue the memory.”

  Alison held it in her hand, and kept holding it until long after her father’s ship had sailed out of sight. How beautiful it was, soft green-blue like the ocean with the silver sparkling like light off the water. Something in it called to her, pulling her back to her earliest childhood, happy with her mother. Finally she carefully put it away.

  That night she told Mary. “That bottle is something that will always keep our happy memories in it. Every time I open it I smell Mummy, and it makes me sad and happy together. I feel like she has left her happy memories and love for me in there.”

  Mary said, “I will tell you the story of that perfume bottle, as was told me by my grandmother, back in Scotland. Her name was Mary too. When I was a little girl, about as old as you, I used to love to visit her house in the next village. Sometimes I would stay with her for a h
oliday.

  “One day, when I was sitting with her as she dressed to go out, I saw her pull out that bottle and dab some perfume on. I asked her about the bottle, as it was very beautiful, and much nicer than her other things. She told me it was given to her by her grandmother, because she had thought it beautiful, when she herself was a little girl.

  “The story her grandmother told her was about her great-great-great grandmother, a very long time ago, named Katherine. She had worked as a maid to Mary, Queen of Scots, back when she was a young woman and had first come back to Scotland.

  “Queen Mary had much beautiful jewellery made for her by a jeweller in Edinburgh. Mary ordered a new necklace with pearls and diamonds. One day the jeweller’s apprentice brought it to the castle, to make final adjustments.

  “Young Katherine, then 15, was serving her lady. She was smitten by this young handsome apprentice, and started to secretly meet him. After meeting him several times, one day he brought her a beautiful gift, this perfume bottle, covered in the finest delicate silverwork. He told her he had made it in his spare time in the jewellery shop, when the master jeweller was away, using little pieces of silver he had saved. The beautiful sea-blue bottle he had bought in the markets, from a sailor just returned from the Far East, because it matched the colour of her eyes.

  “Soon after this her mistress had to flee from Edinburgh to northern England with her retinue. So Katherine was forced to leave suddenly before she could even say goodbye to the apprentice. She had cried and cried. She never saw him again, but remembered him with great fondness, even after she married and had children of her own.

  “She always kept the bottle, to keep the memory alive of her first and happy love. Over time she would take it out when anything special happened, to help her remember. So it became a treasure for her to hold her special and happy memories.

  “Then when she was very old she gave it to her own grand-daughter telling her to use it to keep her special happy memories in, just as she had done for all these years since it had been given to her. Since then it had been handed from grandmothers to grand-daughters and sometime to daughters to keep the memory alive.

  “I gave it to Hannah when you were a baby and I told her the story. She was like a daughter to me and you my first grand-daughter. She said that in time she would pass it to you and that would keep the memory alive.

  Perhaps one day you will give it to a grand-daughter of your own, after you have put all your happy memories into it, to add to all the happy memories that I, your mother and many others have put in there. That way we can pass our love and joy down through the years to come.”

  Before she went to bed that night Alison wrote this special story into the diary that she kept in the locker next to her bed. After this she pulled out the bottle almost every night when she went to bed, to put her happy memories into it. Sometimes she wrote them in her diary too, to help remember them.