Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Your appeal causes me distress but I am taking action. I speak to Mrs Matron as we are drinking tea and conversing together. And it seems to me all threads of power meet at her. I ask: Could you get a Category 1 woman from the Asylum if she is not mad to start with? She asks what the woman did.

  I tell her how I met you first in Manchester county prison where your solicitor let you wither and wait in a public cell – though he could have dipped into your husband’s money to pay for something better. As I tell her I remember when I came to that dark prison ward how you shone like a star with your every kindness. Remember that woman with the two children? Receiver of stolen goods? Both her tots had bad bowels and the whole ward full of a reek of thin shit! You wept softly. I thought this woman should not be here. Not this angel! You were above that place.

  I tell Mrs Matron: The woman I speak of was married to a dyer many years older – a tyrannous man of very crooked desires and in the way of taking poisons for the sake of his health.

  Mrs Matron looks under her rounded eyebrows. So this is your ducky is it? You want your ducky friend here?

  It seemed that despite her might she is jealous to keep the tea and time she and I spend together.

  But she is talking of helping. She says: I could claim that because of the death of mad old Martha I have a spare billet in Category 3–the one category a poisoning woman could be in. But that would be in a cell of seven feet by five in the far wing. But, better for your friend than the narrow cell named a coffin she might have had in the execution yard had the judge not been moved to pity! Then Mrs Matron goes on: I would like to be kindly but cannot have it otherwise than Category 3. The Visiting Justice would create a frenzy if I put her in with you!

  But when the Visiting Justice is not visiting she does what she likes – this Matron Pallmire. But for the start I shall see my Alice in the cell of mad Martha – this is the cell of an old woman returned many times to the Factory by her masters for being tipsy. This is however but a start for you. But a start my friend Alice.

  Mrs Matron sounds wearied when she says: I have never had a felon woman I could so easily chatter with and if you are to remain that to me I imagine I must keep you happy.

  So I hope you will soon be delivered from the madhouse by the inter-cession of your true friend

  Sarah

  And Sarah Bernard did manage to have her friend moved to the Female Factory, since her next letter, numbered No 7 by Dimp, spoke of ecstatic reunion.

  Letter No 7, SARAH BERNARD

  Loving Alice,

  It proved so easy to persuade them that I should be admitted to your cell. Mrs Matron calls the turnkey and says simply to take me to the prison wing of Category 3. Because I am now paid to supervise the laundry I can give a lummox like him sixpence – to keep everybody sweet. A nothing price to feel your hand on my wrist dearest Alice.

  And now you are here at last like a simple miscreant! I urge you to behave cunningly and well for I have plans for deliverance whether it be yours or mine. Next step is Category 1 – for I am such a friend of Mrs Matron that I can protect you in such a place as the Factory. How I wish you were a simple mean thief like your best and unworthy friend is. I could see a faster rescue for both of us. But be brave lovely Alice and keep in your heart that gravest and most crafty patience which is in you if you do not give way to useless railing. Mr and Mrs Matron have very dark souls and will howl in hell. Yet they might be used as our aid.

  But what a great pity that Mrs Matron dances in towards the end of my visit and looks down her plump nose saying: This is your friend then. Nice to have a friend like this who is pretty. It is wonderful to see in her this jealousy. Yet how can she be jealous of a wretch? There is enough of her soul left that she can see how secret rooms hoarded with sugar and flour are not a sufficiency to the soul. As is your sisterhood to me!

  She paid you that praise – do you remember? She praised the two of us. She tells you: You do not look like Category 3 but then you are a friend of Sarah so of course you would not have the look of a witless thief.

  Her praise is as they say mixed blessings. But fear not since I ask myself the one question all the time. It is this – How to use up Mrs Matron before she uses us up.

  You were thinner. That grieves me but I can bulk out your rations now you are beneath the same roof as

  Your loving Sarah.

  MARRIED LIFE AT NUGAN GANWAY

  There was little enough nuptial holiday for Phoebe. She was impatient with the concept in any case, and determined to join our male cantonment in the bush. All the suggestions her friends made concerning the employment of convict servants she dismissed. The greatest and most miraculous index of what a spirit she had was that though trained in a Swiss academy for young women and prepared thus for the life of a European country estate managed with the help of servants, she took with a joyous zeal to the life of the bush hut. While waiting with her friends the Parslows for our marriage to take place, she had been studying books on colonial domestic management. She had the good grace to relish our life, its awkwardness and wrong-headedness, its want of refinements. By now we had advanced from cooking the food for the homestead on communal outdoor fires to cooking in a separate bark outbuilding, and Phoebe joyously insisted on taking over those duties too, with occasional advice from O’Dallow, whom she liked for his Celtic morbidness and amusingly negative view of the world.

  She cooked, for an example, a vast supply of plum duff, and O’Dallow, sniffing it, said, ‘Well they might turn up, those absconders, with this sweetness in the air, Mrs Bettany, and then you’ll have the blackguards by the nose.’

  It seemed all sin, squalor and ill will were lifted from us for a joyous nuptial season. But neither nature nor the malice of men, which is itself part of nature, let much stand as still as I would like it to be. Riding in to our homestead from a visit to a southern hut one day, I found two well-saddled horses in the stockyard with the insignia of the queen on their blue saddlecloths and a blue-coated constable sitting on a log conversing with the wagon-driver Clancy. Inside, a hulking police magistrate, in a navy-blue uniform with silver crown at its collar, was drinking tea in the parlour with Phoebe, who raised a stricken face to me.

  ‘Look who we have,’ she told me. ‘Police Magistrate Purler has come all the way from Goulburn.’

  She announced it politely but as if to say: Grief has too quickly entered our lives.

  I thought myself, after many years, the inflexibility of law has arrived at Nugan Ganway – as distinct from the mere fictions of law with which Peske had played. Yet Purler himself did not much resemble grief, being florid, youngish, bear-like. He wore a black beard and his pistols rested for safety’s sake on a side table, dangerous beasts asleep for the moment.

  Phoebe jumped up. ‘I’ll get you a cup,’ she announced, making for the sideboard. But something impalpable stopped her in her tracks, as if the task were beyond her. Had the great and glorious barbarity of Nugan Ganway reached and overwhelmed her in that second?

  ‘Oh my dear,’ I said with both a smile and conviction, ‘isn’t this precisely why we need a maid and housekeeper?’

  Nonetheless I was a little mystified and concerned as I got up, took her by the elbow and helped her back to the table, and then fetched the cup and saucer myself. It was Spode china I had ordered from Sydney as a sign of our increasing capacity for refinement. I should announce here too that candles and whale-oil lamps now lit the interior of my household. Decent furniture – a bed, a table, a desk, a bookcase – had been brought in over time by Finnerty’s wagons, and an extra slab timber bedroom appended to the one room which Long and I had previously occupied. I had set Clancy to work lining this nuptial room with pages from the London illustrated papers, so that the eye might equally be caught by the visage of Lord Melbourne or ‘A Vista of the Highlands’ or ‘A View of Vauxhall Gardens’. Thus we now had bedroom as well as a parlour-cum-dining room.

  So I left Phoebe in her chair, in her sweet redol
ence and temporary silence, and turned towards the not unpleasant, honest and horsy combination of odours from Purler’s uniform.

  ‘How can it be?’ asked Phoebe suddenly, and I could see now that she was very forlorn. ‘My friend Catherine is gone.’

  ‘The nun?’ I asked, though I knew precisely whom she meant.

  ‘I have been under insistent pressure from her superior to make inquiry,’ said Purler, ‘into the whereabouts of that nun who was sent south here with your wife. She has not returned to Goulburn. It was presumed by some that she stayed in the bush or fled to Sydney for …’ Purler seemed embarrassed, ‘… for propriety’s sake.’

  ‘What do you mean, propriety?’

  ‘Well, when the chief nun began to complain, I fear the Goulburn authorities may have thought, “The woman has fled, has found a man.” But the chief nun went on haranguing, and so inquiries were made in Goulburn, Yass, Parramatta, Sydney. But the woman couldn’t be found there. And so I was asked to search the country where she was last seen, and Mrs Bettany has told me the circumstances of her parting with the woman.’

  I reached and took Phoebe’s pale hand. She murmured to me, ‘It was my insistence that she come here.’

  For Phoebe’s sake I defended Catherine. ‘She was sure of herself and her life,’ I told the magistrate. ‘She is not suddenly an absconder from what she believes so thoroughly.’

  ‘You mention absconders. I’ve heard from Treloar there are two absconders, are there not, domiciled somewhere in the mountains beyond?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Rowan and Brody. It is the first time I have had any word or question concerning them from anyone in an official position.’

  ‘Were you expecting some word?’

  ‘Some years ago I suspected them of perhaps using and then poisoning a native woman. And of having tried to drown her child.’

  ‘Is this true?’ asked Phoebe, her green eyes widening. This was an awful shock to her image of our Australian Arcady. Until now, she probably believed she had encountered the extremes of vice chiefly in her Geneva classmates, in the young men who climbed the wall, and perhaps in unreliable Goldspink. She might think poorly of her father, but his wealth had kept her safe from the realities of the penal colony.

  ‘But some of your fellows here, to whom I spoke, tell me these men come down to your place to shear.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I admitted bravely. How could that be understood by a man who lived within limits of the sanctioned world, at Goulburn? ‘I reported the death of the native woman to your predecessor Magistrate Gonfleur at Goulburn some years ago. He laughed at me, or more accurately at the possibility of doing anything.’ I was becoming angry, and that was a sign that at some level of my mind I had always considered my relations with the outlaws to be improper. Nonetheless, I kept attacking. ‘After all, in the case of Rowan and Brody, the law has been very late in making an appearance. And I can say of them this. In some ways they are less sly, and almost – one could say – more honest than men such as Goldspink.’

  ‘Well, Treloar likes him not for his character but because he has done a good pastoral job,’ said Purler. ‘Mr Treloar has many interests, and is more concerned, I’d say, in a chap’s capacity to keep shepherds and stockmen in order than in his moral fibre. And it seems that, like you, Goldspink welcomed the absconders, Rowan and Brody.’

  I felt a surge of irritation at being associated with Goldspink, as if I were an equally chancy source of information.

  ‘These associations – I’ll say it again – they began before the government of Great Britain or of New South Wales recognised the existence of Nugan Ganway or Treloar’s Bulwa Mountain. They are not chosen arrangements. They have been forced upon us by the peculiar nature of what we are doing, without the benefit of advice from magistrates.’

  Magistrate Purler drew his chin in and sat back. ‘I can assure you I am not unacquainted with the circumstances under which this country was occupied, Mr Bettany.’

  I looked at this man, probably an English gentleman farmer’s son with a grammar school education, who now exercised in a most distant wing of New South Wales the blunt and not particularly refined power to sentence recalcitrant convicts to fifty lashes, to return women to the Female Factory, and, if he could find them, to return absconders to a fierce retribution. I had to admit, though, there was a worldly understanding in the way with which he had dealt with my momentary vexation.

  ‘Catherine. That’s the question. Where is she?’ said Phoebe, dragging Purler and myself back to the real issue. Then Phoebe uttered a sentiment which could equally be applied to herself as to the nun. ‘Her faith was so simple that one can’t bear to think of her coming to harm.’

  The police magistrate looked at me, and I could now see that he knew more than he was saying.

  ‘Goldspink,’ he murmured, ‘who buys illegal moonshine from the absconders, and perhaps the occasional other person’s cattle, said that he saw them recently, that they arrived in a four-wheeler. I asked him, where would they get a four-wheeler? He told me that he never inquired too closely into anything concerning them, he made points not dissimilar to your own, but did so with more heat and less grace than you have shown, Mr Bettany. He says he saw them go off then, one of them driving the four-wheeler, the other riding beside him and leading a horse. So they vanished. He had feared they had got the vehicle from you, but knew the dangers of questioning them too closely on that.’

  I told the magistrate that I had not owned a four-wheeler until a little time before the wedding. Magistrate Purler gave out a huge sigh over his tea cup. ‘A four-wheeler might not be very serviceable where they were going, in the wild mountains. Perhaps they had a buyer in mind. Perhaps they merely meant to take it out of our sight.’

  ‘Please,’ said Phoebe, standing, her hands trembling, ‘I shall make more tea.’

  We both said no need, but could see that she wanted to be busy. She went out to our primitive bark kitchen.

  ‘Spode china,’ Purler murmured to me, smiling without malice. ‘And yet the young lady insists on doing all her own work.’

  ‘She is involved in her bush idyll, Mr Purler, God bless her. It takes a little time to find out that there are serpents in the garden.’

  ‘Oh, that there are. I chose not to tell you this while your wife was here. One of my native trackers of the border police has already indeed found the nun’s body high up in the direction of Mount Bimberi beyond Mount Bulwa. She was many weeks deceased, her clothing was scattered, and according to Doctor Alladair of Cooma Creek her neck had been broken. Either she had been taken there and killed or killed elsewhere and thrown there!’

  I groaned and called to dear God, all the useless utterances of a bereavement. That this good woman could come all this way voluntarily on a convict transport and die horribly on a distant, unearthly mountain.

  ‘What did you do with the remains?’ I asked, knowing as if by instinct how important such a consideration would have been for Catherine.

  ‘Perforce we had to bury them where they lay,’ Purler told me. ‘We lacked lead-lined coffins and such. I believe that this woman’s sisters in Goulburn are quite desolate and will later translate it to Goulburn, since they think the nun a martyr of the new country.’

  So now I began to calculate the culprits. Could it have been the Moth people who had attacked and desecrated handsome Catherine? That was not likely, I thought. It might have been one or other of Goldspink’s shepherds, and Goldspink himself had the credibly sly fury in him to do it. But he said he had seen the absconders with a four-wheeler. Their possible guilt must be tested as a first option.

  ‘We must watch Goldspink,’ I told Purler, ‘but above all we must find Rowan and Brody.’

  I realised that this was the long-delayed business pending for Nugan Ganway. Though the Captain and Tadgh had often enough discovered me, I knew that the day would come when I must discover them. I wanted very much to weigh in their presence the question as to w
hether they had ravaged and killed the dedicated Catherine.

  ‘You will assist with your men?’ Purler asked.

  ‘I will assist. Two of them speak the same tongue as the absconders.’

  We agreed that with three of my men – Long, Clancy, Presscart – I would meet him and his border police at Treloar’s at noon in three days time. That much was easy to organise. The hard thing came after Purler, refusing my hospitality for the night and wanting to rejoin his border police detachment, rode away and left me to go to our bark and slab kitchen and tell Phoebe that her friend and fellow pilgrim had been found murdered and misused. Phoebe had been cooking lamb by the recipe out of a book named Food Selection and Preparation, and now she kept absentmindedly basting while looking at me with mute horror. I stressed murder, rather than rape. I told her I must join the search for the killers. But O’Dallow would stand watch at Nugan Ganway. She had nothing to fear. With summer ended, the Moth people were gone.

  ‘I am not afraid of the Moth people anyhow,’ she told me through tears. I felt her desolation: the great adventure of her marriage, the story designed to one day enchant grandchildren, had turned on her like a cunning device. The decent impulses of adventure which had united two such different women as herself and Catherine and were driven by her brave blood and imagination had helped produce this obscene and dreadful result.

  She insisted on cooking the lamb superbly, as lamb had never before been cooked on Nugan Ganway, but then ate none of it. I ended in taking it to the men, who fell on it with eager appetite. I found Phoebe waiting for me on the verandah when I returned, gave her some brandy, helped her to our bed and kept strong hold of her hand as she closed her eyes on a world she had thought, till this afternoon, to be the landscape of assured happiness.

  Three days later I arrived with Long and Presscart at Goldspink’s homestead to find a detachment of border police and a black tracker – a native man of diminutive size recruited from some other region, dressed in blue coat and breeches but utterly barefoot – all under the overall command of Purler. But also on the verandah sat my friend Peske, in his green Land Commissioner’s jacket.