Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Awful business, old man,’ he called with an absolutely contented smile. ‘I trust it hasn’t distressed your dear little girl too much.’ His coat was hung about with two bandoliers and a cartridge belt, and he looked fit to munition the entire expedition.

  Everybody was of sober demeanour and Purler seemed to have taken on a higher seriousness than he had displayed at Nugan Ganway, and certainly a more intense air of command. Goldspink was bustling about, boiling water for tea, but booted and ready to ride himself. He suggested to Purler that this was an hour and an expedition where a little spirits might have been forgivable or even to be advised. But Purler, enormous in his uniform and sheepskin coat, ignored him.

  ‘We have two trackers,’ Peske told me, his persistent good humour and blitheness making me doubt his good sense. ‘Friend Purler’s first chap is already out along the trail of these rogues a little. These Waradgery trackers are utter wizards. They can sort out trace from trace, and from right here in the yard the fellow picked precisely the tracks Goldspink reported – a four-wheeler, two horses, one led, one ridden.’

  He settled back, utterly happy with every aspect of the colony and its gradual reaching out for absconders and like anachronisms.

  Indoors, we supplemented the mutton in our saddlebags with some of Goldspink’s fresh damper, and by the time I got out into the yard, a tall tracker was there, returned from his reconnaissance, a great frown on his long flat forehead as he talked to Purler.

  ‘I find ’em, Mr Purler,’ I heard him say. ‘Goan off toward them fellers there.’ And the ‘fellers’ he pointed to were the tangle of mountains almost directly west – quite credibly so, since it was a stretch of country named the Kiandra, whose ownership was uncertain, whose precipitous gorges we avoided, and towards which even Long’s attitude, if he suspected cattle had wandered somewhere in that locality, was very nearly one of resignation.

  ‘They couldn’t get a four-wheeler up there,’ I heard Peske say.

  At last we set off behind Purler’s trackers, who rode barefooted in their police pants and engaged in a sort of shy collaboration at the head of our party. I rode Hobbes, who still served me and was now a mature beast of eight years, and had learned a kind of endurance and patience, I believed, not common in the horses of Van Diemen’s Land. On gradually rising ground, first open, then wooded, the trackers would pause now and then to drop to the ground and discuss matters in the brisk, elliptical language which sounded like that of the Moth people but which was very likely different.

  According to the trackers the two absconders had somehow got the four-wheeler up here, bouncing its ironbound wheels over rocks. At dusk the trackers led us to the edge of the ridge we were then on and pointed out to us the wreckage of the four-wheeler at the bottom of the drop. Purler and one of the trackers climbed down to it. ‘No horse down here,’ Purler called to us, though we could see that already. So they had taken the horse out of its traces and pushed the dray over the edge, giving up the crazy struggle with the terrain. After further conference at the top of the ridge, the police trackers told us that after the vehicle had been pushed into the abyss, the three horses had continued along the ridge, two horsemen leading the carriage horse.

  Things were looking very poor for Rowan and Brody, and we moved with greater wariness. We were running out of light when we came upon a primitive pot still. It sat on a dry stone mount above a quenched fire. This must have been the fire from which the absconders had supplied themselves and my outlying shepherds with moonshine, hauling up stolen sacks of grain for distillation. So we were now close to them, perhaps as close as two or three miles. A grey, wispy dusk was falling, and already there was a sense of an early seasonal frost. So, uneasy, we were forced to camp.

  There were three languages in that camp – the trackers discoursed in some brand of Waradgery, and Long strolled over to a second fire and spoke his Gaelic earnestly to some of the Irish constables of the border police. He once provoked hard laughter with something he said, but he was not himself, for the crime weighed on him.

  Though we needed them high, we kept the fires low, having circled them with substantial stones which we dragged up one by one to hem in the modest flames lest they be seen by the absconders. Peske prattled on in a fraternal murmur, speaking of his fiancée’s family, who were settlers at Gundaroo. He was very proud of his future wife. She was colonial-born, he said, and less affected than some others. It was a sentiment which, given his own affectations, caused Purler and myself to smile.

  I was prompted to muse what Horace would have made of our miserable, drizzly, sparely warmed camp. He would of course have a sentiment for it. ‘Contracto melius parve cupidine vestigalia porrigam … By narrowing my desires I shall increase my real revenues.’ But, having thrown away his shield and renounced militancy in his youth, he would not have much liked this wineless, songless place.

  The dawn came up grey, and with a snarling wind. We revived a portion of ashes for tea and ate cold damper and slab mutton. We left our horses, hobbled, behind. Our party edged forward silently behind the trackers, who would now and then noiselessly turn to make hushing motions with their hands. At last the shorter black tracker came back and told Purler that the absconders’ hut was due ahead.

  The hut we sighted in a frosty clearing up through the trees above us was, in a colony of mean dwellings, the most miserable habitation I had ever seen. Clay caulking had fallen out of the cracks between slabs, and wind and rain seemed welcome to enter. The rickety bark roof looked ripe to be blown away. Convict shepherds were lords by comparison. Though around every homestead lies an accumulation of bleached bones and partial skeletons of sheep and cattle, the ramshackle little refuge of Rowan and Brody was surrounded by absolute ramparts and hedges of white, the remains of livestock shot and eaten to sustain their years beyond the law. Amongst the bones, the three horses of the household grazed.

  The first human movement we saw was of a shivering native woman dressed merely in a man’s shirt who emerged and hurled in our direction the night waste of the absconders. She went inside and then the Captain, Rowan, strolled out smoking a pipe in his shirt sleeves, a hardy creature, one had to give him that. Purler had just then sent some of his troopers around the clearing, to the back of the hut. The border police had a repute for clumsiness and I feared that Rowan, smoking and exchanging some words with the three horses in his yard, might look up at once, aghast, hearing the infallible noise of encirclement. But he went on chatting to himself, a man who seemed so normal that it was hard mentally to assign to him the savagery of which he was apparently guilty. Yet one of his three horses looked to me to be very close to the one I remembered from Sister Catherine’s four-wheeler.

  ‘We will talk to him now,’ murmured Purler to me.

  Goldspink, on my left, heard this. ‘Sir,’ he suggested, ‘shoot the bastard.’

  ‘It isn’t appropriate,’ said Purler dismissively.

  ‘Do we need to wait for Brody to present himself?’ I asked.

  ‘I take your point,’ said Purler. ‘Better to.’

  But at that second Brody himself appeared anyhow, in breeches and flannel shirt, sniffed the cold, high air, raised his quite boyish features to the leaden sky and exchanged an observation with his companion. Rising now behind a shaggy-barked gum tree and stepping around it, Purler cried without any excessive tones of drama, ‘Peter Rowan and James Brody. From the evidence as it exists I am required to question you about the murder of a woman. I think you know which woman. Don’t look that way – my men are there also.’ Brody seemed to be about to take flight. ‘Order your friend Brody to be still, Rowan. Persuade him of it, like a good fellow!’

  But Brody did not cease backing, and Rowan himself, though he had not stopped smoking and had laid what seemed a very unsurprised eye upon us, turned and ran with his young companion into the hut. Long, the coolest of men, the one most appalled by this crime, most ashamed of it, stood and shot off his carbine, and the bullet struck Rowan i
n the hip. If he lives, thought I crazily, he will have that to show with the scars on his back. Rowan was however not the sort of man to be stopped by any wound short of a fatal one, and Brody and he crashed through their door and into their hut, which was at once pushed shut. Within seconds, while we – in a very unmilitary manner – were still standing there in view on the clearing’s edge, a torrent of fire poured through the window flaps of the hut. One would have thought the absconders were firing pistols and carbines two-handed, or that the native woman was reloading for them, or that they possessed a depot of armaments. I could feel the velocity of musket and pistol balls all around me, but had a novice’s immunity to them.

  There was a pause then, in which we all walked back to the shelter of the trees, quite calmly. Peske, who proved to be the only casualty, held up a shattered, bloody hand. ‘Well, it’s not my writing hand,’ he managed.

  Once we had tree trunks between us and the absconders, in a sensible voice Purler called upon them to come out. They fired again – we could hear bullets thrashing foliage and embedding in wood, yet once again we were charmed and none of us were struck. We poured in a fire of our own, and I observed that one of Purler’s constables was binding up Peske’s hand, Peske himself unsuccessfully attempting to move his fingers, and not seeming very upset when he could not.

  Purler asked that they let the native woman out of the hut, since her howling was pitiful. This, after a time, happened – the door opened and the woman came running towards us, keening, galloping through our thin ranks. We let her go thinking she could be retrieved and fed and consoled if necessary. But we would never see her again. Events in the clearing would delay us too long.

  Purler called on us all to blaze away now. With my new carbine I shot the bark door to shreds, thinking that such a demonstration would surely persuade them to emerge. They abandoned the hut rightly enough, with an athletic suddenness, raging out the door, Rowan not slowed at all by his wound. It was, as we all decided later, a form of suicide but one which put the onus of despatching them fairly and squarely upon us. At the time, I think it fair to say, they frightened us, these primitive men stranger than savages, so far beyond our interpretation, moral or social, howling down on us in their shirt sleeves, a carbine in one hand and pistol in the other. I know that my ball was one of those which entered Rowan, and those who discharged carbines to my right tore Brody’s body to pieces.

  Approaching the fallen absconders in sudden silence, we saw that Rowan had his face to the sky, and although his shirt was utterly soaked with blood from his chest, he was capable of calling robustly again and again, something which sounded to me like ‘Olung! Olung!’ An energetic Goldspink was the first to reach him, and put his carbine to Rowan’s head, ready to dispatch him finally. Long, however, pushed him aside, crying, ‘Keep your distance, you pagan bastard!’

  The fact was that Rowan had been calling for Long in Irish.

  His lips frothing redly, Rowan had his last conversation of all with Long in the Gaelic tongue, and, occasionally looking sideways at the rest of us, Long sombrely listened and answered, tears falling down his cheeks.

  ‘Aye,’ Goldspink told me, ‘those bastards stick together in their gibberage.’

  Long stood up as if to talk to us, and Rowan howled, ‘Into your hands I commit my spirit.’ His wounds were appalling, and without another word Long turned the barrel of Rowan’s own undischarged carbine to the man’s head and fired. The trackers keened, and one of the border policemen was as ill as I wished to be.

  ‘Why, sir, in God’s name and on whose authority did you do that?’ Purler roared at Long.

  ‘He would not have lived to be moved.’

  ‘I’ll have you flogged.’

  ‘It will add to the gore of the day,’ said Long.

  Purler stood, audibly snorting. ‘And did he make a confession?’

  ‘He did not, sir,’ said Long, ‘but asked for pardon.’

  ‘Pardon?’ asked Peske, his lips drawn back now with the increasing pain of his wound.

  I noticed Long go across the clearing and speak to Clancy, who had hung his head against a tree like one drained of strength. ‘No false tears, Yankee,’ he said. ‘It’s the way of this awful world, that’s all.’

  The first winter of our marriage was one of poor rain. Little snow fell on the distant hills, and hardly any on our pastures. Some two thousand of the Merinos died famished and were devoured by crows, and the increase at lambing was the poorest to that time. Yet we got the wool in that year, and Phoebe insisted upon cooking for the men, a task so endless that I began to suspect that she might need two servants, not one. Phoebe rode beside me in a convoy as Clancy and seven others, some hired from the new hamlet of Cooma Creek, dragged our wool to Mr Barley. My wife was a wonderful horsewoman, able to gallop sidesaddle, one dress-clad knee hooked up over the pommel in a manner perhaps considered not totally acceptable in Europe, or even closer in Sydney, but of adequate modesty to any fair observer and warranted here by the uneven nature of the countryside.

  Phoebe had gradually softened a little her uncompromising attitude towards living her life in the bush to the full limit of its harshness. I was surprised but pleased when she let me pay £80 to buy a better carriage than we had driven in until now, a well-sprung phaeton and a team of horses from a gentleman recently arrived in Cooma Creek, a young Scot called Dr Alladair, who needed the price of the vehicle to establish his medical practice there. So a physician had arrived as close as thirty miles from the Nugan Ganway homestead. I resolved to keep a watch on his behaviour and repute, for if Phoebe was to bear children and consent to give birth at Cooma Creek, to which I could be easily summoned, he might act as her physician.

  Phoebe travelled with me in our new four-wheeler, with Hobbes and her favourite mare Glory trotting empty-saddled behind. There were to be encountered, despite the brown-greyness of the plain, some wonders of an enlarging world. North of Bredbo, on the borders of the County of Argyle, a young Jew, a relative of Mandelson, had built a stone inn. His dark-eyed wife made a great deal of Phoebe, for Phoebe constituted a promise that no wild borders which she inhabited could be taken as utterly barbarous. While Phoebe and I occupied one of the rooms, Clancy and the wagoneers slept beneath the loads of fleece.

  A little way along the track the next morning we met a curiously laden wagon coming south and accompanied by Mr Treloar on horseback.

  ‘Mr Bettany,’ he cried, admiring my four-wheeler, ‘you travel in elegance.’

  I had met my neighbour only once before, in Sydney at the Squatters’ Ball. Encountering his square and rather jaundiced face there – he was a man of perhaps fifty years – I had never forgotten that he was once willing to be a cohort with Mr Finlay in my ejection from Nugan Ganway. Naturally I treated him politely rather than as a friend, and I looked about for casual topics of conversation, of which the most obvious was the enormous steel pot atop his wagon.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that is a boiler. Didn’t you know that closer in those of us who are left in the wool trade have taken recourse to boiling the sheep for tallow. Boiled up the sheep are worth something in the London market. I admire your bravery in taking wool to Sydney.’

  ‘I have not been told otherwise by my agent,’ I said. ‘He must consider a market still exists.’

  ‘Some bailiffs were selling sheep they had seized for tuppence a head,’ Treloar told me. ‘Until they calculated they were worth 6 shillings boiled to tallow. And at such a time as this the governor chooses to appoint Protectors of Aborigines, to prevent us dealing with those who spear our devalued stock! It is the Whig sensibility run mad!’

  ‘Is that why you have moved your overseer?’ For Long had darkly told me, soon after the deaths of the absconders, that he had gone to visit Goldspink on some business or other and Goldspink was gone, across the alps, to a new station of Treloar’s.

  ‘Yes, he works well and frightens the savages, but that is not permitted any more! So I have moved him over the a
lps where he can at least competently work without hindrances such as Protectors, or Weepers, or Creepers, or whatever His Excellency might call them.’

  After a few more complaints about the efforts of government and markets to cramp his income, he excused himself and caught up with his wagon and boiler.

  In Goulburn we took rooms at Mandelson’s Hotel, where Phoebe was to my surprise persuaded to wait for me while I rushed the wagons to Barley. We had no intention of approaching the Finlay house but, at my urging, Phoebe let her mother know that we had rooms at Mandelson’s Hotel. Mrs Finlay, her eyes still seeming bruised as if from within, had the grace to come. She entered from the stable wearing a veil and avoiding servants. ‘No one will ever succeed in making me slink in that manner,’ Phoebe later declared. Seeing her married daughter in the parlour of our rooms, she began to weep, and Phoebe joined her in tears.

  ‘When I think it might have been both of you,’ said Mrs Finlay, referring to Catherine’s murder, which had been canvassed in all the papers, and about which a booklet, The Fatal End of Rowan and Brody, had been published in Sydney.

  ‘But the men are dead now,’ Phoebe reassured her mother.

  I wondered if Mrs Finlay could read in her daughter’s demeanour that Phoebe had proved herself to be more than an unworldly, novel-skewed maiden. But her concerns seemed, at this meeting, elsewhere. I had heard tales of Mr Finlay’s shrinkage as a grandee, all due to heavy borrowings and the fall in wool price. But I could not believe that Mr Finlay was in any serious danger – if there was shrinkage, he was well-placed to bear it. The sadness in my mother-in-law’s eyes surely arose from some other source than business.

  When I found some excuse to leave them for a while, Mrs Finlay told Phoebe that when our wedding banns had been read in the church in Braidwood and noted in the Goulburn Herald, Mr Finlay had consulted lawyers about stopping the marriage, but Phoebe was, by a mere few months, old enough to dispense with parental permission. He had of course angrily adjusted his will. But, said Mrs Finlay, life was now teaching him that he was not a god, and he hoped, and she hoped, for a reconciliation.