Bettany's Book
Page 45
The big red woman Connolly asks her: You were not transported surely.
We were transported of our own will. I travelled on Almorah on the convict deck from Cork to look to the interests of my countrywomen.
All my sisters – all the four of them – did the same. And one of them murdered here by ungodly men.
Murdered you say? the little woman Carty asks. A nun murdered? A nun murdered? Murthered is how she says it.
Says the nun: We tested God perhaps too much by sending her unprotected into the wilderness. It was all a chosen task for this woman and we could not argue with it nor could we scorn. It was by our own choice that we tempted God by taking to the wide waters of the earth and tending the rope burned hands of the sailors and eating the same diet as prisoners and going down into the mad furnace of the convict deck off Africa.
We listened hard to her. The barrier we put up on hearing advice from most free women was that when they told us what to do they did not know. This woman with the name of a man – this Ignatius – she knows.
She sits us down at a big table and the woman in the high apron pours us china cups of tea on a table that smells of beeswax. Get them some currant cake too says Sister Ignatius who has joined us at the table. A slab of currant cake and a knife are placed in front of us. Help yourself and pass on – so Ignatius advises. Go on. You are ticket of leave women now and must get used to the normal doing of things.
It is excellent cake too and full of a kind of promise. It is sweet. Ignatius puts before us food and drink like good news. And this is a darling cake – the little red woman Carty said – feeding it to her child. We grind it in our mouths. It tastes of our new small but growing power and hope.
The tea and the cake are now drunk and Ignatius stands and says: Well we will all go and deliver Miss Connolly here to her employment at the chandlery. It is peculiar to hear the big red woman called Miss Connolly.
We all put on our bonnets again and set out with Ignatius leading us through the garden of cabbages and potatoes and through the sound of afternoon wood chopping. Carty carries her little freckled girl who is placid. We step aside meekly into a garden to let sheep be driven through a crossroads and we pass the Commercial Hotel. On its verandah men who would normally shout to us merely whisper to each other because – I am sure – of Ignatius. As we walk she is instructing the big red one Connolly – though her counsels are designed in a way for all three of us.
She says: If you have any torment at the hands of Mr or Mrs Schottfeld who own the chandlery you are not to abscond for that is the way to certain retribution. You are to come to me. But – mark you – no silly complaints. I speak of cruel blows or forcing liquor upon you or worse things. It would be the very sin of pride she says to claim before the Lord I have the police magistrate in my pocket. But it is largely the truth. I do have that vain young man there.
The idea makes us all break into shared laughter. She seems to approve of that. We have not laughed such sincere laughter yet on our journey and now she supplies that lack out of her own invention.
The door of the chandlery with Schottfeld written above it is closed and we all peer through the glass and see that within there is some disorder. Barrels are overturned and rope snakes uncoiled everywhere over counters and heaps of coir doormats and jute sacking can be seen.
Dearest Mother! says Ignatius tightly and begins knocking on the glass. Now she tries the handle of the front door and it gives and the door opens.
We travel in a file behind Ignatius down the disordered corridors of the chandlery amidst the stands of picks and shovels and the savage blades of ploughs and axes. We can hear from beyond a half open door at the back of the chandlery the noise of crying and then considerable curses. Leave a bloody man at a time like this! cries – indeed – a man. And more: Travel all the way and nurse his cholera on board and then die on the edge of happiness. On the edge of bloody wealth. What sort of a woman is this? – so the voice asks. What sort?
This is from the storeroom and since Ignatius has emboldened us we step through with her into it. Everywhere are pieces of iron and beams of timber and a man of about forty five years by my guess sits on a stool in the middle of the floor. He seems even sitting to be drunkenly unsteady. From the rafter above him hang nooses in ropes of this gauge and that so that he has left himself provided with many choices for ending his existence. The man at the stool at last sees Ignatius and raises to her a face of ghastly torment.
She has left me – he says – my light and only recourse.
Mrs Schottfeld? asks Ignatius.
A fever two nights ago and then an onset of flux and at midnight last night a seizure. She is in her coffin at the Carberry undertakers. Where I seek at once to join her.
The many nooses he has made for himself show he is not fully decided on this but devoutly wants it.
Ignatius seems to think him undecided too. For, says Ignatius: Living blood cries out for life. The close comes quickly enough in this veil of tears without being rushed along with sundry thicknesses of rope.
The close cannot be quick enough – so says the man who is Mr Schottfeld.
But I have brought your new servant. You must meet Rose Connolly.
Rose Connolly the large red woman. Half friend and half mocker she bows to Mr Schottfeld who considers her.
He holds his head backwards for better viewing. There is nothing that that great lummox can do for me he says. Servants are for the living.
All the more therefore are they for you Mr Schottfeld. Naturally Rose cannot now stay on the premises with you but I shall leave her here each day under the care and supervision of one of my sisters. Ignatius then turned to Connolly. You must begin to prepare a meal for Mr Schottfeld. Look in the pantry in the cookhouse – there will be something for you to get ready.
The large red one looks stricken at this idea and taken with panic but moves off like a woman using limbs she has suspected to be damaged and has not tested again until now. At the same time Ignatius picks up the two thirds empty bottle of brandy by the chair and carries it to the window where she opens the stiff pane and pours the last of the spirits away into the open air. The little red mother licks her lips at such needless waste but says nothing.
The nun is commanding with Mr Schottfeld. You must for now take to your bed for a man must not make such an awful decision as this without rest.
And he goes and does it – this tear streaked unpretty man who was willing at least to think of dying for loss.
To my amazement Connolly obeys Ignatius as the man had and finds some smoked ham in the pantry. Under the direction of Ignatius too the little red mother and I mount ladders and untie the nooses and put the store in order. Then home we go amazed to tea which we eat at the big polished table with two other servants awaiting wagons to their masters and with Ignatius and two of her sisters.
I say at table: They call this a convent do they mother?
It is what I call a convent dear Miss Bernard. It is not what one of those English Benedictine priests in Sydney would call a convent.
I could join Ignatius willingly and at the expense of believing anything and might have done so except that I would need I suppose to take back my pledges to my sweet Alice.
Whose friend hereby for now signs her name
Sarah
I RECEIVE A FIERCE LETTER
I told Phoebe that as well as writing for a housekeeper I would write to her parents with the good news of our impending parenthood. I was always left uneasy by her indifference to her mother and father. I did not doubt her love, but she seemed to think she had centuries and not simply fragile years to make peace, to find a place for them in the tale she was living.
‘Write to my mother,’ she told me knowingly. ‘She will be edified and even a little surprised. But don’t write to my father. He is not ready for a letter yet.’
I had by now had definite news of Mr Finlay’s present problem: he had needed to sell some land at Yass and the brewery in G
oulburn, and in a falling market. The air of respect with which these transactions were reported in the Sydney Herald and even in the very different and more rankly populist Goulburn Herald indicated that these were temporary stratagems undertaken to buttress an inherently robust fortune. Towards other men desperately selling assets they were not as kind.
The autumn rain made me more hopeful for the lambing, yet it was about lambing-time that I got a fierce answer from Finlay concerning Phoebe’s pregnancy.
Dear Sir,
I am appalled to find that you should have imposed a child upon my daughter, no doubt with the intent of claiming my property through it. I take it this infant is designed to produce appeasement, since what brute could oppose the claims of blood and grandchildren! I love my lost daughter and await her return, but in the meantime am left to assure you that no shift, no device you can think of, no felon cunning available to you can make you or your succession welcome to me.
I do ask you to desist from imposing any further contact upon me.
Happily, Mrs Finlay had somehow got control of the envelope and enclosed an imperious but more welcome note of her own.
Please give all my love to my daughter and use her well. When she knows where she will lay in, if it be with the Parslows of Braidwood, I would use every endeavour to visit her there.
I showed Phoebe her mother’s note as if it had been the brisk extent of the letter. The father’s letter I destroyed, not forgetting to make a copy for my journal however, as if that were some sort of vengeance, or a little trap which would one day spring on him. I knew once and for all not to go near the Finlay house, for whatever my demeanour might be, I would be greeted with the standard insult.
MY NEW HOUSEKEEPER
The price of wethers had crept up a little thanks to the autumn rain, and so I took some to Goulburn with Long and my drovers. Phoebe, who was beginning to thicken with child, came with me, saying this was the last excursion she would be able to make for some time. We scudded along royally in our phaeton, in front of the dust of the herd. The men pitched a tent for us each night, and laid out our swags, buttressed by the upholstered green cushions from the phaeton.
I had raised with Phoebe the invitation of the new minister at Cooma Creek, Reverend Mr Paltinglass and his wife, that she should have her lying-in at the little brick vicarage in Cooma, to be delivered there with the help of a midwife and the young Scots doctor Alladair. But when again I suggested that she write and tell her parents that she would have her child in Cooma, she became very short with me, and it was only after we were settled in our tent with a lamp hanging from its central pole that she told me, ‘You might tell my mother if you wish. As for Father, he is still playing at his game of having begotten an ungrateful child.’
I kissed her but it did occur to me that she too was still engaged in a game of vengeance. If Phoebe had a fault, I concluded as we conversed, it was an innate intolerance of her parents. She was dismissive of her brother, George, too. He had gone to Harrow and was now about to enter Oxford. Perhaps as a reaction to his father’s sturdy sense of the material world there was a presumption that he might become a minister of the Church of England.
Other than getting a not-so-bad price at the saleyards of 9 shillings per beast, and sending a man to deliver a note to Mrs Finlay, I had two duties to attend to before Phoebe and I left Goulburn. I had been disturbed by Mr Loosely’s air of wistfulness the last time I visited his Academy in Grafton Street, and wished to see how Felix and Hector were. As I approached the gate of Mr Loosely’s admirable experimental school I saw disturbing signs of decay. The academy’s front gardens, where the pupils were put to work learning botany and primitive agriculture, looked – with the hard summer long over – unwatered. Stakes designed to hold up vines had collapsed, and amongst the withered stalks sat a half-caste child of about six years of age, attempting to extract a little bell from inside a ball made of raffia. He wore only a faded blue shirt and the poor child seemed to be myopic, barely able to see the glint of the blue bell within the strands of wicker.
I rapped on the door, and a desolate-eyed convict maid opened it. Behind her I could hear a hubbub of children which sounded disordered, not at all like the unleashed voice of native Australian scholarship which had been Mr Loosely’s objective.
‘Is Mr Loosely well?’ I asked the convict woman.
‘Not on your oath, sir,’ she told me. ‘Not so lively at all.’
She put me in the parlour, where I sat facing the wall where Loosely’s map of China was crookedly hung. Little, wispy Mrs Loosely hurried in at last. She wore a grey apron on which some stains, perhaps of modelling clay, showed. She made no attempt to explain the turmoil of children I could hear from the yard. ‘Mr Bettany,’ she said. ‘Did you read that the Governor of New South Wales has withdrawn his grace from us?’
I admitted I had not.
‘So we are without support. Our black children are to go to Blacktown, our white to the Devil. This is Mr Loosely’s reward.’ Her face quivered. ‘How easily he could have founded another sad colonial grammar school for the children of the moneyed class … Or he could have been a master at the best British school, if his angels had not driven him here. And the stipend he sought in place of the affluence which could have been his has now been cut off.’
‘I had no idea. What reason did His Excellency give?’
‘There have been malicious rumours concerning beatings, and our enemies have not omitted to throw in slanders about the drinking of hard liquor.’
‘By Mr Loosely?’
‘That in despair he gave some to scholars too. To children.’
I shook my head. No wonder the wife seemed so beset, so worn to a wire. As I wondered what to say and do, the door was pushed open and Mr Loosely was there, wax-pale, unshaven, wearing only his nightshirt and showing gingery straggles of whiskers. Having thrown the door wide, he entered normally, like a schoolmaster in august possession of all his appropriate weeds and wits, and closed it quietly. Then he came across to the table, sat down opposite me and gathered himself as if to be frank.
‘Mr Bettany,’ he said, ‘that second child you sent me is a failure. He has not proven to be a primal well of yearning waiting to be undammed. This child, unsullied with the blood of the European Cain, this child from that supposedly limitless mine of the intellect’s longing, is a cretin, an utter idiot. I expected the fullness of raw intelligence. I got a fool. I became a fool myself for having held out such a vision to the Viceroy. On his last visit His Excellency was acutely disappointed to behold the place and to quiz the children.’
‘You are not well, my friend,’ I said.
Poor mad-eyed Loosely shook his head. ‘I don’t know what is happening to me. I have interminable flux.’
As he sat trembling in his nightshirt and complaining more to God than to me, his wife reached for his wrist and turned her pale eyes to me. Loosely gathered himself. ‘The power of the child Hector’s ignorance is what oppressed me. I had set tasks in ciphering and copying. He failed once, and again, but – sir – I was patient, waiting for that mighty serpent of knowledge to arise. But whatever I asked, at each turn I might as well have been asking him to translate the Rosetta Stone. I brought him brandy and said, ‘Drink that, you oaf. Your mind is incapable of being rendered less prehensile than it already is.’
‘You forced brandy on Hector?’ I was beginning to see why His Excellency might have been shocked. ‘That child is my ward.’
An acute and childlike alarm rose in the faces both of Mr and Mrs Loosely. Mrs Loosely raised both hands. ‘It was unwise. But Mr Loosely had not slept. He was so disappointed, you see.’
‘But how can that excuse such an act?’ I asked.
Mr Loosely fibrillated his hands madly in front of his face. ‘How indeed, sir? How indeed? But doctor has given me opium for the pain of that bare ignorance …’ He gestured towards the noise of his residual pupils from the yard. ‘Their ignorance is a spike in my flesh.’
‘My dear sir,’ I told Loosely, ‘you must see a really good physician.’
I was stricken for him, and for Hector. He had suggested this vain experiment but I had gone along with it, delivering poor Hector to him like an amateur botanist bringing some rare vine. I took a £5 note from my pocket and passed it with minimum gesture to Mrs Loosely.
‘You must both look after yourselves,’ I said.
‘What will become of us?’ she asked.
‘I will write to His Excellency and urge a government pension,’ I told her.
But she seemed to think that was not likely to work. ‘I have, praise God, a well-to-do family in Abingdon on the Thames, and will need to apply to them for great help.’ She took the £5 note nonetheless.
Poor Mr Loosely rose and put the back of his hand to his forehead. ‘Oh the old grief creeps on me,’ he said, and walked out.
Mrs Loosely went running into the corridor behind him. ‘Winnie, Winnie, put Mr Loosely into his bed.’
Naturally, on her return, I asked her if I could see Felix and Hector. She took me to the back door, from which we could see the yard where perhaps twenty ill-clad children were making the noise of two hundred.
‘I shall stop here. I am the matron indoors, but Felix is the only one they will obey outdoors. He is the monitor for the open air.’
I saw them both at once, Felix standing and holding apart a white urchin from a black one, Hector. Hector was bare-bottomed, and they both wore threads and had no jackets despite the advancing New South Wales winter.