Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  Making noises of welcome, I rushed down to meet her. ‘You have a grandson,’ I said, ‘And his name will be George.’

  I did not look to flatter the Finlays in any way, but my own filial instincts cried out for it.

  She grasped my wrist. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was managed then.’ Despite a little discomfort at her frankness I looked at her to see if there was any form of accusation in this. But she said, ‘No, no. I know, Bettany, you are a good fellow.’

  ‘And you make me very happy by being here,’ I told her, very nearly believing in the happiness I felt at all aspects of the day. What I knew more profoundly was that events had caused me to mimic the joy I should have felt. How, after Phoebe’s suffering and the emergence of little George, could I say, even secretly to myself, that what I cherished and retrieved from that day was the sight of Sarah Bernard emerging from the Paltinglass kitchen with a cup of tea or a glass of tonic for my wife, leaving behind her the rude discourse of other kitchen servants. And my perceiving that here was a goddess amongst swineherds. Even while my mother-in-law’s kindly hand was on my wrist, that is what I most knew and most celebrated.

  But I said, ‘How is Mr Finlay?’

  ‘Mr Finlay will play the grandfather in his time, I hope. He takes great time to grow into the fullness of his position, which does not please me. But he will make a doting elder sooner or later. I tell you now, I am possessed by a fear that unless he and Phoebe desist from their stubbornness, our son will not come home soon, for who wants to travel all that distance to listen to orations and rants?’

  In coming days on that same verandah from which I had rushed to welcome Mrs Finlay, I held my son, swaddled and moving his head with that infant quickness. I sniffed the Australian air like a man with all life’s questions settled and for minutes on end escaped the ridiculous groove in which my head ran. My continual fear was that someone would notice a hollowness in my fatherly exuberance. And I was exuberant, and already loved my son. Bernard was something, however, which I feared would be visible to my friends, and sat in me not so much like the definite paternal joy I felt in George, but like a wound, or the swellings of a fever.

  Phoebe and Bernard had not long returned to Nugan Ganway with little George, its heir, when an unlikely traveller arrived at the homestead by way of our now distinct track to Cooma. Even from a distance, he looked ecclesiastical in an old-fashioned way, with his large black hat and his leg gaiters, of a kind many colonial clergy found inconvenient. Closer up, he had the same pale and clouded eyes as new-born mice, and his skin was so pale that the summer had not turned it brown but brought out sore-looking patches of pink. His dray was loaded with sacks of flour, tea and sugar, and with boxes which proved to contain a supply of tracts.

  He stopped on the north side of the homestead, where I stood by the home yard to meet him. He dismounted, sniffed the air, and said, ‘Sir, you have not been forced to boil down!’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I have been lucky in that regard, Reverend Mr …’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I am the Reverend Inigo Howie, Protector of Aborigines for this region.’

  So this was the man Treloar had raged against. I felt an unease myself. Had I behaved well towards the Moth people? This man might not think so.

  But his round, reddish-complexioned face seemed mild and even hapless. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘I would regard it as the greatest charity if one of your men could turn my poor horse out, and yard it.’

  I told him that was easily done, and called on Felix, who was at the time seated on the verandah with Bernard, reading. Phoebe and George, who had had a restive night, were both sleeping. I asked the man inside. I had some port and gave him a hefty glass. He had the appearance of a man who needed it.

  Phoebe arose and hungrily questioned this inoffensive fellow. She told him of her efforts to teach the alphabet to native women. Though she had persuaded three of them to look into the house, they had not stayed more than a hour or so, polite and timorous at one moment, and the next loud and likely to pick up objects – tea cups, books, samplers – and walk off perhaps innocently, calling on their fellows on the verandah to admire what they clearly intended to take for their own use.

  The Reverend Howie drifted away in the midst of Phoebe’s account of the natives, and even on the matter of his own family. Reverend Howie, Phoebe and I told each other with a glance, was perhaps fifty years, and too aged for the task he had been given.

  ‘When I saw this post advertised in the Church Times,’ he told us, ‘I imagined something utterly different, something like the missions to the Cherokee in the Americas. Maize gardens and a church built of rudimentary yet charming materials, having about it much of the natural aspect of the country, and a manse ditto. I did not, for example, realise how truly wandering a race the natives are. Therefore how wandering I must be. On arrival in Sydney, I was given a dray and told to come to this quarter of the country without my wife or my older daughter.’

  During the evening, he frequently uttered sentences such as, ‘It is so hard to get a living in England, or even to get a curacy without influence.’ And so here was pallid, blinking Howie, newly appointed by the improving Governor Gipps, who wished to be ensured that all random slaughter of the sable brethren be proscribed and punished. Again, by the way his mind drifted and his hand trembled, he seemed to me an inappropriate person to be a missionary–policeman, a regulator of malice.

  Yet, particularly after Phoebe had retired, he had a few wily questions. He remarked, ‘I heard there had been a Ngarigo woman shot here some time ago.’ I coloured despite myself.

  ‘May I ask how you know?’

  ‘One of Treloar’s men told me.’

  ‘It was not possible to report it at the time, especially as it seemed in any case to be an accident. I chose to take the woman’s child and have him educated, and that process is still under way.’

  ‘With the Roman nuns in Goulburn,’ he murmured, with a somnolent vagueness which made me dream, despite his dusty black cloth, of hitting him.

  ‘You are splendidly informed, sir,’ I told him.

  ‘It is my only strength. Inquiry. I realise that you have no ill will towards the poor nomads. I heard you did your best to raise the half-caste child who unhitched my horse.’

  ‘Felix,’ I said. ‘I am very proud of Felix. He has the attainments of a good scholar and of a good stockman. I have mentioned to him the possibility, should my finances hold, of an English education.’

  ‘You would consider sending this child, not your own, to Oxford or Cambridge?’

  ‘He is a remarkable boy,’ I said. ‘I had intended, and still intend, to use him as a mediator with the natives. But we have not lately met any large numbers, nor have we had any quarrels with them. The worst was when they slaughtered some hundreds of stock. The pasture looked like a battlefield of fallen.’

  ‘So you notice that the people are fewer in number, Mr Bettany? And have you seen how poxed some of the women are?’

  ‘The women who present themselves to my wife don’t appear poxed.’

  ‘That is right, I suppose,’ said the Reverend Howie with a sigh. ‘The worst cases die on their pilgrimages from place to place, or are found on the edge of Goulburn, in a brawling, drunken camp-of-all-tribes. Would you object, Mr Bettany, if I had a conversation with your overseer?’

  ‘What could he tell you?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said the Reverend Howie, ‘men talk to the overseers with a frankness they do not display towards masters, however friendly and humane.’

  Having begun the evening thinking Howie a pitiable ninny, I now saw that he was, in whatever state of bewilderment, doggedly pursuing the clear light. I told him to ask Long anything he chose, and said I had noticed some absences among the Ngarigo in an indefinite way, and despite my trouble in drawing pictographs and ordering a breastplate for him, I had not seen Durra for more than a year.

  The Reverend Howie slept in the parlour by the fire and at breakfast made a
fuss of young George. Then he and Long spent more than an hour in Long’s rough, orderly hut, drinking black tea. Next I loaned Reverend Howie a horse and we rode out to visit our hut at Ten Mile. The hut-keeper was in attendance, but above, on a slope, a Ngarigo woman loitered chewing some plug tobacco, and I wondered if she had visited my men for a purpose predictable enough.

  We entered the hut, and Howie questioned the men about the behaviour of the Moth people. They answered in the clichés of their bush trade: ‘Them blacks don’t have regard for property of others.’ This, without any irony, from transported thieves. When we emerged from the squalid little hut, the woman was still there and Howie stood regarding her. I wished we had brought Felix with us. ‘Hello,’ called Howie in a jolly voice, waving, but of all men to retreat from, she retreated from him.

  ‘I noticed your man had a carbine in the corner,’ muttered Howie.

  ‘You will notice it is gathering dust.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said Howie. He murmured, his mind following one track, ‘You mentioned not having seen this king of theirs, Durra. I think the Ngarigo have been much misused. Has Felix said anything?’

  ‘He hasn’t said much at all. He has had many shocks in his life, and they have made him reticent.’

  ‘The boy may be in mourning, Mr Bettany. The boy may have heard what your overseer has heard.’

  ‘And what is that?’ I asked. The idea that Long knew more than I did about this country always frightened me.

  ‘That somewhere north-west of this spot, the Ngarigo have been much misused.’

  ‘Please, please, Mr Howie. Clear words!’

  And Mr Howie told me in explicit words.

  It would at other times have been a grand excursion – Long, O’Dallow, the strange clergyman and myself, riding north-west along the Murrumbidgee and breaking off into the mountains, into the indefinite country where we had stalked the sainted Catherine’s murderers. From here I would normally have enjoyed the sight of plains strewn with those natural dolmens and, from one jut of earth we paused on, of one of my shepherds and his tranquil flock. Lambs may safely graze … But you could see in the clear air that the man was leaning casually on his firearm.

  ‘He is armed too,’ the Reverend Howie commented.

  The minister did not dwell on that point, but I felt I must offer the normal defence. ‘Of course he is armed, Reverend Howie. If not, there is some risk he would be studded with spears like a porcupine, and whether it is his own fallible nature which caused it would not be the question, for he would be equally dead as any virtuous man. Yet he has the strictest orders to fire over heads first – the men know very well I am particular on that point.’

  I sounded to myself like a temporiser, an evader. The Reverend Howie said, ‘But you told me that you gave Durra an illustration of a white man punished for shooting a black. Would that happen if your shepherd down there killed a black now?’

  ‘Why of course.’

  ‘But not if it were an accidental discharge, as in the case of the child Hector’s mother.’

  ‘In the absence of other authorities I must use my own judgement, which I hope is not morally deficient.’

  ‘One wonders whether people such as Durra understood these subtleties from the treaty of pictures.’

  I exchanged glances with Long, who seemed rather to favour this pale clergyman.

  Long had heard a circumstantial story of a disaster, which he had not shared with me until now. Why? Perhaps he thought until the Protector appeared that there was no suitable, no useful ear to pour it into. He had abstained from writing to his family for seven years, since his family, like the Ngarigo impasse, could not be mended. But now, I wondered, having seen him take Bernard off on afternoon rides, whether he was hoping to mend himself with her, and at the same time mend the Ngarigo through the sudden apparition of Reverend Howie. Under both these lights, he had an aspect more that of a rival than of my pastoral intimate.

  Progress in the steeper country was hard, and we had no native tracker with us – we would have needed to send as far as Michelago for one. Nonetheless it was as if Long knew infallibly where to take us. It was high up along a ridge marked by red gums, where some force – who could say in view of what we were about to see that it was God? – had placed a majestic thicket of huge standing boulders. We could see these stones from quite a way off, and scattered over them, for all the world like the petals of Sydney’s frangipani trees, were fragments of white. Beyond the boulders the earth dropped away to the west to become a brown limitless plain, and innocently I thought, surely there is pasture over there, in that flatness!

  None of this mattered now, since it had become apparent to me what the frangipani white meant, settled there like ridges and patches of snow. We rode closer but were in no hurry. Some of these white remains represented to us the places where amidst the great boulders people had in their terror sought sanctuary from some wild onset. Others were thrown wide. The wind keened around our ears, and took up a new pitch, in case we did not understand this was a vicious place. As we reached the first heap of bone, Reverend Howie slipped with a groan out of his saddle.

  ‘Dear merciful God!’ he said. He seemed robbed of all competence, but then he told us, ‘Gentlemen, let us all count skulls. That will be easiest in the circumstances.’

  The rest of us, pleased to have been given a task, jumped from our horses and began functionally wading into the shelter of the standing stones, counting skulls large and small, O’Dallow now and then crying to Long, ‘What do you ever make it now? I think I make it twenty-seven.’

  So we continued to step and count amongst the dead. Long cried, ‘Mr Bettany, there is something here.’

  I joined him, moving gingerly amongst the thigh bones and fibia, the occasional shattered ribcage where a ball had found a heart. There was a punctured skull holding loosely in its widened mouth a tarnished silver-plated plaque which read dimly ‘Durra, King of the Ngarigu’ (the engraver in Goulburn having mistaken my ‘o’ for a ‘u’), ‘Chief of Nugan Ganway’. It seemed they had shot him and then, mocking him and me at once, stuffed his insignia in his teeth.

  I found Howie beside me, blinking down at the awful terror here, frozen – so to speak – in the bone. ‘Long tells me there is a stockman named Morpeth who witnessed this. He is a time-served labourer in Goulburn now. He may swear an affidavit.’

  ‘My God. How does Long know these things?’

  ‘It is his gravitas,’ sighed Howie. It appeared that Morpeth, who was then Treloar’s man, told Long when they met by accident on the plain, looking for lost stock one day during the last winter. ‘If I were a man like Morpeth, shamed and condemned and far from home, and if I saw this happen, I too would speak to a fellow like Long. He has the air of a confessor.’

  I acknowledged the truth of this amongst the shards of bone.

  ‘An affidavit will be very important. Morpeth may not want to betray his comrades when it comes down to it.’

  The Reverend Howie moved on and pointed out an infant ribcage, ineffably delicate, fallen atop adult remnants – a female pelvis, said Howie. It seemed that with satanic pride someone had felled Madonna and child with the one shot. I thought at once of Phoebe. I was forced to think of Bernard too. Since servants knew what masters didn’t, had Long confided to Bernard that this Golgotha stood here, high above Treloar’s, the wind scattering the murderous dust in Nugan Ganway’s direction?

  Long had now paused in his search and, leaning against one of the largest boulders, had begun to smoke a clay pipe. I made my way with awkward delicacy, fearing to shatter some brittle remnant under my boot, towards him.

  ‘I must say I would have liked to have been told of this.’

  ‘Mr Bettany,’ he said, ‘I thought of it, but then Mrs Bettany was there …’

  ‘Well,’ I told him, ‘you showed too much fastidiousness. I mean, you must surely tell your master these things, for God’s sake.’

  ‘There was no one to do anyt
hing,’ he said in a near-whisper. ‘Not until yon parson came. Now there will be one of those Alfred-Davids from the man who saw it.’

  ‘So you keep me in ignorance of huge … of awful events … some official turns up and suspects I am hiding something, and shames me with what I haven’t heard!’

  ‘That wasn’t for a moment what I set out to do, Mr Bettany,’ Long assured me, standing upright and taking his pipe from his mouth. This was for him an apology.

  I demanded he tell me about this Morpeth, and everything he himself, Long, knew of this place.

  He began. ‘You wonder, sir, why Goldspink was moved away and beyond reach? Goldspink was moved beyond reach because of this. A stockman is easily replaced, but not a good overseer. The Protectors like that wee parson there were coming, and Goldspink did his best to assure there remained nothing to protect. The orders may have come from an altogether higher level of society than Goldspink. But I had a bone to pick with Goldspink and he was gone in a trice.’

  ‘Are you telling me, Sean, that Treloar ordered or connived at this monstrous business?’

  But Long’s cautiousness entered. ‘Oh, that’s for surmising, Mr Bettany. But this fellow Morpeth hated what had happened amongst these boulders. He hated Goldspink, who had had a great deal of trouble with the Moth people as they crossed Mount Bulwa station. They subjected him to much aggravation because he subjected them to the same. He dreamed of a thunderclap, an end to the botheration. But the amusing bit is this, sir … Morpeth says Goldspink wasn’t here for it.’

  Morpeth had told Long that at the end of the muster Goldspink had made a speech at the campfire about ‘settling the blacks for good’ now that they were coming north from Nugan Ganway at the end of the summer. He made sure there was rum aplenty available to his men.