Bettany's Book

by Thomas Keneally

  ‘Bettany,’ he called. ‘Be sure to inquire of your father.’

  ‘My father?’

  ‘Meet me by the yard in half an hour,’ he shouted, and it was all he said by way of clarifying things. ‘Before you leave.’

  I told my men to abandon their work on the hurdles and to break the camp. ‘Had trouble with natives,’ I said, nodding to the homestead. ‘Not a good time for frivolity.’

  I felt Felix’s handsome eyes on me. But what a good lad – he had ridden and stood watch like a man.

  ‘Would have thought he’d be glad to have bloody people round,’ said Presscart.

  My men began to gather themselves. We would want to be well on the road beyond Yass by dark. I sat and drank black tea, peering at the homestead. In a while, I saw Charlie emerge, coatless, and pace by the yard, smoking a pipe. By now of course he had spoken to Julia and the housekeeper. He knew I had not been inside the house. Perhaps that was the crazed idea he had had in the first place. That I might offer some affront to Julia! If so, what did he think of my honour?

  I had intended to take my good time, but could not sit watching him for more than two minutes, and so, with a ‘Keep at it!’ to my men, I mounted and rode down the incline to join him. When he saw me coming he began knocking out his pipe against a railing.

  I dismounted near him.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘didn’t you think the tone of our last exchange a little cold?’

  ‘If so, it will not much improve,’ he told me. He considered me.

  ‘I don’t know what in God’s name you mean, Charlie,’ I said, softening towards him, because in his reserve I could see some acute pain.

  ‘It is all over Van Diemen’s Land and you do not know? Of course, everyone does Mother the honour of pretending not to believe it and never mentioning it. But the knowledge is universal, and Van Diemen’s Land is a closed place to me now!’

  ‘Is your mother ill?’

  ‘No, but I wish so. I wish she were dead.’

  ‘Dear Charlie!’ I said.

  ‘Never dear, and never Charlie again! Your mother is the wife of a scoundrel, though herself a victim of his easy charm. You’re the spawn of a scoundrel. “It was a mistake of youth,” my poor father said of his crime. What about this crime? This one?’

  ‘These are very appalling things you say, Batchelor,’ I told him. ‘What crime?’

  ‘Just that my father’s house is disgraced. My mother is disgraced by your father, and it is the gossip of Van Diemen’s Land. And you have not heard, you say! It is inherited in you – the air of hurt and blithe innocence!’

  ‘You be careful!’ I roared, pointing at him. It was the subject on which I had least composure.

  ‘Drop that idiotic, stage-gentleman finger of yours, Bettany. While your father was teaching us the politer lines of Horace, he was applying the more tempestuous ones to my mother. “… nunc et campus et areae lenesque sub noctem susurri composita repentantur hora,” and so on. “Now in the fields is the appointed hour for night time whispers …” It seems he knew too well what such sentiments meant.’

  I uttered the normal outrage and denials, then said ‘Dishonour your mother if you choose, but do not dishonour my father!’

  ‘But you always thought him better than he was. You thought him a statesman because your mother pretended so. But he was always a plausible scamp. Go to your brother! The story is he has known of the indecency for some time and sought out a station on the mainland just to get away from the shamefulness of his father. Or else, more son-like, go to your poor dishonoured mother, who still has to ride into Ross in a cart and listen to the whispers, while your father stays safe in the degenerate port of Hobart.’

  Hence I heard from Charlie that my family was in ruins, and it seemed at once that my unfaithful yearnings for Sarah Bernard had somehow infested the past and undermined my family’s honour in reverse. Yet I could not picture my father in my situation, as the besotted adulterer. My brain ached with the task of imagination.

  Charlie stopped leaning on the rail, put his pipe away, and prepared to go inside. ‘I know you have a competence for grazing,’ he told me. ‘But you will never become more than a low-bred fellow. And you will never have any honour.’

  This statement terrified more than offended me to the extent that I grabbed his shirt collar. But he looked at me with such a calm contempt that I let it go again. Nothing he had said could be amended by blows or even the infliction of wounds. Perhaps in punishing the Myall blacks, he had also been punishing the Bettanys.

  ‘I wish to see all of you off my land before dark,’ he said and went inside. I could not follow. I walked back to my men with a pretence of dignity. I was reminded of the night when, after two rums, my father had said, ‘There is no charity which is not the Master and Servant Act.’

  I had not known then what he meant. I knew now. The Batchelors had mimed fraternity. Had my father thus been encouraged to punish them?

  Phoebe was the first to mention Alice Aldread to me.

  Sarah had told her story to Phoebe, describing her as a woman who had more played at murdering a tyrannous and aged husband than killed him. The victim himself a man who believed in taking arsenic and mercury for his health.

  ‘She’s a sad case,’ said Phoebe, with that beautiful obdurate light in her eye, reciting lines which I believed had come from Bernard. ‘She was locked in amongst the mad at Tarban Point, before languishing in the Female Factory. She has also been much weakened by some consumptive illness. It would be wonderful if she could live out her time in this country, which would be very tonic for her. She might be useful for lighter duties too.’

  ‘But does she have her ticket-of-leave?’ I asked.

  Phoebe was busy at needlework but reading at the same time. I so admired her simultaneous talents.

  ‘It should be possible for you to get her one by writing,’ said Phoebe. ‘She has a champion in Sarah, and I think we should be her champion too.’ We had, she pointed out, been more than fortunate in our convict servants, our record was good, and so a letter to the Colonial Secretary petitioning for this Aldread’s release and assignment should be successful.

  How cruel it was of me that I could listen apparently lightly, seemingly half-jokingly to my generous girl-wife as she asked me to pursue a kind impulse at the urging of Bernard. In fact, so far was I from being easy and indifferent in doing Sarah Bernard favours that, with dinner ended, after engaging in pleasantly deceptive conversation with Phoebe, I excused myself to smoke my pipe. Hidden like some morbidly observant and moonstruck farm boy beneath the overhang of my bark verandah, I watched the light from the mutton-fat lamp glint through the woolsack curtains of the kitchen. This was the same light by which Sarah Bernard worked. I looked for every subtlety of that dull, muted beam and–Iam ashamed to use the word – trembled when her shadow, generated by a step forward, fell across it. Then the light was quenched. Envy the lamp, for it had shared her breath, Horace might have said.

  Then, in a wind which sharpened itself against the great boulders of my pastoral country, she appeared by cold and partial moonlight and walked out towards Long’s hut, the blast flattening her dress against her shins. Her gait was leisurely, but the wind and I urgent. By now my pipe was snubbed out with my thumb and resting cold in my pocket, and I was at the one time raw and glowing.

  Through the small gaps in the slab timber of Long’s hut, a more sullen light showed. It looked to me like the light fit for a man who had finished his labour and drowsily renounced the day. Trailed by me, Bernard rapped on the door and it was opened a little by Long, who said, with his same old dolefulness, ‘Come in, Miss Bernard my love.’ I would have traded my own and Charlie Batchelor’s flocks and herds to acquire somehow the right to make such a welcoming noise.

  Seeing this much, I was not quite crazed enough to take my spying further. I returned to my homestead and my noble young partner. But my task of observation and pursuit became a regular nightly exercise.
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  One night, in my half hour of tracking Bernard’s short progress from the kitchen to my overseer’s, as I stood behind a damp tree trunk whose moisture was fast turning to hoarfrost, I was rewarded by the noise of a quarrel.

  ‘You should not think that you have some claim on me, Sean,’ I was delighted to hear her tell him. ‘If kindness is a claim, then what is its value?’ On the one hand, I found it hard to believe that anyone could quarrel seriously with Long. On the other I knew an uncontained joy that it seemed improbably to be happening. I heard him murmuring a little in baleful apology, or even, if she had driven him that far, in self-justification. A careless caress, I assumed, and if he were chastised for it, that might mean it was a rare gesture.

  The next day I went to the kitchen and quizzed her on Aldread. She is a good woman, said Bernard, claiming to have known her since the ship that transported them both and taken such care of her as was possible. She was a woman removed from the Factory to work on light duties at the Parramatta Gaol hospital after the scandalous case of the Pallmires, the former matron and steward of the place. ‘She is in trouble only when she lives in disorderly places. She will be very good here.’ As I questioned her I saw the little curtained alcove of slab-timber and bark where, unless she slept by George’s cradle, she spent her nights. After of course first visiting Sean Long.

  On the off-chance that she would thereby be pleased, I wrote the following:

  27th June 1842

  To: the Rt. Hon. The Colonial Secretary

  Macquarie Street

  Sydney

  Dear Sir,

  I have the honour to address you in the matter of one Alice Aldread, per Whisper who is serving a life sentence for the manslaughter of her reportedly tyrannous and aged husband. My information is that the behaviour of said Aldread has been in the colonies unexceptionable, and that her illness, and time spent in the Female Factory hospital, and the hospital of the Parramatta prison, have between them effectually chastened her.

  It is believed that this prisoner’s health is not good, and I am thus pleased to report that my wife and I have the honour to reside in one of the colony’s more tonic reaches, which would no doubt be beneficial to the well-being of this misguided but repentant soul.

  Etc, etc

  In the same season I received a letter from my brother Simon beyond the alps. He had lost some 1400 sheep from catarrh, and it was a very daunting prospect for him and his young wife, Elizabeth. He proposed that I might kindly consider bringing a flock, some of which he would purchase over two years, some he would pasture according to the normal arrangement, and some to be sold in Melbourne, where the market had revived. This journey would need to be done before the shearing season, but after the worst of the mountain snows. It struck me abstractly as not unwise to have investments on either side of the mountains.

  The letter also contained a sentiment, and offered a challenge, at which my heart sank: ‘The other great benefit to you would be that you could see Father, who has joined me here for a time.’

  So I had pressing duties, one financial, the other familial. Yet even when my motives were reputable, my feelings had become so duplicitous that all I planned seemed uncertain and dishonest to me. Should I take Long on what might be a challenging crossing of the Port Phillip Pass to the south-west? It would be unremarkable if I did so, I decided. O’Dallow could stay with his sweetheart and soon-to-be wife Tume and manage Nugan Ganway with utter competence. For it was an unspoken arrangement that O’Dallow would become the permanent overseer in the coming time when Long would receive his conditional pardon for time served, ask for his share of the stock, and disappear.

  So Long and other stockmen, including the enthusiastic Felix, ever the student of bush horsemanship as well as of the Punic Wars, accompanied me through fine, clear September air. We rose up a long valley, accompanied to the west by mounded peaks with the snow streaks of the past winter’s storms adhering only to their more shadowy contours. We contended with steep, wooded hills, but the weather held and the ascent to the Port Phillip Pass itself was gradual on this eastern side, and according to report the western slopes were gentler and well-grassed even in dry seasons. Felix proved yet again what an admirably reserved and hardy boy he was, and in every evening camp, while the quart pot was boiled by Presscart, he would fetch one of the Latin texts I had bought him from his saddlebag and read it to me and translate it by last light. He had begun to study a Greek primer too, since though I had but a minor grasp of Greek, he would need it for his ultimate education. He would honour his race at Oxford or Cambridge, and make a way for my son, George. They would become used to robust Australian intellects in these distant academies.

  In these lessons as in all else, the journey was pleasantly predictable. We came down through the great native forests into the clearings of the Broken River, which we followed until we encountered, by seeking out the origin of some smoke we saw, my brother’s first shepherd hut. Here a bare-footed hut-keeper sat nursing a carbine and looking with surmise at further smoke, that of a native fire on a rock outcrop above.

  ‘Having trouble, young man?’ I called.

  ‘Not as much as them’ns, mate,’ called back the convict, nodding towards the native fire. A grenadier guard protecting the person of a monarch could not have sounded as clearly dedicated to his martial task as this fellow did.

  The journey had by now become more leisurely, the sheep slowing us down as they luxuriated in these new and richer pastures. It was some time before we met stockmen mustering cattle, and the head man told one of his native assistants to ride to the homestead and warn my brother of our coming. This rider was one of the native horsemen my brother had brought with him from the Port Phillip area, and although, like Felix and Hector, his tribe had never laid eyes on a horse until less than two decades ago, the man rode off with the grace of an ancestral rider – such as we read of amongst the Indian indigenes from the plains of the Americas.

  My brother had barely come a mile from his homestead when we encountered him. Simon was a well-made young man, less tall than myself, brown-haired, with a manly, pleasant face.

  ‘Brother,’ he said, leaning out of his saddle and grasping my right hand with his, and my upper arm with his left hand.

  But behind the boyish features lay the barely disguised lineaments of care. They were worried eyes which stared forth at me, with no glint in them to make authentic the smile on his lips. I wondered had my father’s presence anything to do with his worn looks.

  ‘I’ve brought you prime stock,’ I told him, smiling.

  ‘You have been splendidly kind,’ he said. ‘The appetite for mutton goes unabated in Port Phillip. They even have their own architects’ office now.’ We smiled at each other, but perhaps each brother could see in the other that the plain, pastoral matters were of solace only if the soul was aright.

  Simon turned back with us, and pointed out new-made pens amongst scattered tall trees where my men could turn out our sheep to pasture. ‘They should mount shifts though,’ he counselled with a careworn frown. ‘For the natives are still somewhat active.’

  We were at last, sans men and livestock, riding side by side down the slope to his homestead near the Broken River, with its sundry outbuildings and stockyards.

  ‘Does Father live in the house?’ I asked.

  ‘By his own choice he stayed only one night. Since then he occupies that old overseer’s hut. It’s better. Elizabeth is hard put upon by what she calls anaemia. She complains of lack of strength. As soon as our daughter is two years of age, I propose that they return for a visit to her aunt and uncle in England. I hear that these new ships are more like health spas than the horrors we had on our 400-ton floating Hades coming to join father.’

  My memories of all that were confused – uncontainable nausea, dimness, violent movement, the sharp, penetrating stench of overflowing privies and of bile, and beneath it the symphonic and enduring malodour of bilges, the smell which penetrated skin and cloth a
nd dreams.

  ‘Is she upset to have Father here?’

  ‘She is very dutiful. She has never uttered a word of complaint. After all, the man is charming company when he sits at our table, and little trouble otherwise.’

  ‘How does he fill his days?’

  ‘He reads, he writes and – I confess – drinks rum. He gets his exercise through long rides with a convict, Tyler. Father has what he always wanted. Enough to read, some stationery and a pen, a few books, and a pupil.’

  ‘Have you asked him about Mother?’

  ‘He is cheery about Mother. He says he is giving her a rest from his company.’

  ‘One of us must go down there to Van Diemen’s Land soon.’

  ‘Oh certainly. I intend on my next visit to Port Phillip to take ship. We must show our love and affection for her … she is the wronged party.’

  ‘Have you heard from Charlie Batchelor?’ I asked in a lowered voice.

  ‘I got the rummest letter from him. Full of obscure references to our returning to type. I decided to put it away and neither seek his company for the time being nor judge him too harshly. This life in the bush is a hard affair, and brings out flaws in the character.’

  I said nothing to that in case I gave away something of my own especial flaws.

  It got cold early in this trans-alpine world. I sat with Simon and Elizabeth, who did not look well, drinking tea in their parlour, with an Irish woman keeping a watch on my utterly healthy infant niece. I had one eye out for the return of my father and his companion from their ride. And when he arrived, what would I say? My father had still not appeared when Elizabeth excused herself to rest before dinner. It was hard to tell whether her departure was an attempt to avoid the coming, awkward reunion.

  I had gone out to look for him when Father finally appeared from the blind side of the house, galloping hard, in contest with his companion. He looked a wiry figure in his jacket of kangaroo skin. I went over to meet him as he handed the reins to his companion. I had not seen him for eight years. His head was barer and what was left of his hair hung in grey ringlets about his ears, yet the old intelligence shone in his eyes.