Mrs. M

by Luke Slattery

  If he had died suddenly in the colony from disease or misadventure it was his wish that his body be packed in salt and returned to Mull for a burial such as this. And if not his body he requested that his heart be returned in its stead — a grim task that would have fallen to William Redfern, the colony’s surgeon. In time I will lie here too, beside him, though I never really understood the fierceness of his feeling for this place above all others. His heart was always returning. My own heart, well, it has a tendency to wander.

  On the journey out to Sydney, we lost a deckhand of just eighteen years from Cork. Young Benjamin Quinn plunged from the topsail and, cracking his skull, was dead in an instant. No stone mausoleum; we buried him at sea. A mute uncomplaining splash and his stiff corpse was plucked by the swell.

  A dreadful thing an ocean burial. To end one’s life as a ragged fish-pecked skeleton shifting indolently this way and that on the ocean floor. To be denied a simple plot and a bare headstone; a place to which some loved one, or even a childhood friend, might come with a poesy, or a few jewelled tears, and the benediction of kindly words. To not have such a place in death, a resting place, a marker to speak, however perfunctorily, to future generations — well, it’s to have never lived.

  Every few weeks a life was taken by typhus or dysentery or the meanness of the diet. Seven months at sea, three thousand leagues, thirty souls lost. At least Benjamin Quinn was dispatched to the next world with a tawdry ceremony; many a dead convict was discarded late at night with only a cold moon as witness.

  By the time we appeared off the Heads with our colours raised the ship was pestilential. Later I would learn that the citizens of Port Jackson claimed to have caught our stench on the breeze that swept us in. They pressed their cotton kerchiefs, or folded napkins, over their noses. And they gagged and they laughed at the unfortunates rolling and pitching in their own filth. They were not to know that the source of their mirth was the transport that would bring their new governor. ‘The Father of Australia’ they call him now.

  I gather in these spinning thoughts. Each night this past week I have dressed for bed, thrown a shawl over my nightdress, and sat with pen and ink by my side, staring vacantly at a book of smooth vanilla-coloured octavo sheets as one stares into a mirror.

  In a week’s time the priest will need the words for the inscription on the rose granite panel rising some six feet from the ground to the lintel. ‘Just try to distil the essence of the man,’ he tells me, ‘and I will turn the phrases.’

  No. The phrases will be mine. I will not have some clerical unguent poured upon them.

  I live with this story — have lived it. I must now tell it and in the telling hope to find some peace, or at least a formula for it. So I will stand strong, as formidable as the cliffs of Ardmeanach or South Head, against the gusts of memory. I will let them come.

  My hope is that when the storm is spent, the right words for Macquarie will be there, the fine public words, lying like cherries on the grass after a gale: precious, if a little imperfect. And true — as he was.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By birth I am a Campbell, a Hebridean at heart. I grew straight and tall from my tenth year and by my thirteenth had reared to five foot eight — a giantess for my age. I gained another two inches before the age of fifteen and then my growing ceased. All these years later I remain that proximate height: tall, for a woman, or statuesque, as I’m often called. A mystery, this precocious spurt of growth, like a brass tap turned on full in one solid wrench of the wrist and closed off again just as swiftly.

  And when I began to flower again it took another form. The boyish girl had reached the verge of womanhood and, with one leap, vaulted right across. I could intuit from my side of a closed door when the conversation between adults had turned to the subject of my welfare. The two words I would most often catch from my listening place — words uttered always in a brittle tone — were developing and maturing.

  At school in London I won the respect of my classmates, though not, I think, their affection. By temperament I was singular, held in and set apart. I craved the affection of my instructors and spent hours in the company of the French mistress, Miss Fullerton, at her small, cluttered apartment in Marylebone. She had lived in France — precisely why, with whom, or in what circumstances she never cared to divulge — and seemed greatly affected by that nation’s tumult. She had seen, she said, the promise of the revolution fade into a cavalcade of death. She stressed, blinking as she told the tale, that she had really seen it. In consequence she was, I believe, as alone as I was in London: to both of us, in different ways, a foreign city.

  She had a long face and a prominent yet finely modelled nose; a handsome rather than a pretty woman, with large restless hazel eyes. We would take tea in her drawing room before a window overlooking a green and leafy — almost rural — park. Gazing over the treetops and, beyond them, the roofs and chimney pots, we would drift into our private thoughts. When the silence was broken, we would converse in French. I was, in truth, more audience than companion. I was compelled to train my ear to the fluvial subtleties of French — a skill that has served me well on my journeying.

  Airds, the Campbell estate on the mainland at Appin, sprawled from a two-storey temple front with Grecian pilasters. As the youngest of five children, I was oftentimes little more than an extra serving girl in that house. My three sisters married young and bred tirelessly. On their visits home with their broods I fell into the role of maid to mistresses who were my own flesh and blood. I believe I developed, at an early age, a powerful instinct towards flight.

  On school holidays at Airds I would flee the stir of society whenever I could. I was very much alone. But I was never lonely — never that. I managed with a degree of native guile — a good Scottish trait — to orchestrate my absences so that they were noticed only when I had been a long time gone. I was forever tramping the high ground that hemmed the estate on three sides or combing the shore of Loch Laich when Connor, the cook’s boy, was sent to reel me in, cupping his hands and calling in his clear silvery tones, ‘Liiii-zzeeee!’

  In those years I would ruin a pair of boots in a summer. But my pretty dress shoes I would outgrow barely worn at all.

  My father, John, tall and thin, wealthy yet frugal, was a somewhat rigid man who on all subjects held the opinions of others. ‘The child is destined for the Edinburgh Circus,’ he remarked more than once to visitors drowsy with cake and biscuits. ‘A proper monkey. She vanishes before one’s eyes, materialises whenever food is set upon the table, and disappears along with the plates.’

  I had a favourite place — what solitary child doesn’t. It was a perfect little stone bridge thrown over a rill. In my wild imagination I gave it a Roman provenance — across the stone bridge tramped a legion bristling with standards and spears. And when I was told that no Roman legion ever came this way my fancy simply altered course. Over the bridge, in a procession of images possessing the vividness of memory, came knights in shining armour, riding richly caparisoned horses bound for a tourney.

  The lichen-covered stones of various sizes were wedged haphazardly together and the masonry was so touchable, so varicoloured — almost alive — that the feel and scuff of it on my young palms has never left me. In winter the old arch was powdered with snow; flowers carpeted it in spring; drying weeds by late summer; fallen leaves in smoky autumn. Barely wide enough for a traveller and a dray to cross, and then only at their peril, it was rarely used.

  From my earliest years I would spend lazy hours there in the gentle months, planted on the arch, legs dangling in the air as the glassy stream slid below, feeling as if I were striking roots deep into the crevices where the mortar had worn away. The shallow stream sliced over a bed of speckled stones, and always there was the companionable murmur of water over rocks.

  When the weather was warm, which was rare, the stones on the arch were deliciously cool. On those days I would lie back across them, spread my arms, allow the sun to caress my pale skin and to
heat my young blood. And when I returned to the grand house, which was designed to be above things, I felt most peculiar beneath moulded ceilings, niches filled with decorative urns, and chandeliers with their beads of false light. Having been high born, I knew that I would always live on stilts. But I craved the restless sky, the green fields and the chill breeze that swooped down from the bare crags. I loathed the very thought of stillness and torpor and desired above all things an adventure.

  My mother, Jane, possessed an unfailingly sweet nature. Ever the diplomat, she cooled my father’s bursts of rage and rouged the family’s pallor. And when things went bad she somehow made them good again. As a cure for my solitary ramblings she took me, upon my coming of age, to the Continent. Father was unable to make the journey on account of an indisposition — gout, though not a fatal illness, is certainly an enfeebling one. Margaret, my elder sister, travelled with us in his stead. We stayed with relatives in Rue Saint-Honoré, and for a few weeks in Paris I transformed a capable knowledge of French into a genuine facility. When we left on the coach south to Lyon before the journey across the Alps, I was able to read tolerably well in French. But how grey was Paris, which I had always expected to adore but did not especially like; it paled beside the radiance of Venice and Rome — especially Rome.

  My cousin Ronald Campbell, a merchant whose Glaswegian ships would leave Ostia with Sicilian Marsala and return with English twill, put us up at his three-storey villa on Via dell’Orso, close by his offices on the riverfront. It was a bachelor’s residence wrapped around a small courtyard barely big enough for our coach. Cramped and restless on my first afternoon, I took Margaret’s hand and made her walk the cobbles with me. We soon came upon the baroque Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. I assumed that the church’s name betokened a French affiliation and hoped that French-speaking Romans, descendants of that ancient race of world rulers, might worship there. Surely there would be a young man — devout but not seminary bound — whose acquaintance I could make in the lavishly marbled interior. He might show me the city. Why, an attachment might develop.

  The French affiliation was not a living thing, but ancient and half-forgotten; like much of Rome, I suppose. And the interior of the church was empty at that time of day but for a few kneeling figures gathered around the altar, one with a hacking cough that echoed disconcertingly around the gilded nave. But the paintings in the chapels held me fixed. One of them was a tender rendering of an aged St Matthew visited by a rather smug angel suspended in a swirl of drapery. It spoke of the angel’s mystic beauty and the saint’s aged vulnerability: the eternal spirit and the fallible flesh. Margaret broke the spell when she stole up behind me and whispered, ‘But here, what is this clothed statue that stands before me, head as still as marble?’ I clapped her lightly on the shoulder and we walked together into the soft powdery sunshine.

  *

  No sooner had we returned to Scotland than we learned of the passing of the elderly Murdoch Maclaine, Laird of Lochbuie. Mother took me aside before the funeral, to be held at Lochbuie House on Mull, a day’s journey away. She settled herself on the divan and patted the cushion beside her as if summoning a favourite terrier. Defiantly, I took the seat opposite. Between us on the low table was a pot of steaming coffee, which she did not trouble to pour, and a plate of oatcakes, which she neglected to serve. Perhaps she was waiting for a wayward servant.

  I would soon, she began almost girlishly, have an opportunity to make the acquaintance of a man I had greatly impressed. I inquired how it was possible that I had impressed a man I had never met and she replied, a smile easing across her plump cheeks, that she had sent the man a small portrait painted of me when I was but fifteen years of age. I roared with laughter and asked her to consider what would happen when this man came looking for a child and found instead a grown woman. My mother sharply reminded me that if he had met me at that age he would find me little altered now, as I did all my growing early.

  ‘My dear,’ she went on in an indulgent tone, ‘you have lived your short life at such a sharp angle to the world that …’ Here she paused, lowering her tired maternal eyes. ‘It is just that, well, it has been somewhat difficult to find a match your own age. Every time a young man walks through the front door you disappear out the rear.’ She drew a laboured breath, let out a low sigh. ‘Pressing you into the company of an appropriate suitor is like, well … forcing an owl upon the morn.’

  Mother was, despite her many fine points of character — though it seems churlish to make mention of it so soon after her passing — a ceaseless meddler. I had anticipated this turn of conversation, for it had been rehearsed in numberless small ways. It was a relief to have done with it.

  ‘I thank you for your concern Mother,’ I said. ‘I fear that I have failed you. But I have not neglected to form an alliance out of some flaw of character. Or,’ I shook my head emphatically, ‘a lack of interest.’

  I conceded that I had often seemed shy, and awkward, and somewhat solitary. ‘The true impediment,’ I insisted, ‘is the world in which I was raised.’

  I had been born in the midst of the American war and recall Father’s rage — though I can’t have been more than six years old — at news of its outcome. In the year I sat for the portrait that Mother had distributed to proclaim my readiness for marriage, the French murdered their king and their beautiful queen.

  In a high and rather proud tone I said, ‘Among the young men of my acquaintance I have heard talk of little else but bringing Boney to heel, clapping the Moghuls in chains, sending the Americans to the gallows. I can barely recall a young man whom you might consider eligible who has not purchased a commission, journeyed abroad to serve the King, and either failed to return or returned broken. The possession of a pulse means nothing in this age,’ I huffed. ‘The veterans are as ghostly as the dead.’

  ‘I had been expecting some such asperity,’ Mother sighed. ‘I see your spirits run high today.’ She waved her hand as if dispersing an odour and leant forward. ‘In all seriousness, now, you must promise me that you will meet with him at the funeral. See he writes to us,’ and here she reached behind her and retrieved a sheet of paper, the light returning to her eyes.

  ‘Mother,’ I said, raising a resolute hand and making to leave. ‘No!’

  ‘Stay, Elizabeth,’ she urged. ‘Please.’

  And so out of respect — and a flicker of curiosity — I did.

  ‘There are a few things I thought you should know,’ she continued. ‘The gentleman of whom I speak is Lachlan Macquarie. His father is a relative of the sixteenth Chief of MacQuarrie; his mother is a Maclaine. You have never met — he has spent twenty years in the army — but you may have heard of him. He will spend some time at his estate at Gruline on Mull when he returns for the funeral.’

  I had not so much heard as overheard tales about the man. He was by reputation a great traveller. ‘I seem to recall that he has visited the Pyramids,’ I said airily. ‘I promise that I will look winsomely into his eyes and inquire as to the glories they have seen.’

  Her voice dropped an octave and she went on in a grave tone: ‘What you might not know is that he is recently widowed. He married a young beauty, Jane Jarvis, daughter of the chief justice of Antigua. The two met, it is said, in Bombay. There was a great romance and they were espoused within the month. She was in poor health — consumption. And it carried her away in Macau, poor child. The marriage lasted barely three years; but his mourning has gone on an age. The girl leaves him with a small fortune from her father, and a broken heart. He is a strong man from a good family to which we are warmly bound. Your father and I greatly desire that you deepen this bond. But, well, how best to put it: the wound he carries from a French sabre in the American war is not the only scar.’

  My first thought on when I saw his tall, uniformed figure across the room — standing stiffly in front of a bookcase that seemed to frame him — was that he looked intolerably old. Why, his hair was almost entirely grey! He was alone at that point bu
t was soon accosted by the late Laird’s son. The boy was laying siege with question upon question, to which he replied at length. When our eyes met there was a flash of recognition — so he knew the woman from the image of her young self!

  He continued to entertain the boy, eyes all the while seeking mine. By my side were Mother and the rheumy-eyed James Campbell of Tobermory, some eighty years of age and straining to stay awake. Macquarie’s feet, I noticed, were growing restless. He shifted from side to side. Eventually he laid a large hand on young Lochbuie’s shoulder, stepped past him and strode determinedly towards me.

  On reaching my side he breathed deeply, as if he had just bounded up a flight of steps. My mother made an artful withdrawal, taking the aged Campbell by the sleeve and tugging him, blinking and bewildered, behind her.

  ‘I see the lad exhausts you,’ I said to Macquarie.

  ‘I will concede,’ he smiled cheerfully, ‘that he wearies me. I would not expect such a fierce interrogation in a courtroom. The lad dreams of India. He will not let the subject alone.’

  ‘Of what, precisely, does he dream?’

  ‘Its wealth.’

  He held out his hand and squared his shoulders. In the instant I took his hand, which enveloped my own, I became conscious, as I had never been before, of a man’s physical power. The broad-backed men in my life were blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers — crofters. Here before me stood a powerful man my social equal. I was drawn to him, as he seemed to know I would be.

  I can barely recall our conversation that evening. I was giddy with a new sensation.

  That night the family stayed at Lochbuie. The mood was sombre but the clear autumn sky above the island, dusted with whorls of starlight, was almost joyous. At dinner Macquarie continued to cast furtive glances at me from the other side of the table and, more out of curiosity than anything, I began to cautiously return them. After dinner my mother insisted I perform for the group — she was incorrigible! — and a viola was produced. I played Purcell’s ‘Chaconne in G minor’: the key of tristesse seemed right for the evening. There were a few tears by the time the last note faded into a long silence. Though I was urged to continue — Macquarie in particular applauded loudly — I excused myself by pleading the lateness of the hour and the sobriety of the occasion.