Mrs. M

by Luke Slattery

  And with that he strides off.

  With small gestures and an almost imperceptible nod, Rose draws me closer. ‘He desires to put an end to what he calls a “war”,’ she says in French, her almond-shaped eyes widening. ‘We believe that he means to provoke one. Be careful! Be alert!’ As if to perform the motions of vigilance she looks sharply over her left shoulder, then her right.

  In Rose I perceive a like mind and spirit, and she, I believe, detects an ally in me. She speaks her mind, as I do. Holds her head equally high. Was she chastised, as I was in my young years, for her fiery spirit? I am certain of it. And if Macquarie had announced his intention to sail the world on an adventure then I too, I like to think, would have stowed myself on board.

  And yet she is vastly more skilled in the arts of deception — this Rose. Freycinet has acquired both a wife and a spy for his long voyage. Masking her purpose with a smile, she throws her head back and laughs.

  ‘This Commissioner believes,’ she continues calmly, ‘that there are two classes of people here: the rabble and the upright, he calls them. The Governor, he claims, is on the side of the rabble. The Commissioner comes to ensure that the upright prevail, and in doing so —’ She breaks off. Once more she takes in her surroundings nervously. ‘He means,’ she continues in a secretive whisper, ‘to injure your husband. He calls him a radical. Yes, he does. Says it openly.’ A small nod. ‘But you are fortunate, no? This man is very boastful. Even in the port of Rio he makes his intentions known to the French consul. Fool!’

  My eyelids, I am aware, have been blinking rapidly. My mind has come to a halt. Surely my features betray my bafflement.

  Rose cocks her head and looks at me quizzically. One fine strand of her hair has detached itself and come to rest on her thickly painted lips like a crack in a painted portrait. She takes it between her fingers — there is a flash of red nail polish — and sweeps it back into place. She draws herself up and gives a solemn bow as if to say, ‘There. I have played my part.’

  ‘I know nothing of this,’ I return after an agitated pause, hands clasped so tightly together that it pains the joints. ‘Nor does the Governor; I am his confidante as well as his wife. You had best tell him, and quickly.’

  Freycinet weaves around groups of uniformed officers, arranged in ornamental circles, to rejoin us. He has replenished his glass. ‘Have you told her,’ he asks Rose, his lip curling, ‘the Commissioner’s name?’

  ‘It is John Bigge,’ she says.

  He muffles a laugh with a sip of claret, takes another, and looks around. ‘And you know — this is the most delightful thing — he is very, very small.’ His laughter ends in an asinine snort, which draws a curt look from Rose.

  Elsewhere in the room conversation stops and heads turn. We, all three of us, adopt blank surprised expressions. After an awkward moment of silent disapproval, the hum renews.

  Freycinet pauses to take another sip from a glass that seems too meagre for his thirst. He sighs a little too loudly, and drinks rather too deeply. ‘Depending on the force of the trade winds,’ he says, ‘Bigge may be here any day.’

  ‘Please, then,’ I entreat him. ‘Inform the Governor — immediately.’

  I trace Freycinet’s path through the crowd towards Macquarie. There is a conference between them. I believe I detect the precise moment the news is delivered. Even from a distance of several yards I detect a tightening of the eyes, a slackening of the cheeks and the liquefaction of Macquarie’s normally impeccable social smile. It is followed, just as quickly, by a partial recovery.

  Soon afterwards I am asked if I might play a tune at the regimental piano that is only ever used for bawdy drinking songs. I arrange myself on a seat before the keys, focus my thoughts on a Haydn sonata. As I begin to play I catch sight of Freycinet and Macquarie departing the scene together. For a beat I pause with hands raised above the keys, quite overwhelmed by the pace of events, before collecting myself.

  It is not the most musically educated audience I have performed for. But I am surprised how quickly I manage to disperse it with my poor playing. I desire something tempestuous: the Appassionata. In this rush of motion, I crave a rush of emotion.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The day after Freycinet’s arrival I set out for the Domain in the trap. I seem to feel so many things at once — excitement and remorse, guilt and promise, conviction and fear, mostly fear — that I scarcely feel anything at all. I seek the air out here; the reviving air of solitude. And what of these rumours? If they prove true, and we have an enemy stalking us under British colours, what can be done to avert catastrophe? But perhaps my fears attach themselves to a fiction unworthy of the time I indulge it. The French would love nothing more, says Macquarie, than to plant a thorn in Britain’s flank and sail gaily home to their monarch. As a young man he helped to drive Napoleon from Egypt and he still believes they fight by their own rules, that they are tricky, overly subtle and Janus-faced. I am not so sure. What rules do we obey in our fight with the natives?

  Drawing up to my stone seat, I unpack a nest of cushions from the trap — deep blue fringed with crimson and gold lace. I arrange them about me. I sit, inhale, take in the view.

  *

  Unbidden comes a line of verse, or perhaps a mere fragment of a line: ‘She did lie in her pavilion — cloth-of-gold, of tissue.’ Shakespeare, I think. The Egyptian tragedy? It calls to me from the past. But the past — how strongly present it is at this moment. I am here on the isle of Mull, a woman of forty, hair falling loosely over the shawl wrapped around my shoulders. Set before me is an orderly book of octavo sheets, a file of Antipodean mementos, and beside them a steel pen, ink and blotter. And I am a woman in her mid-thirties seated on a rocky plinth in the Antipodes beneath a spreading fig tree, plumping up my cushions. And here I am, twelve again. I’m perched on the little bridge above the glassy stream on the Airds estate, feet dangling in the cool liquid air. I am all three. The same blood. The same soul. But would the two younger selves recognise me, a memoirist beset by her sorrows, awaiting the dawn and whatever it is that the dawn might bring?

  I take a candle and pick away the guttering to release the pale fading light. I swing it in an arc to illuminate the walls. Here is a sketched portrait of Bungaree, in three-quarter profile, drawn by an expert hand; beside it is an oil of my husband, more naively done; and there the Architect’s fantasia of buildings from all ages and places rising from the forested coves and promontories of Port Jackson.

  The stone chair. What was I feeling that day? What did I see? I kept no diary; my memory and my mementos help to orient and steer me as I journey between two hemispheres and two lives. Without them I am lost.

  *

  I am tilting back my head, untying my cap and shaking out my hair. I gaze up at the arabesque of oily leaves from the embowering fig tree.

  Gone are yesterday’s blue–white breakers. The insistent, impetuous wind has lost its force.

  I am fortunate to call this bluff my own — only too aware that my lease upon it is for a brief span — and to watch this New World at work. In my time here I have watched it grow.

  For an incalculable age — millennia, maybe more — this place belonged to another people and their dreams are set out like a glowing grammar upon the wall of the cave below. A stencilled hand in its cloud of ochre declares, ‘Me. I am.’ And also, ‘Mine this place.’ The kangaroo trussed up in its own skeleton is primal magic and also a deity: ‘Come to me great spirits of prey, I call upon you!’

  I take out my novel and place it face down on the bench. The Princess will have to wait. I am too distracted even for diversion.

  Behind me, a clatter of hooves. I leap to my feet, turn to face the intrusion. Towards me come two horses, rasping hard. Brody rides the bay Arab and there is a visitor on a powerful chestnut stallion. I tie up my hair and put on my cap.

  Brody comes forward as the figure behind him dismounts in a tangle. Here is a man who once rode confidently and well but no longer rid
es often. My guess is that he boasted of his riding prowess before the stallion was saddled for him, and confessed to Brody on the ride that he had slightly exaggerated. If he had been honest at the start they would have saddled him a gelding.

  ‘Monsieur Arago — from the Freycinet expedition,’ Brody beams as he approaches with long strides before executing a sharp pivot and motioning to his guest. The visitor follows, bow-legged and a little pained. He rubs his side, lifts a leg and shakes it. Before he has a chance to speak, Brody speaks for him. ‘Did you know they are circumnavigating the world? We catch them on their run home.’

  The visitor removes a deep green hat — gaucho style, I have seen its type before — from a head of thick curls darkened with perspiration. He takes my hand, pressing, almost caressing, with light fingers. And then, with an open expression across broad, high-coloured cheeks that have not seen a shaving blade for several days: ‘Enchanté. A pleasure to meet you, madam. Arago — Jacques.’ Unlike his captain, the Uranie’s draughtsman wears his hair long over the nape of the neck. It recedes from a strong face defined by a beetling brow and a heavy, slightly simian, upper lip.

  ‘I have just been explaining to Monsieur Brody’ — he turns to the lad and holds out a hand as if supporting a tray of drinks — ‘that Port Jackson is a great surprise. A joy. I am charmed. We were told to expect a prison, very grim. One of the inner circles of an’ — he clicks his fingers to spur his mind — ‘enfer terrestre. A hell on Earth. But the spirit is lighter here — more hopeful — than many of the free ports we have put into on our voyage. Although it is certainly warm enough today for hell.’ He loosens his damp neck cloth as he smiles and then, not satisfied, unties it.

  Brody breaks in excitedly, ‘After a fortnight at Jackson they sail for home. The Governor and I plan to make the most of their company — they have so many stories to tell, tales of the Sandwich Islands, of Guam, Hawaii, New Guinea, the oceans, the strange creatures of the sea, the even stranger inhabitants of land. I felt you would like to hear these tales … of adventures.’ The ensign’s Irish brogue is more noticeable when heard in a duet with Arago’s liquidly accented English.

  The visitor, who has been staring at his shoes during Brody’s narration, raises his head with a flashing smile. He has forty years behind him, I would guess. But most certainly he believes himself to be a man of twenty-five.

  ‘May I trouble you first for the whereabouts of a fresh spring?’ he looks about, shading his eyes. ‘I have ridden in this heat for an hour. I have thirst. And the water — I have just realised — it is all gone.’ He cuts me the look of a small helpless boy. He must consider it charming.

  ‘Here,’ I say, taking a bottle of fresh water from a basket beside me. ‘But there is only one glass.’

  ‘I would be so … very … grateful, madam. Please, you first.’

  I drink a half glass, refill it to the top and offer it to him.

  ‘The storms crash into these headlands with the ferocity of Mongol hordes,’ I say as he sips from the glass, not forgetting his table manners, even though there is no table and the chair is of stone. ‘They bring good rainwater to a dry land. But the Tank Stream is fouled. For a fresh spring you will have to ride to Queen’s Wharf, just below the old hospital. Now if I am able to direct you to the source of good water, Monsieur Arago, are you perhaps able to reciprocate with good wine?’

  ‘Ah, wine,’ he says with a smile and a sleepy nod. ‘I have drunk enough good wine on board the Uranie to last a lifetime — we were especially well provisioned in that regard. But there have been many times at sea when there was barely water enough for life itself. My mouth felt like the inside of a cheap leather purse.’ He pokes out his tongue, crosses his eyes and drops the corners of his mouth.

  Arago would shine brightly in any company. Is there a queen who would not want him at court?

  ‘You were saying — the colony is a surprise. I know that I was surprised, on my first day. But you, I think, had different expectations. What, if I may ask, were they?’

  ‘Difficult to say,’ replies Arago with the confident air of a Frenchman who has lived at one time among English speakers. ‘It was never expressed. Not openly. We deliberately chose to visit a society — perhaps the world’s first — entirely dedicated to the rehabilitation of malefactors.’ He rolls the word out slowly as if savouring it. ‘Freycinet gave a very good report,’ he goes on after a pause. ‘But almost twenty years has passed since his first visit with Baudin. I wondered if the English since that time had built a Château d’If on the shore of a shark-infested ocean. But I see instead that you have built for pleasure.’

  ‘Not entirely … But you have noticed Captain Piper’s villa.’

  ‘Yes. And a fine lighthouse with a tapering column. A pretty fort. And this, er, large castle,’ he turns, scans the settlement, picking out the castellated stables with a forefinger. ‘The horses sleep in a palace while the Governor and his fine lady make do with a cottage. That, if you will excuse me, is as upside down as the seasons in this country.’

  ‘A very large and well-appointed cottage, if I may correct you.’

  ‘Yes, a cottage orné.’

  ‘In any event the plan is to unify all the parts. Make the building coherent. In time …’ I detect an earnestness in my tone, and break off. He has not come all this way to hear of my plans for the residence.

  ‘May I,’ Arago says motioning towards the seat.

  ‘Apologies, I am so often alone here that I begin to think of it as my exclusive domain. Which it is, in part.’

  ‘It seems,’ he goes on, ‘even after this brief stay, that England’s felons have reason to prefer a life at Port Jackson, despite its hardships, to one at home. The cold and damp of an English winter — that alone is reason to wish for transportation. No?’

  I incline my head a little towards him. ‘It is certainly not missed, the cold.’

  ‘There are, I am sure, many indignities such as these’ — he swipes the air — ‘mouches. But there is much to hope for in a new country under the rule of law, even if you have come to it as one disowned by the land of your birth. As a place of correction it barely serves. It is a place, rather, of liberation.’ His mouth and cheeks inflate into a grin that collapses as if punctured when it goes unanswered.

  ‘In France,’ he continues, ‘we killed a king and his queen, and then we killed their killers, and we do not forget to kill one another. We have bathed in blood. All so that we could begin again. But the remaking was not done. We have restored the monach. It is very … boring.’ He places a heavy accent on the second syllable, which has the strange effect of making a word designed to express tedium sound almost jaunty. ‘Ah, but the remaking,’ he goes on, ‘is being done here. Voici la vraie révolution.’

  I wave a chiding finger at Arago. ‘Well sir, you may speak your mind with me for I am,’ I turn from the harbour and look at him a little fiercely, ‘of the same view. But you must take care not to put it about too widely.’

  ‘For the fear that I might … what? Seriously. C’est vraiment … It is really true. There is a mild yet reasonable Governor. He believes in his heart in the … the rehabilitation of the convict. A jail has fathered a settlement. And that settlement will one day soon be a city. Before too long there will be a nation; a fine one, perhaps. Pourquoi pas.’

  ‘You have more confidence than me, my good sir. The Governor is criticised strongly at home by wealthy men who believe the convicts are treated a little too well.’

  ‘Too well. Or … perhaps well enough to embarrass those who would treat them poorly? A criminal, almost by definition, forfeits his rights as a human. In most places.’

  ‘I know only that the Government in Britain will not sit idly by in the face of criticism from titled men and those of means.’ I pause at the intrusion of a memory — a dispatch from Bathurst cataloguing these complaints. ‘In point of fact it will not,’ I go on, ‘even permit itself to be accused of meekness, for it is the Government of t
he powerful. And you say yourself — at least your captain and his charming wife seem quite certain — that there is a Commissioner on his way to address the situation.’

  ‘Very true. He is to have an inquiry, but he has already made up his mind. He is, on the other hand, an Englishman. He is not a monster. France has produced a Robespierre and a Bonaparte within one generation. Here in this colony you have not, I note, enslaved your native population, as we might have done.’

  ‘This, surely, was the crime of an earlier age,’ I remark in a combative tone. Arago recoils, just a little, as if he had received a knock on the jaw. I go on. ‘Britain has abolished the slave trade and within a few years it will be stamped out across the Empire. Meanwhile Dawes, who was a famous friend of the natives here’ — I point to the promontory named after him — ‘fights for the cause from Antigua.’

  ‘Ah, but we French are very clever. The trade was declared illegal, then legal again. The business itself has redoubled everywhere sugar is grown. Voices are raised in protest, and tears are shed in pity. But the profits climb. We have some two hundred ships in Le Havre dedicated to that ugly trade, and another hundred in Nantes alone. Believe me, madam, if it were the Tricolour and not the Jack planted on these shores — a fact that I, as a Frenchman, naturally regret — the natives here would not roam free. The leg irons used to transport the convicts would be fastened, on the return journey, around the ankles of native slaves. They would serve the sugar plantations of Martinique.’

  ‘You speak with strong conviction, sir.’

  ‘I am proud of my country in many respects, but not all. Why we have just this morning met with Monsieur Bunga … Bunga …’