‘They departed shortly after you, the Commissioner seeming slightly agitated after something Monsieur Freycinet said to him in a low voice. I was too far away to hear distinctly but it sounded like a mild inquiry about his health after some incident in Trinidad. Surprising that it should elicit such a frosty response.’
The Architect, he reports, also sought an early night. ‘He says he has some distance to travel on the morrow.’ I cut Rose a quick knowing look.
‘Bungaree returned to his tribe carrying a basket of leftovers and some bottles. Captain Piper, I think perhaps, tries too hard to shine: there was at least one joke you were both fortunate to avoid. The Captain, Monsieur Freycinet and the Governor are taking brandy and smoking cheroots in the office. They are all three quite jolly but they have sent me to look for the “two beauties”, as they put it.’
We walk back briskly through the gardens.
I long for sleep. I fear that the days ahead — the months — will be the unhappiest I have ever known. But there is one more thing I need to do.
Within plain sight of the residence I give a little tug at Brody’s sleeve.
‘When I am home, Brody, Madame Freycinet will go first to the office to join the men. I will tarry in my room. Shortly afterwards I will join the gentlemen and you will leave us. There will be a letter — pray that I have time to seal it — inserted into the leaves of the sheet music at the pianoforte. Meanwhile in the laundry, freshly washed, you will find a white satchel. It came yesterday with a gift from Monsieur Arago. I will need you to slip the letter inside the satchel, and convey them both to Madame Freycinet at the moment you accompany her and her husband to the boat that will take them to their ship. Before you leave them for the fort, make sure they are aware it is a gift from me for the traveller. Do you hear: the traveller.’
He nods gravely.
‘When the time comes you must act swiftly: the letter to the satchel, the satchel to the Freycinets.’
And it was done.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Soon after dawn there is a heavy knock at the front door. I am already awake, frozen with dread. I rouse Macquarie and we go to the door together in our dressing gowns. Hawkins arrives presently in his butler’s livery, hair neatly combed and parted in the centre. Piper, unshaven and a little the worse for wear, has come in the company of a guard to relate the news of Freycinet’s sudden departure.
I let the men go together to the office and return to the bedroom but I linger in the hallway long enough to catch a fragment of their talk. Says Piper, ‘I was informed an hour before dawn and I have been awake since then with arrangements. I thought it best not to disturb you.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t … So last night’s welcome party was in fact a farewell.’
‘I am not particularly surprised after the events of last night. I swear that Freycinet sent all his squibs at Bigge knowing that he would not be around for the consequences.’
‘Thought he might fire his cannon and be gone,’ murmurs Macquarie in his husky early morning voice. ‘Very French.’
Anxious that he might have left a parting letter of deep sentiment for me — among a file of sketches, or leafed into his copy of Palladio — I make an excuse to visit the lighthouse.
Arago, I tell Macquarie, has left in my possession a few panoramas of the town sketched from the observatory. ‘He begged me to deliver them when he was gone to the man he called the “demiurge of Sydney’s marvels — the creator”. That can only be one man. Of course I had no idea his departure was … imminent!’
I ride off hastily with Brody to deliver an empty folio. If I had waited any longer the Governor might have grown curious about these drawings of Arago’s and asked to see them. But I can rely, I wager, on his ruminations over the events of the week to keep his suspicions at bay.
The Architect, as I expected, is gone; his most treasured possessions, among them his Palladio, have vanished with him. His fantasia of buildings drawn from the Old World and imagined afresh in the new — an Ottoman minaret, a Norman keep, a Chinese pagoda and a red and white striped lighthouse — it lies on his workbench wrapped hastily in copies of the Gazette and tied with a hat ribbon as if for a birthday.
There are no tender parting words for me. I step outside, shade my eyes from the sun, and fill my lungs with the pure, wild air.
*
I bear the news, with an expression of feigned surprise and shock, back to the residence. It is widely assumed among the townsfolk that the Architect has made his escape with Freycinet, but the theory is impossible to prove — or to disprove. Rumour swells to fill the void left by mystery. Howe prints an article several days later, in which he conjectures that the Architect rowed to Georges Head and there joined Bungaree’s tribe. Some say he leapt off the cliffs in anguish, leaving behind an empty bottle of rum and a sketch for a mausoleum styled after Halicarnassus to be erected in his memory at the Heads so that visitors for time immemorial would know his story and weep. This tale persists even after news spreads of Bigge’s intention to have the Architect arrested for embezzling public funds.
Enraged by the escape of his quarry, Bigge cannot bring himself even to communicate with the Governor. He sails for Hobart just as soon as the Cerebus is manned and provisioned. Some say he flees in the hope that Freycinet, with his keen memories of 1802, will take the southerly route home and might, if he is as easily diverted from his course as his predecessors, be intercepted in the waters of Van Diemen’s Land.
Bigge returns several months later to renew his investigations into the state of the colony, though we are never again on speaking terms.
And then a year later, with Macquarie’s health failing, we leave at last for home. The Governor and I tour the towns he has established in the west, as well as Newcastle to the north. ‘That damned Chinese pagoda will have to wait,’ he laughs grimly as we return to Jackson. Robinson publishes a rather tortuous ode to the ‘brave Scot from Mull whose rule never was dull’.
Each night in the week before leaving we stand close together on the verandah of Government House and regard the rising town as if it were a beloved infant. I walk out alone to my chair hewn by the Architect from the harbour sandstone. I sit on the cool seat and breathe deeply as memories break upon me. Will I miss this place? Most certainly. Will I long for it? No. My life here is over; my work done. Brody comes out to meet me as I stroll across the Domain and up the rise to the residence.
‘You must, when you return home, come visit,’ I say. ‘At Mull we are closer to Belfast than Edinburgh. You Irish sent us your priests. Surely you could make the short sea voyage.’
‘I doubt I will return home now,’ he says with a smile that pierces regret like sunshine glimpsed through cloud. ‘Perhaps my old ma, she will take the journey if she is strong enough.’
Have I been strong enough?
Will I be?
On the day before our departure we go by barge across the harbour to Georges Head. All has been organised by Barney Williams: the journey, a feast for the natives — even some grog. Bungaree and around fifteen of his people come down from their village to farewell us in a slow procession. There is much wailing from Gooseberry and the women, who have clipped their hair and stained their bodies with red ochre. Wearing splendid adornments of tooth and bone, they dance in a circle around us, waving smoking sticks.
And then, with great solemnity, the departing Governor presents Bungaree with a red and gold bundle: the uniform that he will never wear again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I finish my long night’s vigil with two fresh candles, ecclesiastically white. The house lies in darkness save for this bedchamber alight with memory. Any moment now the golden light of dawn will catch the crest of Ben More. Already I have caught its herald in a trill of birdsong.
I sat myself down here not so much to write Macquarie’s eulogy, as to prepare myself to write it. I did not expect to relive the story of our lives. But that is what, it seems, I have done.
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I loved my husband, most assuredly. And he loved me. Yet an earlier perhaps even more powerful love had claimed him. Although she died long ago I do not believe that he ever stopped loving her, poor spectre that she is. Poor Jane Jarvis.
And my pact with the Architect — a man closer to my age and more attuned to my dreams, who is part of my conversation even when he is not by my side to converse with. Is that love? Was it? Did I feel it long before I named it? Or did I give it that name only to console myself when it was near lost to me?
I could not have imagined two more different men: the solid and the quicksilver, the ruler and the artist. I needed both braided into my life. Just as, I suppose, I am nourished by the Antipodes and the Hebrides at the extreme ends of the Earth.
There was a love between both men, a fraternal, often strained, yet abiding bond that set limits on the Architect. He could so easily have played the part of Lancelot to my Guinevere, yet he managed to tame his affections and his natural boldness so that he was always my loving accomplice and not my lover, though there was a time when I wished — and dreamed most vividly — that he were both.
And the Governor, who could easily have banished his rival, dismissed him from his service; he refused to do so. He was the Architect’s ally, and the Architect was his. My husband smelled smoke and decided, out of some loving kindness that may have been in part paternal, to contain the fire rather than extinguish it. Even if the Architect was banished to his lighthouse, I was free to visit now and then in the company of Brody. And so things went on in this manner. A fine balance. A delicate web. Until one man left me. And then another. And now I am alone.
I return to the bureau with a clear head. The storm has passed. The gale of memory is spent. The fine public words for Macquarie — I see and hear them clearly now — are ready. Words for a life.
I pick up my steel pen:
HERE IN THE HOPE OF A GLORIOUS RESURRECTION
LIE THE REMAINS OF THE LATE
MAJOR GENERAL LACHLAN MACQUARIE
OF JARVISFIELD
WHO WAS BORN 31ST JANUARY, 1761
AND DIED AT LONDON ON THE 1ST OF JULY, 1824
THE PRIVATE VIRTUES AND AMIABLE DISPOSITION
WITH WHICH HE WAS ENDOWED
RENDERED HIM AT ONCE A MOST BELOVED HUSBAND,
FATHER AND MASTER, AND A MOST ENDEARING FRIEND.
HE ENTERED THE ARMY AT THE AGE OF FIFTEEN
AND THROUGHOUT THE PERIOD OF 47 YEARS
SPENT IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE
WAS UNIFORMLY CHARACTERISED
BY ANIMATED ZEAL FOR HIS PROFESSION, ACTIVE BENEVOLENCE,
AND GENEROSITY WHICH KNEW NO BOUNDS.
HE WAS APPOINTED GOVERNOR OF NEW SOUTH WALES A.D. 1809
AND FOR TWELVE YEARS FULFILLED THE DUTIES OF THAT STATION
WITH EMINENT ABILITY AND SUCCESS.
HIS SERVICES IN THAT CAPACITY
HAVE JUSTLY ATTACHED A LASTING HONOUR TO HIS NAME.
THE WISDOM, LIBERALITY, AND BENEVOLENCE
OF ALL THE MEASURES OF HIS ADMINISTRATION,
HIS RESPECT FOR THE ORDINANCES OF RELIGION
AND THE READY ASSISTANCE WHICH HE GAVE
TO EVERY CHARITABLE INSTITUTION,
THE UNWEARIED ASSIDUITY WITH WHICH HE SOUGHT TO PROMOTE
THE WELFARE OF ALL CLASSES OF THE COMMUNITY,
THE RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF THE COLONY UNDER HIS AUSPICES,
AND THE HIGH ESTIMATION IN WHICH BOTH HIS CHARACTER
AND GOVERNMENT WERE HELD
RENDERED HIM TRULY DESERVING THE APPELLATION
BY WHICH HE HAS BEEN DISTINGUISHED
THE FATHER OF AUSTRALIA.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
I had no communication with the Architect after his escape. I received no word, not even through the loyal Brody. And I sent none. But then, almost a year ago, I wrote to him from London with news of his old Governor’s death.
Macquarie and I had been visiting the capital in an attempt to restore his reputation in influential circles after the catastrophe of Bigge’s report. An interview with the Prince Regent had been promised, on account of Macquarie’s long and distinguished defence of the Crown. No such interview was forthcoming. A champion was sought; someone to petition on our behalf. None came forward. Bathurst did agree to a meeting, but was not prepared to publicly defend the thing that mattered most to Macquarie: his reputation. The career soldier had aimed in the latter period of his life to make his mark with something more than a sabre. And he had done so. But with Bigge’s calumnies so widely put about, all seemed lost.
Macquarie had been ailing for two years before his death, and in truth had not enjoyed good health for a long while; I suspect that some equatorial debilitation from his early years of service in India conspired with his labours at Sydney Cove to weaken his constitution. But he would — I am convinced of it — have lived another decade if it were not for the injury to his pride. To demean such a man — and so publicly! — was to poison his soul.
They killed him, Commissioner Bigge and his kind; this I will always believe. Labelled a humanist and a liberal in an age of vicious conservatism, he was disgraced. How did Bigge put it: ‘The most effective way to the heart of the Governor — and to his table — is to have been sentenced at the Old Bailey. Only declare yourself to be a free man, unstained by crime, and he will turn his back.’
If I had armies at my command I would send out ten thousand men to avenge my husband. If I were a character in a Greek tragedy I would plunge a dagger into Bigge’s heart and scream ‘Aiieeeeee’ as it went in.
*
I wrote to the Architect again from Gruline, to tell him of my return. I sent the letter, as I had done once before, via the boatman, an old family friend and the only messenger we could both trust in our treacherous circumstances. I was not ready to see him. It was not the time. But in the summer, I promised, that was when we would meet. I asked him to leave a message for me with the boatman by the last Monday of June, when I would retrieve it myself, weather permitting.
On our last evening together at the Cove I had slipped my letter to the Architect — a farewell and a plan for escape — into a white satchel, the one that had held a gift of Rhône wine from Arago. Once back on Mull I had time enough to sew a white cotton satchel much like the one that had served us both so well that evening. I planned to place a gift for the boatman in it — some peaches or a handful of cherries if they were ripened by then — and he would return it to me with a letter from the Architect.
The cottage the boatman selected for the Architect at Ormaig was little more than a shell. It was in need of a new roof, strengthened walls and a sitting room. He would have time to rebuild. The labour might do him good, I thought, but I begged him to continue to work with paper, to sketch his dreams.
‘In the meantime,’ I wrote, ‘Survive!’
In time you will become again — I am certain of it — what you were meant to be. The Architect. Today you dream of what you might build. But tomorrow — or the tomorrow after — you will begin once again to build your dreams. Though perhaps not on the islands. It may be time for another journey.
It is my intention, so long as a decent price can be obtained for some parcel of the estate, to undertake the Grand Tour that you always desired. Will you accompany me on some small part of it? To Rome, at least!
Of course you will.
CHAPTER FORTY
In the marbled file of mementos lies his unopened letter with my name written upon it in his beautiful hand. I took it from the milk-white bag with the cherry stains, just as soon as I returned from Ulva. I resolved to deny myself the pleasure of its contents for one night: I had denied myself so long, a few more hours should be easy enough to endure. Once or twice in the course of this long night of reverie I have caught myself reaching for the letter. But I needed, first, to attend to the past and to honour a most honourable man.
Now, in this perfect moment, I have made my peace with the past. It is time to conjure a future.
The right time.
I open the letter.
My dear Elizabeth,
In the still hour before dawn I stood before a mirror, my face lit by a lamp set at a tilt on a porcelain sink. Across my back and arms — unknown to all but you and William Redfern — spreads a lattice of red scourge marks and the scar that looks for all the world like a serpent — you once told me this! — soldered onto the skin.
I cannot afford to have that scar discussed in the streets of Tobermory. A blaze of gossip might be the end of me. So I wear my shirtsleeves fastened over the wrists — a little too long for ordinary wear. I clasp them tight with a set of silver cufflinks fashioned in Batavia and given to me by a Frenchman as a parting gift. His name is Arago. He asked me, when we were next in communication, to be remembered to you.
Are you asleep? I wonder. Do you, alone now in the house at Gruline, sleep at all? I doubt it very much. I suspect you are with me: awake for the dawn.
So we are to meet. We are in high summer and it dawns bright. It has been a long absence, achingly long and full of uncertainty. I will be ready for you when you come.
I hear the complaining cry of gulls and the slow regular pulse of the waves below. The broken cottage in which you had me installed at Ormaig, I have restored not to its former glory — it had none to begin with. But I have made it a home.
The sea is a constant companion on this islet, as it was at the lighthouse. Even on still days when the swell subsides into a pool of molten metal the ocean’s animal presence is sensed through the breathing silence. I would miss it if fate were to bear me away.
Elizabeth, your first letter arrived twelve months ago from London. On my way here I followed the trail you laid out — from Marseilles on a brig flying French colours to Ajaccio, Cadiz and Porto, and from there by steamboat to Calais before the crossing to Dublin, thence to Glasgow.
I have no notion of how you managed to explain the need for complete secrecy — and mine is a perilous secret! — to those Campbells young and old who came so valiantly to my aid. But I fancy they might have enjoyed the adventure — providing me with a new identity and transporting me by coach to Oban and from there by boat under a moonlit sky to Ulva — if only to vex the English.
Mrs. M Page 25
