Colonial Daughter

by Heather Garside

  For a foolish, angry moment he entertained thoughts of revenge, but he quickly thought better of it. Vengeance was useless and gained a man nothing but his pride. Pride was of little use to someone who was languishing in gaol, which is where he would most likely end if he tangled with Charles Ashford.

  Images of Louise filled his mind. Mounted arrogant and aloof on old Shadow that first day out from Bauhinia Downs. Clinging to him dazed with passion on the night of the race ball. Coupling with him in the saddle-room at Kilbride; and again here in his own bed. He remembered her dodging the marriage issue with the agonising realisation that she’d never intended to marry him at all. She’d lied to him and amused herself with his body. But the incredible part of it was, she’d given him her virginity in the process.

  He thought of his life and of the few people who had ever loved him. Louise had meant the world to him, a new and better future, and he hadn’t doubted her commitment. Now his dreams were in ruins and the pain was tearing him to pieces.

  Gingerly he rose to his feet and staggered into the shack, rummaging in one of the cupboards for a bottle of rum. He sat at the table with it, drinking steadily, until at last oblivion overtook him and he slumped there in the chair with his head pillowed on his arms.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Two weeks later at Moreton Bay, Charles and Louise Ashford boarded a sailing ship bound for England. Charles hadn’t wanted to wait for a passage on a steamship, which would do the journey in half the time. Louise suspected it was because, once they were at sea, it would be impossible for her to run away again.

  He’d engaged a companion for her, a middle-aged Englishwoman who had been widowed in Rockhampton and was now returning to her homeland. During the journey by steamer from Rockhampton to Brisbane Louise had been miserably ill with seasickness and hadn’t enjoyed sharing the cramped confines of her cabin with a stranger. Her companion, Mrs Souther, was a dour-faced woman with whom she found it difficult to converse. She wished Charles had dispensed with convention and allowed her to travel without a female chaperone.

  As Louise stood on deck and watched the shores of Moreton Bay recede before her eyes, despair lodged in her throat, making her gasp for breath. Would she ever see again the familiar Queensland coastline or the man she loved? Above her, the giant sails filled and billowed with the breeze, while the rigging groaned and the wooden deck creaked protestingly as the ship rolled with the swell. Lloyd was already separated from her by hundreds of miles. By now he should have received the letter she’d written to him from Banyandah. She wondered if he was still angry with her and if he was missing her.

  Tears stung her eyes despite the proximity of her fellow passengers jostling for space at her elbow. Turning her face to the breeze to dry them, the familiar queasiness began to stir her stomach at the increasing motion of the ship. She brought her handkerchief to her mouth and hastened below.

  As the weeks went by Louise’s sickness didn’t ease. Unable to eat more than the lightest of meals, she spent most of her time in her cabin. Instead of losing weight as she would have expected, her gowns seemed to be growing tighter at the waist. As the days went by her fear increased.

  The ship’s doctor, whom Charles had summoned to visit her on more than one occasion, must have suspected something. He asked if he could examine her and gently probed her stomach.

  ‘When did you last have your monthly bleeding, Miss Ashford?’

  Louise paled. ‘Not for more than two months. Probably three. Is that significant?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ The doctor, a middle-aged man with wise, gentle eyes, looked at her compassionately. ‘Is it possible you could be with child?’

  Louise flushed and bowed her head. ‘Yes, it is possible. I have been afraid of this.’

  ‘I take it the baby’s father is no longer in your life.’

  She nodded. ‘Not from my choice, or his. My brother didn’t consider him a suitable husband for me.’

  ‘What a pity. If he’s back in the Colonies it is too late for second thoughts on your brother’s part. But Mr Ashford will have to be told. Would you like me to talk to him?’

  She nodded, knowing Charles would be appalled and angry, though there was nothing that could be done about it. They could hardly ask the ship to turn around and take her back to Brisbane. She was going to England, child or no.

  Charles looked grim and pale when he came to see her. Thankfully he didn’t lecture her or moralise. From Charles of all people she couldn’t have taken that now.

  ‘It seems I took you away too late. The damage has already been done.’

  ‘You were so determined to take me,’ Louise responded bitterly. ‘If only you had left me there.’

  Charles ignored this comment. ‘We’ll find a way out of this. If you keep to your cabin once it begins to show...heaven knows you’ve been doing that already. When we disembark, you’ll be wearing your cloak; you can keep that wrapped around you. Once we arrive at Fenham Manor you can stay in seclusion until the baby is born. No-one need know.’

  She stared at him incredulously. ‘But what of the baby? How do we hide its existence?’

  ‘We’ll find a good home for it. There’s sure to be a childless couple around who’d keep their silence.’

  ‘I’m not about to give it away! How can I give it away? You speak as if it were a stray puppy!’

  ‘Louise.’ Charles sat on the chair opposite her and looked at her levelly. ‘You’ve no choice. If you keep it you ruin yourself and disgrace the entire family. You can hardly raise an illegitimate child at Fenham Manor and expect society to accept it. You’ll have to play your part in this for everyone’s sake.’

  She hadn’t the strength to argue. What was the use? What else could she do but miserably reconcile herself to whatever plans they had in store for her?

  ~*~

  The weary weeks went by. They had long since rounded the southerly tip of Western Australia and entered the vastness of the Indian Ocean. At least the seas were calmer now. Louise had grown weak and pale with constant sickness and a disinclination for food, much of which she was unable to keep in her stomach. Her feelings about the baby were ambivalent. She was shamed and humiliated at her pregnancy, yet the child was Lloyd’s and as such could not be rejected. She worried about the infant’s welfare, but at around four months she felt the first strange, fluttering movements and was reassured.

  Day after endless day she lay in the lonely saloon-class cabin that she shared with Mrs Souther, usually seeing no-one but the widow, the doctor and the stewardess who brought her meals. She even began to look forward to Charles’s visits. Living as she was in a state of emotional and physical apathy, she found her resentment towards her brother fading and Charles was willing to be kind.

  Perhaps he regretted his decision to take her away. Perhaps he felt responsible for the pale wraith she had become, but it was too late for second thoughts. When the vessel lay becalmed in the torpid heat of the Tropics for several days, so helplessly at the mercy of the winds, she suspected he also wished he’d waited for a passage on one of the steamers.

  Mrs Souther had become aware of Louise’s condition and the woman’s shocked censure added to her misery. Charles bribed the widow to silence and found a dressmaker on board who was able to make over Louise’s gowns that no longer fitted. Since she wasn’t appearing in public it hardly mattered what her clothes looked like. At least the calmer seas enabled her to recover from her nausea and eat heartily for the first time since boarding ship. Then at last the winds came to their rescue, blowing them into the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea and finally through the Suez Canal.

  ~*~

  England at last! As they docked at Portsmouth, Charles was in high spirits but Louise viewed the grey, grimy town with indifference. It was early autumn and raining, with already a damp cold that seeped through her many layers of clothing and made her shiver. And this in the south of England. It was fortunate for Charles that he didn’t expect to drag her into the no
rth. Sunny Devon, her mother had used to say. Well, let her only be right.

  As they disembarked, Louise drew her cloak more firmly about her, covering her loose dress. Her pregnancy wasn’t particularly obvious, even without the cloak, as she wasn’t large for six months gone. With her hood pulled over her hair she was a drab, insignificant figure, scarcely recognised by her fellow passengers who hadn’t seen her for the last two months of the journey. They’d been told that Miss Ashford was confined to her cabin with illness and her present appearance did nothing to contradict that story.

  The Ashfords passed the night at an uncomfortable hotel that wasn’t usually frequented by the upper classes. In the morning they took their leave of Mrs Souther, who would be returning to her old home in Sussex, and boarded the train which would take them through Southhampton to Dorchester.

  Louise paid little attention to the varied beauties of Dorset, with its valleys and down-lands and long coastline. Charles was in a better humour and inclined to be interested in the scenery despite an outward bearing of nonchalance. Louise, though now free of the acute nausea that had plagued the early months of her pregnancy, was tired, dispirited and unbearably homesick for Australia and the man she’d left behind there.

  In Dorchester they exchanged the train for a hired horse-drawn carriage and as each jolting, uncomfortable mile brought them closer to Devon she began to dread the approaching confrontation with her parents. They would be expecting them, for Charles had managed to send a letter ahead of them while their ship was waiting to dock in Portsmouth. But she guessed he hadn’t entrusted to letter the delicate matter of her condition and that he was dreading the interview with their father almost as keenly as she. Louise suspected their parents wouldn’t have chosen to jeopardise the family’s good name for the sake of their elder daughter. Charles was likely to be out of favour for bringing her to England.

  Charles enthused over the extreme age of such Devonshire townships as Exeter, with its cathedral dating to the Norman occupation in the twelfth century. To one who had never been out of Australia, where even the first settlement at Sydney wasn’t yet a hundred years old, these centuries of history were something to marvel at. But Louise barely glanced at the historic buildings in the streets of Exeter.

  It was only a few hours’ journey from here to Fenham Manor, so Charles gave the coachman orders to proceed straight through town. Once out of the metropolis they passed through some of the most picturesque countryside they had yet seen. The green hills and valleys wooded with oak and beech, the farmlands with sheep and red Devon cattle, the many quaint villages with their cottages of cob and thatch; this was what Mrs Ashford had enthused over. Yet Louise, staring blindly out of the coach window, was unmoved by the beauty of it all.

  Dreading the approaching interview with her parents, she longed to be back in the comfort of Lloyd’s arms, unencumbered by this embarrassing pregnancy. If she closed her eyes she could almost hear his voice murmuring endearments and feel his hands stroking her hair, with the coarse weave of his shirt rough under her cheek and the smell of horses and saddle-leather in her nostrils. The physical desire for his body was gone, quenched by the dragging weight of her stomach and the tenderness of her swollen breasts. But she seemed to have succumbed to an emotional weakness that made her need of him stronger than it had ever been. What had begun so recklessly and thoughtlessly had ended dismally, in shame and misery, with the child within her the innocent victim.

  It was almost dusk when she was roused by the horses’ hooves clattering noisily on the cobblestones of yet another village street. Charles’s voice intruded on her misery. ‘This is the local village. Buck up, old girl. We’re nearly there.’

  Louise had barely time to register the sign on the ancient inn–featuring the head of a huge black boar and appropriately titled – when the coachman turned up a narrow country road. After a mile or so they came to a set of wrought-iron gates, opened for them by a gatekeeper even before the horses drew up. She stared apprehensively down the short driveway, bordered by a sweep of emerald-green lawns, to the manor.

  It was a large stone house of two floors with a tiled roof and countless chimneys. She shivered, finding the stark aspect of the house grey and forbidding in the waning light. As she descended stiffly from the coach the massive front door opened and an important-looking individual stepped out.

  ‘Mr Ashford, Miss Ashford,’ the man said formally, inclining his head in a slight bow. ‘Welcome to Fenham Manor. I’m Dawes, the butler. I trust your journey was comfortable?’

  Dawes was very civil and correct, but Louise no longer felt at ease with servility. She merely nodded her head and left the responses to Charles.

  ‘As comfortable as could be expected.’ Charles spoke tersely. ‘However we’re both tired. If you could send someone to see to our luggage...’

  ‘Of course, sir. Mr and Mrs Ashford are waiting in the library. They are most anxious to see you and Miss Ashford.’ He led them through the door and into a sparsely-furnished entrance hall, with medieval tapestries hanging on the otherwise bare granite walls. ‘If you will allow me to take your coats I will show you to the library. Dinner has been held back until nine o’clock.’

  Charles allowed the butler to help him out of his overcoat but restrained him when he made to take Louise’s cloak. ‘Could you have Miss Ashford shown to her room right away? She isn’t well and must rest. I shall see our parents now.’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ Dawes rang a bell for one of the maids and on her prompt arrival instructed her, ‘Show Miss Ashford to her room and see that she has brought to her whatever luggage she requires.’

  The maid, a thin, pale-faced girl with wispy hair escaping from her cap, swiftly did as she was bid, leading Louise up a magnificent oak staircase. She took her down a long hallway, past a number of closed doors, finally pausing at the end of the passage.

  ‘This is to be your room, Miss.’ The girl spared her a nervous, yet curious sideways glance as she swung open the door. ‘Mr Ashford will have one of the rooms at the other end of the passage.’

  Louise stepped inside, staring in surprise at the elegant interior. There was a four-poster bed with silken hangings, a beautiful mahogany dressing-table in the much-decorated contemporary style, sumptuous wallpaper, a thick carpet and heavy velvet curtains.

  ‘This room has the best view of all,’ the maid was saying. ‘It looks over the back gardens and the woods, as you will see in the morning. And this doorway leads to your dressing room and beyond it is the bathroom.’

  The bathroom was fitted with a large tub and hot and cold taps, all very modern. It appeared this part of the house had been recently renovated. Louise knew the building itself dated from the sixteenth century and the draughty hallways had done nothing to dispel the exterior impression of almost Spartan starkness.

  Louise closed the dressing-room door and turned back to the maid. ‘Could you have my trunk brought up, please?’

  The girl directed her a quick look and Louise remembered belatedly that her family didn’t say please and thank-you to servants.

  ‘Of course, I’ll see to that right away, Miss. Would you like me to take your cloak? Mrs Ashford’s maid will be along to help you change.’

  ‘No, that won’t be necessary. I’m accustomed to dressing myself. I shall not be coming down to dinner. Could you have a tray sent up to me?’

  ‘Very well, Miss.’ The girl looked at her strangely but went obediently to the door. ‘Please ring if there’s anything more you need.’

  Louise heaved a sigh of relief as the door closed behind her and quickly slipped out of her cloak. She left it on the floor where it fell and went to the bathroom to wash. While she was there she heard her trunk being deposited in the dressing-room, but decided not to change for bed just yet. Should either of her parents decide to confront her tonight she would be better equipped to face the interview fully dressed.

  The maid had turned back the covers on the bed but she didn’t get betwe
en the sheets, merely laying on top and drawing the hangings about her. She closed her eyes in the comforting darkness, succumbing to an exhaustion that was as much the result of emotional strain as of the rigours of travel. It was surprising to reflect that she’d once ridden almost as many miles on horseback as she’d travelled by train and coach since arriving in England. Of course she hadn’t been six months with child then, but on the contrary had been in the best of health and spirits. How much her life had changed since that day she’d ridden away from Gainsford almost a year ago.

  She was unable to sleep, tired though she was. Instead she lay there with her thoughts drifting again to Lloyd and fleetingly to the Jamiesons. Mrs Jamieson would have given birth to her infant long since. She wondered bitterly if Lloyd had turned to Mercy for consolation and how he and the Jamiesons had responded to the letters she’d written from Banyandah. Had they accepted her excuses for deceiving them? In Lloyd’s letter she’d included the address of Fenham Manor and had asked him to write to her there. If he did so and presuming his letter wasn’t intercepted by her father, would she tell him about the baby? There was little he could do but agonise. But if he didn’t write she would assume he hadn’t forgiven her and so he would never know of the existence of his child.

  The thought depressed her further, making the tears smart behind her heavy eyelids. Her own predicament was distressing enough, but her anxiety for the future of her child outweighed even her yearning for the babe’s father.

  A dinner tray was brought to her and she forced herself to eat for the infant’s sake. When the long-awaited knock came at her door she leapt off the bed and went to the mirror to compose her dress and hair before opening it.

  It was her mother, slim and still attractive, elegantly attired in evening dress but with more grey in her fair hair than Louise remembered. It was approaching two years since they had seen each other but there were no glad cries of welcome. Mrs Ashford swept into the room without a word, her well-bred face showing only cold anger and contempt. Louise, though faint with tiredness and trepidation, was strengthened by a surge of the old defiance that had so exasperated her mother in past times.