The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  That night Isobel had another bad dream.

  Again, she awoke in her old bedroom at Rosemount to the sound of the great house creaking and listing like a stricken ship. When Isobel sat up she found her room had already keeled over, its furniture like so much driftwood piled up against the wall. She dragged herself to the window and looked out. No tempest raged, no screaming wind or high water, but lightning flickered in the dark cloudbanks on the horizon and the muffled timpani of thunder could be heard in the distance. As far as the eye could see stretched the ocean under a fog-white sky, as still as a mirror and the colour of tin. The sun shone on this dead calm sea with a dull sheen. Far and wide, flotsam was scattered, stuck fast as if in treacle. This was the aftermath of Isobel’s first dream, once the violent storm and the great wave had passed.

  Isobel crawled across the sloped floor as before, finding the tiny key and pocketing her dragonfly brooch before climbing the spiral staircase to the roof. From here Isobel surveyed the bleak ocean in all directions. And there in the middle distance she saw a rowboat with a hunched figure busy at the oars. This was unmistakeably her Charles. Isobel could hear the dip and splash of each stroke but she could not be sure if the boat was travelling towards or away from her. She could see Charles’s handsome face as he looked hopefully in her direction but his strenuous efforts seemed to gain him no progress. The oars struck against the proliferation of objects all about, suspended like vegetables in thick soup. She recognised the wreckage of Rosemount’s furniture, the Broadwood piano, the chiffonier, a wooden globe with its upper half stove in, glass cases of butterflies, her father’s precious leatherbound books circling lazily like a fever of stingrays, Conrad Martens’ painting, face up.

  Isobel heard water lapping at the courtyard wall that surrounded Rosemount’s dome and rooftop. She realised that the ocean, though flat and unruffled in appearance, was imperceptibly creeping higher and higher. With a bright burbling, a gush of water rushed over the lip of the wall and pooled around her ankles. The house was still sinking.

  ‘Charles! Charles!’ she screamed. dear God! Charles was her only escape. If she stayed here on this rooftop she would drown. As if her dream could not become any stranger, she heard a young voice behind her, giggling. ‘The stars, Izzie. Up there, look. Stars, eh?’

  There stood Ballandella, still a girl of only four dressed in the guise of a well-bred young lady, pointing towards the horizon. The clouds overhead had fled, revealing a blue-black sky peppered thickly with stars. despite her desperate situation, Isobel could not help feeling a mantle of deep peace settle over her. She smiled at her childhood playmate and hurried to embrace her. But Ballandella had already stripped off her muslin dress and discarded her shoes, gloves and hat. She stood on the edge of the courtyard wall in nothing but her petticoats. ‘Time to go, Izzie,’ she said, and with a shout launched herself into the sea.

  Isobel woke in a state of disquiet. How strange it was to have dreamed so vividly about Rosemount and to wake instead in her attic bedroom in Faulconstone, still a refugee from her beloved home. It was the morning of her father’s departure so it was understandable she should be preoccupied. Her rational daylight mind dismissed her dream as nothing more than a maudlin fancy, fashioned out of her anger against Father and anxiety about Charles. She dressed, now almost out of habit secreting under her blouse the dragonfly brooch on its chain, her constant companion and confidante, and went down for breakfast with Aunt Louisa. As she descended the main stairs, a sense of profound unease lingered.

  That unease was not dispelled when she was greeted in the breakfast room by her aunt. ‘Good morning, my dear. There is something your father has asked me talk to you about.’ Her aunt cracked the top off her soft-boiled egg, ready to receive its strips of buttered toast.

  Isobel fetched a plate of kippers from the sideboard and poured a cup of tea. She apologised for not attending morning devotionals at half past six as she had suffered a bad night’s sleep and could not be woken by the housemaid. ‘What is it you have to tell me, Aunt?’

  ‘As you know, your father leaves for England this morning. And in the next day or two Grace will join her husband at their splendid home at Hunters Hill to start their new life there.’ Aunt Louisa had each hand splayed, fingertips pressed together in a mirror image, mimicking the shape of a pyramid. The two index fingers of this pyramid rested against her upper lip, a gesture implying careful consideration. ‘Your father has decided to close up Rosemount while he is away. The staff will be dismissed and a caretaker and gardener left in residence.’ Isobel looked thunderstruck that Papa had not communicated such momentous news in person. Her voice cracked as she asked, ‘But why?’

  ‘The Major has been struggling with this decision for some time,’ said her aunt, recognising Isobel’s shocked look of hurt. ‘As you can imagine, Rosemount costs a considerable sum of money to maintain. With Grace no longer there to manage the house, your father will have to hire a head housekeeper. depending on the outcome of the Governor’s report, he may no longer have the income to sustain these costs.’ Aunt Louisa tapped her fingers against her top lip. She seemed to be debating with herself whether to go on. ‘I think it is possible, Isobel, that he may wish to sell the house when he returns. Especially if the government’s report means he will be forced to retire.’

  ‘Sell Rosemount?’

  This was more than momentous news; this was earth-shattering. Rosemount was Isobel’s and her siblings’ inheritance. She had always imagined that it would stay in the family and that one of them would end up living and raising their own children there as Winnie and Angus had done. It was impossible to contemplate it in the hands of another family. ‘I am not saying that is what will happen,’ warned her aunt. ‘It is just a possibility.’

  ‘And what will happen to Anna?’

  ‘Ah, now that is what I have to tell you,’ said Aunt Louisa. ‘There was a discussion about her going to live as a companion to Mrs Palmer. But the dear woman is eighty-two and has been suffering from a terrible bout of nerves of late. It was felt that…well, it was considered not fair to burden Mrs Palmer with any extra responsibility.’ Anna had no friends as such. Isobel could not imagine the Finches or Bradleys taking her in. Nor could she live at Rosemount all by herself, taking on Grace’s role of looking after the house and Father. She had neither the wit nor surety of mind to be trusted in that capacity.

  ‘Until we arrive at a better arrangement, I have agreed that she can stay here,’ announced Aunt Louisa. The hall clock struck a quarter past seven, its chimes splitting the silence like the tolling of a church bell. Isobel stopped breathing for several seconds. She heard a loud buzzing in her ears as if she was about to faint.

  ‘Isobel, my dearest, you look terrible!’ Her aunt was suitably alarmed as her niece spilled her tea and her face drained of all colour. How could Isobel even begin to explain to her aunt the secret history of Anna’s troubled mind? This was an unforeseen catastrophe: Rosemount to be sold and Anna to live in the same house as Isobel with no Grace to umpire her temper tantrums. Charles! thought Isobel, with an absolute conviction that her only route to survival was escape into the arms of her lover. The dismal prospect of being trapped at Faulconstone with Anna for the rest of her days was now an even greater spur to Isobel’s love and determination to be married, as if she needed any greater incentive.

  ‘What does Anna feel about this arrangement?’ she asked.

  ‘Your father hasn’t told her yet. He plans to explain it all to her this morning.’ Isobel did not like to think about how Anna would receive the news that she was to be expelled from Rosemount and forced into exile at Faulconstone with Isobel.

  ‘Come, it is time for us to repair to Circular Quay for your father’s departure,’ said Aunt Louisa briskly, rising from her soft-boiled eggs and toast, seemingly unaware of the trauma her announcement had inflicted.

  Isobel, Grace, Anna, Aunt Louisa, and Mrs Palmer made a tearful chorus at the dock where the brigantine Johns
tone was taking on its last few passengers. Accompanying this honour guard of female tenderness was the stoic figure of Augustus. The whole company was gathered at the quay to bid farewell to the Major on this cool summer morning, a strong wind whipping off the harbour. The trunks had been loaded earlier and the Major now stood by the gangplank in his smartest bell-topper, swathed in his greatcoat against the wind and carrying only a leather portmanteau. In consultation with the petty officer, he had learned that among his fellow travellers were a Dr and Mrs Poet, Mr Lethridge, a retired solicitor, and Mr Lang and Mr Cummins, two businessmen. ‘I sincerely hope some of these characters will furnish me with diverting conversation for the next four months,’ said the Major. ‘Otherwise I shall have to content myself with redrafting my speeches.’

  With favourable weather, the ship was expected to arrive at Gravesend in late June. The Major was excited about the engagements he had secured in London and in the counties to address marine engineering institutes about the prototype of his ‘boomerang’ screw. Over the last few years the Admiralty had been busy converting their warships from paddlewheel to propeller-screw propulsion, and the Major saw a very profitable market opportunity for his innovation. He also hoped to speak with one of his patrons, Lord Sherbourne, a former Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office, who might intercede with his superiors on the Major’s behalf when the Governor delivered the commission’s report. He had already written to arrange a meeting with his brother Fergus shortly after his arrival and had promised to send any news regarding Alice as soon as he was able. ‘I will write to you at Faulconstone, Louisa my dear. The caretaker at Rosemount will send on any other mail that arrives there.’

  With all practical talk exhausted, the time came for embarkation. The pangs of longing that usually attended such scenes of farewell were also underwritten by fear. Only three days ago The Sydney Morning Herald had reported the horrifying tragedy of the HMS Birkenhead lost off the South African coast with 643 soldiers and civilians on board. She had hit an uncharted rock and sank rapidly. All the soldiers stood aside to let the women and children board the available lifeboats. Only 193 passengers survived. At every breakfast table across the Empire, people caught their breath at such proof of British pluck and chivalry but also the mortal danger that stalked every sea traveller.

  The party on the dock waved at the dark shape of the Johnstone, growing ever smaller until she shrank into an indistinguishable dot, swallowed up in the blue vastness beyond the Heads. ‘I hope Papa has a safe passage,’ murmured Isobel, reluctantly breaking off her intense surveillance of the departing ship and her tenuous connection with her father.

  Isobel was now faced with two challenges.

  The first was to accept the fact that Anna was coming to live with her and that she must negotiate a modus vivendi to make life bearable for them both. When Anna arrived with all her belongings, she was in a dark, subdued mood, as was to be expected from anyone who had just bade farewell to her sister, father and home all in a matter of twenty-four hours and whose prospects were, at best, unclear. While she had her periodic bouts of delusion and anger, in her more lucid moments she was cunning and fearful enough to realise her fate now hung in the balance, and so she had made a resolution to be as well behaved as her demons would allow her. She understood the need to settle amicably into her new life at Faulconstone as the possible alternatives were much more unpleasant and intimidating. Isobel’s heart was pierced with a strange pity to see Anna so unnaturally quiet.

  For the first month or so Anna did her best. She continued to attend music classes with Madame Bertheau, German classes with Mrs Arnold and dance classes with Mrs Acutt, although at times even she wondered what point there was in an ornamental education with no prospects of marriage in the offing. Music was Anna’s truest passion, the one that she expressed daily for no other purpose than to lose herself in its perfectible beauty. Aunt Louisa agreed that Anna could bring the family’s Broadwood with her from Rosemount as it was as familiar to her touch as her own face. It was her refuge, her shrine, her intimate.

  Aunt Louisa’s Methodist tastes tended towards heart-stirring hymns like ‘Guide Me, Oh Thou Great Redeemer’ and ‘O’er the Gloomy Hills of darkness’, the second verse of which she would sing with exceptionally pious gusto, thinking of the good work of missionaries among the pagan natives of the Australian wilderness:

  Let the Indian, let the Negro,

  Let the rude Barbarian see

  That divine and glorious Conquest

  Once obtain’d on Calvary;

  Let the Gospel

  Loud resound from Pole to Pole.

  Anna condescended to play these hymns for Aunt Louisa at her twice-daily devotionals. By way of exchange, the widow agreed to indulge a guilty pleasure in the sacred music of Mozart and Bach and the secular delights of Chopin’s études, nocturnes, preludes, polonaises and mazurkas. Morning and evening, Anna could be found at the Broadwood in the drawing room in rapturous execution of her beloved Chopin. Ever since the Polish composer’s death two and a half years earlier, Anna had become obsessed with his music and religiously paid tribute to him twice daily, her own version of matins and evensong. Isobel suspected that Chopin had come to occupy a place in Anna’s heart akin to an unrequited love. What objections could anyone have to this harmless devotion if it kept Anna’s inner turmoil pacified?

  The second challenge that Isobel faced—and perhaps the greater one—was what to tell Charles. The previous week he had sent Isobel a short note to ask if the following Monday was suitable for their next art lesson at Faulconstone. She had already written him a brief apology for being so busy with her sister’s wedding and father’s departure and he had accepted her explanation gracefully with no hint of anxiety or annoyance. But now the day approached when Charles Probius would expect an answer to his question.

  Isobel had been raised to believe that honesty was always the best policy in the knowledge that nothing escaped the attention of God. But there were some exceptions. As a child, she had tested God’s alertness when she bribed a maid and hid a key for her solitary vigils under the stars beside Rosemount’s dome. By good fortune she had never been discovered or asked to explain the missing key. And then her mother had begged her to keep the opal dragonfly hidden from her own family. Surely she must not break that promise! She now wore it secretly every day next to her heart as a talisman of her mother’s love and faith.

  It was alarming how easy the habit of lying could become.

  Was there any reason she should tell Charles the truth now her father had left for a year? If she chose not to, would she not be inevitably found out? She decided she would face those consequences when the time came but right now her chief object was not to lose Charles. To Isobel’s surprise, Aunt Louisa seemed unaware of the Major’s injunction against her courtship with the ex-convict and of Isobel’s promise to obey her father. Had the Major left it solely to his daughter to comply with his solemn request or had he raised it with his sister before he departed? The only evidence that anything had been said was Aunt Louisa’s remark in passing that Isobel’s father had asked for her ‘to keep a close eye on you’.

  ‘Why would he say that?’ asked Isobel over supper the night after the Major’s departure, a lump rising in her throat as she feared what would come next.

  ‘Well, my dear, I assume it means no more than that he loves you and wants to protect you,’ her aunt observed. ‘Poor Alice has paid such a heavy price for her husband’s deception. Which is why your father has become so wary of the flattering attentions of young suitors! That is all.’

  Isobel held her breath in anticipation of Mr Probius’s banishment. And then in the very next sentence, Aunt Louisa put her mind at rest. ‘So when is your next drawing lesson, my dear?’ Her aunt’s change of tone implied she had switched to a new topic. By some preordained miracle (awkwardly unflattering to Mr Probius, perhaps), her aunt made no connection between the elegant art master and the threat of predatory male suitors.


  ‘He asked if next Monday was convenient,’ said Isobel. ‘Oh, and he is also bringing that lithograph he promised you. done by Mr Austin, one of the finest printers in the colony, so he tells me.’

  ‘He is such a charming gentleman, that Mr Probius,’ mused Aunt Louisa, already imagining where the picture would be hung on her drawing room wall. ‘I think it is important you keep busy with your lessons. It will keep your mind off your father’s absence.’

  Out of compassion or by mistake, God had given Isobel her aunt’s misunderstanding as a gift. But God never made mistakes so she was happy to receive it as a sign of His love: a blessing. There was too much at stake to do otherwise. Of course, Isobel deeply trusted that Charles loved her, but she could see no reason to put that love at risk when—all in good time—her father may very well change his mind. Why throw away her only chance at happiness on an absurd principle? She would not let this unusual, sympathetic and considerate man slip through her fingers. She simply would not.

  So it came to pass that Isobel Clara Macleod took her destiny into her own hands with her characteristic impulsiveness and courage. She sat in her room late one night, staring into the bright firelight of the opal dragonfly, and spoke to her mother, seeking reassurance. ‘You would like him, Mama, I know you would,’ she whispered. ‘Such a clever and unusual man. He wants to nurture my talent, teach me new ways of seeing the world.’

  Charles Probius arrived the following Monday with the lithograph of Faulconstone tucked under his arm as he had promised. Aunt Louisa was seduced by its expressive beauty. He was crafty, thought Isobel, when she saw how effortlessly he charmed her aunt. To be honest, it did the dowager no harm to have her heart animated again by gentlemanly courtesy and attention. No one could blame her for being flattered.

  The art master and the student soon retired to the morning room, where Isobel’s easel and paint set had already been assembled. Charles took off his apricot suede gloves and his cherry-coloured frock coat and the lesson began. Perspective. After ten minutes or so, Isobel put down her charcoal. ‘I promised to give you my answer,’ she said.