The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  ‘You have spoken to your father then? I did not want to burden you, but the matter has been pressing on my mind,’ Charles confessed. ‘Has your father left for England yet?’

  ‘I have spoken to him. And yes, he has left for England, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He is in favour of the match!’ she said, her face breaking into a broad smile. Charles beamed at her with a look of almost indescribable relief and gratitude. And then he frowned a little. He had detected a note of reservation in Isobel’s voice.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘No, no, not at all,’ lied Isobel. ‘My father has no objection to our courtship. In principle. He would still like to meet you in person and discuss your proposal for my hand in marriage.’ Isobel blushed at her own boldness and hastened to add, ’If that should be what you seek, of course. He is old-fashioned that way. He apologises for not being able to meet you before he had to hurry away to England.’ Isobel briefly explained her sister Alice’s heartbreaking dilemma and explained how urgent it was that Father attempt to find and rescue her and his grandson.

  ‘That is a truly terrible situation. Of course I understand.’ Charles looked genuinely shocked to hear of the young Baron’s deceit and Alice’s abandonment. ‘I hope Alice and Xavier will be able to return safely to Australia as soon as possible. You must miss her.’

  ‘I do.’ Isobel nodded. ‘There is one other important matter to consider.’ She sighed and her breathing became a little shallow and rapid. ‘I hope you will not think our family history is nothing but an imbroglio of scandals and emotional dramas. My mother died a few years ago, as did my poor brother Richard. It has affected our family deeply.’

  ‘I know something of your sorrows, Isobel. Mrs Cooper told me a little of your family’s trials. Both deaths must have been a shocking blow to you and your siblings. Not to mention your poor father.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, they were. And this has made everyone very—how can I put it fairly?—fearful…wary of the future. The first good news we have had in a long time was my sister Grace’s betrothal. To be honest, I think Grace had given up all hope of finding a husband.’

  ‘It is a great blessing to find someone to share your life with,’ Charles said with an appreciative smile as he studied Isobel’s face tenderly.

  ‘My father is very protective of both my sisters, who have suffered severely since my mother’s death. He does not want to disturb their peace of mind. Grace can be seized with the most unreasonable fits of jealousy, as can Anna. Both have often regarded me as Father’s favourite.’ Isobel grinned guiltily. ‘Not without good reason.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Father has asked a great favour of me. And you. That we conduct our courtship in private and with the greatest discretion. He is worried that both Anna and Grace will become jealous of our…’—Isobel blushed a little—‘…of our fervent friendship. He hopes that you will be patient and caring enough to give them both time. Time for Grace to grow in confidence in her marriage. And for Anna to make peace with her new situation.’

  ‘I hope to prove myself both patient and caring enough to be worthy of your love, Miss Isobel Macleod.’

  Isobel’s eyes sparkled. ‘I knew you would understand! Less than a twelvemonth from now Father will give his formal consent to our engagement. This will afford us time to grow closer in spirit and in mind, unhindered by my siblings’ resentment or any vicious talk abroad about our family. I have endured enough of that!’

  ‘So it shall be. Time heals all wounds, they say. Your aunt seems happy for me to be your art tutor and pay you regular visits.’

  Isobel laughed. ‘dear Aunt. I do not think she has yet understood the nature of our friendship. I see no reason to disabuse her!’

  Mr Probius laughed, with a mischievous spark in his eyes. ‘dear, oh dear, you are asking me to dissemble? To traduce my name and my sacred vow to honesty? You are more wicked than I thought, Isobel Macleod.’

  Isobel was taken by surprise when Mr Probius sealed their lover’s covenant with a sly wink and a gallant press of his lips to the fingers of her right hand. ‘It shall be our secret then, my sweet. Until your father returns.’

  Isobel sighed dreamily at the bliss of her lover’s first kiss, albeit so light and delicate a one. But she also sighed from relief at Charles’s willingness to believe her, and her own exhaustion from such a sustained burst of duplicitous and creative invention. ‘I will write to Father tonight and reassure him he has nothing to fear, my dear Charles.’

  And so, under cover of being Isobel Macleod’s drawing master who visited Faulconstone weekly and assisted with her commission at Juniper Hall as often as required, Mr Charles Probius had the perfect pretext to covertly make love to his young bride-in-waiting for the best part of the coming year. To be honest, it appealed to his sense of theatre and daring, very much in the spirit of a true bohemian.

  Chapter 26

  LOVE

  MARCH TO AUGUST 1852

  What followed were some of the happiest months of Isobel’s life. In the weeks and months after the Major’s departure and Grace’s wedding, Charles and Isobel spent many blissful hours together, either in art classes in the morning room at Faulconstone or sketching en plein air on excursions around Sydney with Mrs Palmer or Aunt Louisa. If the weather looked fine, they took up their sketchbooks and easels and picnicked by the waters at Coogee, Bronte, Manly, Clontarf and Botany Bay. They even embarked on a three-day excursion, accompanied by Mrs Drummond and her two daughters, all keen art students, to the sublime crags and waterfalls of the Blue Mountains.

  ‘These misty valleys and majestic bluffs are nothing short of a paradise for painters!’ declared Charles, overcome with admiration. Charles was a patient and inspiring teacher, courteous, encouraging, full of passionate enthusiasm and generous praise for his fellow artists Glover, Earle, Evans and Eyre, as well as the talented women botanical illustrators Mrs Louisa Meredith and the Scott sisters.

  Meanwhile he and Isobel rejoiced in their knowledge of each other as it grew, day by day. By the exercise of great stealth and discipline, they managed to avoid stirring up any suspicion or scandal regarding their ‘friendship’. Isobel was relieved, of course, that no one in her social sphere had guessed her feelings for Mr Probius or his for her. And yet, while she appreciated his gallantry, she also fretted in the private pages of her journal about his ‘lack of ardour’: Am I hopelessly wicked for wanting something more? Some sign of affection apart from his courtesy and kindness. Her ‘wicked’ prayers were soon answered.

  It was early April. The leaves were turning in the garden and the last of the frangipani blossoms had appeared on the tree at Faulconstone. Isobel had almost finished her work on the painting for Mr and Mrs Cooper and would soon have no more excuses to visit Juniper Hall. She loved the time she had spent in its garden in the shade of the Kaffir lilies and evergreen magnolias, sketching the iron arch and gravel path bordered by flower beds and shrubs trimmed into box hedges along the wall.

  Whenever he could spare the time from teaching Mrs Cooper’s offspring, Charles joined Isobel in the garden. They were usually accompanied by Miss Catherine Cooper, her fellow debutante the night of the ball that, in Isobel’s mind, now marked the auspicious beginning of Isobel and Charles’s romance. As Charles stood at her side, the air between the art master and his protégé seemed to pulse palpably with the heat of their desire. Meanwhile Catherine played on the lawn with Alphonse, her boisterous cocker spaniel. Every now and then she found an excuse to absent herself, announcing loudly and brightly that she would fetch her dog a ball or a bowl of water. This ruse gave the lovers their furtive opportunity.

  And so it came to pass that on her sixth visit to Juniper Hall, with her sketches all done and little time left before Robert the Large and his family had to finally vacate their grand home, Isobel and Charles first kissed. Isobel swore she would never forget that moment: his warm hand on the nape of her neck, her small hand press
ed against his chest and then withdrawn to signal her consent, the loveliness of his handsome face so close that she could smell the astringent aroma of his skin.

  At first there was the tender, even tentative, touching of lips that fast became more inviting, more overwhelming, more daring and demanding. Isobel felt the steam valve of her heart opening, the heat of her body flaring, the urgent telegraph of her pulse, the flash of flame in her loins like a lamplighter’s wick to the gaslight. Behind the blood-red flesh of her eyelids she glimpsed her own face, eyes closed, adrift in a bubble beyond time and care.

  Was she lost or was she found? Was this a fall or a rescue? The torrent of her desire surged through her body like the giant grey-green wave of her dream, clearing away all notions of what was proper, crushing in its path the old-fashioned strictures of her girlhood. In her lover’s eyes she saw herself anew, in his arms felt both freedom and security, in the blissful oblivion of this kiss felt released.

  ‘I have something I want to show you,’ she whispered in his ear. She unbuttoned her blouse and, from beneath her lace petticoat, she showed her lover her cherished secret. The opal dragonfly. How it flashed and fluoresced in the sunlight! Charles gasped with delight.

  ‘dear God! It is so beautiful.’ At the sound of footsteps on the gravel path, Isobel hastened to tuck the pendant back into its hiding place. The couple sprang apart as young Miss Catherine approached with a knowing smirk on her face.

  It was a week later during an art class in the morning room at Faulconstone that Isobel unburdened herself of the secret history of her mother’s strange gift. Charles listened, fascinated. She did not, dared not, mention her dreams. Not yet. But she did tell him the story of meeting Fanny Macleay in the garden, the Tennyson poem of the dragonfly and Fanny’s talk of young girls being ‘gobbled up in the jaws of matrimony’ by their suitors.

  ‘I hope when we are married,’ Charles declared, ‘that you, my dear, will always be able to fly as “a living flash of light”. Just like the dragonfly in Mr Tennyson’s poem! I do not want to be a husband who crushes your spirit and shackles you to the role of Angel of Hearth and Home. God forbid! The thought of such a life fills me with horror.’

  After that day, to Isobel’s astonished delight, Charles would sometimes whisper in her ear the tender soubriquet he had coined for her, ‘Madame Libellule’. Lady dragonfly.

  As he walked across the front lawn of Juniper Hall in the late afternoon, with Alphonse the spaniel gambolling at his heels, Isobel, freshly kissed and fizzing with desire, looked on her lover with eyes of adoration and wonder. What a marvellous, strange man!

  It was irrefutable that Charles Probius was unconventional in many ways. He was well known for his colourful but always superbly cut outfits, particularly his daytime ensemble of burnished knee-high riding boots, cream jodhpurs, mustard waistcoat, mint green frock coat and French blue cravat, and his much-admired collection of walking canes featuring the carved heads of birds. He liked to call himself a ‘bohemian’, having recently acquired the Parisian writer Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de Bohème, celebrating the lives of struggling artists in Paris. He even read favourite passages aloud to Isobel.

  Isobel saw clearly that, as an artist and a free spirit, Charles walked on a broader stage than most men: the merchant, the lawyer, the politician and the public servant. His horizons were wider, literally and figuratively. He had lived abroad and mixed with intellectuals and artists of all nationalities and creeds. He had encountered ideas alien to the pinched, narcissistic society of New South Wales, with its endless treadmill of status seeking and its politics of envy, greed and loathing. He had even stepped outside the bounds of the law in a desperate bid to survive. He was a man who, to pursue his calling, had learned to view humanity with an uncompromising and gimlet-eyed clarity. In this way, he saw the inner workings of people’s souls: their foibles, vanities, virtues and passions.

  How had Isobel been so lucky to be taken up by such a man? she wondered. She prayed that the words spoken by the soothsayer were about Charles. ‘I speak of the future. The future not set in stone, not carved in marble. Of what will come if nothing is changed. Of a man that you love who sees you clearly.’ Isobel hoped that Charles was not just a lucky accident but rather a soulmate, whose appearance in her life had been set by destiny.

  From their very first meeting, Charles Probius had seen Isobel more clearly than anyone, except perhaps her father. He had glimpsed her secret passion and recognised her talent. He had even talked of her future vocation: ‘Some women, with uncommon strength of character and will, as well as prodigious talent, have managed against all the odds to become artists…I have a feeling that you could be one of those women. Could I be right?’

  Isobel was determined to prove him right. She surrendered herself willingly to his authority and guidance as her teacher. She no longer attended lessons in Surry Hills with Mr Vasey, her longtime art tutor, a gentle, old-fashioned gent who used the well-worn demonstration-and-copy method, commencing every lesson with a technique or subject that his female students then dutifully copied. ‘Cloaks are very useful for hiding badly drawn legs and arms,’ Mr Vasey advised. Amateur lady artists like Isobel were stuck with drawing thumbnail landscapes with small stick-like figures in the foreground. They were forbidden to draw from life as the academic painters did; the closest they ever got were miniature portraits at which Mrs Georgiana McCrae, the Melbourne painter, excelled.

  As a young woman, Isobel had quickly tired of flowers and miniatures and Mr Vasey’s tricks of the trade. Given the views from her bedroom window and Rosemount’s gardens, Isobel embarked instead on picturesque landscapes, inspired by Messrs Martens, Earle, Glover and Prout. She worked in ink and watercolours, never graduating to oils or trespassing in the forbidden male territory of the Classical or the Sublime.

  Isobel had no illusions. She knew very well that the number of women artists of any talent or note in the colonies was very small. There was Mrs Sophia Campbell, unorthodox wife of rich merchant Mr Robert Campbell, who painted early views of the town. There was Mrs Georgiana Lowe, wife of the brilliant, mercurial lawyer Robert Lowe, and a fine watercolourist of plants and harbour views, particularly around her charming house at Bronte. There was Miss Mary Allport, a successful Hobart artist and printmaker, who had even had her sketch of the Great Comet of 1843 printed in The Illustrated London News. To pay her baker’s bills in hard times, Mrs Georgiana McCrae had taken on portrait commissions while Elizabeth Gould, wife of the famous bird taxidermist John, did over six hundred illustrations for her husband’s books. The Scott sisters, Harriet and Helena, had only recently finished a magnificent book of moths for their entomologist father. It was easy to see the odds were against any chance of success for a woman artist.

  Even so, Charles remained supportive of Isobel’s talent and ambition. He had no tolerance for the notion of art as a mere display of feminine ‘taste’, and art education for women as no more than ‘ornamental’. He encouraged Isobel to sketch en plein air and take risks with more difficult techniques and materials. He gave her tutorials on how to make lithographs and aquatints. He promised to one day teach her the finer points of oil painting.

  ‘You shall be known as the painter Madame Libellule, the envy of the academicians!’ he told her. ‘I hope to see the day when one of your works hangs in the National Gallery in London. You shall be a guiding light to generations of women artists.’ She kissed him then and loved him for his gallantry and unapologetic high opinion of her worth.

  Charles himself was kept busy with several commissions from wealthy clients but had so far had no luck in his quest for a well-paid position as a private art master (apart from his lessons with Isobel, of course, for which he charged much less than he normally would). Mr and Mrs Cooper and five of their brood had embarked for England in April leaving behind their daughter Catherine, who was reluctant to give up a prosperous suitor, and was now in residence with an aunt.

  Despite this lack of
secure employment, the artist seemed happy enough to stay in Sydney, though he sometimes still talked about his plans to start afresh in Melbourne or even Hobart, where he believed artists were more valued. Flushed with gold, the civic leaders of Melbourne had started making noises about a public art gallery like the Royal Academy in London or the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Charles prayed that one day Sydney might do the same. ‘I look forward to the time when this brash, vainglorious upstart of a town is no longer in thrall to Mammon!’ Charles told Isobel during one of their field trips as they looked over the lovely city of sandstone spires and turrets. ‘Maybe then its burghers will stop aping their betters back home with their preference for all things English and snobbish contempt for anything done here! That is the only way we will plant the seeds of a cultured society.’

  It was not as if artists lacked for sublime and epic subjects in the colony. In June, the people of New South Wales were reminded of the awful terror of Nature when floodwaters carried away most of the settlement of Gundagai on the Murrumbidgee River. Charles read out the dramatic newspaper account to Isobel: ‘“Eighty-nine people, comprising a third of the town’s population, perished in the mighty waters of the flash flood that struck Gundagai on 25th June. The township has all but vanished with only three dwellings left standing.”’

  Of singular interest to Charles was the courage of four Wiradjuri men, who risked their lives in bark canoes to pluck over forty stranded white settlers from the roofs of their houses and the raging floodwaters. ‘Now that would make a subject for a painting!’ enthused Charles. ‘A different story to the ones we usually hear, eh?’

  In pursuit of the sublime, Charles and Isobel, accompanied by a less enthusiastic Catherine Cooper, braved the cold winds roaring off the iron-grey harbour for a day of sketching at Watsons Bay. Isobel was reluctant at first to revisit the site of her humiliation at the hands of her so-called friends, but she was persuaded by Charles’s enthusiasm and her own fascination to witness the vision of The Gap, especially on such a dramatic day.