‘What is it? What has happened?’ asked Aunt Louisa, full of fear.
Tears began to slide freely from Grace’s eyes then and she did nothing to check them. From her reticule she pulled a folded sheet of paper. A letter. ‘From Joseph. It arrived this morning.’ Aunt Louisa took the letter, unfolded it and read aloud.
My belov’d sisters,
I apologise for the long silence since my departure from you. When you have read the contents of this letter I hope you will find it in your hearts to forgive me. My hand has been stopp’d every time I plucked up my pen to write you; even now, I can barely bring myself to record what I must tell. Poor, sweet William is dead.
‘No, no, no, say it is not so,’ cried out Isobel, half-swooning to the floor.
Behind her, Anna began to pace, clawing at her hair. ‘dear God, what have we done, what have we done, what have we done to deserve this?’
Grace stood as silent as a statue. Aunt Louisa’s face collapsed into a ruin, her voice trailed away. She bowed her head and murmured, ‘I am the Resurrection, and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’
‘Please, Aunt. What does Joseph say?’ pleaded Isobel.
Aunt Louisa read on.
Bear up, dear sisters, in your Grief! I have a sad story to relate. Two weeks into our voyage, our ship was struck by a typhoon off the coast of Celebes. Driven onto rocks and broken up, she sank so swiftly that most souls on board perish’d, among them my dear Brother. We embrac’d in our cabin when the ship struck and prayed together for deliverance but were separat’d in the chaos that ensued. By Divine Providence, I surviv’d the fury of the storm and drifted into a current that carried me into the nearest shipping lane. Here, a passing Dutch merchantman retrieved my broken body from the sea.
While I escap’d Death, I suffered grievous injuries to my person and am grateful to the skilful doctors at the Sinees Sieken Huys in Batavia who saved my life. In my weaken’d state, I laps’d into a coma for six weeks. For a short period of sweet delirium, I imagin’d William sat by my bed, comforting me as he always did…
‘Oh, this is unbearable!’ moaned Isobel. Aunt Louisa continued to read.
By the time you receive this letter, I shall be on a ship back to Sydney. I find I have no stomach for the enterprise that William planned for us. It was mostly his dream to succeed in India and he recruit’d me out of his boundless love. Forgive my bitterness but I believe had Father allow’d me to apologise for my indiscretions and plead my case before him, this whole tragedy might have been avoided. William wish’d to repair the schism between us and invested much hope in this situation in India to overcome Father’s disappointment in me.
Ah, Disappointment! The burden that has crushed all three sons of Major Macleod. How can I explain to you the pain that dwells in the heart of a son who is a permanent disappointment to his father? Such a son hopes to win his father’s favour while raging against the very vanity of that hope. It was Papa’s disappointment that drove poor Richard to his untimely death and now it has killed sweet William.
I pray to God to lift the burden of my bitter anger from me. I know how heavily this news will fall on you all. And on Father. I pray that each of you can find some peace of mind to reconcile you to this loss. Amen.
Your brother,
Joseph
Silence settled like dust over the four women in the drawing room. They were dumbstruck, unable to summon a single word of piety or solace to ward off the full horror of this news. Not William, not William, Isobel said to herself, why should God strike down dear William?
And then the drowned man in her dream surfaced in her thoughts and Isobel felt herself dragged under by a giant, cold wave of absolute terror.
Chapter 28
DUST STORM
SEPTEMBER TO NOVEMBER 1852
The harbour scintillated in the lovely sunlight, its dark green waters swelling with the morning’s ebb tide. Isobel stood with her back to the old sandstone grotto, one of her favourite picnic spots in Rosemount’s gardens when she was a child. It was here, the morning before her thirteenth birthday, that she had sat in the shade with Winnie, talking of her father’s troubles and sketching the harbour view in her journal. That was only five years ago but it seemed to Isobel an aeon.
Isobel was supposed to be at her dance class with Mrs Acutt in Woolloomooloo but instead she had alighted from the coach and walked down Victoria Street to her old home. Anna had been unwell and stayed in bed, so there was no one to witness Isobel’s diversion from her usual routine. It had felt so strange to wander along Rosemount’s empty driveway past the forest and the gardens, coming into their spring foliage, and the silent house, all its curtains drawn, asleep like a hibernating giant. The image from her dream of Rosemount in ruins, ravaged by nature’s trespass like the Baron’s family seat, drifted into her mind. When she looked at her home in that dismal light, it now appeared to her as an unloved old man on his sickbed, pale and comatose, teetering on death.
She lingered for a long time in the coach loop outside the house.
It was almost a year since the three sisters had waved goodbye to William and Joseph but Isobel could recall the scene as vividly as if it was only last week. She had whispered in her brother’s ear, ‘Please read my note, dear William, I beg you. And send me your good counsel.’ His short reply (now tucked away in her writing desk drawer) had come weeks later, urging her to be brave. Oh, what courage I shall need now, sweet brother, more than either of us could ever have imagined! With William gone, Charles was her only good counsel.
As Isobel stood inside the grotto, overlooking the sparkling harbour, she held her mother’s last gift, the opal dragonfly, in her hands. These past few months she had worn it about her neck as a talisman of her mother’s love and protection. And as a badge of honour worn by a proud daughter in secret communion with her mother. Winnie had been no stranger to duty and suffering but she also knew the value of love. And it was this reassurance that gave Isobel the courage to defy—at least for now—her father’s refusal to give his blessing to her courtship.
For the sake of love. A love that would save her.
This is what Isobel told herself as she turned the dragonfly over in her hands. But, just like her mother before her, her attachment to this lovely treasure had become complicated. She recalled Winnie’s bewilderment on her sickbed and her words, half-blessing, half-warning, as she handed Isobel the ‘powerful gift’. ‘I want to give you this but…I am afraid to do so…I have such strange dreams. Terrible dreams…Unimaginable…They show me…I do not understand what they show me. Or where they come from.’
As Isobel stared into the shifting flames of the opal—the bright fire in the cold stone—she was struck by life’s troubling ambivalences: her love for Charles, conceived in a moment of pureheartedness, but now only made possible through deceit; her love and respect for her father, once the innocent adoration of a child, now hedged about with doubts and rebelliousness; her childhood worship of Grace and protectiveness of Anna, now poisoned by years of petty antipathies; even her love for her mother, hallowed by death and longing, but tainted by the memory of her heartless rejection of Captain Tranter.
Sometimes Isobel wished she was a child again, who knew nothing of the complications of the adult world. Why had she ever asked her mother to explain her father’s unhappiness?
Now she was not interested in the past. She wanted to know about the future. What was it that her nightmares were trying to tell her? If her disturbing dreams were indeed glimpses into a future that revealed ‘what will come if nothing is changed’, as the soothsayer had said, then what did she have to do to change that future?
She feared that the Macleods had not yet drunk their fill of misery, that the opal stones had more misfortunes to tell for this seemingly cursed family. Her mother had warned her that if the opal dragonfly ‘should ever cause you—or anyone you love—pain or suffer
ing, then throw it away! Cast it into the sea, bury it somewhere secret.’
Isobel stood, her fist clenched about her mother’s brooch, willing herself to hurl it into the bright waters. Was that the answer? Could she walk away from her family’s woes that easily? Or was she tied to all their fates, her brothers’ and her sisters’, her mother’s and father’s? It seemed clear that Charles was her only escape—her dreams had shown her that, had they not? He was the only way she could flee from Rosemount’s ruin and her family’s downfall. And why shouldn’t she?
The social disgrace that Isobel suffered was not of her own making; it was the legacy of a proud, stiff-necked father obsessed with his own reputation and honour. She would not be dragged down by her father’s pride. It had already entrapped two of her sisters and, according to Joseph’s letter, led to the self-sacrifice of two of her brothers for the sake of their father’s approval.
She raised her arm and prepared to cast the opal dragonfly into the harbour. ‘do it, do it!’ an inner voice urged. But she could not. ‘It is all very well to rage against your father’s hubris,’ she murmured to herself, ‘to talk of disowning your family. But to do it? That is too hard.’
Her heart was breaking. She was Isobel Clara Macleod, youngest daughter of Major Sir Angus and Winnie Macleod. Her past—Grangemouth, Ballandella, Rosemount, her father’s fame, her mother’s love—were knitted into the sinews of that heart. To cast away the opal dragonfly would be to throw away a part of herself, a vital part. Now that it seemed clear her exile from Rosemount was final, her mother’s brooch was all she had left to remember her childhood by. A precious trinket. A token of love. A knot of memories. She could never just throw it away.
Grace promised to write to the Major in England about William’s death. There was a good chance that Father would have left England by the time the letter arrived; it was even possible that the mail ship from Sydney and his return vessel would pass each other in the Indian Ocean. The three sisters and their aunt put on their mourning garments, their grieving made sharper for the lack of a body to weep over and to lay in the earth with the ceremony that was its due. There was a small private service at St Mark’s at which all the Macleod women broke down and wept openly. Grace placed a black-bordered obituary in the Herald with a poem:
We cannot tend beside his grave, for he sleeps in secret sea.
And not one gentle whispering wave, will tell the place to me.
But though unseen by human eyes, and mortals know it not.
His Father knoweth where he lies, and angels guard the spot.
No willows weep, no scented flowers bloom o’er the watery grave.
No emblem left of him who sleeps, beneath the silent waves.
Charles had never met William but he knew how deep Isobel’s bond was with her brother. He did his best to comfort her without resorting to the pieties of ‘eternal sleep’ and ‘release from suffering’ and ‘God’s mysterious purpose’. William was a young man, full of energy, ambition and faith in his future, and he had been cut down for no good reason.
Isobel wondered if God had winked asleep for a moment at His peephole as he looked down on William and Joseph’s foundering ship. How could the premature death of her brother make any sense in God’s plans? And then she paused to consider God’s wisdom in saving her other brother, Joseph. Was that not a miracle? Isobel’s faith was sorely tested. Nor could she forget the old soothsayer’s words: ‘And now two more brothers. Over water. And a sister. Over water. They are lost to you.’
And the next blow to come? Unlike William’s death, everyone knew what that was. The commission of inquiry into the Major’s conduct of his department, chaired by his old nemesis, Mr Macleay, had submitted its report for the Governor’s consideration in August. The Macleod family waited anxiously for its publication in the Government Gazette in September. On the strength of this report, the Governor would make his recommendation to the Colonial Office as to whether Major Macleod should have his pay cut or be removed from office.
In consultation with Grace, Augustus decided to write a courteous letter on behalf of the Macleod family to crave the Governor’s indulgence in delaying public release of the report until the Major’s return. The letter explained the extenuating circumstances of the death of the Major’s eldest son, William, news of which had not yet reached his father. A letter had been sent to England in the hope that he would receive it before his departure. If not, public scrutiny (and, no doubt, censure) of the Major’s career coupled with the shock of his son’s death would be a severe double blow on his return.
The Governor sent a gracious reply in which he expressed his sincerest regrets at the family’s loss and agreed to delay the public release of the full report until the Major came home. He insisted that the Major must return no later than January. The Governor conceded that the Major’s service to the colony warranted the courtesy of his reading the report in full before it was made public and any other actions were taken with regards to his employment.
Over the following few weeks, the agony of grieving for dear William was numbed a little, particularly with Charles’s tender attentiveness and kind words, but Isobel was not immune to repeated bouts of weeping and melancholy. ‘This is all to be expected, my love,’ counselled Charles, quoting the poet Shelley:
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
‘Your love for William will never die, nor will your grief,’ said Charles. ‘“Winter is come and gone, But grief returns with the revolving year.”’
Not surprisingly, William appeared many times in Isobel’s dreams: as a boy playing cricket at Grangemouth, as a young naval officer on leave from HMS Iris, as a well-dressed traveller with bright prospects in India during his last visit to Rosemount. Charles encouraged Isobel to sketch her brother’s face from her recollections. This was painful at first, almost unbearable, but she persisted. And with time, this exercise became a salve to her soul and a moment of private communion with her dear departed brother. Much like the way she sometimes sat in her room alone late at night, holding the opal dragonfly up to the candlelight and talking to her mother’s spirit.
One morning in early November, seven weeks after the news of William’s death, Isobel was sitting in the drawing room with Anna and Aunt Louisa, all three women busy at their reading. Ever since her encounter with the French aristocrat at Grace’s housewarming party, Isobel had decided to become better informed about current events on the world stage. Aunt Louisa looked at her with an expression of puzzlement when asked if Faulconstone could take delivery of the Herald but had indulged her nonetheless.
On this morning, Isobel was thumbing through the newsprint when her eye was drawn to the following paragraph in the Water Police Court reports:
The second inquest before the Coroner today concerned the death of a 38-year old woman, a Mrs Emily Vera Pittman of Gloucester Street in The Rocks, found floating near Pyrmont Bridge by a seaman while making fast his vessel. The deserted mother of seven was last seen alive at the Black Dog the previous night in a drunken state. Asphyxia by drowning was announced as the cause of death by the medical man having examined the body. Three of the dead woman’s children are already in the Benevolent Asylum; all seven will now be sent to the Protestant Orphan School at Parramatta.
Isobel’s hand flew to her mouth. She suppressed the urge to cry out. She looked up at her Aunt Louisa, absorbed in reading her book in the morning light. Could this sad story have been avoided if my aunt had been less suspicious? thought Isobel. Was poor Mrs Pittman condemned from the minute that we walked out her front door?’ Isobel was sure that this woman’s death—whether from drunkenness or suicide—would simply be proof in her aunt’s mind of her unfitness as a mother.
The image of Mrs Pittman’s bloated body, facedown in the murky waters under Pyrmont Bridge being hooked out by the water police,
haunted Isobel all day. She tossed and turned that night, praying the poor woman’s corpse would not turn up in one of her dreams. She didn’t. Mrs Pittman’s death was just another footnote in the sorry story of Sydney’s poor. There would be many more deaths like Mrs Pittman’s and, if they were reported at all, they would always be buried deep in the fine print of the court reports.
That morning Isobel was tempted to stop reading the newspapers. What was the point? This endless catalogue of misfortune and misery, violence and deceit. As if to confirm her worst suspicion that newspapers were chroniclers of nothing but human tragedy, the following morning she spotted another notice, even shorter than Mrs Pittman’s, which simply stated:
DEATHS
On Tuesday, the 18th inst. at Parramatta, Mr Alexander Macleay, Esq., MLC, F.R.S., F.L.S. in the 82nd year of his age.
‘Did you know Mr Macleay had died?’ Isobel asked her aunt, looking up from the paper.
Aunt Louisa nodded. ‘Mrs Forbes told me last week. Something about a carriage accident at Government House. The horse bolted and Mr Macleay lost control. His carriage overturned and he died on the spot. Sad business.’
It was obvious Aunt Louisa did not feel at all sad about Mr Macleay’s demise. Isobel thought of Fanny, of course. She hoped that her recent marriage provided some refuge from the overwhelming grief of losing a father. But what disconcerted Isobel most of all was the brevity of the death notice, its reduction of Mr Macleay’s life to one line, a mere jot in a sea of newsprint. No eulogy, no record of service, no tribute or lamentation. Was this stark record all that Mr Macleay deserved? Isobel expressed her surprise to her aunt.
‘Mr Macleay will get his public encomiums and memorial plaques, don’t you concern yourself about that,’ said Aunt Louisa. ‘Men like Mr Macleay always do.’
The Opal Dragonfly Page 30
