The Opal Dragonfly

by Julian Leatherdale

  Three days after the reading of the will, a carriage had arrived at Faulconstone from Rosemount bearing two tea chests. The first contained Father’s sketchbooks and field journals, part of his bequest to Isobel, and was carted up to her room. The second chest, packed with items of sentimental value to Louisa, was sent to her aunt’s room.

  Isobel took her time inspecting the contents of her tea chest, sitting on her bed and slowly leafing through the stack of her father’s sketchbooks. Some were from his time as a young soldier in Spain, others were more recent including landscapes of Victoria Pass in the Blue Mountains and watercolours and pencil drawings of scenes all over New South Wales. There were bridges, rivers, mountain ranges and copses of slender gums; quick ghostly studies of natives massing with spears or settlers in cabbage-tree hats leaning on rifles in attitudes of indolence or reflection, depending on your point of view. ‘Oh, Papa,’ she sighed, smiling at the large green caterpillar and the undulating snake, both drawn in splendid isolation on their blank, creamy pages. And there was the candid study of a soldier lying on the turf, stealing a few minutes’ reprieve in the pages of a book, her favourite sketch of Papa’s from when she was a girl. Tears poured freely as she turned these pages. Healing tears.

  She had been deeply moved when she heard that Papa had bequeathed her these sketchbooks. They had talked of them while walking in the gardens at Rosemount when he had congratulated her on her first commission. ‘I flatter myself I had a hand in encouraging your talents for drawing when you were younger,’ he had said.

  She understood her father’s impulse to leave her these. But why had he left her the field journals as well? These contained the day-to-day entries he had made every evening by the light of an oil lamp or the fire of his campsite during his perilous excursions into the interior. They were the source from which he had composed the official accounts of his expeditions, later published in London. Why on earth had he passed these into her keeping?

  She stacked the journals up on the floor of her room, a pile of honey-coloured paper in dark green and red-veined marbled covers. As she did so, she noticed her father had written what must be a dedication on the title page of one of the journals. It read:

  To my dearest Isobel,

  I leave this true record in your hands. You will know what to do.

  With a father’s undying love,

  Angus H. Macleod.

  The note was written in a hurried hand and dated two days before his death: his final message to her. Isobel was so shocked she dropped the journal as if it burned her. ‘Why, Papa?’ she cried out. ‘Why?’ She could not fathom the reason her father had written this message to her. did he have some intuition he would die soon? And were these books some form of deathbed confession consigned to her care? None of it made sense. But whatever the reason for this bequest, Isobel felt a terrible burden had been placed on her. It seemed both her parents had chosen to leave their youngest daughter with a troublesome inheritance: her mother’s gift of the clairvoyant dragonfly and her father’s ‘true record’ of she knew not what. What had Isobel done to deserve such a dubious privilege? Was she supposed to be grateful for their trust?

  Despite her misgivings, Isobel resolved to read these journals so that her father’s request might become clear. She even hoped that, perhaps, they would help her in her grief.

  Charles visited Isobel every day that he could find time from his busy schedule. The wealthy businesswoman he had hoped for as a patron had commissioned a portrait of herself and her husband; Charles still awaited her decision to appoint him as a drawing master. Isobel welcomed all good news. She needed it like a drowning man needs flotsam to cling to for survival.

  ‘I do not think we should delay the announcement of our engagement any longer,’ she told Charles three days after Anna’s disappearance. ‘And I want to set a date for our wedding as well. I am sure Aunt Louisa will help us with all that.’

  Aunt Louisa was still in a state of shock about what had occurred at Rosemount the night of her brother’s funeral. But Isobel had gone to her and explained the strange circumstances of her mother’s gift (or at least a version that would not strain belief), telling her how dear Winnie had made her promise to keep this heirloom a secret. ‘She knew what grief it would cause between her daughters if I did not. It seems she was right to be afraid.’ Having witnessed some of Anna’s lunatic behaviour for herself, Aunt Louisa was more than willing to give Isobel the benefit of the doubt when it came to Anna’s vile accusations.

  ‘do not concern yourself, my dear,’ counselled Isobel’s aunt. ‘I am sure this will all blow over. We are all out of our minds with grief. Such times are sent to try us!’

  Isobel knew that the timing was not propitious for announcing her engagement and planning her wedding but she yearned to run as fast she could towards her happy future, free from her family’s misery. Grace and Augustus had originally offered to host a wedding breakfast at Rosemount; it was unlikely that was ever going to happen now. She did not care. She wanted to marry Charles, with or without Grace’s blessing.

  ‘But what about Anna?’ asked Charles. ‘How can we go ahead when we don’t know what has happened to her?’

  Isobel turned her face to him, eyes blazing. ‘Charles, I have taken care of Anna’s feelings ahead of mine my whole life. I will not let her cheat me out of my wedding day.’

  If Charles was shocked, he gave no sign. ‘Very well, my darling, as you wish.’

  Anna was discovered six days later. She must have wandered down the far side of Woolloomooloo Hill and ended up sleeping in a paddock at Rushcutters Bay near the blacks’ camp at the edge of Barcom Glen estate. The sad figure of the deranged woman in her mourning weeds had won the sympathy of the natives. She traded away her jewellery for food and drink and the blacks built her a crude humpy to keep off the rain. She was lucky that it was a mild autumn with no frosts or heavy storms. It was the offer in the papers of a monetary reward for her discovery that led to one of the local blackfellas notifying the police.

  When the constables found Anna, she was lying beneath a pepper tree, drunk and asleep. She told them her name was Ballandella and her adopted father was Major Macleod, who had saved her from her tribe. She had half-sisters who no longer loved her and had driven her away. She insisted this was now her home. She did not answer to the name of Anna Macleod. ‘She died years ago,’ she said. She was a pitiful sight: her hair filthy and matted, her face black with dirt, her arms covered in suppurating sores and scratches, her mourning clothes torn to rags. She resisted all attempts to remove her at first but grew weak with weeping and was taken away to the Tarban Creek Lunatic Asylum.

  The matron, Mrs Digby, wrote to Grace Macleod stating that ‘a woman matching your sister’s description has been admitted’. The letter explained that ‘she has been examined by two independent doctors who have issued medical certificates and an order for admission had been granted from a magistrate to protect her from further harm to herself’. The matron wished Grace to confirm her sister’s identity as soon as possible and warned her that she might find her altered state shocking.

  Grace reported all of this later to Aunt Louisa. She and Augustus decided it was safer to visit Tarban Creek without Isobel as she was sure Anna would become agitated in her presence. Purpose-built as a hospital for the insane on Bedlam Point overlooking the Parramatta River, the asylum was a solemn collection of barrack-like buildings. Grace and Augustus found the atmosphere more fitting to a place of incarceration and punishment than rest and recuperation. The grounds were surrounded by high walls and the courtyards (for exercise and outdoor ‘recreation’) were narrow and permanently in shadow. Once inside, they were shocked at how small, dank, overcrowded and dismal were the dormitories and cells.

  Concerned as they were by the conditions of the asylum, Grace and Augustus had to admit that Anna was in no fit state to return to their care or Aunt Louisa’s. When they entered the ward, she cowered by her bed, wild-eyed and muttering. Grace
was inconsolable when confronted by this pathetic, unrecognisable creature. She still refused to answer to Anna, insisting her name was Ballandella. What had broken in her sister’s soul that she would impersonate the little black girl Father had brought home all those years ago? Was this her way of feeling more valued—as Isobel’s preferred playmate? It was both remarkable and sad to think that these childhood injuries possibly still had such a grip on Anna’s mind.

  Even Isobel’s heart was mollified a little when she heard about Anna from Aunt Louisa, now the only source of news from Rosemount. Poor mad Anna. Had there ever been any hope for her? Was she always fated to end up like this? Isobel’s own life now teetered precariously on a knife’s edge between the condemnation of her family on the one side and the happiness and love promised by her marriage with Charles on the other.

  When she was younger, Isobel had always assumed her life’s story was already written. As the youngest daughter of Sir Angus Macleod, her fate was clear: to be ‘gobbled up in the jaws of matrimony’ by a man from a ‘good’ family, either from the colony or the Old Country. Marriage, children and then grandchildren would all follow in orderly, middle-class fashion, the same narrative as her mother’s. But, ever since that fateful morning of the duel, Isobel’s life had not faithfully followed this pattern.

  With all the strange events of the last two years, it was not surprising that Isobel often reflected on the nature of fate. Were the blows that rained down on her family to be understood as divine punishments or were they no more than a series of terrible accidents? And what of her dreams? How was she to understand them: were they proof that the future was set in stone or the complete opposite, warnings to help Isobel navigate a happier path? Winnie said she did not know what the dreams meant. But Isobel was sure that her mother hoped the dragonfly’s gift of foresight would be a boon not a burden for her daughter.

  As she unpacked Papa’s tea chest, Isobel came across a slim notebook from his time as a college student in Edinburgh. She skimmed its pages, crammed with youthful scribblings and notes on all manner of subjects. She was not in the least surprised to find that one of his favourites had been phrenology, the popular science of the human brain that had become all the rage for members of the intelligent middle class, her father included.

  In the same way that a surveyor could map a landscape to understand its geographical features, phrenologists claimed they could map the regions of the brain to understand the qualities of an individual’s character. For men like her father, clever, talented and ambitious, this was a philosophy that liberated human potential. He had written: ‘With the right training tailored for our individual brains, we can improve ourselves in every conceivable way and aspire to excellence in all our pursuits. Education and not aristocratic privilege is the path to rank and fortune. No longer will advancement be the inherited monopoly of the rich.’

  As she contemplated her uncertain future, Isobel wondered to what extent her own character had been formed when she first came into the world, written in the map of her brain. did this mean she was as easily classifiable as a flower or an insect in some Linnean equivalent of human types? Female (Caucasian, British descent, Christian, Evangelical): charitable, pious, well-bred, educated, good character, excellent health, pleasing appearance, propertied family, upper middle class, socially prominent, well-connected, promising prospects.

  What would happen to Isobel if, like a flower or an insect, she was suddenly removed from an environment into which she had been born, formed and nurtured? Would she inevitably wither and die? Or would she adapt and become someone different?

  Little did Isobel know how pertinent these reflections would prove one day in the not too distant future.

  Chapter 34

  MARRIAGE

  APRIL TO MAY 1853

  Isobel could see no reason to delay her wedding and did not want to tempt fate to throw even more obstacles in the path of her happiness. In early April, on a warm sunny day, the marriage of Isobel and Charles Ludiger was celebrated at St Mark’s, a modest but felicitous affair followed by a wedding breakfast with a handful of friends in the garden at Faulconstone. As she had anticipated, neither Grace nor Augustus attended. Joseph also declined but sent a short note. ‘You will always have my love. I trust Charles will be an honourable husband who will make my dear sister happy.’ It was not a resounding vote of confidence in her future.

  On Isobel’s side of the church, her matron of honour, Aunt Louisa, sat with the ever-loyal Mrs Palmer and three members of the fancywork circle, Mrs Drummond, Mrs Long and Mrs Smart. On Charles’s side of the church sat Miss Catherine Cooper, determined to show support for her teacher and her fellow debutante (and to defy her haughty brother, Augustus), joined by three of her sisters. Catherine must have written to her parents with the glad tidings as a letter of congratulations arrived on the Chusan in June. ‘What a handsome portrait of marital bliss you two must make!’ wrote Robert the Large in his hard-won copperplate.

  Among Charles’s group of bohemian friends was his best man, the heavily bearded, mysterious gentleman known to Isobel only as ‘Richard’, and the artist-engraver Mr Austin. The church was more than two-thirds empty but Isobel was not overly concerned. The only absences that truly affected her were those of her parents, her brother William and Alice, to whom she had written with her good news. Otherwise she was overjoyed to finally make her wedding vows to her beloved Charles.

  At last her life was set on its proper course.

  There were tearful farewells at Faulconstone. Some sentimental items of furniture chosen from Rosemount were conveyed to Isobel’s new home, as were all her worldly goods: clothes, journals and sketchbooks, her desk easel and boxes of colours, a fine antique wardrobe from Faulconstone that Aunt Louisa presented as a wedding gift, and the tea chest of the Major’s journals and sketchbooks. The latter were placed on bookshelves in the studio with Isobel making a vow to commence reading them as soon as she had set up house.

  From Charles’s own savings and a trifling sum that had been advanced to Isobel from her father’s still unresolved estate, the young couple paid rent on a small but pleasant terrace in Woolloomooloo within sight and sound of their much-loved harbour. It had an upstairs room sufficiently large for a studio, a small parlour and adequate dining room, and quarters for two servants. When the upstairs windows were opened wide, sunlight flooded the studio, and warm, salty breezes carried the cry of gulls and noise of marine traffic off the bay.

  The hope was that when the Major’s estate was settled, Isobel and her husband might be able to move into the larger terrace house nearby that had been bequeathed to her and Anna in their father’s will. The interest on Isobel’s thousand pounds would also bring in a tidy annual income. When Anna was finally recovered from her fit of madness and discharged, she would probably be sent to one of the family farms at Camden to live out her days in the relative quiet of the countryside.

  To Isobel’s joy, married life began auspiciously. The happy couple fell quickly into a routine of painting in the mornings, breaking for a modest lunch, taking a walk around the bay or through the domain in the early afternoons before Charles called on clients and Isobel wrote her journal. They came together for dinner every evening except on the odd Friday, when Charles met up with fellow artists for a meal. Isobel invited Mrs Palmer, who was her neighbour in Woolloomooloo, and Catherine Cooper, if she was free, for cards and supper. When they could afford it, she and Charles went to plays at the Royal Victoria Theatre on Pitt Street, race meetings at Bellevue Hill, and lectures at the Australian Museum and the Mechanics’ School of Arts. At weekends they would head to a beach with a picnic lunch or embark on a painting trip to Parramatta, Windsor, the south coast or over the Blue Mountains.

  ‘Where shall we go today, my love?’ Charles would ask, arms outstretched, as if to embrace the world in all its infinite richness. ‘Beachcombing at Manly perhaps? Coogee?’

  Isobel would kiss Charles’s noble brow, lovingly stroking his t
emples or curling a finger around one of his lush stray locks. ‘Wherever my lord and master commands!’ She would giggle then and Charles would laugh, folding her in his arms. He was so unlike the template of the sober, authoritarian husband and she of the quiet and obedient wife that they both liked to make a game of married life, playing their roles like children in dress-ups, mimicking their parents.

  Isobel’s heart had not felt this light and carefree for so long. Every morning she sat and combed her dark hair in her cheval glass, smiling at her own reflection. Ever since she had moved in under the roof of her new home, her nightmares had gone, vanished! All that heavy burden lifted. She enjoyed peaceful nights of sleep undisturbed by fateful dreams.

  Some days she felt so emboldened, so free from care, she proudly hung her mother’s gift and love token about her neck on display for all to see. The opal dragonfly. No longer a harbinger of doom, it was now worn as her badge of honour as a married woman. Mrs Isobel Clara Ludiger. ‘Madame Libellule’, the artist.

  What had begun in a coach under cover of a dust storm was resumed in the marriage bed proper. How Isobel revelled in that! And yet. And yet her lover’s ardour that she had experienced that first time was never fully revisited, though she could not understand why. It was certainly not from any lack of desire on her part. Perhaps it was the dull safety of the marriage bed, hemmed about with convention and duty or the humdrum demands of daily life. Was that what robbed Charles’s passion of the savage hunger that had been there in the whirlwind of the dust storm? Was it precisely the forbidden and risky nature of that first encounter that had inflamed him in a way that married sexual relations could not?