It was Richard. Even with his heavy beard, it was obvious from the cuts and bruises on his face that he had been punished. Bent over on his knees, he rocked back and forth, keening like a distraught widow at a funeral. ‘No, no, no, no.’
Isobel felt a surge of disgust rise in her gullet. Were all the men in this town drunkards and cowards? This vile creature had conspired to rob her of her husband and her unborn child’s father. She had no pity for him.
‘I saw this piss-maker in the Rose and Crown. And overheard him boasting about his plans to make off to Melbourne with his lover! Turns out that the lover in question is none other than the husband of this fine woman.’ The Major addressed these remarks to the figure of Charles, kneeling before him, with the air of a magistrate about to pass sentence.
‘What’s more,’ Tranter continued, ‘far from feeling any guilt or shame, this nasty piece of work expressed nothing but contempt for his lover’s wretched wife who, he claimed, had tricked her husband into a loveless marriage. And trapped him even further with a child!’
‘Lies! Lies!’ shouted Richard. Isobel saw now that her husband’s lover had both his hands bound behind his back. The soldier to his left casually struck the pathetic sot across the neck with the butt of his rifle, knocking him onto his face in the mud.
‘No! No!’ cried Charles. He clutched his own head as if he had received the blow. ‘Punish me, not him. I am the one to blame.’
Major Tranter stepped forward and dragged Charles to his feet. ‘Oh, you will answer for this, sir, do not worry about that. We shall settle this like gentlemen to defend the honour of this peerless woman. You know the rules, sir, surely? “Any insult to a lady under a gentleman’s care or protection is to be considered as a greater offence than if given to the gentleman personally.” So you shall answer as if you have done me insult and worse.’
The two soldiers lifted Richard up by his armpits and hauled him, half-walking, half-stumbling, across the street to where Charles now stood, bewildered. ‘Here is your second, sir,’ said Tranter. ‘I am sure he will serve you well.’ The Major cocked his own pistol before doing the same with the second firearm. He handed the loaded pistol to Charles, who refused it. ‘Come, sir. Are you a coward? Take the gun, man. Or I shall be forced to put a ball through your skull right now and be done with it!’
All this while, Isobel stood, frozen in disbelief and terror, watching this scene unfold on the street in front of her house. The macabre irony did not escape her. Here she was again, trapped in the middle of men’s madness, forced to intervene or watch a man she loved be murdered in front of her eyes. ‘Stop this, I beg you, stop this!’
She broke down and wept, plucking at the Major’s arm to elicit his pity. How she hated herself for being so weak! She would end this farce with the sacrifice of her own life. There was no other way. She saw it now. She had no future, her story was over. She saw how it would be done, rehearsed it inside her head. She would run to embrace Charles and take the deadly shot that was meant for him.
In the meantime, the manservant had gone to the rear of the terrace, climbed out a back window and sprinted as fast as he could in the rain towards the nearest police watch house. Lights had come on in neighbouring houses and there were clearly visible shadows of people at their windows. But no soul was brave or foolish enough to interfere in this private quarrel, especially where soldiers were involved.
‘Please calm yourself, my dear.’ Tranter took Isobel firmly in his arms and steered her back to her front door. ‘This is not a matter to concern a lady. You must go inside now and leave us to settle this affair.’
Isobel struggled in Tranter’s arms but his grip was firm. Quicker than she realised what was happening, he had pushed her into the hallway and shut the front door. One of his men had already picked up a length of timber from a stack of wood that lay in the street where work was being done on a fence. The soldier jammed the beam under the door handle, preventing it being opened, and stood guard over the entrance.
Isobel was trapped inside. She ran to the front parlour and pulled back the curtains. Her mind was in a whirlwind of terror, the same terror she had experienced two years ago when she had hidden in the paperbark grove with James and watched her father face death. She tried to open the window but the latch was rusted shut. She pounded the glass with her fists and screamed at the man who would kill her husband. Isobel’s protests were all but silenced behind the front parlour window. She could not hear a word that was uttered on the street and could barely see what was happening in the thickening rain.
‘No, no, please no. Not again! Not again!’ Her voice became hoarse.
Tranter returned to where Charles stood, body slumped, head bowed, the very picture of pathos. Isobel could tell he was weeping openly by the rise and fall of his shoulders. He knew he was going to die.
The soldier pressed the second pistol into the artist’s trembling hands. As if reminded at the last minute of his obligations as a man, and acting almost involuntarily with that weary resignation of one condemned to death, Charles took the gun. Tranter turned and walked away from him, measuring out the correct distance for a duelling ground. The second soldier had taken up a position between them as the umpire, raising his right arm to signal.
Isobel screamed mutely behind the glass. Who should die: Charles or Ralph? This was insanity. This was what men did to each other and the ones they loved. How could the world continue in this way, forcing women to witness such wanton destruction and stupidity?
For a second, Isobel wondered if her husband would shoot the Major in the back and try to make his escape. It would have been a futile and cowardly act, unworthy of a gentleman, of course. But she would have hardly blamed him. Instead, he stood his ground, his head tucked into his chest, his arms hanging lifelessly at his sides.
Richard fainted, folding up like an umbrella and toppling to the ground. Isobel would not allow herself this luxury. She would bear witness to poor Charles’s death. She would be able to testify later when it was needed. From one point of view it could be argued that she, Isobel Clara Ludiger, nee Macleod, was the cause of this murderous ritual. She would not flinch and look away.
The rain fell so heavily now it formed a shifting veil of water over the whole scene. Isobel thought of all the nightmares that had tormented her these last two years: the man drowning in the surf as she ran along a beach; visions of her childhood home inundated and destroyed by water, the terror of the great wave wiping away all the precious trinkets of her family’s wealth and status; the blood-red river where bodies floated, and the eerie ocean where Ballandella swam away, where Charles sat, hunched, frozen at his oars and where her baby was delivered in a rowboat no bigger than a basket. She knew that, through this rain-veiled parlour window, she now watched the final act of a drama that had begun the night she woke at Rosemount in her moon-drenched room, listening for her father’s footsteps.
Tranter took up his position and raised his pistol. Over the thunderous drumroll of the rain, Isobel heard the umpire shout, ‘On my signal!’ His arm dropped.
Charles did not raise his pistol. At the last minute, he turned his head and looked to where Isobel stood at the window. She could not see his face behind the rain. But she knew what he was thinking: Forgive me.
And then the pistol ball struck and Isobel saw her husband’s body jerk and spin and fall to the ground, lifeless.
Chapter 38
THE TRUTH
AUGUST 1853
Major Tranter was put on trial, found guilty of murder and hanged. Isobel’s name was in every newspaper, with her described as the ‘grieving wife of the murder victim’, the ostensible reason for the duel and the key eyewitness. But her testimony was not solely relied upon. Many eyes had watched and many ears overheard what took place that night. In addition to the events of that fateful evening, there were also reports of Major Tranter’s troubled marriage, his gambling debts and bouts of drinking, and his obsession with the woman he had once courted and a
lways loved. With little evidence of shame, he confessed that he had stalked her secretly for years, hiding in the gardens at Rosemount, in the streets of Sydney Town and Woolloomooloo and by the barracks near Faulconstone. Isobel recalled the many times she had felt the weight of some stranger’s gaze on her with an unshakeable and unsettling sense of being watched.
The Major, whose mind was greatly perturbed, said very little in his defence when offered the opportunity to speak except to admit, as if it was a self-evident truth to excuse his behaviour, that ‘I loved her.’ The Major’s widow, Mrs Charlotte Augusta Tranter, nee Bathurst, moved back to England. Rumour had it that she remarried within the year.
Isobel had sat in the courtroom, her hands folded protectively over her swollen belly. She still wore mourning weeds for her father and her brother William. Every sordid detail of her counterfeit marriage and scandalous family was aired for public scrutiny and opprobrium: her prenuptial pregnancy; her ex-convict husband’s unnatural liaisons with his drunken, dissolute lover; even her sister Anna’s lunacy and the ignominious end to her father’s career. This was all picked over by the ghoulish press whose speculations included whether her unborn child was in fact Major Tranter’s and that she and he had conspired to murder the famous artist Probius. While the legal proceedings were supposedly intended to prove Major Tranter’s guilt, Isobel could not help feeling that it was she who was on trial.
Isobel bore all this with a stoicism that surprised her. It was only later that she realised she had spent much of this time in a state of numbed shock, listening to the speeches in the courtroom as if they were dramatic monologues in a theatrical production.
As she had anticipated, everyone from her past life turned against her, even Dr Finch and Aunt Louisa, either out of hatred or shame or merely anxiety to distance themselves from scandal. Catherine Cooper sent her a note of condolence but, newly married, could not risk being contaminated by association with this now thrice-fallen woman. The Bradley women and the Finches, all her teachers and former acquaintances, and the ladies of the fancywork circle too kept their distance and all but vanished from her life.
The only person in her ever-shrinking circle who remained loyal and even accompanied her to court was Mrs Palmer. ‘I will never abandon you, my sweet Izzie, for yours and your dear mother’s sake.’ dear Mrs Palmer. She sat in the public gallery every day, pressing a handkerchief to her teary eyes as she watched poor Isobel’s humiliation.
The trial took two days to conclude. When the judge had pronounced the death sentence, the Major’s wife had astonished everyone present in court, including Isobel, with a howl of rage and despair. This performance was followed by an even more melodramatic assault on the steps of the courthouse in which she tried to claw at Isobel’s face and had to be restrained by constables, a denouement that the press delighted in describing in lurid detail.
Isobel was soon confronted with the aftermath of her husband’s death. He had accumulated debts of one kind and another so that she found herself virtually penniless and owing rent on her terrace. With no compensation for her loss and no progress in the probate court regarding her father’s will, Isobel did not know where to turn. Mrs Palmer gave her a paltry sum from her own mean savings but Isobel’s pleading letters to Joseph and Aunt Louisa were met with an obdurate silence. She wrote to Alice too in a last desperate bid for help but the letter was returned ‘unknown at this address’. While Grace did not acknowledge the letter she wrote her, four days later a sum of money in an envelope from Rosemount was delivered by a post boy.
With this she paid off the rent owing on her and Charles’s terrace. Isobel had thought about moving into Mrs Palmer’s tiny cottage a few streets away to be a companion and, soon enough, a nurse in her final days. Mrs Palmer would have welcomed such an arrangement but she was overruled. Her cottage belonged to her eldest son, John, who refused to have such a ‘dangerous fallen woman’ living with his mother. Instead, poor Isobel scraped together enough to pay the rent on a smaller, shabbier terrace in another dingy street of Woolloomooloo. To make some cash, she sold most of the furniture and dresses that she had brought with her to Woolloomooloo, save only a few precious things, of course, including her mother’s brooch, her father’s field journals and sketchbooks, hers and Charles’s sketchbooks, and her own journals and unfinished paintings.
As she watched all these familiar possessions pass out of her life, she thought of the funereal procession of wagons and coaches loaded with treasure that she had watched leaving Woolloomooloo Hill when she was a small girl. She thought of the families bankrupted by the depression and forced to become refugees from their villas and mansions. Now it was her turn. She too was a castaway, a shipwreck survivor washed up by the tide of misfortune on an unknown shore. Her few precious possessions were her only links to the past.
Two days before the hasty and modest funeral of Charles Probius, buried in the cemetery at St Stephen’s in Newtown and farewelled by a small circle of friends and admirers, Isobel had received a letter that she now looked on as a last link with that past life. It was from Mr Simon Davidson, member of the Legislative Council, the outspoken critic and enemy of Isobel’s father. She had written to Mr Davidson after finishing her father’s journals and finding herself in a quandary as to what to do next.
What were her father’s intentions? I leave this true record in your hands. You will know what to do. Part of her could not believe that the Major, who had always been so proud and insistent in pressing his claims for recognition and fame, would wish to destroy his posthumous reputation. On the other hand, now that he was beyond worldly judgement, perhaps he thought it only just that the record be set straight. Who would it hurt but his children? Which is why, perhaps, he had left it in Isobel’s hands to decide.
In a moment of reckless and malicious revenge, Isobel imagined the terrible blow she could deliver to her proud aunt and her superior sister Grace. With her memories of the exodus of so many rich families from the Hill, she had also recalled her own family’s triumph: the purchase of Rosemount arising from Mr Macleay’s bankruptcy. As a little girl she had been struck by the nostrum ‘one man’s fortune was another man’s ruin’.
So who had profited from Isobel’s fall from grace and the tragic downward trajectory of her family’s fortune? It seemed to her that the only beneficiaries had been Grace and Augustus, who now lived in Rosemount in perfect bliss with their daughter, Olympia, untouched by misery and poverty. How sweet then to let them taste some of Isobel’s disgrace!
Though great was her temptation, Isobel knew such sentiments were despicable. And yet she still hungered to know the truth of her father’s past. There was only one way to find out for sure. So she wrote to Mr Davidson, revealing she had inherited and read her father’s private journals as well as the letter that Mr Davidson had sent him two weeks before their duel. She concluded, ‘I entreat you not to hide the facts as you know them for my sake. Please be honest with me, I beseech you, and provide me with the unvarnished, uncensored truth, no matter how painful it may be to hear.’
This was the reply she received:
Dear Mrs Isobel Ludiger,
I have read your letter with some degree of astonishment as you can imagine. I had no idea that your father would now risk linking his proud name to the truth he went to such pains to keep hidden. And yet it seems that he has left the door open to uncovering that Truth. I have good reason to remember what an exceptional young woman you are so it does not surprise me that your father has entrusted you with his legacy. Out of respect to your courage and love for him, I shall tell you what I know.
As I wrote to your father, Mr Charles Sturt had partly follow’d in the footsteps of Major Macleod’s second expedition down the Darling River. Sturt was surprised to discover how welcoming the Barkindji people were, contrary to your father’s descriptions of them as ‘murderous savages’. They told Mr Sturt what he believed to be a true account of the tragic events that occurred at the hands of Major Macleod�
��s men. This account is different from the one that the Major used to justify the later massacre at Mt Dispersion. I must warn you that it concerns some of the most depraved aspects of human nature. But you have asked for the ‘unvarnished, uncensored truth’ and so I shall tell you.
A young Aborigine named Topar, aged eleven at the time of the tragedy, told Mr Sturt what he saw that day. Two convicts had gone down to the river to fetch water and saw a native with his wife and child by the riverbed. One of the ‘whitefellas’ then went to the riverbank and, with threatening gestures, frighten’d away the native man who swam across the river to escape. The white man then tried to force himself on the poor native woman who resisted strenuously. In a fit of anger, he drew his pistol and shot the woman in the thigh. He then raped her. When he had finished, he killed her and her child with a tomahawk. The second white man shot at the man swimming in the water but missed. The three other convicts, sent by the Major to investigate, fired at the retreating native but their bullets only struck trees.
When he returned to Sydney, Mr Sturt consulted me about these revelations. I agreed to take responsibility for making the truth public as Sturt wanted to avoid any accusations of destroying the reputation of a rival explorer. I wrote to your father giving him the opportunity to correct the public record. He refused.
What was then the right course to pursue? I knew that your father had recently lost his son in an accident and his wife to illness. While I believed in the justice of my request, I also felt pity for your father. I reminded myself that he may well have been lied to by his men. He had hitherto always shown respect for Aboriginals and intolerance for aggression towards them. I also took into consideration his family name and the future of his children.
It was these thoughts that stayed my hand when I went to write to the Governor. Instead I chose to make public a lesser offence—his flagrant overspending of the departmental budget—to chastise him. Perhaps I regarded it as a ‘shot over the bow’ hoping he may still confess to the true nature of the events. Instead he challenged me to a duel.
The Opal Dragonfly Page 43
