by Peter McAra
‘And I earnestly ask, before God, that you, my wife, do the same,’ he said, voice ringing with sincerity. ‘So if you have assumed a false name, as well you might have — a common enough practice in this new country — I trust that you will write nothing but the truth on this sacred occasion.’ He placed a blotter over his writing and laid the pen beside the book.
Eliza nodded, too charged with emotion to answer, and took up the pen.
‘I, Eliza Downing, spinster, late of Marley, Dorset, do hereby…’ She finished the words she had rehearsed with Mrs Blakemore, scrawled the signature she had not written since her days back in the village of her birth. She set down the pen and smiled at Martin, who stood a respectful distance away. He returned her smile, then stepped forward, head bent towards the book to take in her words.
The choking cough. The wave of white shock flooding Martin’s face like a giant wave breaking over a rock. His stumbling to the floor. His strangled gasp, the smash of his head on the tiles.
‘Eliza Downing.’ The words came from him as if strong hands gripped his throat in a stranglehold. ‘I am…your…natural father.’
As she watched, paralysed, he turned and stared up at her, eyes wide with horror. ‘My God! My God! Forgive me! I have married my daughter!’
He choked, clutched his chest, groaned; a high-pitched, throttled gasp. Then his face froze. He body twitched, lay still. His eyes stared upwards at — nothing.
After a paralysed minute, Eliza bent, took hold of his wrist. She knew well enough the practice of taking the pulse of someone lying injured, had done it often aboard the Swan when her messmates lay sick. In the limp wrist she now clutched in panic, there was no pulse. She stared again into the wide-open eyes, took in the stillness of the prone body. It was the stillness of death.
Martin Townsend was dead, from the fatal shock to his fragile heart.
Eliza felt herself floating, an automaton without sense or feeling. She removed the blotter from Martin’s signature in the register. Read the words.
I, Martin Townsend, widower, late of Marley, Dorset…
Martin Townsend. The vicar of Marley. The kindly man who had invited her to his library, discussed the classics with her. The gentleman who had halted his horse by her garden, talked with her over the fence. The parson who had preached wisdom from his pulpit every Sunday. The man towards whom her foster-mother Aunt Hannah had nursed a dark, never-expressed, suspicion…
In the state of suspended emotion which enveloped her, Eliza took stock of other scraps of insight now pulsing into her memories.
Her golden hair, identical to that of the blue-eyed man now lying dead on the vestry floor.
Her unusual intelligence around words and numbers, often remarked upon by the villagers of Marley. Vicar Townsend, it was said, had earned firsts in all his Oxford exams — signs of dedicated scholarship.
Her passion for study, for books — remarkable in a village of working class peasants.
The cryptic smile, the knowing nods, given her by Mother Turlington, the village wise woman, as she passed by in the village square, or outside the church on Sabbath mornings. She remembered the old woman’s puzzling comment from an afternoon the pair met as she walked home from the village school. ‘Goodness me, child. Your hair is grown into spun gold. So like our dear vicar’s. And your eyes too. Blue, like his.’
She recalled her flash of curiosity the first time she had looked into the face of Vicar Bentleigh at St Mathew’s mere months before.
Martin Townsend was indeed her father. He would not have wished to identify her as an escaped convict. She had lately learned that the punishment for escape was death by hanging. Many a convict had seized the moment when he worked unguarded in field or barn, and fled into the vast unknown. Lately, the government had been forced to impose a harsh deterrent. She took hold of the register, tore out the page each had signed, and held it in the candle flame until it fell into black ashes.
For a last moment, she looked down upon the body of the man she would ever afterwards acknowledge as her true father. Then she stepped back into the church, her body trembling like a skeleton tree in a winter storm.
‘My. Husband. Is. Dead!
CHAPTER 26
For hours at the end of that long, long day of standing at the gates of hell, Eliza lay sleepless. She must resolve the conflict that burned deep in her soul before she could ever sleep again. The father she now saw as her own true blood, whose intellect she had inherited, was dead. As long as she lived, she would remember the times when they had shared books telling of the knowledge of the ages, the wonders of the world. She lit a candle and stood, staring into the looking glass by her bed.
‘Who am I? Who am I?’ She spoke aloud to the sad ghost who peered back at her, chin lit by the candle she held to her breast. All her life, until that day, she had known herself as the daughter of Charlotte and Silas Downing, offspring of a seamstress and a ploughman. A village child, born to toil. To stand head bowed while the gentry rode by in their coach and four. To curtsey when they stepped down from their coach to attend the village church on Sundays. To be silent when Viscount De Havilland spoke to Mr Harcourt on those rare moments when he visited his children in their schoolroom. To work out her life in the village, if not as a milkmaid, then as teacher in the village school. To subsist on the pennies earned from her teaching, on the vegetables she might grow in the cottage’s humble garden, the butter and cheese she might make from Bessy the cow’s modest, ever shrinking daily gift of milk.
Then Harry had come into her life. In her childish naïveté, she had believed him when he told her they would marry. Her finger flicked to the scar in the palm of her hand once again. And yet…and yet… On impulse, she slid out of her nightdress and stood naked before the looking glass, staring at the wraithlike image before her. Slowly, slowly, as she peered into the glass, her face, her eyes, seemed to change.
‘I am a new being,’ she said aloud. ‘I am a gentlewoman. A widow. I am aged one-and-twenty. From this moment on, I will become a new person.’
Then she slid back into her bed and dreamed of Harry. Harry pulling up beside her as she walked along a path to the village. Harry reaching for her hand, lifting her onto his horse, nestling her body between his legs, holding her between strong, loving arms as he flicked the horse’s reins. Whispering in her ear as the horse sped into a canter.
‘Come back to me, Eliza. Come back.’
The parishioners took the news of their vicar’s death calmly.
‘Poor man. He were always a strange one. Always close unto himself. A body don’t wonder that his poor heart died the moment he signed the register. That heart of his were always feeble. Sometimes he would have to sit while he were preaching at the pulpit. Take a little breather, he said.’
To all intents and purposes his widow, Eliza retained a lawyer to sort through Martin’s papers. The lawyer was more down-to-earth than the parishioners.
‘Your legal wedded husband — we have a church full of witnesses to swear to that — was possessed of a large fortune, left him by his former wife, one Hepzibah De Havilland. The records were found in his trunk. And he had arranged for authenticated copies to be kept safe in the local bank. So, Mrs Bentleigh, I must congratulate you on your most generous inheritance. I shall have a word to the bank manager at Campbelltown. You may be sure that he will advance you cash, as much as you wish, immediately thereafter.’
Eliza continued to ponder her future during the long sleepless nights following her father’s burial. No one in the world would ever learn of the outrageous truth that had caused his frail heart to quit beating. Mother Turlington, if she had somehow divined that Eliza was Martin’s natural daughter, must be long dead. Eliza’s purpose in teaching at the mission school seemed now to have vanished. It had been the vicar’s notion, and now he was gone there seemed little point in continuing.
What to do with her life? She reminded herself that as a rich widow, she could mould her future as she wishe
d. First, she must explore Sydney Town, make a new life for herself. Then the way would be open to consider ways she might return to the arms of the man she would always love.
When Eliza told Mrs Blakemore that she must leave the mission, the housekeeper poured her a generous cup of sympathy.
‘I understands, dearie. Your poor heart must be broke. Your husband dead, afore he took you to wife, proper-like. You must weep every time you sees his house, the chapel, the schoolhouse, all the places where the two of you took your loving walks.’
‘Er, yes.’
As Eliza embarked on the long coach journey to Sydney Town, she fell to wondering how she might conduct herself as a rich widow. Though born and raised as a lowborn child, she had read much of the ways of the gentry during her surreptitious years in the library of the Great House. Over those years, she had blended what she read with what she saw in the gentlefolk traversing its stately rooms and endless corridors. Back in England, everyone, from the humblest bootblack to the most elevated prince of the realm, instinctively placed others at a particular level on the shelves of the social hierarchy. And their first steps in making this placement began the moment they heard a stranger’s first spoken word.
‘Prunes and prisms. Prunes and prisms. Prunes and prisms.’ Eliza murmured the words to herself a hundred times as the coach rattled on its way. Her tutor Mr Harcourt had drummed into Eliza’s brain what he termed the proper pronunciation of those words during her first heady days in the schoolroom of the Great House.
‘A slight rolling of the r, then shape the lips into a kiss as you pronounce the vowels,’ her tutor had ordered.
Now her challenge would come from the first words she spoke to a local resident, likely a gentleman rather than a gentlewoman, when she stepped from the coach. Everyone knew that gentlewomen were thin on the ground in Sydney Town. Since its beginnings, the place had been host to shiploads of overwhelmingly male-dominated immigrants. Lately, waves of entrepreneurial young men — some tradesmen, some gentry — had crashed onto Botany Bay’s shores as stories of the new land’s wealth, its opportunities, filtered back to the Olde Country.
The men tended to be young, adventurous, risk-takers. Few of these fortune hunters had brought wives. Now, their fortunes accumulating healthily, they searched for mates. Children would become essential as the men realised they must bequeath their wealth to their offspring before they died. Newly arrived gentlemen would be on the lookout for that rarest of species, the unattached gentlewoman.
On the evening of the first day’s travel, the coach pulled up at the King’s Inn in the village of Liverpool. Never before having set foot inside an inn, Eliza must now take a room for the night; her first act as a gentlewoman. Certainly, money was no object, but still her nerves tingled at the prospect. She reached into her purse for a sovereign and stepped through the inn’s battered doors, hoping her newly bought fine clothes would speak for her. A maid saw her, curtseyed.
‘Would ye be wantin’ a room for the night, Miss?’
‘Indeed I do. Thank you.’
‘Your baggage, Miss?’
‘The ostler may fetch it.’ Eliza must appear unconcerned.
‘We has smaller rooms, Miss. Then upstairs, larger; as costs three shillin’s.’
‘The larger, thank you.’
‘And dinner, Miss? We has a big pot of beef stew on the fire. Along with vegetables. What we grows in the inn’s garden.’
‘Thank you. Serve my meal in my room, if you please.’
‘Yes, miss. Thank ‘ee, Miss.’ They reached the room; a comfortable enough space, with a generous dining table, a many-paned small window overlooking the road to Sydney Town.
‘Will that be all, Miss? I’ll tell the ostler — your baggage.’
‘Thank you. One moment.’ Eliza dropped the sovereign into the puzzled girl’s hand.
‘Ow! My lady! Thank ‘ee. A blessed fortune!’ The girl curtseyed low. ‘But why, my lady? Why did you — ?’
‘I want you to enjoy a little happiness for a moment or two. You deserve it.’ She could hardly tell the peasant lass that she had provided Eliza’s first step into the world of the gentry, and for that she must be rewarded appropriately.
‘I’ll run and fetch your dinner, Miss. And thank ‘ee. From the bottom of my heart.’
Eliza eased herself into a chair beside the window and looked out into the evening. She had passed her first test as a gentlewoman. Now a new world lay open to her — a world in which she could begin her search for Harry De Havilland.
CHAPTER 27
At dusk next evening, the coach pulled up outside a small Sydney Town hotel that had struggled, and failed, to achieve the pretentiousness that would attract the wealthier visitor. Eliza made out the name Kangaroo Inn in faded paint atop the façade facing the street — George Street, she had observed as the coach turned off the highway a few minutes earlier.
‘Dinner is served in the dining room.’ The concierge pointed. ‘Will madame?’
‘Thank you. First I must attend to my toilette.’ She touched the brim of her hat, smoothed her skirts.
‘Of course, madam. Shall I tell the maître d’ you require a table in, say, half an hour?’
‘Thank you.’ Eliza ascended the stairs confidently, looking forward to the solitude and quiet of her room.
Soon she sat alone in the Princess Adelaide suite, the hotel’s most expensive, apparently aimed at wealthy gentlewomen travelling alone. The concierge had read her clothes, her bearing, her accent, then offered her the finest room. She observed the depth of his bow when she accepted, and paid the tariff in advance. She was three parts a gentlewoman already. The rest should be easy.
A week later Eliza moved into her new house. She had bought the place immediately after inspecting it, finding the cost trifling by comparison with the healthy balance in her newly opened bank account, and the expectation of generous annual earnings from the investments in her portfolio. The house was three storeys high, with low-ceilinged servants’ quarters at ground level, and two generously constructed floors above. A high stone fence with an iron gate faced the street and a stable opened onto a lane at the rear. Later she might buy a coach and horses, but not yet. Any place she might wish to visit was a mere ten minutes’ walk away. This took her to the centre of the town, with its churches, markets, shops and dock towers.
What next? She would fit out her house with furniture, knick-knacks, a larder full of pots and pans and cooking ingredients. She would employ servants. She smiled as she recalled some of her fellow passengers on the Swan. Whatever came to pass, she must never make the mistake of recruiting one of them. But setting up house would not give her the diversion her mind hungered for. She pictured herself sitting in the large drawing room reading, dreaming of Harry. Never knitting or embroidery. She was simply not mentally equipped for such pastimes. When night fell after her first day in residence, she sat on a wooden crate in the drawing room and looked about her, imagined the room decked with elegant furniture. Imagined Harry seated on the sofa, next to her. Imagined his hand, his lips, reach for hers…
One morning, after she’d lived in her new house for a week, she took a walk round the harbour foreshore. As she had heard, it provided a pleasant distraction. She passed Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, the place where the wife of former Governor Macquarie had ordered a seat to be built so that she could sit and contemplate the sea, all the while looking in the direction of her beloved Scotland. As Eliza returned through the town to complete the circuit back to Woolloomooloo, a man fell into step beside her. He was young, dressed in gentleman’s attire from elegant hat to polished shoes with silver buckles. A lock of curly light brown hair fluttered across his brow in the breeze. At odds with this pleasant picture was a large, much stitched and repaired canvas sack he carried on his shoulder.
‘A pleasant day for walking, is it not, Mrs Bentleigh?’
‘Er, indeed.’ She maintained her pace and direction. How did the man know her name?
‘I sincerely beg your indulgence, ma’am. Addressing you informally before we have been introduced. But I am your next door neighbour. Horatio Cathcart at your service, ma’am.’ He dropped a mock bow as he walked, then smiled, a smile that Eliza must describe as disarming. ‘Mr Thompson — he negotiated the sale of your house — he told me your name.’
‘All is forgiven, Mr Cathcart.’ Eliza smiled back, enjoying the moment, resisting the reflex urge to curtsy in return. Never before in her life had she exchanged words with a dashing young gentleman as if she were his equal. She spoke inwardly to herself. Eliza Downing. You are become a gentlewoman. Now conduct yourself as such.
‘Perhaps,’ He beamed as he spoke. ‘I may be of assistance to you as you…acclimatise to the neighbourhood.’ His smile widened.
‘Indeed.’ Eliza returned his smile. ‘I trust you to inform me of any bunyips which may lurk hereabouts.’ She had learned the local word for hidden monsters from her Aboriginal pupils during her time at the mission. If she dropped the name in easy conversation, it might tactfully inform the dashing young Mr Cathcart that she had not arrived on the last ship from Southampton.
‘Mmm. The only bunyip here in Woolloomooloo is Miss Aynsleigh. A near neighbour to both of us. Eighty years old if she’s a day, and always lying in wait for anyone who so much as drops a scrap of paper in our street. We are high society, you understand.’
‘Thank you. I must ever be on my guard against Miss Aynsleigh, then.’
‘Not too obviously on your guard, I trust. Miss Aynsleigh has a habit of inviting neighbours to soirées. She sings obscure ditties from her Home County — Kent, I believe — and accompanies herself on the harpsichord. And she serves truly irresistible cakes and tea. You have been warned.’
