‘No,’ said Robert, ‘not like that. Not big jumps like that.’
‘Yes! Yes!’ Lucy’s voice almost drowned the renewed shrieking from the bedroom. ‘Like this! Like this!’
‘No!’ Robert beat a crutch on the floor in frustration. ‘Little jumps!’
Elizabeth Robertson came in.
‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Now what is this? Stop that jumping, Miss Lucy.’
‘I have,’ said Lucy.
‘She has,’ said Robert indignantly at the same time.
‘Lucy,’ said Amelia, ‘don’t go back to your blocks. You say you are hungry. Elizabeth will give you something to eat.’
‘I don’t want anything to eat.’
‘It is laid out in the nursery, ma’am.’
‘Very good,’ said Amelia. ‘Send Madge to tell me when they have finished, Elizabeth. I will wash and change them and put them to bed.’
‘I am making a house,’ said Lucy.
‘Come, now, Miss Lucy.’
‘I don’t want to go out there.’
‘Lucy, dear . . .’ Amelia rose and took her hand, but Lucy pulled it away, grasped James Murray’s leg, and cried piteously that she wanted to stay with him. Robert swung over to Elizabeth’s side.
‘Look, Lucy, I am going with Elizabeth.’
‘And so will Lucy,’ said James. He picked up the little girl, and held her, sobbing, over his shoulder, patting her back with his free hand.
‘There is a good pudding,’ said Elizabeth, leading the way from the room.
‘Are there currants in it?’ enquired Robert.
Lucy stopped sobbing abruptly.
‘Black with ’em,’ said Elizabeth.
Lucy’s resumed sobbing was slightly forced. ‘Poor mites,’ said Amelia, when they had gone. ‘But they are young. Their faith,’ she said, sighing as she picked up her sewing, ‘has not been endangered and eroded by the disbelievers of this world. Perhaps Frances can convey the plans to Sydney, Louisa. I wonder when they will leave. Let me see—the news will go down on the Alligator. You know she has been detained for that purpose. I have not written a single letter. Well, she will arrive there in, say, eight days. And a ship to carry them is certain to be dispatched at once. That will be another eight days. Sixteen days, and some to spare for bad weather or delays.’
‘Three weeks,’ said Louisa.
Amelia nodded. ‘To be on the safe side.’
James Murray came back, sighing and shaking his head.
‘Poor James,’ said Amelia, looking at him over her sewing.
He sighed again, and sat down.
‘Well, James,’ said Amelia, ‘it is an ill wind, but it has blown its modicum of good.’
It was their first opportunity of discussing the event without the presence of the children. James Murray nodded in agreement. ‘There will be no libel action.’
‘That is not what I meant by good,’ said Amelia. ‘Mr Smith Hall ought to be brought to book.’
‘Someone else will do it,’ said Louisa.
‘But who as fit as our late commandant, Louisa, armed with his perfect probity?’
Murray lowered his eyes. Louisa looked with cocked head at her sketching pad. ‘Then what did you mean,’ she asked, ‘by a modicum of good?’
‘Why, that they are not for Madras.’
‘True!’ cried James with relief.
‘Madras is not healthy.’
‘Where will they go?’ asked James.
‘To Ireland, I expect,’ said Louisa.
‘One . . . may go only so far as Sydney.’ Amelia paused, with needle high and thread taut, and gave Louisa a consulting look. ‘I understand that to be a possibility?’
‘Do you suggest that Miss O’Beirne—’ But James stopped in confusion, made too shy by his own boldness to go on.
‘Will marry there?’ Amelia did not look at Louisa this time, but continued assiduously to sew. ‘There has been talk of it. And in my opinion, and I am sure in Letty’s, it would be quite the best thing.’
Letty shrieked again. James Murray pursed his lips, and Louisa went on pencilling her measurements. But Amelia shook her head.
‘All the same, it does not signify that she is out of her mind.’
‘That hardly needs saying,’ murmured Louisa.
‘Grief is not madness,’ agreed James Murray.
‘Of course not! But my dear James, to refuse to see you!’
‘She refuses to see anyone,’ said James.
‘Except Frances, which is quite natural.’
‘Frances is allowed in,’ said Louisa, ‘but I doubt if she is seen. She stands helplessly, poor girl, and watches, and can do nothing.’
‘So young! How can she find the right words?’
‘What are the right words?’
‘Louisa, the words of God.’
James bowed his head. ‘She will be ready to receive them soon.’
‘Carried by whom?’ asked Louisa.
Amelia rested her sewing on her lap. ‘I would offer myself as a humble receptacle, but would not do so if dear James were of our faith, or if there were another of our faith more fit than I. Now, how we do feel our lack of a chaplain!’ She raised her sewing again. ‘Henry Cowper would of course do his best, but he is a poor substitute at such a time.’
‘Henry does not offer himself as a receptacle,’ said Louisa. ‘At least, not for that. What a good thing Captain Clunie decided there should be no service today. He would have had to take it himself.’
James Murray drew his watch from his pocket. ‘I ought not to be so long absent from the hospital.’
But he spoke without urgency, and did not rise from his chair, for he was infected by the general disorganisation. He had not been forced to travel by bullock cart to the Eagle Farm during the absence of the search party: Clunie had kept him at hand not only to attend Robert, but to make sure that he would be present to attend Letty when the news came. No surgeon had been at the Eagle Farm for more than a week: medicines had been sent out by bullock cart with the rest of the stores, and so far at least, no one had been the worse for it. Yesterday James Murray had murmured to Clunie his first suspicion that under Logan too much had been done by rule instead of by need.
The drawing room was neither as pretty nor as comfortable as before. The blue sofa was still in its usual place, but the armchairs were contained by crates, and more empty crates, ready to receive other pieces, stood about the room. A few chairs, sturdy and rough, had been sent on loan from the lumber yard. Two of the shelves in the glass-fronted cupboard had been cleared of china, and a small crate stood open nearby, for Letty and Frances had been on their knees, packing the china, and Lucy, on top of a big crate, had been exulting over Robert, whose injury had prevented the climb, when Letty, as if informed by instinct, had suddenly risen, and had blundered across the room and through the french doors, and had seen the boat.
‘The burial—’ said Amelia. She broke off, let drop her sewing, and burst into tears. ‘No, to be sure, it is simply too dreadful. Try to keep up one’s spirits as one may, it is too dreadful.’
James Murray leaned out of his chair. ‘He must not be buried here.’
‘No,’ said Louisa.
‘That is what I was about to say,’ said Amelia, sobbing into a handkerchief. ‘There are prisoners—monsters—who say that if he is buried here, they will have him up.’
‘But supposing she wants him buried here?’ asked James.
‘We must all dissuade her,’ said Louisa. ‘You are right, Amelia. It is simply too dreadful.’
‘Oh, so I am right, am I?’ said Amelia, bridling through her tears, the toppling of one barricade having endangered others. ‘ “Right for once”, I think were the words on your tongue. I don
’t miss your mockery, Louisa. And there is much else I don’t miss, that you think I do.’
‘Well, dry your eyes,’ said Louisa calmly. ‘We must not quarrel, you and I.’
‘Certainly not, ladies,’ said James, trying to laugh.
‘Especially at this dreadful time,’ said Louisa.
‘Indeed! Indeed!’ cried James eagerly.
Amelia put away her handkerchief and picked up her sewing. ‘The white perpetrator of his murder,’ she said in a voice only slightly tearful, ‘or perpetrators, if more than one, must suffer the full penalty of the law. But I have said before, and I say now, and I shall repeat as often as needs be, that even at a time like this, the poor blacks must not be blamed. We must accept their share of the blame, for our failure to send missions among them. The law of man is but a reflection of the law of God. How may they be punished by a law they don’t know?’
Louisa and James assented. ‘But of course,’ said Louisa, ‘neither black nor white will be punished unless they are taken first.’
‘Inconceivable that they won’t be!’ said James.
‘Or that they will be,’ said Louisa.
‘Poor Captain Clunie. One sees his dilemma. He has not the men to send, yet must make the attempt. Lancelot,’ said Amelia, looking only at her sewing, ‘longs to go, though still feverish.’
‘And Victor. But it is absurd. How will they know where to look? The murderers may be hundreds of miles to the north or west by now, in country as wild and strange as the poles. And speaking of things wild and strange, James, you have not given me your opinion of my flower sketches.’
‘Ma’am, I prefer not to.’
‘Flowers should not be made to look like fleshly creatures,’ said Amelia in a suddenly trembling voice.
‘Yet now I have begun to do them in that way, I can see them in no other. It is very peculiar. How lucky your insects were finished, James, before this mood took me. When one can talk to Letty again, shall we give them into her charge to deliver in London?’
‘Why not into Frances’s charge?’ enquired Amelia.
‘Well—’
‘So you do think she will end her journey in Sydney?’
‘I believe,’ said James, ‘that she is quieter.’
They all listened.
‘Yes,’ said James, nodding, ‘I don’t hear even the sobbing. She is calmer.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘I shall wait a few minutes longer.’
Letty was certainly calmer. Still wearing the apron she had put on to pack the china, she lay near the edge of the big bed. Her right hand, which had felt so inanimate in Frances’s grasp of attempted consolation, was trailing over the edge, and her face was turned away, instead of rearing up at the chin, as before, to gasp and rake in the air needed for the expression of her sorrow. Her breast heaved in sighs instead of her former shuddering sobs, and except for these sighs, she was silent.
Only her feet were unaltered. In white stockings discoloured at the toes, they stuck straight up from the bed and pointed in different ways, like headstones neglected and askew. Frances found them so much a betrayal of her sister’s usual practised grace that it seemed an indelicacy to look at them, and as much as possible, she avoided doing so.
Frances no longer stood in uncertainty by the bed. Reconciled to at least a temporary helplessness, she had drawn a chair to the bedside, and was sitting with her elbows on its arms, and her feet on the first steps of the bedsteps, waiting again.
Before, she had been waiting simply for the first crazed sorrow to pass, as she knew it would do, for she had experienced it in some degree in her own life, and because she came from a country where there was much to mourn, had been able to observe it besides in Bridie and Meg and many others. But now, as Letty’s sighs became less frequent, and then died, and the silence took over entirely (yet was an active silence, and not to be imagined as the silence of sleep) Frances came to realise that her sister was deep in thought, was in the act at last of clothing her naked grief. And she realised too that her own present wait was not only for Letty to return to her surroundings (as Bridie and Meg, rising, would feel with their feet for their slippers and raise their hands to their hair), but that she was waiting as well for a sequel to the words Letty had said on seeing the boat. She was expecting, not an explanation of them, which she did not need, but some sequel in action.
While packing the china, Letty had been speaking gently, insistently, and in a voice too low for the children to hear, on what seemed to have occupied her mind most during the absence of the search party, though Frances now believed that it was only by directing her concentration to this one question—and to the future it might hold for her children—had she been able to alleviate her intense apprehension, to make her hands steady to wrap and pack the Irish china, and her voice to insist, against Frances’s equally gentle insistence, ‘But my love, you must send another letter by the Alligator. The coolness of your last weply was almost a discourtesy.’
‘I have not refused to marry him. I said I looked forward to our meeting in Sydney.’
‘Where you will impose your impossible conditions.’
‘Other persons in the colony have no convict servants.’
‘No gweat estate is managed without them.’
‘Nor does everyone have a great estate, or is heir to one.’
‘Fwances, without his uncle, what is he? A stwuggling lawyer.’
‘True. Indeed, it would be little better than governessing. So unless I find I love him, which would make the struggle worth something, I shan’t marry him. But it will never come to that, because in a choice between his uncle’s estate and me, he will choose the estate.’
‘Thus showing his good sense.’
‘No doubt.’
‘Oh Fwances, silly Fwances, let things be. He will accept his uncle’s offer, and you will be his wife, and you will have the gweater chance of convict weform, because you will be among them.’
‘But who will reform their masters?’
‘Why, if that is needed, you will also be among them.’
‘And their master’s masters?’
‘Can you aim so high?’
‘Not alone. No. And besides,’ said Frances, more gentle than ever, ‘most of those are not capable of reform. They must be removed from office.’
‘What! Oh, gwacious, Louisa says there are no Jacobins now, but there is one left, I swear.’
But she had laughed as she spoke, and Frances had smiled in response, and as if in agreed respite, they had consulted on packing the china.
‘Spouts are a pwoblem.’
‘Mama,’ said Lucy, let me look at the tea pot.’
‘No,’ said Robert abruptly, ‘it is to be packed.’
‘We could pack it this way,’ said Frances.
But Letty had got to her feet and was blundering towards the door. The children, silenced at once, Lucy on the crate and Robert below, were watching her. Frances put down the tea pot and ran after her.
As soon as she saw the boat, Frances turned back and shut both the french doors, so that the children, still as immobile as she had left them, could not follow.
The tide being low, the boat was drawn in, not to the stone wharf, to which the body would have had to be raised many feet, but to the narrow timber jetty near the house, which advanced far enough into the stream to allow the body to be lifted with comparative ease on to the waiting stretcher.
This transfer was in progress when Frances reached Letty’s side. Knowles and another of the hospital attendants were receiving the body from Lazarus, who stood upright in the rocking boat, while Collison and Henry Cowper, in a second boat with the other prisoners, had come alongside to hold the first steady.
Captain Clunie and James Murray stood together on the wharf, and if proof were needed of the content
s of that great stained cocoon, it was given by the swift glance of trepidation Murray suddenly sent over his shoulder towards the house, and which, catching on Letty’s face, turned into a stare of dismay. Murray’s glance was followed by Clunie. He saw Letty, removed his cap, and bowed his head in solemn confirmation.
Frances put an arm round Letty’s shoulders and turned her towards the drawing room. She let herself be turned, making little hobbling movements with her feet. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, the blood had left her face, and she spoke through whitened lips.
‘At least, now it will not all come out.’
‘No,’ said Frances, fully understanding in that moment what the main burden of her sister’s worry had been. But it was doubtful if Letty heard her, and indeed if she was herself conscious of having spoken. As Frances opened the door, she pushed past her, and ran across the room to where Lucy, crouching on top of the crate, and Robert, on his crutches at its base, were waiting. Frances thought she was about to embrace them, but when she had almost reached them she halted, as if in confusion and forgetfulness, and simply stared. By the time any of them spoke, Frances had reached them.
‘My father is dead,’ whispered Lucy.
Frances supplemented Letty’s twisting but silent lips. ‘Yes.’
‘They have all been saying so,’ said Robert with a nod. ‘They say Boylan got him.’
Letty whirled about to face her sister. She spoke very fast. ‘Let them stay only with you or Elizabeth. Or Amelia or Louisa, if they will.’ She grasped Frances’s hands in hers and vigorously shook them. ‘I will see no one.’
‘Not me?’ cried Frances, her eyes filling with tears.
‘No one! No one!’ said Letty with ferocity.
In her rush from the room she was impeded by Madge Noakes and Elizabeth Robertson, who came crowding together into the doorway. Elizabeth’s face was crumpled in distress, but Madge’s was peaceful, and her dark eyes enlarged and steady. She wore neither cap nor kerchief, and was fastening the buttons of her bodice as she came.
Letty clapped both hands over her face. The women stood aside, and with her face still hidden, Letty ran between them. When she reached the corridor, Frances heard the first shriek. She stood distracted, her will divided between her emotions and her instructions, uncertain whether to follow or to stay, until she saw that Lucy had clambered down from the crate and was crossing the room towards the verandah, and that Robert was following her, swinging fast on his crutches.
The Commandant Page 29
