Land of Golden Wattle

by J. H. Fletcher

  Ephraim was reluctant to believe that a physician as highly regarded as Sir Edmund Wilkes could not resolve any medical problem, major or not.

  ‘So what other action will you take?’

  ‘My dear sir,’ Sir Edmund said in a lofty tone, ‘the practice of medicine requires the co-operation of the patient. Without that the most talented practitioner is rendered helpless. Helpless, sir! As, most regrettably, is the case here.’

  A cold hand gripped Ephraim’s heart. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I am saying, sir, that the spear point damaged tendons in the foot. The injury might have responded to treatment but has been exacerbated by neglect. By being walked upon, sir! By being subjected to use when absolute rest for wounds of this type is a prerequisite. What you have done has resulted in serious and I regret to inform you irremediable damage to the foot. Ruptured tendons cannot be repaired. Once severed, no surgeon can restore them to health.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘Which means, Captain, that I can and shall cure the infection from which you are presently suffering.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But the tendons cannot be repaired. You will limp until you die.’

  ‘I was given to understand that you are a pre-eminent authority in the treatment of war wounds.’

  ‘That is true,’ the physician said.

  ‘Yet you can do nothing to help me.’

  ‘I have already explained –’

  ‘A reputation without performance is of limited value.’

  Sir Edmund was indignant. ‘I shall rid you of the infection,’ he said. ‘No one in the world can do more. And if you wish to blame somebody, blame yourself.’

  ‘Very haughty he was,’ Ephraim said. ‘And I’ll guarantee his bill will reflect it. But unfortunately that doesn’t help me. He says he will clear the infection tomorrow but for the limp it seems nothing can be done.’

  He was sharing a dish of roast beef with his friend the stockbroker Peterfield Adkins in Esau’s Chop House in the Strand. He was also, bitterly and deliberately, getting drunk. He was trying to put a cheery face on it but the truth was his world had come crashing down. The army had been his life; he had never contemplated anything else. Now, brutally and unexpectedly, that avenue had been closed to him. An hour in Sir Edmund’s consulting rooms and he had become a nothing man, without money or prospects, and his self-esteem was destroyed. He had thought to marry Emma Tregellas but how could he now, when he could offer her nothing but penury? It would mean her destruction. He knew she would accept it for him but was he prepared to accept it for her? What was the honourable course?

  Beyond the leaded lights of the bow window coaches, cabs and pedestrians fought a chill wind that lifted skirts and sent hats bowling down the crowded street: London was the biggest city in England and the Strand one of its busiest thoroughfares.

  ‘Perhaps another opinion?’ Peterfield suggested.

  ‘I doubt it. I have the feeling he’s right.’

  ‘Won’t that mean resigning your commission?’ Peterfield asked.

  A grim smile. ‘A regiment of foot is no place for cripples. So the answer to your question, my dear, is yes. No more army for me.’

  ‘What do you plan to do? Become a gentleman of leisure?’

  ‘I had planned to return to the Antipodes but that is now out of the question.’ He stared morosely into his wine glass. ‘I fear my damnable foot will mean many changes apart from the army.’

  ‘But there is nothing to stop you going anyway, is there?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Ephraim said. ‘Apart from a complete lack of non-military skills and an equal lack of money.’

  ‘But surely your aunt –’

  ‘My aunt has always been of the opinion that the money and the title should be reunited. My cousin is a dissolute buffoon who prefers London to Norfolk and has rarely visited the estate. But he has a son who in course of time will become the eighth earl. She will leave everything to young Percival.’ He gave a broken smile. ‘Damn the lucky lad’s eyes.’

  ‘So what are your plans?’

  ‘At the moment? None.’

  He could take her to America or accompany her to Australia. And do what? Without money or skills, he might end as a clerk in a counting house, which would drive him mad, or even as a labourer. Dear God! Could he subject her to that humiliation? Could he subject himself?

  ‘Then I have a suggestion,’ Peterfield said. ‘Come in with me.’

  ‘Become a stockbroker?’

  ‘Why not? There’s good money to be made.’

  ‘But I know nothing about stocks.’

  ‘Neither did I when I began. You’ll soon learn the ropes. There is one condition, mind.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Our clients expect their brokers to be married men.’

  Emma had bought two dresses after her arrival in London, lighter and brighter than the mourning grey she had been wearing. She had visited the shipping agents’ offices and booked passage to Hobart Town in faraway Van Diemen’s Land. She had taken a coach through the brawling London streets to the docks. With her case and what remained of her precious money safely stowed in her cabin she now stood on the deck of the Admiral Cockburn while the crew readied the vessel, which the master, Captain Cooling, had told her would head downriver as soon as the ebb cut in.

  ‘Wind and tide in our favour, we should be out of the river before dark.’

  Emma waited.

  Ephraim had touched her hand; he had smiled, speaking soft words; he had left her with her heart once again smashing against her chest.

  Now she waited.

  He had been confident the doctor would cure his wounded foot. He had told her he would be travelling with her.

  ‘We shall celebrate our escape together,’ he had said the evening before his departure from Raedwald Hall. She had believed him. Now she stood on Admiral Cockburn’s deck, fragments of ice from the windblown sleet matting her hair, and waited for him to come, the man to whom she had given her heart. Every face of every man along the wharf was his until each turned and became a stranger.

  The crew bustled; the longshoremen stood by the warps; the captain was by the helm watching the first flowering of the sails along the yards. The visitors had gone ashore; the gangway was empty. Still she looked. Still she waited. He had said he would come. She willed him to come.

  He did not.

  The gangway was hoisted in. The warps fell splashing into the water. The vessel edged clear of the wharf. Men like monkeys scaled the rigging. The long voyage had begun. One final beseeching look at the vanishing berth; Emma went below with darkness in her soul.

  You spin the wheel. You win; you lose.

  ‘Marriage?’ Ephraim said. ‘Are you serious?’

  A sudden hope. Perhaps that might be the solution? Marriage to Emma, become a London stockbroker. There was still time to fetch her off the boat…

  ‘Never more so,’ Peterfield said. ‘Clients think a man with a family is less likely to take off in the night.’

  ‘There is one woman whom I would dearly love to marry,’ Ephraim said.

  But within seconds his hopes, so cruelly raised, came crashing down

  ‘No, no, that won’t do,’ Peterfield said. ‘I am thinking of a specific woman, you see. My sister Veronica would be part of the deal. I am suggesting you marry her. Quite frankly you’d be doing me the most enormous favour if you did.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Veronica’s driven away every suitor she’s laid eyes on,’ Peterfield said. ‘She had her chance with Mackenzie. Owns half the Highlands, a castle that Macbeth might have envied, and she treated him like a footman! He wouldn’t put up with her nonsense and I for one don’t blame him. Now she’ll do it my way. She’s twenty-two, damn it! Before we know it she’ll be too old to make a match at all and I don’t plan to support her all my life. It’s time she settled down.’

  ‘Why do you think she’ll say yes to me?’r />
  ‘As I have just said, I don’t plan to support her all my life. I’ve a wife and seven children. I don’t have the groats or inclination to keep a sister as well. She might hanker for a duke but between having nothing and having money she’ll choose money every time. She’ll take you, I’ve no doubt of that.’

  ‘Is she a looker?’

  ‘She looks like a sackful of spiders. But I daresay she has all the tackle a man needs in a woman. And later, handsome fellow like you, I doubt you’ll have any problem finding other women if that’s what you want.’

  That night Ephraim lay awake and watched Emma’s face in the darkness.

  His heart ached but it was no use; without funds or prospects he had nothing to offer her. To abandon his dream, to marry someone he did not even know, would be like tearing out his heart, but the brutal truth was that he could do nothing else. He saw he had been a fool to think his damaged foot could be so easily mended. He blamed himself for treating the wound too lightly. For treating Emma, dear Emma, too lightly also. It was clear now their love had been doomed from the first.

  He held her tight in his arms. Every part of his body ached for her. Tears in his eyes, he made love to his love in the darkness. He felt her soft breath.

  It was no use, no use. That chapter of his life was closed. And he had to earn his living somehow.

  The next day he went to Peterfield’s office and told him he agreed to his terms.

  1982

  It was the eyes Tamara remembered. There had been other things, of course, on what had so far been her only trip to Europe – to revisit the graves of the ancestors, as Bec had put it – but the impression of the eyes lingered, soiling her skin. She’d been twenty-three then and a bit of a nervous Nelly at first but that had soon changed; she had never been one to live in terror of the unknown.

  Greece, first. The islands. There, in the stark bones of marble temples, she discovered the mystery and magic of the past. She also discovered ouzo and the sensation of reeling off the walls of the corridor leading to her bedroom overlooking the fishing harbour, the boats with their multi-coloured sails, the lemon trees growing in the garden. She made much of her discovery, believing that ever more she would be able to taste the essence of the islands in the ani-seed-flavoured liquor. A false hope; she discovered the ouzo magic had deep roots and could not be transplanted.

  After Greece Italy, where from Genoa to Palermo she was pinched so often her bottom was covered in blue exclamation marks when she showered of an evening.

  They never troubled her. They were all part of the joy of living that overflowed so exuberantly in the Italian spirit. As long as you took them the right way you could think of them as compliments. As fun. She was young, alive, some would have said beautiful, and being pinched was part of it, telling her that others thought so too. They were harmless.

  She went on to Paris, Berlin and London. Things were different there. It was in those northern cities she first encountered the eyes, hard and speculative, signalling not laughter but danger. Even on the main streets they stripped her bare as she passed. Initially she ventured no further but found she could grow used to anything in time. It wasn’t long before she was exploring the shadowed alleyways piled with rubbish. From overflowing bins a hundred eyes watched as she passed, rats jealous of their citadels.

  Was she looking for something? Someone? She could not have said. Late one London evening, the first darkness pressing down, she turned into a lane leading between the blank walls of warehouses to the moon-glint water of the Thames. There she found the answer in the rainbow lights of a bar, its face to the river with its wail of passing barges, riding lights shining like jewels in the darkness.

  She pushed open the door and went in.

  A bar room dimly lit. A handful of drinkers. At one end of the counter she met a man about her own age. He was wearing a feathered hat and told her he was an artist.

  ‘Got a name?’

  ‘Aladdin. Aladdin Warboys. But I lost my lamp,’ he said.

  They talked or mostly she did; Aladdin was not much of a talker, more a man of action. Was he ever. Afterwards, she never knew how it happened, she went back with him to his place, a garret with a skylight. She lay on the bed and looked over his shoulder at the pacing clouds. She floated. She flew.

  They became an item. He came with her when she paid a visit to the Scilly Isles off Lands End. One warm night they intended to go for a drink at the Island Hotel but when they got there his hand drew her on. Instead of drinking beer or gin they made love in the heather, the loom of the Bishop light flowering in the west. She listened to the crying of gulls and knew it was time to go home.

  Aladdin came with her. She discovered that, like ouzo, he was not transplantable. He didn’t take to Tasmania and Tasmania didn’t take to him. He soured the relationship with endless complaints, while the locals looked askance at his feathered hats. It wasn’t long before they were sick of each other. He left. She stayed.

  She thought she might miss him and for a few days did, but the loneliness passed. She asked herself whether their weeks together had been a waste of time. She decided that on the contrary they had been a valuable experience. Through her relationship with Aladdin she had discovered two things that stood her in good stead.

  Her roots were here, in this land. She had seen as much of the world as interested her; now she was home.

  The second thing was she’d found she had the courage to accept adventure. She had survived the watching eyes, the rats and alleyways; she had survived Aladdin Warboys. She saw that the family estate must be modernised to achieve its potential in a modern and competitive world. She would face opposition: from the farm managers, from Grandma Bec, perhaps even from her brother, but after Europe and Aladdin Warboys she knew she had the will to take on the lot of them.

  The estate named for Hobart’s river became her lover and her love.

  1826–7

  Ephraim Dark married Veronica Adkins, his business partner’s sister, in St Michael’s church Holborn on Saturday 17 December 1826, the Reverend Carmichael Strutt presiding.

  Afterwards they celebrated at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street. His mother-in-law disapproved, pointing out that the upper rooms had at one time been used as a brothel. On this occasion no money changed hands but Ephraim thought there were obvious similarities between the happenings of those days and what was planned for the wedding night. He also thought it would be wise not to point this out.

  Later Ephraim left his wife to make ready. He walked out into the street. It was dark and cold with a threat of snow. He thought about Emma Tregellas far away. Emma, who had gone and taken much of his heart with her. Emma, whom fate had sent to a land beyond the seas, whom he was destined never to see again. Yet she was with him still and would be, he knew, both that night and far into the future. No help for it; the die was cast. Yet the thought of her was an ache in the soul.

  There were moments when he thought it would have been better had he never met Emma at all.

  On board ship Emma struck up a friendship with a Mrs Stephen, travelling with her husband and four children, who airily confessed that dear Mr Stephen, as brother to the solicitor general, had the closest connection with men of influence in the colony. This lady apart, Emma got to know no one on the five-month voyage.

  She did one thing, however. She sent her uncle a letter by fast packet from Cape Town, announcing her impending arrival in the colony and saying how much she looked forward to meeting him.

  It seemed the courteous thing to do.

  ‘I suppose there’s no hope the damned girl fell overboard during the crossing,’ Barnsley Tregellas said. ‘The Indian Ocean can be rough, after all.’

  It was an hour after dawn, Wednesday 14 February 1827. It was a clear day but there was a slight chill in the air; the southern summer was dying and the poplar trees bordering Barnsley’s land were already showing the first hint of yellow. Any day now the first storm of autumn would strip the poplars’ bran
ches in a tempest of spinning leaves.

  A stocky man of fifty-three with iron grey hair and an unforgiving mouth, Barnsley stood in the drawing room of his stone-built house and stared through the window at the Derwent River shining golden at the bottom of the slope. He spoke without turning his head.

  ‘What are we going to do with her, Mullett? Tell me that.’

  ‘A thought did occur to me, sir,’ said Mullett, his convict manservant.

  Barnsley turned and stared at Mullett with hard banker’s eyes. ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘This lady what is seeking to impose herself upon us, sir. Am I right in thinking she is your brother’s daughter?’

  ‘My late brother, yes. As I told you, the damn fool got himself killed in a duel. Owing me a thousand guineas, what’s more. I suppose I can forget any notion of recovering it. Unless you think she’s coming to pay me back. I doubt that, Mullett. I doubt it very much.’

  ‘I was wondering, sir, whether there might be another way to recoup your investment.’

  Barnsley watched Mullett closely. The man had been convicted of embezzlement but there was nothing wrong with his brain. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Did you not tell me your late brother was wedded to a lady connected with royalty?’

  ‘Not royalty. Aristocracy, yes. My sister-in-law was second cousin to the Earl of Leominster. God knows how he managed to catch her.’

  ‘Which would make the young lady herself quite a catch, would it not, sir? A relative of the Earl of Leominster?’

  ‘A distant relative.’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, I would say distance is of no consequence. Seeing as the colony is short of what you might call genuine aristocrats. Might be quite a catch, sir. For the right gentleman.’

  ‘Marry her off to the highest bidder?’ Barnsley paced and thought. He stopped in mid-stride, staring at the convict with a cold smile. ‘By God, Mullett, I think you may be on to something.’

  He returned to the window and stared down at the Admiral Cockburn, the immigrant ship that had arrived the previous night and would soon be discharging her passengers. Among them, presumably, his niece.