William turned his mind to other matters. ‘I’ll have to go down to see my uncle once I’ve got you to Sydney. But there are servants there who’ll look after you.’
‘And make sure I don’t nick nuthun,’ Maria said.
‘Something like that,’ William said.
Cynthia Tregellas stared at her husband.
‘You’ve done what?’
‘I need an heir,’ William said. ‘You’re not able to give me one so it has been necessary for me to make other arrangements. The woman in question is waiting for us in Sydney and we shall journey there together.’
‘Do you know how humiliated that makes me feel?’ she said.
His cold eyes, so like his uncle’s, stared her down. ‘About as humiliated as I felt when I discovered you were incapable of giving me the heir every man requires.’ He sipped from the glass he was holding. ‘Look at you. Useless, utterly useless.’
For once in her life Cynthia’s outrage overcame her timidity. ‘This child… You expect me to pretend to the world that it is mine. That is your plan, I take it? Well, I won’t do it. I won’t!’
William crossed the room in two swift steps.
She flinched as his strong fingers seized her chin and forced her eyes up to meet his.
‘You will do as you are told,’ William said.
‘I curse the day my father forced me to become a member of your vile family,’ she said.
He let her go. ‘Curse it as much as you like. You are a member and that’s the end of it. You will do as I say.’
She did not have the will to defy him any longer but at least she did not cry. It was poor comfort but better than nothing.
With the money they’d brought with them Richard and Alice bought a small farm.
‘Sheep and maybe a cow. Vegies. We’ll get by,’ said Alice. ‘I thought to plant a rosebush at the last place. This time I’ll do it.’
‘We won’t ever be millionaires,’ Richard said.
‘I don’t care,’ Alice said.
Two years later, on 20 June 1856, Alice gave birth to a daughter.
‘She’s got a voice on her,’ Richard said.
So she had but was fit too, which was what mattered. They called her Jane. Jane Eyre Dark, after the title of a book Alice had read.
Cynthia remembered her time in Sydney as the most humiliating episode in her life.
It had not entered her head she would be living under the same roof as the woman but that was how it worked out. Worse; not only was the Hack creature there, showing off her jutting belly, but William made it plain how much he preferred her to his wife.
From the moment of their arrival Cynthia saw she was there only so she could play her role in the deception upon which her husband planned to base his dynasty. A dynasty that – most appropriately – would be built on a fraud.
Alone in her room at night she stared at her reflection in the mirror. ‘I will have vengeance,’ she whispered.
How or when she did not know – she was only too well aware she was physically incapable of doing anything against either her husband or his vile paramour – but the day would come when she would be avenged; she was determined about that.
She had no idea what the arrangement was between her husband and Maria Hack but one day, three months after the baby’s birth, she was gone and Cynthia saw her no more.
Twelve months after arriving in Sydney Cynthia Tregellas returned to Van Diemen’s Land holding in her arms the child, large for its age, that the world was told was hers.
She had nothing but hatred and contempt for her husband, feelings enhanced by the displeasure he showed that the child was a girl and not the wanted son, but foresaw no problem in bringing up Bessie as though she really had given birth to her – the circumstances surrounding the birth were not the child’s fault, after all, and it was not unheard of for a married couple to adopt a child – but she discovered in herself something she had not expected: a deep and abiding resentment that she, who had lost her own child, was being forced to present to the world a baby who was not only not hers but who she discovered she did not like. She might have come to terms with the arrangement had William let her tell people the child had been adopted, but he had made it plain that was something he would never do. Bessie was not only another woman’s child but an imposter.
How was it possible to resent an innocent baby? But she did and could not help it; by her existence Bessie had deprived her of the little self-respect she had left.
She did her best; she was not cruel to Bessie, but love was out of the question.
Alice and Richard spent peaceful years on the farm they named Proud Acres. He had wanted to call it Wheal Alice after the mine but Alice had said once was enough.
Nothing happened. Everything happened. There were excitements in the world, an ongoing war with the Russkies in a place called Crimea where some woman called Florence Nightingale had made a name for herself, but it had nothing to do with their lives and made no impact.
The things that mattered were ordinary things but special in their ordinariness.
The child Jane grew, as healthy children do. They hoped for more and tried often enough. Things didn’t work out that way for all their efforts and in time they became reconciled to the situation. A cow calved. There was drought and once they were almost washed out.
They stood at the window of the house, staring at the swirling floodwaters, and asked God or themselves whether the rain would ever stop. It did, of course. It was just weather.
They saw nothing of Richard’s half-brother but couldn’t avoid hearing about him. William had become a big name in the district and probably beyond. From what they heard, he was cordially hated too, for his harsh ways. And perhaps because everything he did seemed to turn to gold, which made blokes envious, but the people who mattered would have forgiven him the bad things he did, had they even noticed them.
‘They’re rich too,’ Richard said. ‘They’re all the same, that mob.’
Richard had become cynical in a mild way. Not that he knew much about being rich, having experienced wealth only once in his life and then losing it. Almost before he’d had it, you could say.
He might have regretted that but didn’t, not really. Those days spent burrowing like moles in the dank earth were no longer real to him. At least they had escaped from Ballarat and its troubles with a whole skin, which was more than you could say for some.
‘I wondered what happened to old Karl,’ he said once. ‘That German bloke at the diggings? You remember him? What was his surname?’
‘Leipzig,’ Alice said. ‘His name was Leipzig.’
‘So it was. I wonder what happened to him.’
But they would never know, except perhaps by chance, and it didn’t matter.
‘That kid of William’s,’ Alice said. ‘That one landed on her hoofs all right.’
Richard had been reading stock sale figures. ‘What you on about?’
‘You know what they used to say about that wife of his? How after that accident the doctors told her she couldn’t have kids?’
‘The doctors got it wrong, then, didn’t they?’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Alice said. ‘I reckon Bessie isn’t hers at all.’
‘Why do you say that?’ He wasn’t particularly interested but said it to humour his wife, who had always tended to be the curious one.
‘You remember that woman who was with William in Ballarat? That Maria Hack?’
‘What about her?’
He wouldn’t admit to knowing her because Maria Hack might have been a bad lot but was one of those women who had the knack of pricking lust in any man.
‘She was pregnant. They skipped Ballarat together, didn’t they? Her and William? I reckon Bessie is Maria Hack’s kid, nothing to do with silly Cynthia.’
Which was the unkind nickname she’d been given by the locals.
Richard couldn’t see it mattered.
‘I’m sure of it,’ Alice said. And nodded, as
sembling in her mind all the inside information she didn’t have.
A man came by once, when Richard was away at the market with a load of spuds. Said he was looking for some place Alice had never heard of.
She gave him a cup of tea. He admired her rosebush, which had come on well.
Alice was happy; better than that, fulfilled, and had no plans but to live with her husband until she died, but the sneaky desire for adventure and challenge that had impelled her to the goldfields still flickered from time to time.
It flickered now and she knew that with the right words or even the right look something could come of it. She was tempted, no doubt about it – he was a personable man, with the type of luxuriant moustache she had always admired in a man – and her thighs yearned just for a minute for something new, but she did nothing about it and the moment passed.
Afterwards she looked up at the bone-bleak hill behind the farm (it was a dry year) and told herself she was glad, yet for weeks afterwards, under lamplight, she would touch her thighs and wonder.
Time passed.
Bessie Tregellas grew up aware that her father, although distant, loved her but that her mother did not. She did not know why that was so, only that it was.
Since her father was away a lot and busy even when he was at home, Bessie did not see much of him. On the rare occasions she did he was friendly in a preoccupied way, as though he didn’t know quite what to do with her. He talked to her awkwardly, with intervals between his words, while her mother, Mrs Tregellas, tended to smile at her without warmth and say nothing at all. So that Bessie, without knowing what the word meant, grew up lonely.
Home was a big house in the middle of the city and Mrs Briggs, the severe nanny, said she should be grateful.
‘You do not know how lucky you are,’ said Mrs Briggs, as though somehow it was all Bessie’s fault.
While Moxie, one of the maids, who was mean to her when no one else was about, told her she’d been found in a paper bag outside the kitchen door and had only been taken in out of kindness.
‘Mighta bin me instead of you,’ Moxie said. ‘Some folks has all the luck.’
Mama had told her that Moxie’s mother had been a convict and therefore allowances must be made but Bessie had heard her saying nasty things to Moxie, and Mrs Briggs said that Mrs Tregellas had a down on all convicts and the children of convicts.
Bessie was confused. ‘Was you a convict, Mrs Briggs?’
Mrs Briggs bristled like a hairbrush. ‘Certainly not!’
Bessie found a stray kitten and made friends with it but not for long. Mrs Briggs said it might have fleas and took it away. Bessie never saw it again.
When she was four she met an old man who she was told was her grandmother’s uncle. Mama told her she must be on her best behaviour because Grand-Uncle Barnsley was very rich and expected people to be polite to him.
Grand-Uncle Barnsley did not look rich. He didn’t look happy, either. He wore shabby clothes, walked supported on sticks and had a mean mouth. His hands shook and he made a hissing sound when he breathed. Bessie was scared of him. He stared at her with hooded eyes but never said a word, which made Bessie more scared than ever.
A month later Mrs Briggs dressed Bessie in a black dress. Mama’s dress was black too while Papa wore a tall hat and a stern face. They all went out of the front door of the house and down the steps and got into a closed carriage drawn by horses wearing black plumes on their heads. There was another carriage drawn by more horses also with black plumes. On the carriage was a kind of long box covered in flowers with huge heads and Mama said that Grand-Uncle Barnsley had gone to heaven.
They went to a place which Mama said was the cemetery. There were lots of people there whom Bessie didn’t know and a man Mama said was a clergyman who had a lot to say. There was a hole in the ground and men took the box off the carriage and used long ropes to lower it into the hole. Afterwards Bessie was given a flower which Mrs Briggs said she must throw into the hole which seemed a pity but she did what she was told and watched as people threw earth on top of the box.
‘Is my grand-uncle in that box?’
‘Be quiet,’ Mrs Briggs said.
Later Moxie told her yes, that her uncle had been in the box and they had covered him with earth so that no one need see his nasty face any more.
‘But how will he breathe?’
‘He can’t breathe, silly. He’s dead.’
That was when Bessie learnt that to go to heaven you first had to be buried in the earth although she still did not understand the business of not needing to breathe.
She was very small when she first saw Derwent. Afterwards she did not remember much about the visit except that it took a long time to get there and when at last they reached the house on top of the hill she was not allowed to go out.
‘Why can’t I go out?’
‘Because the Abos might steal you.’
‘What are Abos?’
‘Never mind.’
Left to her own devices for so much of her life, Bessie grew up with the idea that doing things was important. In order to protect herself from the Mrs Briggs and Moxies of the world she taught herself to let no one tell her what she had to do. She had been bullied when she was tiny; as she grew older she learnt to bully others and discovered she was good at it.
She had grown no closer to Mama over the years – she thought of her more as an acquaintance than a friend – but had discovered she was a twitterer, scared of Papa, scared of life and increasingly scared of her daughter. Bessie was untroubled; where there had never been any real affection it was hard to feel respect for someone so ineffectual.
By contrast Papa was a strong man, hard and determined. By the time she was old enough to see these things Bessie understood most people were scared of Papa, who was even more of a bully than she was. A worthy heir to his uncle, he had expanded the Tregellas Bank and acquired businesses across the state and on the mainland. He was still a young man or at least not old. He had put on a lot of weight and grown more florid with the years but had been successful in everything he did. Bessie didn’t care about his weight but admired his strength and business skills; she made up her mind to do everything she could to model herself on him.
Mama was unhappy with a daughter who seemed determined to be a man. From Bessie’s earliest days she had told her again and again that it was a woman’s duty to defer to her husband. It was an opinion Bessie did not share; in her world respect had to be earned and there was no way she would defer to a man simply because he was a man or because she was married to him. A man like Papa would be different, of course, but how many men were like Papa?
Rather than engage in painting watercolours or embroidery, Bessie became interested in the family businesses. The bank was a key pillar of the family’s wealth yet banking struck no sparks in Bessie’s breast. Her interest lay in Derwent, the reality of Derwent, the power and influence that Derwent bestowed on its owner. Power and land, she thought. They were what mattered in this world. And the family, of course.
By the time she was sixteen she knew the estate as well as she knew herself. It was then that her world changed, when Papa took her into the room in Derwent that he called his study and told her there were people coming to dinner.
‘A Mr and Mrs Penrose and their son Phelan. They will be staying overnight. They are important people who own a lot of property in the district.’
‘How much?’ Bessie asked, very much man to man.
‘Twenty thousand acres.’
Father and daughter looked at each other.
‘Good land?’
‘I believe so,’ William said. ‘Depending how things work out, I suspect we may be seeing a lot more of them. I shall be discussing business with Mr Penrose and Mama will look after Mrs Penrose, so I thought it would be nice if you could take care of Phelan for me.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘A few years older than you – around twenty, I believe – but he’s just back from
Europe so should have interesting stories to tell about his time there.’
‘What was he doing in Europe?’
‘He went to school but afterwards he spent a year or two travelling around before coming home.’
‘What’s he going to do now he’s back?’
‘Perhaps he’ll tell you, if you ask him.’
Phelan was amiable; you could say that for him. He had pretty eyes and was also handsome in a loose-jawed way. He smiled at her encouragingly.
Daywear had become more modest than in the past – a change that Bessie, secretly proud of her bosom, regretted – but somehow Phelan conveyed his awareness of her as a woman without stepping beyond the line of propriety. Bessie enjoyed that and the warmth it created beneath her high-necked gown.
Phelan showed no sign of being over-assertive: he wasn’t assertive at all. If there was a word to describe him Bessie thought it would be languid: a quality as unlike any she possessed as it was possible to be. On the other hand she had discovered in a book she was not supposed to have read that a languid man might also be passionate in his private life.
Phelan’s inviting eyes suggested that might be true.
She was fascinated by the thought that it might be possible to be dominant in daily life but accommodating in private. It would be a challenge but challenge, after all, was an important part of life. And to be willingly accommodating was itself another form of domination, was it not?
The idea excited her. There was also the question of the twenty thousand acres.
She thought he might do.
Her mind made up, Bessie saw no point wasting time. Most improperly she enticed Phelan to accompany her on an unchaperoned walk beside the river. Demurely, she permitted him to kiss her. The deed was done.
They made the announcement on their return to the house and were congratulated.
In the privacy of his study Papa told Bessie he was proud of her. Mama twittered. Mr and Mrs Penrose were agreeable and did not comment on the hasty nature of the courtship. Champagne was drunk while William’s later discussions with Albert Penrose took on an increased urgency.
Land of Golden Wattle Page 29
