Land of Golden Wattle

by J. H. Fletcher

  Later William called in his lawyers. A prenuptial agreement was drawn up and a trust deed prepared.

  Afterwards William told his daughter what he had decided.

  ‘I cannot leave the estate to you or any part of it.’

  Bessie was indignant. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because as a married woman any assets you possess automatically belong to your husband.’

  ‘That is outrageous!’

  ‘It is the law,’ William said. ‘But you needn’t worry. On my death everything I own will be transferred into a family trust.’

  ‘What does that mean? And how does it help me?’

  ‘The trustees become the legal owner of the property. In practice it won’t affect you at all. As beneficiary you will still receive all the income but it stops the estate being transferred into your husband’s name.’

  ‘He can’t touch it?’

  ‘Not a penny.’

  ‘But who would run things if anything were to happen to you?’

  ‘The trustees would appoint someone.’

  Bessie gave him a sharp look. ‘Someone?’

  ‘That someone being you. And anyone you wanted to give you a hand: in running the bank, for example.’

  ‘And no one else could interfere?’

  ‘Absolutely not. The trustees will act on your instructions. The trust is simply a device to keep the estate in the family.’ William laughed. ‘In any case I am not dead yet.’

  ‘And hopefully not for many years,’ Bessie said.

  ‘That is my intention,’ William said.

  Two days later William Tregellas collapsed during an afternoon stroll. He was carried to the house where he lay, semi-conscious and raving about shadow walkers watching him from the foot of his bed.

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Bessie said.

  ‘I fear it is the devil,’ Mama said. She had become notably religious over the past twelve months and spoke of God having struck her husband down. ‘For his misdeeds,’ she said.

  ‘What misdeeds?’

  ‘Our lives have been a lie,’ Cynthia Tregellas said. ‘It is not my fault, not at all. Your father is to blame.’

  She was unwilling to be more specific so Bessie began to suspect Mama might also be afflicted.

  The Penrose family arrived: father, mother and son. They looked grave as was appropriate but Bessie suspected there was more to Mr Penrose’s stern expression than concern for William’s health and prospects of recovery.

  There was land involved and several businesses; inevitably questions had to be asked about who would be the right person to run them. Should William, unhappily, be taken from them.

  ‘Not that we are thinking of anything like that,’ Albert Penrose said.

  That was nonsense, Bessie thought. Of course he was thinking about it; he’d be a fool not to. With Papa so ill and she so inexperienced, Albert Penrose would be pondering how he could get in his own people to run things. She had no worries on that score – the terms of the trust deed would prevent it – but there was another problem. If Albert found he couldn’t run the show himself he might decide to walk away from the relationship altogether: there were other heiresses, after all.

  She had to make sure that didn’t happen; if it did she could kiss goodbye any prospect of getting hold of the Penroses’ twenty thousand acres.

  Papa came back to the world. No more talk of shadow walkers; no more haunted nightmares that had reduced the hardest man Bessie knew to screaming tears.

  His voice was there but only in whispers. His lips were loose in his head, as though they might drift away. It was hard to make out what he was trying to say. He beckoned urgently; she bent her ear to his mouth.

  ‘You must marry him. Don’t wait. Don’t give his father an excuse to break the agreement.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Bessie said.

  William, not a smiling man, managed one now. ‘I’ll be watching. Not sure where from but I’ll be watching.’

  There was no point pretending there was any prospect of Papa’s recovery: death was painted on his features and would not be long denied. Even the effort of those few words had exhausted him. He panted for a while.

  ‘Better send your mother in,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make sure of everything,’ Bessie said.

  ‘Erridge is a good man,’ William said. ‘You can trust him. He’ll help you.’

  Erridge was the family lawyer, he and one of his junior partners the trustees of the family trust.

  ‘I shall be glad of his advice,’ Bessie said. ‘But we’ll manage. Do not worry.’

  William’s head sank back on the pillow, yet an echo of his buccaneering past returned one more time. ‘I have watched your fiancé these last weeks. I have no doubt you will be able to handle him without too much difficulty.’

  ‘You may be certain of that,’ Bessie said.

  ‘Get your mother in here,’ he said. ‘And remember: marry Phelan as quickly as you can. Next week if you can manage it. Don’t let that slippery Albert Penrose sneak away. He probably doesn’t think you’re capable of running things without me so he might try it if he thinks he can get away with it.’

  Later that night, after Papa had died, Bessie liked to think how their last words had been of Derwent, Albert Penrose and how to prevent him reneging on the deal they had made.

  She had expected she would be distraught at Papa’s death but was not. She was William’s daughter and had businesses to run; she had no time for grief. Any tears she would shed in private; the public display of grief she would leave to Mama, so much more experienced in weeping than Bessie.

  ‘I’ll do what you wanted,’ she promised his memory, wondering whether he could hear her. ‘You rest easy. I’ll take care of everything.’

  She would do it for him and for herself. She would keep the faith.

  After the funeral they all went back to the house. Bessie made sure the staff had an abundant tea. Albert Penrose thought it was a waste of money bordering on disrespect for the departed, and said so. Bessie did not, and said so.

  ‘Continuity is important,’ she said. ‘They need to know their future is assured.’ She gave Mr Penrose a smile so sweet it almost cramped her lips. ‘Of course a man understands these things so much better than a woman. Why,’ she said, ‘I feel quite helpless. I am so thankful that Phelan will be there to support me. And you, of course. How grateful I am that I can rely on your assistance, dear Mr Penrose. I declare I would be quite lost without the pair of you.’

  Albert was gratified. He had feared this pushy girl might present a problem but now was willing to believe he had misjudged her. Trust or no trust, it was obvious she would need mature advice in running her inheritance. It seemed to him there was every prospect of her being amenable to his suggestions. One of which would be to make him a trustee of the Tregellas trust, giving him effective control of all the Tregellas assets. He therefore favoured immediate action.

  ‘I know it is customary to wait in these circumstances,’ he said. ‘But I really wonder whether a delay is necessary. No disrespect to your late father would be intended and in my experience it is better that arrangements of this nature be implemented as soon as possible.’

  ‘It was my father’s dying wish,’ Bessie said. ‘The sooner the better: they were his last words.’

  Mama was the only person to protest. ‘What will our friends say about it? My dear, they’ll think you’re pregnant.’

  ‘I hope I soon am,’ Bessie said. ‘And who cares what they think?’

  Fortunately Mama’s protests could safely be ignored.

  A special licence was obtained. Two and a half weeks after William Tregellas’s funeral Bessie and Phelan Penrose were married in the little church Emma had had built when Ephraim Dark first obtained title to the land. Mama might have thought it inappropriate to have the wedding so soon but at least, Bessie thought, it gave her the excuse to shed more tears.

  She hadn’t known what to expect. Friends who claimed
experience sang its praises behind their fans, raving about sensations beyond belief or description. On the other hand she had overheard a maid discussing her latest boyfriend, calling him a Johnny Come Quickly.

  At the time Bessie had not known what she’d meant. Now she did.

  She wondered whether it was Phelan’s fault or her own. She wondered whether it was a question of fault at all. She thought it was a disappointment that might come right in time even though there had so far been no sign of it.

  Later still she decided it was a good thing. Sensations beyond belief were dangerous, hinting at enslavement. The way things were, Bessie was free.

  Alice and Richard were astonished when they heard the news of William’s unexpected death.

  ‘Still in his thirties,’ Richard said. ‘Makes you think. I wonder what happened to him?’

  ‘Probably somebody shot him,’ said Alice, who might have a curious nature but was not the forgiving kind, and had not forgotten the Eureka Stockade and how she would always believe William had set them up.

  ‘Should we go to the funeral?’ Richard said.

  ‘If you go you’ll go alone,’ Alice said.

  ‘He was my half-brother.’

  ‘So he was. And never lifted a finger to help us, did he?’

  ‘We wouldn’t have taken it if he’d offered.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  So they gave the funeral a miss. The next thing they knew, Bessie had married Phelan Penrose. The way the papers went on about it, the Tregellas and Penrose clans might have been royalty. Which by local standards Alice supposed they were.

  ‘William hardly cold in his grave and Bessie already married?’ Alice said. ‘What kind of people are they?’

  ‘Rich people,’ Richard said.

  ‘I’ll bet she’s pregnant too,’ Alice said.

  But in that, to her private disappointment, she was wrong.

  Mama’s reaction to Papa’s death tried Bessie severely. She had always been limp but now, after Papa’s death, she became more so than ever, as though without William’s ruthless strength she was a rudderless boat drifting on seas without horizon.

  She spent more time in her room, sometimes not appearing for days at a time. Bessie was busy but made it her business to go and see her when she could. Most days she managed a few minutes with her, sometimes as much as half an hour.

  ‘You should get out more.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it, Bessie.’

  ‘I’ll get Wilkins to take you out in the carriage.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it, Bessie.’

  ‘I’ll get…’

  But what was the use? Mama had put down anchors and was not to be moved.

  Weeks passed. Bessie employed a woman to keep an eye on Mama. One morning the woman came to see Bessie in the room she used as an office.

  ‘I think you’d better come, madam.’

  Mama looked as though her life were draining into a bottomless void. Her fingers clutched the sheet; her lips were drawn back. Yet the look she now directed at Bessie was something Bessie had never expected to see on her face: an expression not of apology but malice.

  ‘I am sorry I have not been a better mother to you. There was a reason but I should have tried harder.’

  ‘Don’t let it trouble you,’ Bessie said.

  ‘It troubles me very much. I agreed, you see. It was never your fault.’

  Bessie had no idea what Mama was talking about.

  ‘I promised your father I would never tell you but I believe you have the right to know.’

  ‘To know what?’

  Mama’s eyes closed, then opened again. She drew a deep breath. ‘To know you are not my child.’ She smiled as though the words gave her the greatest possible pleasure. ‘I had to tell you, you see. I hope he knows what I have done. I hope he does. It is the only chance I shall ever have to punish him for what he did to me.’

  1982

  Bec press-ganged four maids, who scrubbed and cleaned St Madern church until, as cheeky Doris put it, the bride and groom could have scoffed the wedding breakfast off the aisle floor and the sun, shining through the solitary stained-glass window, threw multi-coloured puddles of light on the chancel steps.

  Bec had also suggested press-ganging the bishop from his Hobart hidey-hole, but Tamara had had a run-in with him once and said over her dead body, so they gave that one a miss. A run-of-the-mill vicar would do although Bec was inclined to mourn the purple robes.

  ‘Getting quite the snob in your old age,’ Tamara said.

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ Bec said. ‘I’m a bit light on granddaughters so I thought I’d put on a show for the one I’ve got, but I’m sure we can find a whisky priest hiding in some ditch, if that’s what you would prefer.’

  Although the man they got did not live in a ditch and seemed to prefer tea to scotch, which Bec thought a severe failing on his part. At least Giles was there to give his daughter away. Bec wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tried to dodge what he called the show – after all, he’d done blow-all for Tamara for most of her life – but he assured everyone who would listen he wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

  ‘Long life and happiness to the pair of them, that’s what I say.’

  He even came up with a half-decent cheque, which was a surprise but welcome nonetheless.

  The downside was that Raine and Jaeger would be there too, which was a pity but couldn’t be helped. Nor, with Mr Elphinstone digging into Raine’s background, did Bec think it would matter, in the end.

  Tamara came to her wedding in an open carriage. She sat with Megan, an old school friend, who was acting as bridesmaid.

  ‘The road ought to be lined with serfs to cheer me on,’ Tamara said, but coming down the steep road from the house there was a severe absence of watchers of any kind.

  ‘Where’s a good serf when you need one?’ Megan said.

  ‘I’ll have my own bloke,’ Tamara said. Even in joke it was hard to believe. ‘Provided he turns up.’

  ‘I was thinking of me, not you,’ Megan said. ‘All this is making me randy.’

  Bec had arranged flags and bunting on the trees lining the narrow roadway that wound its way uphill from the main road to the church. The sun was out now but it had rained in the night and underfoot the ground was damp.

  ‘Here’s where I fall flat on my face,’ Tamara told Megan as she prepared to step down from the carriage, but in the event she managed it as nimbly as a ballet dancer.

  There were people waiting on either side of the path and outside the church’s open door. Some were talking, others laughing, while one or two by the look of them had anticipated the festivities by getting in a belt or two first. The tree branches overhead splintered the sun’s rays into arrows of brilliant light.

  Tamara looked at the people waiting. ‘A better turn out than I’d expected.’

  She walked quietly and slowly up the path. When she had woken that morning she remembered asking herself whether she was the right person to marry Grant or anyone, but now she found she had no doubts at all. This is today, she thought, and after today we shall have tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that.

  She entered the church; the sense of being one with an age-old tradition engulfed her. The church, its stones sombre with age, greeted her. She saw Bec in the poshest of hats but did not smile or acknowledge her. Now she was one with past and future and time, as she paced arm in arm with her father down the short aisle, had no meaning. As she placed her hand in Grant’s hand a thousand generations of women accompanied her in what had for centuries been the ritual of the woman’s surrender to the man.

  They had come a long way from the days when a woman came to the ceremony with the halter of subservience about her neck; now it was more a question of sharing equally, the ceremony not degraded by the past. Tamara listened to the words flowing like honey in the tiny church and, as she uttered her responses, felt the warmth and fulfilment of one who had finally come home.
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  The reception was held back at Derwent House.

  As at Bec’s birthday party there were lots of guests. Bride and groom were congratulated. There were gifts, some generous, others less so. Raine was particularly cordial but her eyes said what her words did not, that she and Tamara were at daggers drawn over Derwent and that she regarded the marriage as no more than a gambit in the battle they were waging on the chessboard of the future. She was no fool either, and, marriage or not, Tamara knew the battle was a long way from being won.

  Jaeger, by contrast, was inclined to sulk, which brought a barely concealed joy to Tamara’s heart.

  After sea trout, oysters and roast lamb, champagne and wedding cake, both bride and groom were well-wished half to death and Megan found a friend of the groom who she thought might do in the absence of a suitable serf.

  The shadows were long across the grass as Grant and Tamara stepped into the car that would take them to the hotel outside Hobart where they would spend the night before flying out to Malaysia and a week at an up-market Penang resort, a choice Bec thought particularly appropriate when she remembered how the Chans of Penang had saved the family’s bacon back in the 1930s.

  Now the lamps were turned low. They could hear the wind’s soft voice, see through the bedroom window the river’s polished shield gleaming silver beneath the moon as it followed its course to the sea, the waiting sea. Now, at last, they were alone.

  ‘Love me,’ Tamara said fiercely.

  1913

  After her run-in with Jonathan Bessie Penrose sat and thought for a while.

  That Hampton clan, she thought. They’ll be the death of us if I don’t stop this nonsense. The blacksmith’s daughter mistress of Derwent? Her father the stable boy lording it in the living room? It was unthinkable.

  She had to make sure it never happened. It was tricky; maybe it was no more than a passing whim – a lot of men, her husband included, had been incapable of keeping their hands off the maids – but her instinct said this might be more serious than that. In any case she couldn’t afford to take the chance. If her grandson cared so little for the family’s good name she would have to take care of it for him; the one thing she knew for certain was that never would she countenance a member of her family marrying the daughter of Conan Hampton.