And Catherine passed alone into the cathedral where she and Colonel Mitford had walked to her wedding twenty-one years before. What did she have to show for it? There were the children. Also she was rich, but what was the use of that? She was as alone as she had been all those years before. Then she had lost her love; now she had lost her dear companion, champion and friend.
Edmund, Sarah and one-year-old Philip were there. Edmund, suitably dressed in black, read the lesson and made a good job of it but his eyes were dry. Mrs Byfield, impoverished now, had come. She was old and a little hunched, a little withered, with the same bitter-lemon mouth as always. There were many others, people whom Catherine knew well or slightly or not at all.
The bishop preached. The organ paid tribute to the dead man. The choir sang a psalm. There was a hymn in which the congregation joined and it was over. Accompanied by her two children with a nanny taking care of baby Philip, Catherine walked black-veiled through the mourners. She looked at no one but observed silently from the corners of her eyes. The service, a life, a marriage: all were over. What remained? She did not know what remained.
She went into the cathedral annexe where the funeral feast had been laid out. There was always work, of course, but life? She did not know. Yet there had been one thing, a face at the back of the congregation she had not expected to see. She looked around at the mourners already tucking in but Mungo Jackson had disappeared.
That night at Cat’s Kingdom Catherine, aware of its emptiness now Roger was gone and conscious for the first time of her own mortality, began a task vital for a woman with many secrets and no one left to tell them to. She took out a blank leather-bound book and made the first entry in what she was determined would be her journal.
It was a time to come to terms with her life. Funerals were good for that.
On the surface things went on as before. One less seat at the table, one less body in the bed, silence where before had been the comfort of sharing the important trivia of two interwoven lives: these things were gone but there was little show of grief because at fifty, and prosperous, dignity had become important. Yet there was emptiness. Her life had become starched and still.
It was frustrating because fifty was hardly old yet she had started to think of what had been rather than what was to come. There were days when she thought over the adventures of her youth but the woman who had done those things – exciting, outrageous, in some cases criminal – had become a stranger. These days her adventures were on paper but columns of figures depicting her increasing wealth seemed an arid end to dreams of life and love, to the gypsy’s talk of a tower-tall man who would make her dance.
Edmund was twenty, with his own place in the city where rumour said he entertained whoever was the strumpet of the week and others whom you might not wish to know. He also played the stock market as though it were a casino. He still owned a portion of Catherine’s heart but she knew better than expect anything in return. There was no comfort to be found there.
Sarah was kind and gentle. She was fond of animals and flowers and small children; she had long, quiet fingers with elegantly shaped nails. These were admirable qualities but the ferocity of challenge was a stranger to her.
Philip was a comfort, as babies were, but far too young to understand that loneliness could be a living presence.
I need something to stir my stumps, Catherine thought. Gales howling in out of the Southern Ocean brought some relief. She faced the battering of the storm. Chilled to the core she told herself that life was not over. She would not give in to lethargy. She remembered the unexpected face at the funeral and thought yes.
There were those who would be shocked? Let them be shocked. Let me revisit the glory.
She engaged a sign writer. Bronze letters a foot high, set individually into a granite base that was in turn fastened with heavy bolts above the door of her house. She stood and admired the sign. Yes, she thought for the second time. CAT’S KINGDOM. A name but more than that. A statement of intent.
What had that American sailor said? I have not yet begun to fight. Now was not an end but a beginning. Cat, after so many years, was back.
She saddled her horse, no longer Sheridan but a bay mare called Fire. She did it to prove she still could and rode south.
Twenty-two years, she thought. Am I mad?
No; rebuilding her life was not madness. It was a frightening business, all the same. Riding through the remembered trees she owned the future. By seeking to recreate the past she might lose what she had but it was the nature of courage to risk catastrophe. As she rode she listened to the pounding of her strong heart. The fingers that had held her husband’s in death she now placed in the hand of fate.
She observed Mungo’s house from the fringe of the trees. Not much had changed. The house was older, as they all were, but well maintained. The trees around the building had grown out so that the chimneys of the house appeared through a canopy of leaves. She remembered the time she had first come here and been held at rifle point by the man Raven. That day she had been scared, wondering what her reception might be. Today she was scared also but having come so far had no intention of turning back. She dismounted at the door of Jackson’s Landing. Once again her luck held. She turned to the door and it was already open, with Mungo standing there.
A matter of five yards separated them. Five yards and twenty-two years and for a moment she thought she had made a mistake coming because he did not smile or speak but waited, his hand on the latch. His face was lined, his hair although thick was grey, but his eyes were as clear as ever, his body hard. They looked at each other and she knew that there must be only openness between them; anything less would destroy any hope of a new beginning.
‘I do not recognise the horse,’ he said.
‘Fire is new,’ she said. ‘And I am old.’
‘As beautiful as ever. And fifty is not old.’
‘There are days when I feel a hundred.’
‘There was a time when I felt like that.’
‘When was that?’
‘Twenty-two years ago.’
‘One becomes reconciled.’
‘Or resigned,’ he said. ‘Resigned to how things have to be.’
‘You told me once we are all prisoners of our biology and you were right. But I was right too.’ And now her eyes confronted him.
‘In what way were you right?’
‘I told you that love is forever.’
‘And is it?’
‘That is why I am here.’
‘In which case you had better come in.’
She entered the house of so many memories and walked into the living room with its piles of books and its view down the creek and it was as though she had never been away.
‘A glass of wine?’ he said.
‘Any cheese?’
They smiled at each other.
‘You have not forgotten,’ Mungo said.
‘I have forgotten nothing.’
He rang the bell; a woman came. He told her what they wanted and she went away again.
‘Agnes?’ Cat said.
‘Agnes remarried.’
‘There was a time I thought she was one of your women.’
‘There was a time when I thought she might become so. But never after I met you.’
‘Yet you used her to entice me onto your boat.’
He smiled. ‘I remember how forcibly you objected.’
‘Especially later,’ she said.
‘That is one of my loveliest memories.’
The wine came and the cheese. They ate and drank and talked peaceably about small things.
Mungo said: ‘As you just said, love can be forever, can’t it?’
‘Not for everybody, perhaps.’
‘But for you and me.’ He took her hand. ‘I want to make love to you now,’ he said.
‘I want that, too. But I am frightened. I was married twenty-one years. I have given birth to two children. The body you remember is not the body I have now.�
��
‘I loved your body from the first because it was yours. I love it now for the same reason.’
‘Even though you haven’t seen it.’
‘But hope to very shortly.’
‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ she said.
The days of wonder had returned. Cat supposed she should have felt bad about it, as though somehow she were betraying the memory of her dead husband, but did not. She had respected Roger and been fond of him and had never betrayed him except occasionally in her dreams but Roger was dead and she had a life to lead.
She discovered that what she had now was in some ways better than it had been before. Mungo, at sixty-three, was no longer the firebrand he had been, no longer hostile to domesticity, and she dared hope the relationship they were rebuilding would endure as long as life itself.
The reaction of the children was as Cat would have expected. Sarah was puzzled but willing to accept the presence of this man who Mother told her she had known before she had met Sarah’s father. Edmund was resentful, fearing that he who had done nothing to win his mother’s affections might now find himself displaced by the forceful stranger.
Cat did not want to embarrass or quarrel with either of them but intended to lead her own life. She hoped that in their different ways they would come to terms with the new situation but if they did not she had no plans to change course.
Edmund was outraged by the unfairness of the world. On the one hand you had Mungo Jackson, his mother’s lover, and a man born into a noble house who could live in luxury without regard for cost; on the other hand he, Edmund, whose mother had oodles of tin yet was so mean that the allowance she gave him meant he had a battle to live as a gentleman should.
It was her background that was to blame, of course. He would never forgive her for laying upon his shoulders the burden of her convict past. He preferred to pretend she did not exist; he had let it be known that she was not his mother at all. According to this version his mother had been a lady of gentle upbringing with a well-connected family in England who had met and married his father during a visit to the colony only to succumb to illness shortly after giving him birth. He mourned her daily although his memory of her appearance and knowledge of the family from which she came was understandably hazy since he had been only a baby at the time of her death. It was a story that had proved irresistible to a number of ardent young ladies in the past and would continue to do so, he was sure, in the future.
Sarah had always been quiet; it was a defence mechanism that over the years had become a habit. Insofar as she was anything, Mother was Church of England. She had sent Sarah to a Catholic boarding school because it offered the best education available but one or two nuns had not taken kindly to having what they called a heretic in their classes and had made their views known. Some of the girls, particularly those in the hockey team, had taken their cue from the teachers and done what they could to make Sarah’s life miserable. She had understood that getting into arguments would only lead to more trouble so had ignored them as well as she could. There was no joy in tormenting a girl who would neither cry nor fight back so it wasn’t long before they left her alone. She had no real friends, nor did she miss them; she was content within her little circle of silence. And when towards the end of the winter the hockey captain, she who had been the arch bully, found three minutes before the start of an important match that the laces of her hockey boots had been cut through there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth but no one thought to associate Sarah with the disaster that cost the school the trophy and the captain her cherished award as best player of the year.
Sarah admired and respected her mother but felt diminished by the energy she radiated. In comparison with a woman who had started with nothing and achieved so much she knew she was of no consequence. Mother was perhaps the smartest person in the colony, also kind and patient and loving, but Sarah had always felt it would be an intrusion to waste so busy a person’s time with her trivial problems. She had therefore learnt to keep them to herself, to solve what could be solved and ignore the rest. She was a shadow in Mother’s light.
A messenger arrived at Cat’s Kingdom with a telegram. A ship heading in from the west coast had signalled the Mount Nelson Signal Station as soon as it had entered the river. The message had been relayed to the city by the recently installed telephone line and had now been delivered into Catherine’s hand.
Science was on the march. Steamships, railways and now telephones. The world was on the edge of a new and marvellous age. Human progress was a reality. Would there ever be an end to it? The notion was wonderful but frightening too: she felt sometimes that things were beginning to run away from her. Or was that merely the tired thinking of a tired old woman?
She laughed at herself for having such a thought. As Mungo had told her, fifty was hardly old. She opened the note and read the information it contained. She got to her feet and went to find Mungo. The old arrangement still stood; he spent half of each week at Jackson’s Landing and the rest with her. She missed him when he wasn’t there and believed he missed her but in truth the arrangement suited them both.
She opened the door of his sitting room and found him poring over a newly published magazine devoted to cattle-breeding and the land.
He looked up and saw her expression. ‘What is it?’
‘I have just heard from Andrews, one of the surveyors we’ve got over on the west coast.’
‘And?’
‘He says he’s found copper in payable quantities on the western face of Mount Victoria.’
SIXTY-SEVEN
Cat
On the last day of December 1886, at a New Year’s party hosted by her mother and her friend Mr Jackson, Sarah met a man called Justin Fletcher. She was standing at Mother’s side when she became aware of him and guessed he was in his mid-twenties. Even before they spoke she saw that he was very handsome, upright and slender, while his brown eyes, examining her across the room, were sending her messages of admiration. No man had ever looked at her like that and it made her feel awkward. It was hard even to ask about him but somehow she managed it.
‘Who is that man?’
Mother was in the midst of greeting two late arrivals. ‘I was so sorry to hear you were returning to England,’ she was saying. ‘The colony will miss you. So many years of sterling service…’
She was smiling with a secret amusement as she turned to her daughter. ‘Mr and Mrs Arbuckle were guests at the first party I ever hosted,’ Mother said.
Sarah looked at the couple tottering with dignity across the room. She could see nothing amusing about them.
‘I fear I disappointed them. I suspect they thought I would eat my peas with a knife.’
As so often, Sarah had no idea what her mother was talking about.
‘That man over there,’ she said again. ‘Who is he?’
Mother looked. ‘His name is Fletcher. His father is chairman of the company that is busy building railways all over the island. He was behind the Hobart–Launceston line.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘I have a small interest. Why do you ask?’
‘He was looking at me.’
‘You mean the son?’
‘Of course.’
‘Was he indeed?’ Cat looked at him, measuring and thinking, her face showing nothing.
He had turned away. What a fool I am, Sarah thought. As though a man who looked like that would waste his time looking at me. But her heart was beating fast. He did look at me, she told herself. I did not imagine it.
‘There will be dancing later,’ Mother said. ‘After they’ve cleared the supper things.’
And later, indeed, there were dances. Waltzes and polkas and one outrageous dance that had originated in France many years earlier and that spiteful Mrs Talbot had mentioned on the occasion of Catherine’s second visit to the Governor’s House. Many still believed it should be prohibited because of its blatant sexuality.
‘Can-can?’ Sarah
said to Mungo Jackson, with whom she had danced the previous waltz. ‘I have never heard of it.’
‘I understand the queen does not approve,’ Mungo said. But the queen was far away.
Sarah watched a handful of couples braving the high-kicking dance. My goodness, she thought. If only I had the courage to dare something as exciting as that.
Then the young Mr Fletcher was standing bowing in front of her, asking for the privilege of the next dance, and Sarah’s heart twisted and she fell in love.
Cat, watching while taking care not to be seen doing so, saw the rapturous expression on Sarah’s face and was startled. Justin looked enchanted also and she began pondering the benefits of a marriage with the railway tycoon’s son. Of course Sarah was far too young; then she remembered how the touch of Ensign Noakes’s hands had awoken feelings she had never known she had. I was barely sixteen, she thought, and Sarah is seventeen, the same age I was when I stepped ashore from the St Vincent. The thought appalled her. I am fifty-three. The next thing I know I’ll be tottering around like the Arbuckles. I’ll have a quiet word with Justin’s father, she told herself. See how he feels about things.
Two months later Cat and Mungo were sitting beneath a canvas canopy that had been rigged outside Cat’s Kingdom and looking at the sea. For the most part they sat silently. The silence wasn’t heavy: less a lack of conversation then the peaceful presence of calm. Two people from diametrically opposed backgrounds who had loved for a quarter of a century and still loved, who knew each other better than they knew anyone in the world and who were sure of their importance in each other’s lives. Feelings that were intense and secure and did not need expression.
‘As safe as the Bank of England,’ Cat said, breaking the calm.
‘What is?’
‘Us.’
‘Oh that.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘I hope we are safer than the Bank of England,’ Mungo said. ‘With Salisbury back in Downing Street.’
‘I think we are entering an age of miracles,’ Cat said. ‘I was sure Sarah was going to end up an old maid and here she is getting married in three months’ time.’
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