The Dark Mountain

by Catherine Jinks

  Not luxurious accommodation, by any means. The wallpapers were execrable, the servants’ quarters were damp, and the chimney in the library smoked with every hard northerly that blew. Nevertheless, it was not a bad little house. And we were happy enough to reach it that day after the bazaar, for a chill breeze had sprung up, and we were none of us dressed for the cold.

  Imagine our horror when Mama pushed open the front door, and we found ourselves looking at my stepfather.

  He had cast himself onto the only upholstered chair in our possession. There was dried mud all over his boots, and he wore no waistcoat. He was smoking a pipe, and nursing an old issue of The Mirror.

  We froze on the threshold.

  ‘Aye, stop there and let the cold in,’ he snapped. ‘Here is the meanest fire I ever saw, and you must fill the room with frosty winds!’

  ‘What—what is the meaning of this?’ my mother stammered, without moving.

  ‘Come in and I’ll make it plain,’ George Barton replied.

  We could do nothing else, though we were reluctant. As my mother divested herself of bonnet and gloves, she instructed us to ‘go and fetch Mary’—causing Barton to utter a terse guffaw.

  ‘You must drag her if you do,’ he said. ‘The dirty wench is in Lushington, and was already on her spree when I arrived. It was as much as she could do to admit me—I believe she all but broke her neck on the stairs. Had I been a low sort of creature, Ma’am, you’d have no property left by now. She would have let in a stray pig, or an armed bushranger, with just as little ceremony.’

  My mother hesitated. Clearly, she was uncertain as to whether she should leave her children alone with such a man as George Barton, or send us off to witness a scene of squalid debauchery somewhere down the back of the house.

  At last she decided in favour of the known quantity.

  ‘Wait here,’ she instructed, and vanished.

  It was a truly awful moment. My siblings and I stood together against a wall, as Barton surveyed us contemptuously through his pipe-smoke. I must have been scowling, for he remarked, ‘You do not improve any’, before fixing his gaze on my brother. ‘And what have you been about today, in yer fine brass buttons?’ he sneered. ‘Paying afternoon calls, I’ll warrant.’

  James said nothing. It was Emily who replied, having taken to heart my mother’s strictures on politeness in company.

  ‘We have been to the fancywork bazaar,’ she squeaked.

  ‘Hah!’ Barton threw back his head in a snort of derision. ‘I’d have expected nothing less. Fancywork, i’faith! And did you purchase for yerself a pretty set of satin slops, my fine little man?’

  ‘We have no money for such things, as well you know,’ I interjected, pressing my brother’s arm. ‘You will find no money in this house, nor one single treasure.’

  ‘Aye, just scraps and rubbish,’ Barton declared, his eyes sweeping across our tense forms. He meant to imply, by this action, that we ourselves were of little value. And I took exception to his tone.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I demanded. ‘I told you—we have no money!’

  ‘And what makes you think I need it?’ he rejoined, just as my mother re-entered the room. She looked flustered, but adopted a commanding manner nonetheless.

  ‘Off you go, children,’ she instructed. ‘Go to your rooms and stay there.’

  ‘What about Mary?’ I wanted to know. ‘Is she drunk again?’

  ‘That is not your concern!’ said my mother sharply. ‘Obey me at once, if you please! I want you each to write an account of the bazaar in your daily journal. And do not come out until I give you leave.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Now, Charlotte!’

  I could hardly object. Yet I withdrew as if my feet were weighted with lead, throwing many a backward glance over my shoulder. As I shut myself in my bedroom, I heard Barton inquiring about my mother’s one-thousand-pound legacy.

  Behind me, Emily said: ‘I am so hungry, Charlotte.’

  ‘So am I,’ was my brusque retort.

  ‘What about tea? Will Mary bring it?’

  ‘Mary is drunk,’ remarked Louisa, settling herself onto the window-seat. I shared a single bedroom with both my sisters. My mother occupied another, while James had been given the smallest for his own.

  But he had chosen to join his sisters, and sat huddled by the empty grate.

  ‘My journal is in the library,’ Emily observed. ‘Where is yours, James? In your room?’ She looked around nervously. ‘Who will fetch them?’

  ‘No one,’ I replied. ‘Do something else.’

  So they did. James picked at the Indian matting on the floor, while Emily rearranged the shells on the mantle. Louisa, for her part, occupied herself with a description of the School of Industry Bazaar.

  As for me, I gave an account of the bazaar that reflected my state of distraction. ‘Went to the Female School of Industry,’ I wrote. ‘Bought pincushion cover. Mr Barton was at home on our return. He must have bullied Mary to admit him—perhaps in exchange for rum. Mama has sent us away.’

  All the while, I was listening hard. Every so often a raised voice would make us sit up straight, ears cocked. But there would follow another low murmur, or measured footsteps, and we would know not what to think.

  The minutes dragged by. I heard a door shut somewhere close. I heard the jingling of keys, and the squeak of a window shutter.

  ‘Is He gone?’ Louisa finally asked.

  I shrugged in reply.

  ‘It’s getting dark,’ Emily pointed out. ‘How can we write, if we have no candles?’

  ‘Maybe we should go and see,’ Louisa suggested, but James shook his head.

  ‘No!’ he gasped. ‘No, she told us to stay!’

  ‘But something might have happened—’

  ‘Nothing has happened,’ I said quickly. ‘We would have heard. There would have been fighting. You know what they are.’

  ‘Please, Charlotte.’ Louisa gazed across the room. She was only eight years old, yet already her eyes differed from the eyes of most children her age. Perhaps it was on account of the things that she had witnessed—or perhaps it was because of her bodily suffering. Whatever the cause, there was a resigned sort of wisdom in her steady regard. ‘Please, will you go and look? Or I shall. But you are much quicker at running away. You can say that I’m feeling ill.’

  ‘But are you?’ asked Emily, in troubled tones. ‘You’re not lying, Louisa?’

  ‘No. Oh no. I feel as if I might faint at any moment.’

  ‘Very well.’ I stood, and went to the door. ‘But you must back me up, all of you. No peaching. Is that clear?’

  There were nods all round.

  There were nods all ‘Word of honour?’

  ‘Word of honour,’ they chorused.

  Satisfied, I took a deep breath, and let myself out of the room.

  It was late. Dust motes drifted about in the last, orange rays of the setting sun, which penetrated one of our western windows and illumined a shabby patch of carpet in the hall. Everything was quiet. There seemed to be no one about. I checked the drawing room and the library, and was hovering outside the closed door of my mother’s bedroom when I heard a noise from within.

  There can be no explaining certain connections that take place in a girl’s head, upon her abandonment of childhood. Childhood, I feel, is almost a state of mind; there are some who remain children up to the very point of marriage, or even beyond it, while others—the offspring of debauched and impoverished unions, for example—are never children at all.

  You must remember that I was raised on a farm. It was a farm, moreover, staffed for the most part by coarse men of blunt manners. Yet only after spending four months at a ladies’ academy were my senses attuned to a particular consciousness that infected almost every conversation. Even talk about the School of Industry’s stated purpose, or the conduct of housemaids, made elusive reference to a form of union that I need not examine closely here, but which (I am afraid) very much occu
pied and perplexed all those young women whose stated destiny in life was a good marriage.

  As I stood outside my mother’s bedroom door, listening to the sounds from within, I suddenly understood something that many girls never come to understand at all until their wedding night. From stray remarks gleaned among the convict huts at Oldbury, and the conduct of fowls in the yard, and the drunken ramblings of our housemaids, and the odd, sly titter at school, I pieced together an image (not absolutely incorrect) of the kind of congress in which my mother and stepfather were engaged at that moment.

  It was not a pleasant picture. I reeled, and gasped, and was horrified. I knew not what to think. Such matters are very ugly for children even where domestic harmony prevails. Where it does not, and there is a possibility of enforced submission, even the strongest and most well-developed mind recoils.

  My own mind, being only half-formed, could not begin to address the subject. I fled from it. Physically, I fled from it. I hurried back to my bedroom, and slammed the door. ‘They are busy,’ was all that I said. ‘They will call us.’ I do not know if my flushed cheek and breathless voice awoke any speculation in Emily or Louisa. I only know that, when they saw my face, something about it forestalled their questions.

  It was getting on to half past six when my mother finally came to our door. She was dishevelled, and moved awkwardly. Her voice sounded rough as she told us that we might come out now and eat supper.

  ‘Mr Barton is gone,’ she said, and cleared her throat. ‘You have nothing to fear.’

  As far as I am aware, it was the last time she ever laid eyes on him.

  Twenty-six

  An interlude

  I am an old woman now, with a good understanding of the world. I know what happened after the School of Industry Bazaar. That is to say, I understand the act that was perpetrated. Perhaps it was an assault, in which case my mother could have done nothing to prevent it—for Mary had been rendered incapable by drink, and there were no close neighbours whom my mother might have alerted without, in the process, alerting her children. Besides which, the Law was on Barton’s side. What man can be gaoled for enjoying connubial relations within his own marriage?

  In this case, moreover, the Law may have been right. Perhaps it was not an assault. For I have learned over the years that hatred does not necessarily preclude desire. There can be no way of knowing what happened between my mother and stepfather, behind closed doors. Anger and passion are too closely related for my taste; looking back, I remember all too well evidence of the fervent reconciliations that took place between Mama and Mr Barton early in their marriage, after one or two raging rows. Of course, my mother was quickly disillusioned. There can be no doubt that she grew to loathe her husband with a poisonous loathing.

  Even so, I am not about to pass judgement on an event that I failed to witness personally. Not now. Perhaps my mother suffered in silence so as to shield her children from Barton’s foulness. Perhaps she remained mute because she had no need of anyone’s help. At my advanced age, it is easy enough to believe either proposition.

  As a young girl, however, I had not such a wide experience of humanity. I could not have reconciled blows and caresses; I was barely enlightened as to the nature of the central act itself. Floundering in the half-dark, I was prey to all the excesses of a lively imagination. How I suffered! And in the flurry of comment that followed Lynch’s hanging, I suffered still more. For the Sydney Gazette reported something quite new, once Lynch was dead. Upon describing the tragic end of Bridget Macnamara’s daughter, it made mention of an incident that occurred after the poor girl was permitted to say her prayers.

  ‘After this time had elapsed,’ it declared, ‘and violating her person, he dispatched her soul also.’

  Consider the effect that such a remark would inevitably have on me. I brooded upon it. It inflamed my sensitivities still further. I asked myself endless questions: had George Barton ‘violated’ my mother after the bazaar? Had the bushrangers done so in the Belanglo forest? Could this be the secret that had prevented Barton from naming or even testifying against Lynch, lest the truth be revealed in court?

  The proposition was never quite so clearly formulated in my head—not for many years, at least. I came to it piecemeal, rejecting the most painful possibilities almost as soon as I envisaged them. I was muddled and angry. On the one hand, it seemed to me that my mother might perhaps have been the victim of a monstrous crime. On the other, that she might have damaged her reputation through the careless indulgence of her own coarse appetites. What had she been about, riding off into the forest with her overseer? Surely Oldbury could have spared a few men? Had their party been larger, they might not have been stopped at all.

  I brooded over these points for many years. But I had no one to whom I could open my heart, for by the time my sisters were of an age to discuss such matters freely, we had parted. I wish that it had not been so. I wish that I had found the sense and courage to consult Louisa, at least. Louisa would have displayed much insight, despite her long maidenhood; she had far more penetration than was ever bestowed on me, and the leisure in which to indulge it.

  Back then, however, I was ignorant. For a long time I discounted my youngest sister because she remained unmarried. How could she offer any enlightenment when she had no understanding of those dark currents which drive men towards women? It was a stupid opinion, though not entirely the result of blind arrogance. On the contrary, I was ashamed. Our positions in life were very different, and my own did not strike me as superior. While Louisa had retained a purity of mind and person, I had soiled myself with blood, sweat and tears, immersing my thoughts in a kind of sludge comprising all the impotent and purposeless emotions of an ill-considered existence.

  So I said to myself: ‘She will know nothing useful. And it’s better that she should not know. Why spoil her peaceful nights and cloud her clear eye with sordid speculations? Let her be, Charlotte. Do not withdraw your protection now.’

  I held to this view for many years, mostly from utter weariness. The demands on my time and energy were such that I could not re-examine those ideas upon which my general conduct was based. All my thoughts were bent on the petty business of getting through each day: the chores, the debts, the demands, the endless decisions. I gave the whole matter very little attention until 1871, when Tom Hellicar’s Children was published.

  I was in Orange, then, struggling to establish my school. This was long before Mr Richards opened Weymouth House; in those days, the building occupied by his school—on the corner of Byng and Sale Streets—was a police lock-up, and stood directly opposite my own little academy. Not the most salubrious position for a girls’ school, I know. Far too many obstreperous drunkards were hauled in and out of that lock-up, fully visible from my classroom windows. But what choice did I have? Orange was still in its infancy, with few solid and respectable buildings available for rent. None of the really fine homes had yet been constructed, though Summer Street was taking on a certain solidity, with brick stores and banks sprouting up like corn, and many new settlers arriving in a steady stream, some crushed and despairing from the goldfields at Ophir, some well supplied with money and inspiration.

  Nevertheless, there was not the variety of business that exists now. One could not simply stroll into Mr Norwood’s shop for the latest edition of the Sydney Morning Herald. While the local newspaper was always in good supply, it was safer to subscribe to any other. Therefore I used to send Ernest down to the Post Office every morning to collect my own subscriptions, wherein Louisa’s work could often be found. I would read about her trips to the Fitzroy Falls and Mittagong, and wonder if she might be living around Berrima again. It certainly appeared so. She had begun to offer up ‘a few sketches of some of the principal sights of the districts of Berrima, Nattai, Sutton Forest, and the Sassafras’, which had led me to conclude that a removal had taken place. However, I did not realise that this removal had followed close upon her marriage.

  For she had marrie
d, you see. Some two years after my mother’s death, she married Mr James Calvert. I learned this long after the event, thanks to our peculiar estrangement—which was perhaps more a product of diffidence and delicacy than any kind of mutual antagonism. If an invitation had been sent, I did not receive it. If a notice had appeared, I must have missed it. From my careful study of the newspapers, I gleaned only that my sister had moved from Oldbury to Yass, and then back to Berrima. I also noted something peculiar about her circumstances. In the Sydney Mail, towards the end of 1871, she published a short series entitled ‘The New Bush Home’. Though the author was given as ‘a Country House Mother’, I recognised Louisa’s style easily enough; who else, while on the subject of raising fowls, would have paused to discuss tiger snakes and their prevalence? But what puzzled me was the professed ‘newness’ of her home—not to mention the word ‘mother’. Louisa was not a mother, surely? And if she had indeed returned to Oldbury (to keep house for my brother, perhaps) then why all this talk of establishing a ‘new’ home?

  The answer was very simple. My sister was expecting. And she was living, not with my brother James, but with her husband at Swanton. Had I known this, I may have been moved to write. Relieved of any concern for her unsullied maiden state, I may have broached the topic that was never quite banished from my thoughts.

  I did not, however. I remained in the dark. Everything that I knew about Louisa’s circumstances was derived from her journalism, and from her latest novel. Tom Hellicar’s Children was serialised in the Sydney Mail during the early part of 1871. Of all her books, it disturbed me the most. You will know why when I tell you that it concerned a woman—Mrs Hellicar—who had married above her station, and who, when widowed, was deprived of her children by the executors of her late husband’s will.