The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Except for one.

  ‘Dunlevy. Not expecting to run into the Prem, are you?’

  George Drummond-Smith emerged from one of the chambers. The fellow fairly burst from the room, as was his wont, a bulldog of a man, barrel-chested, with a vast plain of a forehead and a skull that was all bone and no flesh at all. He sported an immense walrus moustache on a scale to rival that of the Premier’s own and had such bulging, staring eyes one’s natural inclination was to step back as though one had stumbled across some brutish hound, chained and slavering, at the gate of a house one had intended to visit. And once Drummond-Smith had got your scent in his nose he did not let go.

  He had got Alasdair’s scent.

  ‘Because Reid departed by train at dawn. Selling Federation to the northern townships—Murwillumbah, Lismore, Byron, Grafton, those sorts of places—and he took Rothe with him. You didn’t know?’ And with an amused smile Drummond-Smith leaned against a conveniently placed bust of William Wentworth. ‘Had you arranged a meeting with him? Ah, I see. You imagined the Premier would take you with him on his Tour of the Regions? How priceless.’

  Alasdair had stood perfectly still as Drummond-Smith spoke these words. Now he advanced on the man. He had not realised how tightly wound he was. Felt his fingers clench into a fist, the air around them both growing hot then cold.

  ‘Careful, Drummond-Smith. You sail too close to the wind.’

  Drummond-Smith lifted his chin a little, fixing him with an appraising eye. ‘Indeed? How so?’

  ‘Do not come the fool. You have played with fire. Do so again, you will get burned.’

  Drummond-Smith let out a shout of laughter. ‘Two clichés and a threat! Priceless. And you, Dunlevy, are the fire? How absurd you sound.’

  No doubt he was absurd but, oddly, it seemed not to matter. Alasdair’s thoughts, at this moment, seemed extraordinarily clear. I am ready for what he says next, thought Alasdair.

  Though, of course, he was not.

  ‘Your dear wife,’ said Drummond-Smith, stroking his monstrous moustache, ‘how is she? I thought she was looking a little unwell last night, even before that preposterous incident with that chap and his toy gun.’

  For a moment their eyes locked. Alasdair saw the little vignette at the Premier’s reception last night. He saw Eleanor standing with Judd and Pyke and this man, Drummond-Smith, at her elbow, at her ear—saying what?

  It was Drummond-Smith whose gaze dropped first. But only so he might turn his gaze on another.

  ‘Well, now, here’s a sorry tale,’ he murmured just loud enough for his words to reach the ears of Leon Jellicoe, who had escaped the throng of pressmen and was now crossing the lobby.

  Jellicoe evidently heard, for he paused and turned. He returned their gaze coolly. For a long moment it seemed he would not speak, then: ‘What is it you want, Drummond-Smith?’ he demanded, a flash of the old Jellicoe present, or something akin to it.

  ‘Business proposition,’ Drummond-Smith replied loudly with barely a pause. ‘I hear your place at Potts Point will soon be on the market. I might make you an offer. Cannot promise you market value, naturally, but I expect you would be glad of what you can get in the current climate. Am I right?’ And when Jellicoe’s eyes narrowed and he took a step towards them, ‘Oh, no need to make up your mind now, old man. Think on it.’ And he pulled a match from his breast pocket and proceeded to light a cigar.

  Jellicoe did not hesitate but came up to Drummond-Smith and thrust his face at the other man, and even at this late stage of his demise he still retained that steady gaze, that formidable jawline, that extraordinary Iron Duke nose.

  ‘Your behaviour does not become you, sir, as either a gentleman or a member of this house.’

  Jellicoe turned, not awaiting a reply, and left them, and Drummond-Smith, having succeeded in lighting his cigar, choked, though whether from the acrid trail of smoke or the words Jellicoe had spoken to him was unclear.

  ‘Really! A lecture on manners by a fellow fallen so low? Now that I call rich,’ he declared at Jellicoe’s retreating figure.

  But Alasdair had eaten at Jellicoe’s table. Had consumed the fellow’s finest wine. And he had heard the man speak a dozen times in the chamber.

  ‘You make enemies too readily, Drummond-Smith. A man who wielded that much power in the state is not a man whom you should make an adversary.’

  Drummond-Smith afforded him a sideways glance. His eyebrow crawled its way up his massive forehead. ‘You envisage a phoenix-like rising from the ashes by our fallen minister at some distant point in the future, do you? My dear Dunlevy, there are some pales beyond which no man may return.’ He puffed once, twice. Knocked ash onto the carpet. ‘A reputation is a fragile thing. The most fragile thing a gentleman possesses. More fragile than the love of a woman.’ His eyes narrowed speculatively.

  Alasdair looked away, his face burning. A functionary hovered with a dustpan and brush. The little pile of grey ash lay on the carpet at their feet. Alasdair glared at the man, who slunk away.

  ‘You have a reputation to lose too, Drummond-Smith.’

  ‘I think we both know you have more to lose than I, old man.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ANGEL OF MERCY

  The little gold carriage clock chimed the hour and Eleanor raised her head to listen. She had sat on the settee in Miss Trent’s drawing room for a long time. She was not certain how long. She held the gold tiepin in her gloved left hand. Her fingers closed over it then released it. She wished to hold it tightly and at the same time to take it to the window and hurl it far from her into the tangled garden below. She did neither. The chimes ceased. She sat.

  She thought of the clock on the mantel—a present from a loving father, and the old sea chest in the bedroom.

  Miss Trent’s people were dead. She was alone here, perhaps had journeyed across oceans by herself. It struck Eleanor that they were alike in this way, she and Miss Trent, for her own parents were many years dead. She still thought from time to time of her mother, the schoolmaster’s widow. Almost never of her father, because the loss was so much greater. But he came to her now, William Tremaine, his callused hands, his sea-salty smell, an impossibly tall man, or so he had seemed to her as a child of three, four, five years old, with steel-grey hair, a sun-coarsened face and eyes permanently squinting after a lifetime at sea scanning distant horizons. A man who had lived his life and settled down to old age before his first and only child had come along, travelling to New South Wales to take up a land grant in the inner harbour suburb of Balmain. He had built himself a two-storey sandstone cottage with a crow’s nest in the roof from which lofty vantage point he could sip his rum of an evening and train his spyglass on the many and varied vessels on his doorstep. He had also taken a wife, his neighbour, Mrs Eliza Bass, widow of a schoolmaster whose husband and three children had perished in a single year from typhoid. The widowed Mrs Bass, who was well into her middle years and must have considered herself past the age of marriage and motherhood, at the age of forty-eight had found herself married once more and mother to a thriving baby girl.

  There had been no further children. Eleanor had grown up the child of two ageing parents who had both experienced the best and the worst of life and were content to count their blessings and enjoy their quiet good fortune.

  Were they alike then, she and Miss Trent? Were their origins, were the paths they had followed, so different? Eleanor had loved her father with an intensity that occasionally made her stop and gasp at his loss even now. But it was her mother who had made the decision, that hot December afternoon twenty-three years ago, that they attend the lecture at the town hall. And now Eleanor was the wife of the minister.

  And Miss Trent—what was she?

  The clock chimed again, the quarter-hour this time.

  Eleanor stood up. Miss Trent had not returned. And now Eleanor did not wish her to return, did not wish Miss Trent to come through her door and find a stranger seated there. But not, perhaps, a stranger
—for Miss Trent must, surely, be aware of Eleanor’s existence. It was vulgar, suddenly, the idea of their meeting, and Eleanor crossed the room and flung open the door and returned the cheap little key to its hiding place and she left. Her haste turned to humiliation and her humiliation grew as she fled down the wide staircase and through the front door and down the steps. To be found out now, to be seen fleeing, was hateful to her. She reached the street without meeting anyone and set off in a direction, any direction.

  And there, not twenty yards ahead of her, was Miss Trent.

  But not the same Miss Trent whom Eleanor had observed setting out from her house that morning. There was none of the urgency that had swept Miss Trent along the street and across the Domain and onto a tram a few hours earlier. Now she walked with a flagging step that spoke of exhaustion or illness or some great disturbance of the mind. Her face was a curious pale grey and her gaze was gripped by the ground before her as though she didn’t trust it not to crack apart or trust her feet to carry her safely. Something made Miss Trent look up with an instinctive sense that she was being watched. Or perhaps Eleanor had made some sudden movement, made some involuntary sound. Whatever it was, Miss Trent raised her head, raised terrible eyes to the face that observed her.

  And she stumbled. Her legs gave way beneath her and her body crumpled and she lurched forward. She threw out both hands and let out a cry as she fell.

  Eleanor watched as though from a great distance, at first frozen in horror at the sight of the one person she least wished to see coming at her and then by the extraordinary sight of Miss Trent falling.

  She ran forward, was at Miss Trent’s side in an instant, though she was aware of no conscious decision to help, simply found herself running to the young woman’s aid. Eleanor kneeled down and took her elbow, got the stricken woman to her feet, retrieved her reticule from the gutter, and ascertained with anxious questions if she could stand? (She could, yes, but unsteadily.) And did she require assistance to get home? (She did, most certainly.) And so assistance was rendered and they made their way at a cautious pace towards the very house that Eleanor had a moment earlier fled.

  ‘Here? This is your home?’ she asked, and Miss Trent nodded, her eyes closed, leaning on the angel of mercy who had appeared from nowhere. They negotiated the steps and the front door, they chose the lift over the stairs and stood in silent and grim communion as the hydraulic lift rattled and wheezed its way up to the first floor.

  But she has recognised me! thought Eleanor with a horror that turned her flesh clammy. She knows who I am and that is the cause of her collapse! And now they were trapped together, she and Miss Trent, in this cage.

  But it could not be, she reasoned. The girl was unwell before they had met, the girl’s collapse had come when her eyes were fixed solely on the ground at her feet. There was no danger, then—though what she had thought that danger might be, Eleanor could no longer think. Exposure, perhaps. Her unveiling.

  ‘This one—this is my door,’ Miss Trent gasped. ‘The key—it is in the pot.’

  And her angel of mercy scrabbled around in the pot of the giant fern and soon located the key, and she opened the door and helped the young lady inside. She took her to the little chintz settee and lowered her gently down.

  And now what?

  Eleanor did not move. She felt the absurdity of her situation. She observed in a bewildering rush the host of mismatching tables and chairs, the crimson wallpaper, the Landseers and the pre-Raphaelite women on the walls, the French doors and the little balcony beyond, the mantel and the clock and the door to the bedroom. She had left the bedroom door slightly ajar, she saw now. And the clock, was it exactly in the centre of the mantel or had she replaced it a little too far to the left?

  ‘Thank you. I am a little better now, I believe,’ said Miss Trent in a low voice, not lifting her gaze from her hands in her lap.

  She did not look a little better. Her face was a ghastly grey and her hands showed a tremor. Perspiration stood out on her face as though a fever had overcome her. And there were spots of blood on the fingers of her gloves. And on the hem of her skirt. More than spots, a fresh splash of blood, though its origin was unclear.

  ‘Is there someone I might fetch for you?’ Eleanor suggested. ‘A neighbour, or a friend? Your … husband, perhaps?’

  ‘No. No one, thank you.’

  ‘Then may I get you something? A glass of water? Or brandy, perhaps, if you have such a thing?’

  ‘Perhaps a glass of water …’

  She sat rigidly upright, her hands one on either side of her, pressing down on the upholstery. Her eyes were closed.

  ‘Of course,’ murmured Eleanor.

  There was no kitchen, only a gas stove, a tiny sink, a wall cupboard in a corner. Eleanor ventured over. She did not wish to touch anything. She wanted to handle each and every thing. She opened the cupboard, surveyed a small array of crockery and some glassware. Someone else’s crockery, someone else’s glassware—there was nothing of Miss Trent here. She selected a glass, filled it with water and returned to her patient. She held it out to her, watching closely as Miss Trent opened her eyes, raised her face in a tight little smile, took the glass.

  Eleanor sat, unbidden, on the edge of the settee. She watched as Miss Trent took a sip. Miss Trent’s hand shook. She closed a second hand over the glass, steadying herself. She did not look up again, seeming discomforted by the silent gaze of her visitor.

  Her lashes were wet with tears.

  ‘What is your name, my dear?’

  After all, one wished to be absolutely certain.

  ‘Miss Trent.’

  Eleanor nodded. She did not offer her own name, or any other name, in return, and if Miss Trent thought this odd she did not say so. How could she?

  ‘You are from England, I think,’ said Eleanor. She did not explain how she knew this. Let Miss Trent wonder.

  ‘I—yes, I am.’

  ‘And how long have you been in New South Wales?’

  ‘I arrived in February.’

  Four months.

  ‘And have you no family at all here?’

  Miss Trent shook her head. She did not speak.

  ‘You are alone then.’ Eleanor paused, let the words sink in. ‘But why stay, if you have no one? Have you not considered returning?’

  ‘I have no one there either.’

  ‘Then you are truly quite alone.’

  The colour, such as it had been, was quite gone from Miss Trent’s face. Her very essence drained away, so that one could not judge what this woman might be like ordinarily. And Eleanor did wish to know, she wished it very much.

  Eleanor stood up. She went to the French doors, where it was safe. She stood looking out at the tangle of garden below.

  ‘How old are you, Miss Trent?’

  There was a faint pause. ‘I am twenty-two.’

  ‘I am forty.’ Eleanor addressed the French door, the tangled garden. ‘I have recently begun to wear spectacles for reading, though I have kept this fact from my husband. Curious the secrets between a husband and a wife.’

  Miss Trent made no reply.

  Eleanor turned and faced the room. She stood behind the little settee, behind Miss Trent. This upright posture of Miss Trent’s was not quite natural, she observed, even if one accepted the girl was unwell. It was not the bearing of a gentlewoman brought up for drawing rooms and a good marriage. It was the posture of a girl expected to work, who had worked, in some capacity or other, for much of her twenty-two years. Her answers, too, were the unconsciously diffident responses of someone more accustomed to serving than being served. But not quite a servant, no. An artisan’s daughter, perhaps, or a clerk’s.

  But fallen.

  Eleanor paid no heed to the lashes wet with tears, the hand that shook. Here was a woman who had compromised herself—and for what? So that she might have another woman’s husband? Or because circumstances demanded it? Eleanor had sat on the board of the Benevolent Asylum, she was not without kn
owledge of the sort of woman who found herself in such a precarious position, but that was not Miss Trent—there was no child, so far as one could ascertain, no deserting or drunken or violent husband. She was not in poverty. Why, then, had she thrown her morals aside? Spoiled her chances, such as they may be, of a normal life?

  Unless she had no morals to lose in the first place.

  She thought of the Jellicoes’ housekeeper, the faceless, the omnipotent Dora Hyatt. A destroyer of marriages, reputations, lives, and all for her own nefarious, sordid ends.

  Or so one presumed.

  Miss Trent turned her head, but short of twisting herself right around she could not meet the gaze of the stranger standing behind her. It was awkward; her discomfort was evident. How much more powerful I am than you, thought Eleanor, and she felt her power—she did!—as it surged through her, and in the same moment found she had no power at all. For what could she do? What was there to do?

  ‘Oh, see what I have found on your carpet!’ Eleanor exclaimed. She came around and resumed her place on the edge of the settee, holding out before her, so that Miss Trent might see it, the gold tiepin with the engraved initials: A.D. ‘It is a gentleman’s gold tiepin,’ she added, so that there be no mistaking it.

  Miss Trent peered at the pin. It was not quite dismay on her face but something close to it. She looked away. She said nothing. What could she say? A gentlemen’s gold tiepin in her apartment.

  She did, then, have some modicum of respectability, some modesty.

  ‘It looks to be quite valuable,’ said Eleanor. ‘Perhaps it was left by the previous occupants.’

  She was not sure why she had presented the girl with this way out.

  Miss Trent nodded weakly. ‘Yes, perhaps.’

  ‘I shall hand it in at a police station,’ said Eleanor. ‘No doubt the gentleman who lost it will be glad of its return.’

  And Miss Trent said nothing, but her eyes followed the tiepin as it disappeared inside Eleanor’s reticule and was gone.

  Having rallied for a moment, Miss Trent now seemed a little worse. She closed her eyes once more and leaned back, resting her head, where before she had not allowed herself to do so.