A World Apart (24 page)

‘Ah, Alice. I see the hand of The Lord at work. Again.' He smiled down at her. ‘Please. Take time to consider my troth. In time, you may come to see that your affections will adjust to circumstance. In all fairness, I find it difficult to believe that you will ever see your young man again in this life. Let me recall that wise old saying, “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.” In quiet of the small hours, when Our Lord has loving intimacy with our souls, He tells me He has ordained that we must wed.' He smiled as he took her hand for a moment, then released it. ‘I am a patient man, Alice.'

A month passed, then another. Susannah had long since decamped to Sydney Town. In her last letter to Eliza she had waxed overjoyed.

The letter turned Eliza's mind to her own circumstances. Although she had woven a blanket of lies around her feelings for Harry as she explained her situation to Martin, he had enunciated a fundamental truth. It was, at best, unlikely she and Harry would ever meet again. Meanwhile, she might live out a life of lonely spinsterhood, in a land where the chronic shortage of marriageable women meant men would compete with each other in trying to build happy lives for the women they might marry.

She thought of the battles between rival peacocks displaying their dazzling tails to disdainful females who scratched the ground for worms nearby; of bellowing bulls clashing horns to win a cow who munched unconcerned in the fields; of stags locking antlers as they fought over a coy doe. She recalled Susannah's joy as she took her newborn babe in her arms… The day might come when Eliza should put her gilded memories of Harry in a safe, reverent place, then forge a new life for herself in this abundant new land. ‘The last thing to die is hope,' she remembered reading in some forgotten book. Perhaps it was now time for that vainly lingering hope to die.

During her many sleepless hours during the nights that followed, Eliza considered Martin's proposal, and prepared herself for their next meeting. He was a kindly, decent man; handsome, caring. Though she would never love him, they could create a happy enough life together. She would accept him. So it came to pass that one Sunday afternoon, a little before Evensong, she
told him she would be his bride. As he hurried away to prepare for the service, she felt she had chosen the time well — there had been no opportunity for…closeness.

Plans for the wedding became tucked under the wing of the ever-meticulous Mrs Blackmore, who had somehow taken the place of the bride's mother. She arranged for Vicar Thompson, from a neighbouring parish, and a longstanding friend to Martin, to conduct the service. Meanwhile, Martin clucked about his bride-to-be like a busy cockerel in a yard of pullets. Whenever they met, he greeted Eliza with affectionate handholdings, embraces, bows. Oftentimes in the early stages of their courtship, he made to kiss her, but always she declined. She failed to understand why her instincts made her turn away from him. But she told herself that there were times it was appropriate to follow one's blind animal instincts. Their moments for…intimacy would come when they were duly wed, and not before.

Eliza felt her cheeks take on a maidenly glow as she walked up the aisle of St Mathew's in her gown of white lace. Soon she stood beside her eager bridegroom as the joyous notes of the bridal march swelled from the organ.

The pair stood before the smiling vicar, and he launched into the marriage service.

‘…I now pronounce you man and wife,' he finished in suitably sonorous tone, and set down his prayer book on the lectern.

The organ burst into joyful music, and the couple repaired to the vestry at the rear of the little building to sign the register. Mrs Blakemore had insisted that Eliza complete a practice signing some days before the wedding.

‘We do not need the bride to make some slip of the pen as she signs, my dear. Remember, your signing will be preserved long after you are dead. So it must be correct in every detail.' Eliza had completed her practice conscientiously enough. The looming moment held no threat.

‘We now undertake this sacred act, my beloved,' Martin said as he escorted Eliza into the small windowless room, lit by one candle. ‘You will notice we are quite alone. I have chosen to dispense with the usual witnesses. I am, after all, a trusted member of the community. I will ask a couple of local dignitaries to sign as witnesses later.'

‘Very well.' Eliza fought to control her trembling hand; the hand that would in a moment take up the pen.

‘Since you do not ask why I turn away from this time-honoured convention, I will tell you, my beautiful wife.' Martin's voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I wish our marriage to be honest before God. And I trust that you wish it so also.'

‘Indeed I do, Martin,' Eliza whispered, glad that he had seen this sacred act as verifying his passion for truth.

‘And I now confess to you, my beloved, that during my time in New South Wales, I have lived under a fictitious name. Which I now abandon.' He took the pen and signed. Though suddenly curious as to why he would have adopted a name not his own as he ministered to his flock of native parishioners, Eliza chose not to peer over his shoulder. To do so would compromise the sacredness of his commitment to total honesty before God. She watched as he signed the page in the thick leather-bound book, then handed her the pen.

‘And I earnestly ask, before God, that you, my wife, do the same,' he said, voice ringing with sincerity. ‘So if you have assumed a false name, as well you might have — a common
enough practice in this new country — I trust that you will write nothing but the truth on this sacred occasion.' He placed a blotter over his writing and laid the pen beside the book.

Eliza nodded, too charged with emotion to answer, and took up the pen.

‘I, Eliza Downing, spinster, late of Marley, Dorset, do hereby…
' She finished the words she had rehearsed with Mrs Blakemore, scrawled the signature she had not written since her days back in the village of her birth. She set down the pen and smiled at Martin, who stood a respectful distance away. He returned her smile, then stepped forward, head bent towards the book to take in her words.

The choking cough. The wave of white shock flooding Martin's face like a giant wave breaking over a rock. His stumbling to the floor. His strangled gasp, the smash of his head on the tiles.

‘Eliza Downing.' The words came from him as if strong hands gripped his throat in a stranglehold. ‘I am…your…natural father.'

As she watched, paralysed, he turned and stared up at her, eyes wide with horror. ‘My God! My God! Forgive me! I have married my daughter!'

He choked, clutched his chest, groaned; a high-pitched, throttled gasp. Then his face froze. He body twitched, lay still. His eyes stared upwards at — nothing.

After a paralysed minute, Eliza bent, took hold of his wrist. She knew well enough the practice of taking the pulse of someone lying injured, had done it often aboard the
Swan
when her messmates lay sick. In the limp wrist she now clutched in panic, there was no pulse. She stared again into the wide-open eyes, took in the stillness of the prone body. It was the stillness of death.

Martin Townsend was dead, from the fatal shock to his fragile heart.

Eliza felt herself floating, an automaton without sense or feeling. She removed the blotter from Martin's signature in the register. Read the words.

I, Martin Townsend, widower, late of Marley, Dorset…

Martin Townsend. The vicar of Marley. The kindly man who had invited her to his library, discussed the classics with her. The gentleman who had halted his horse by her garden, talked with her over the fence. The parson who had preached wisdom from his pulpit every Sunday. The man towards whom her foster-mother Aunt Hannah had nursed a dark, never-expressed, suspicion…

In the state of suspended emotion which enveloped her, Eliza took stock of other scraps of insight now pulsing into her memories.

Her golden hair, identical to that of the blue-eyed man now lying dead on the vestry floor.

Her unusual intelligence around words and numbers, often remarked upon by the villagers of Marley. Vicar Townsend, it was said, had earned firsts in all his Oxford exams — signs of dedicated scholarship.

Her passion for study, for books — remarkable in a village of working class peasants.

The cryptic smile, the knowing nods, given her by Mother Turlington, the village wise woman, as she passed by in the village square, or outside the church on Sabbath mornings. She remembered the old woman's puzzling comment from an afternoon the pair met as she walked home from the village school. ‘Goodness me, child. Your hair is grown into spun gold. So like our dear vicar's. And your eyes too. Blue, like his.'

She recalled her flash of curiosity the first time she had looked into the face of Vicar Bentleigh at St Mathew's mere months before.

Martin Townsend was indeed her father. He would not have wished to identify her as an escaped convict. She had lately learned that the punishment for escape was death by hanging. Many a convict had seized the moment when he worked unguarded in field or barn, and fled into the vast unknown. Lately, the government had been forced to impose a harsh deterrent. She took hold of the register, tore out the page each had signed, and held it in the candle flame until it fell into black ashes.

For a last moment, she looked down upon the body of the man she would ever afterwards acknowledge as her true father. Then she stepped back into the church, her body trembling like a skeleton tree in a winter storm.

‘My. Husband. Is. Dead!

For hours at the end of that long, long day of standing at the gates of hell, Eliza lay sleepless. She must resolve the conflict that burned deep in her soul before she could ever sleep again. The father she now saw as her own true blood, whose intellect she had inherited, was dead. As long as she lived, she would remember the times when they had shared books telling of the knowledge of the ages, the wonders of the world. She lit a candle and stood, staring into the looking glass by her bed.

‘Who am I? Who am I?' She spoke aloud to the sad ghost who peered back at her, chin lit by the candle she held to her breast. All her life, until that day, she had known herself as the daughter of Charlotte and Silas Downing, offspring of a seamstress and a ploughman. A village child, born to toil. To stand head bowed while the gentry rode by in their coach and four. To curtsey when they stepped down from their coach to attend the village church on Sundays. To be silent when Viscount De Havilland spoke to Mr Harcourt on those rare moments when he visited his children in their schoolroom. To work out her life in the village, if not as a milkmaid, then as teacher in the village school. To subsist on the pennies earned from her teaching, on the vegetables she might grow in the cottage's humble garden, the butter and cheese she might make from Bessy the cow's modest, ever shrinking daily gift of milk.

Then Harry had come into her life. In her childish
naïveté
, she had believed him when he told her they would marry. Her finger flicked to the scar in the palm of her hand once again. And yet…and yet… On impulse, she slid out of her nightdress and stood naked before the looking glass, staring at the wraithlike image before her. Slowly, slowly, as she peered into the glass, her face, her eyes, seemed to change.

‘I am a new being,' she said aloud. ‘I am a gentlewoman. A widow. I am aged one-and-twenty. From this moment on, I will become a new person.'

Then she slid back into her bed and dreamed of Harry. Harry pulling up beside her as she walked along a path to the village. Harry reaching for her hand, lifting her onto his horse, nestling her body between his legs, holding her between strong, loving arms as he flicked the horse's reins. Whispering in her ear as the horse sped into a canter.

‘Come back to me, Eliza. Come back.'

The parishioners took the news of their vicar's death calmly.

‘Poor man. He were always a strange one. Always close unto himself. A body don't wonder that his poor heart died the moment he signed the register. That heart of his were always feeble. Sometimes he would have to sit while he were preaching at the pulpit. Take a little breather, he said.'

To all intents and purposes his widow, Eliza retained a lawyer to sort through Martin's papers. The lawyer was more down-to-earth than the parishioners.

‘Your legal wedded husband — we have a church full of witnesses to swear to that — was possessed of a large fortune, left him by his former wife, one Hepzibah De Havilland. The records were found in his trunk. And he had arranged for authenticated copies to be kept safe in the local bank. So, Mrs Bentleigh, I must congratulate you on your most generous
inheritance. I shall have a word to the bank manager at Campbelltown. You may be sure that he will advance you cash, as much as you wish, immediately thereafter.'

Eliza continued to ponder her future during the long sleepless nights following her father's burial. No one in the world would ever learn of the outrageous truth that had caused his frail heart to quit beating. Mother Turlington, if she had somehow divined that Eliza was Martin's natural daughter, must be long dead. Eliza's purpose in teaching at the mission school seemed now to have vanished. It had been the vicar's notion, and now he was gone there seemed little point in continuing.