A World Apart (28 page)

‘Mmm. I shall engage my connections. Please visit me again. One week from today.' He cleared his throat. ‘Now, if I may be excused. I have much work…' He waved a hand over his cluttered desk.

Eliza rose. ‘Thank you. Do you require payment on account?'

‘Thank you. Ten guineas should suffice for the time being. And kindly advise me of your address. I may require your presence in the next day or two.'

‘The Bull Inn. But a few minutes' walk distant.' She counted the money into his outstretched hand.

‘Good day to you, ma'am.' He slid the coins into a leather pouch he took from a drawer, then rose painfully from his chair. Eliza let herself out and walked to the inn. Irritating thoughts began to buzz in her head like a cloud of flies over a dung heap. Why? Was there something afoot that was not as it seemed? Why was the old man's voice so tantalisingly familiar?

‘Oh, sir.' The stablehand greeted Harry as he reined in his horse outside the stables of the Great House, tired and despondent after his long ride from the London Stock Exchange, returning to the fate he had desperately wished to escape. Roberts took the reins and bowed. ‘I fear we have some sad news, sir. Your father — '

Harry didn't wait. He ran to the house, up the stairs, along the hall to his father's room. Doctor Hargraves sat beside the bed. As Harry stopped in the doorway, the grey-haired, stooped physician looked up.

‘He's gone, Mr Harry. A blessed release.' Harry bit back a sob. It would not do for the servants to see him weep. For as long as he could remember, his father had been a cold, distant disciplinarian. A man who had never shown his son the least portion of fatherly affection. Harry looked at the corpse, its face grey and still, lying rigid on the bed. As he watched, the doctor draped a sheet over the dead face.

‘It's for the best, Sir Harry — you'll forgive my using your rightful title so soon. I will leave you now. If you wish to pay your last respects…'

‘Thank you.' Harry whispered. The doctor took his bag and left. Alone in the sickroom, Harry knelt by the bed.

‘Goodbye Father.' He reached under the sheet, found the cold, stiff hand, held it. ‘You were not the father I'd have wished for, sir. You were not one to treat his son kindly. Show him his path in life.' The sobs which Harry had blocked in the doctor's presence now ran free in the privacy of his dead father's bedchamber.

‘But I mourn you, sir,' he whispered. ‘And I vow that I will choose a path that will make for a better world. If I should be blessed with children, I will try to be a good father to them. If I learned aught else from you, sir, I learned that a boy needs a father. A wise man who can love his son while he teaches him the things a man must know in order to be a man.'

An hour later, Harry left the room, closed the door. He walked downstairs, back into the realities of his life. Now he must return to the burning problem of naming the date to propose to Agatha.

A thought fluttered into his brain like a wild bird landing in a tree. His father was dead. Harry no longer faced that fateful obligation to him. If he fled the village, the country even, then he would be free to make a new life for himself. Certainly he would lose the estate. But that would be better than losing his future to a marriage he would hate from the moment he slid the ring onto his bride's finger. And once his estate was lost to him, why should he stay?

Now there was nothing to stop him from sailing to Botany Bay to Eliza's loving arms. Surely, there could be problems. Eliza might have been granted freedom, married. She might be dead. The only way to heal his aching heart would be to seek her in the distant land of New South Wales. He would go.

He had heard that in the faraway colony, convicts who had served their time quickly became rich. It was a land of opportunity. Indeed, the fine wool grown by those emancipated convicts had, however indirectly, driven his father, then himself, courtesy of the London Stock Exchange, to ruin. Now he saw that there was nothing to be lost by leaving, and everything to be lost by staying. He could set sail for Botany Bay with a clear conscience. Money? He could
sell the knick-knacks which had lain scattered about the Great House for centuries — paintings, furniture, the occasional jewel — and make enough to pay his fare. And he should do it quickly, lest Louisa should return from the London Season before he left.

A week later, a tired Harry had his footman carry an assortment of bags to the chariot. He'd spent much of the night sifting through the drawers in his father's commodious writing desk. Besides a modest cache of golden guineas, he'd found a small bag of uncut jewels. Though he had little notion of their worth, he guessed that his father would hardly have saved them if they'd been cheap imitations. Into his bags they went, along with the gold, some family documents, and a miniature of the mother who had died giving birth to him. At a respectable hour of the morning, he spoke to the housekeeper.

‘I leave for Southampton on the morrow, Mrs Hawkins. Now that the funeral is over and my father buried, you will understand that I am now but a landless pauper. I intend to travel for a while. Soon the bankers will take charge of the estate, and Mr Thurber will likely own it in a matter of days. I sincerely hope you and all the servants will find a place in Mr Thurber's household.'

‘My condolences, sir,' the housekeeper said. For the whole of Harry's life, Mrs Hawkins had been the competent manager of the Great House, yet nurturing a warm heart beneath her businesslike exterior. ‘Your father was a benevolent master at heart, sir. There are those who will miss him.' Harry took the kindly woman's words to mean that she was not one of them. Understandable. For too many years she'd been the butt of the viscount's drunken outbursts, his endlessly bellowed orders to her to deliver the impossible.

‘Southampton, sir?' she said as he stepped towards the door, eager to visit the stables.

‘Yes. There's nothing to keep me here now,' he said. ‘I plan to take ship to Botany Bay. I hear there are fortunes to be made there.'

‘I believe so, sir.' Her wan smile betrayed her sadness at the loss of the young master she had known since his babyhood. ‘Indeed, some of those fortunes were made at your father's expense, it would seem. That fine merino wool quite destroyed his plan to make enormous wealth from his sheep.'

‘Indeed it did,' Harry said. ‘And I may live to redeem some of those losses.'

‘Then Godspeed, sir. I wish you well.'

Harry walked to the stables. He climbed into his chariot, heard Roberts flick the reins. As he began his long journey to Southampton, he felt at least a little fulfilled. He had taken the first step towards his escape from the England, which in a few days hence would summarily reject him as useless bric-a-brac.

He reached Southampton late on the evening of his second day of journeying. When Roberts found him an inn a respectable distance from the wharves, he farewelled his coachman, instructed him to return home, gave him a guinea, and went to his room, pleased that it was clean and quiet. He had no wish for his sleep to be disturbed by drunken sailors and their strumpets lurching past his room throughout the night.

Next morning he took a path leading to the wharves. As he followed it, he passed a string of ships moored close by. Surely one of them would be bound for Botany Bay. It was not until late afternoon that he encountered a bo'sun who showed at least a little interest in his question. Yes, they might consider taking another passenger to Botany Bay.

‘We sail by The Azores, Cape Town and Bombay. And perchance a berth at the Spice Islands,' he said. ‘You wish to take ship, sir?'

‘Indeed I do.'

‘Then might I suggest that you lay in some warm clothes, a pair of sea boots, sir. And as much rum as you can afford. T'will likely be close to midwinter when we arrive at Botany Bay. It be a terrible long voyage, sir.'

‘Midwinter? But that's only three months away.'

‘Not in the southern lands, sir. Midwinter falls in June in the antipodes.'

‘I see,' Harry said. Eliza would have known that. He must discipline himself to stop thinking of her every second minute of the day. As he stood at the gangplank, he looked up at the curved wooden timbers of the ship, took in the name painted on the bow —
Lady Caroline
. He must look forward to a long friendship with the portly lady. His mind made up, he pulled the now slender pouch of sovereigns from his pocket and counted the fare into the bo'sun's gnarled hand.

‘Thank'ee, sir,' the bo'sun wheezed. ‘We weigh anchor at full tide next Thursday week forenoon. That's if'n we has a hold full of cargo and all our stores is on board.'

‘But that's an age away,' Harry grumbled

‘T'will be more than an age on the journey, sir. Ye'd best enjoy your last days ashore while ye can.'

Harry walked back to his inn, thoughtful. Over dinner he would toast his departure with a celebratory tot of rum. Then he would dream of finding Eliza in the strange upside down land called New South Wales.

As soon as the door clicked shut after Eliza's exit, Obadiah Shaw took pen and paper and wrote.

He called to his clerk to take the letter to the post, and filled his pipe with a generous wad of tobacco. God willing, Miss Louisa De Havilland might soon become the source of rich pickings for a humble lawyer committed to upholding British justice.

Three days after his clerk had posted the letter to Louisa De Havilland, she knocked at the door of Obadiah Shaw's rooms early in the morning. She wasted no time in addressing her enthusiasm for the lawyer's suggestion. It would be most satisfying to bring to justice the upstart child who had inveigled her brother into a disgusting liaison.

‘Downing!' she ranted when Shaw raised the subject. ‘That disgusting trollop. Lying naked with my brother in the grass. Knocking my poor father off his chaise longue so that his back was near broken. He limped for the rest of his life from that injury. And, and…causing riots among the farmhands. I demand that you arrange her arrest immediately!'

‘Thank you, my dear Miss De Havilland. But several legal matters remain to be solved. First we much catch the woman. If she can escape from New South Wales, she must be, er, light on her feet. Then there is the matter of identifying her to the judge's satisfaction.'

‘Identifying her? I can take care of that.' She smiled as she recalled a satisfying moment in her past. ‘A certain scar.'

Louisa did not want to risk having the golden-haired blue-eyed wench stand before some naïve judge unfamiliar with her dark past. With a wiggle of her hips, a smile, she might well bias his judgement.

‘Can we arrange that Judge Fortescue be assigned to the case?' she asked. ‘He was my father's friend these many years.'

Shaw reminisced. He recalled the judge's evident bias towards his friend John De Havilland when the matter of Eliza's assault came before him. Any red-blooded male would have taken advantage of the situation in which De Havilland found himself, would have groped the pretty young maid's thigh as he lay on the chaise longue and she stood close to him, frightened, disempowered. That her fleeing from his grasping hand had made him fall to the floor was…amusing. Shaw remembered the guffaws of his legal friends as they discussed the judgement over their ales after their day in court. At least the judge had later dismissed the charge of assault against Downing. Why might he have done so? But then the sentence of one-and-twenty years transportation for administering unlawful oaths, like those upstart farmhands from Tolpuddle, was a mite severe.

‘Do you know,' one of his cronies had said as they drank, ‘These days they are calling them the Tolpuddle Martyrs?'

Shaw looked into the eyes of the aggressive, scowling woman who sat opposite.

‘Well, it is a matter of timing, Miss De Havilland. Judge Fortescue makes a circuit of the various Dorset assizes. We must plan the case so that he is on the bench here in Dorchester when Downing is tried.'

‘How do we do that?'

‘I will send my man to the court, ask the clerk of the court.'

‘When shall we know?'

‘Well,' Shaw must manage his intercourse with Miss De Havilland so that he extracted as much money from her as possible. ‘With a little…encouragement of the court officials, we may be able to bend them to our will.'

‘How much encouragement?'

‘Oh, let us say twenty guineas.'

He watched as he reached into her reticule, withdrew a handful of coins.

‘Here.' She counted the coins into his outstretched hand.

‘Carruthers!' He called, and his man appeared. ‘Take this to the clerk of the court. Ask him when Judge Fortescue will next sit on the bench.' He winked. ‘It would suit Miss De Havilland's purpose if it were soon, quite soon.' As Carruthers departed, he smiled at his new client.