Bettany's Book (89 page)

‘Would they believe you?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s not likely now. Justice Flense didn’t, and I had a better kind of jury than they have at home.’

And now, we knew, somewhere on the road, from Bathurst or Goulburn or Sydney, a man was preparing to travel with a noose in his bag, while the Governor would soon be reading Mr Handler’s appeal.

‘Mr Bilson,’ Long said, holding his pipe clamped in his teeth, asked me what I thought had happened to Felix. I said, “Oh, he will never be seen again until he takes on a man’s face. He’s gone far down the
Murrumbidgee to live with the Myall blacks. He’ll take a lubra for wife. He was a clever boy, that one, but never happy unless amongst his own.”’

‘But he liked his Latin and Greek,’ I said by way of gentle contradiction.

‘Oh,’ said Long, ‘but there’s no need for Mr Bilson to be so informed.’

‘I have advertised for him,’ I said. To prove my lack of complicity, I had done so. People had mentioned seeing the advertisements in the
Goulburn Herald
, and the
West Maitland Gazette
. They had been very particular advertisements in regard to Felix’s age and features and character.

‘Our Mr Handler tells me not to hope,’ said Long, puffing away at his now-lit pipe, held in a cuffed hand, with the tranquillity of despair. ‘Handler tells me that His Excellency is under a shadow for tolerating and, as they say, favouring Irish lads. He thinks we tend to be given to breaking down doors and houghing cattle, but not to thievery – that’s the explanation for his liking, and he is a Whig that way. Last February, six Irish were charged with absconding and firing on their master, and His Excellency saved the lives of five of them. Now people all say to His Excellency, show us your firmness or you’ll find us writing letters. I am that firmness, sir. I am the sign that no white man, however far out, can be harmed without punishment. This is what Mr Handler warns me, anyhow.’

‘I have told His Excellency of your admirable record and qualities, and expressed the severest doubt about your guilt.’

‘Yes,’ said Long with a terrible plainness of tone, and as if he were distracted by something more important. ‘In regard to all that, there is one service, Mr Bettany, you could do.’

I nodded.

‘We Ribbonmen of Ireland, who swore to punish landlords, if you’ll forgive the fancy, are not given to the idea of quick lime. The same can be said for unconsecrated ground. I spoke of the money you banked. I would have you ask His Excellency to give you my body. If I cannot be buried in open or priest-blessed ground then Nugan Ganway would serve – west of the homestead say, where I could be trodden on by little lords like Michael O’Dallow. And I would care for a little headstone of the local granite and on it a cross and the name of my ship,
Fairley
, so that any later comers will not mistake me for another Long, or another Long for me. It can say I was hanged, if that is what is needed, it can
say that I murdered, if that is what is decreed. But it must say that I was Long of
Fairley
.’

I told him I would write a letter at once to the Colonial Secretary, that if the awful thing happened I would be there with a wagon, and his friend Clancy would carry him back. I also urged him to send for me in time if he were to change his cast of mind. I was willing to make the sacrifice for him, I assured him again.

But he said nothing and we seemed to have covered all his concerns. As for my concerns, after I left him I went straight to the Royal Hotel and drank three rums to quench for a second my rankling sense of my own fall, even though I would prefer to be fallen with Bernard than risen with any other. I took it too for the limitless treacheries I was still growing my way into.

On the principle that a man who consigns another to the gallows should be willing to look him in the eye, I was bound to drive in from Nugan Ganway to Cooma to witness Long’s public execution, having merely as armour the Governor’s permission, which the press would ultimately think an eccentric decree, to accept the remains. By my side was my father, eager to observe Long’s death for the purposes of his writing. What a philosophical dog’s breakfast he would make of it, coming to it as he did with such fixed ideas. He might well be the ultimate indignity for poor Long.

Sarah Bernard had lain sleepless by my side, but loyally expatiating on the idea that Long had somehow been fortunate to have me for a master. She was my courage and my one solidity in a world of vapours. She had become the wifely consoler, and I rebutted but welcomed all her plain soothing utterances.

She said, for example, ‘Sean Long is a great believer. That’s the thing surely. That to believe you’re going to go to paradise is as good as going.’ And I reached my hand and stroked her thigh, to honour her pithiness, her kind cynicism.

‘You have done all you could have done,’ she told me more simply.

‘But how do you know?’ I asked.

‘Sean Long told me. He wrote me a letter.’

There was a pause.

‘May I see it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said definitely. ‘It’s simply mine.’

I laughed. It was as if she had been expecting another response, and she asked, ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘It’s the possibility of secrets between lovers. All fallen creatures need their secrets.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All fallen creatures.’

We lay at a sort of peace with our separate and sometimes unutterable sorrows about us.

I was pleased to rise half an hour before a glorious dawn, rosy as a morning in a print of the Resurrection. I put the horses in the traces some twenty minutes before Clancy emerged to rig up a dray to bring Long back. I wished I could have ridden on horseback – I wanted the good, distracting jolt of a ride. But in Long’s hut my father was already rising, and gathering notebooks and pencils.

I had known in my blood, from the day the trial began, that this was how it would end. With me silent and compliant. And now I expected, at the end of a two-and-a half-hour journey during which my father gave a repetitious commentary on the parallels between Socrates and as much of Long’s history as he had gathered from O’Dallow, to roll into the town to see Treloar and a vulgar mob. Their cries would scour and flay my soul, as it deserved to be scoured and flayed.

But the truth was that the crowd which gathered before the courthouse seemed valedictory and almost shy, as if come more to ease Long upon his way than to hoot and mock. An hour before the time, a number of Mother Ignatius’s nuns arrived, having come all the way from Goulburn. They knelt in a line before the gallows and began reciting their beads aloud. Sundry Irish ticket-of-leave men and servant women arrived from throughout the area, formed lines behind and on either side of the nuns, some of them producing their own beads and murmurously following the good women. Irish housekeepers huddled up to the back of them, introducing their resonance into the prayers. I wished that I could have been joined into their utterances, barbarous – according to some commentators – as they might be. I wanted that exalted company of virgins and that rough company of felons to stand between me and the painful light.

The day became hot, and bright enough to make one squint. ‘Heaven and hell are opening with equal vigour to our friend Long,’ my father told me, blinking under the sun as we walked from the Royal after drinking early morning spirits.

At seven minutes to the hour, Mr Treloar’s carriage drew in behind
me. Treloar tipped his hat, but did not dismount, sitting there sourly instead, a pastoralist waiting for a bill to be paid. He was the only one there for the victim, Goldspink. He made a miserable retinue.

I attributed it to the merciful nature of Mr Bilson that when the seconds had ached away to eleven o’clock, Long was brought out promptly and hustled up the scaffold. There Bilson, a priest from Goulburn, and the executioner awaited him. Long responded to a prod from Bilson as he stood like a reluctant groom, and stepped forward.

Men and women in the crowd began to cry, ‘God save ye, Sean! Go to it Sean! For God and the old land, Sean!’ There seemed to be a communal desire that he behave well. I heard Treloar behind me make a noise in disgust and say to his driver, ‘They’re a dramatic set of rogues.’

Long’s face seemed that of a man at ease. He said, so that the crowd could hear, could perhaps later relate for the consolation of his lost family: ‘Into your hands do I commend my spirit.’ Indeed he did not look heavenward. He looked to what I supposed could be called the people of his communion of saints, Ireland’s penal family as reconstituted on the high plains of Maneroo. He said, ‘I did not kill the man …’

There were shouts from the crowd. ‘No! That you didn’t, Sean.’

A woman cried, ‘You are not the first martyr of our race, Sean boy.’ So they had injected politics into this horror, they blamed it on powers and principalities, and I stood on the edge, unblamed and unpunished. ‘I had hoped to run sheep and cattle of my own, but this rope ends that hope. Did the immortal Christ say, “It is expedient that one should die for the multitude?”’

‘Yes. He did, Sean.’

‘I know He did and I go without malice.’ He did not look at me at any stage of this handsome, scalding little speech. Mr Treloar sucked his teeth and tossed his head, for I could hear his movements behind me. Long’s legs were strapped, the noose put around his neck and his head covered a last time, all very suddenly and as if it were a normal function of society. Over the heads of the nuns, the sound of whose
Aves
had increased, I saw Doctor Alladair and a convict constable go to the underside of the scaffold and trapdoor. When it was sprung with a sound I shall indeed remember to my dying second, since it reverberated in my own spine, I heard above the prayers and sobs Dr Alladair quietly directing the constable to drag on Sean Long’s legs, which he did. The faint trace of Long’s dying urine reached me. But there were no sounds from him, and after a second Alladair told the man to desist, listened to
Long’s heart and, as far as I could see, was satisfied. Everyone waited for two minutes, only the convicts praying, and at last Alladair instructed the constable to slit the rope. Inanimate Long fell to the ground. Clancy was to receive him later, from the back door of the cells, after Alladair had again examined him.

My father shook his head. I could see that he was genuinely touched, and there were a few scatters of tears on his cheeks. ‘That was a case of a herdsman showing how to die, Jonathan. That was noble and, thank God, quick. But it is wearing. I shall meet you at the Royal.’

He wanted to drink, for in his philosophic approach to Long’s execution, he had forgotten what a jolt to the human system it is to see a man mechanically destroyed. I saw him walk away, chatting to the town’s new apothecary, his head nodding at points of emphasis.

Magistrate Bilson and his men now hustled everyone from the scaffold as if they were unwelcome guests. The crowd, some still reciting their Hail Marys drifted away. Some men looked at Treloar as they passed, and spoke gutturally but indistinctly. Treloar himself, convinced that further waiting was not likely to produce more vengeance, turned to me and said, ‘I can understand you would want to hold on to a good man, Bettany!’

It was his version of reconciliation.

‘I would want to hold on to an innocent man,’ I told him.

‘Yes. But the court and the jury didn’t agree with you.’

He turned to his driver and told him to turn home. But I waited by that scaffold vacated even by the corpse, and emerging at last from the courthouse, Doctor Alladair came over to me.

‘You’ll be pleased to know, Bettany, I’m sure, that the fellow did die instantly.’

I was pathetically hopeful at the news, even as it plunged me deeper into the flames.

‘I am grateful, doctor, for your delicacy. But perhaps you will not judge me harshly if I ask you how you know?’

‘The break between the first and second cervical is palpable with the fingers and could only have happened at the drop. There was also no priapism, as would have happened had he lived ten seconds.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said. In departing, noble Long had avoided a last wave in the direction of Priapus, god of male fertility. Almost at once young Magistrate Bilson was at my side, his black cap tucked under his right arm.

‘The prisoner left you this,’ he said. ‘He thought very highly of you.’

What could one say to that? I took the letter. Bilson, whom I had recently heard had been an ensign in the cavalry in India, saluted and left.

The paper said, on its first line, in Long’s deliberate, raw hand: ‘Sir, In case you are distressed I say to you I know all and take all as it comes and forgive all.’

And on the next, ‘God save the boy.’

A last line said, ‘Pass my affection to Miss Sarah Bernard.’

I saw then that he had owed me hatred, but condemned me to his forgiveness.

As he had hoped, Long was brought back to Nugan Ganway and buried the better part of a mile west of the homestead, far enough out to be remembered, not so far as ever to be forgotten by any of us who had known him. The burial was attended by a muscular young priest newly come from Ireland to Cooma. In time Long’s presence and his tragedy could nearly be forgotten.

Meanwhile, Bernard and I did not lack for other distractions. To my horror, towards Christmas in that first year of his cohabitation with Aldread, my father borrowed my phaeton and rode into Cooma Creek with Aldread at his side. So the shame of his arrangement was not limited to Nugan Ganway. I heard later that he had called in at the Reverend Mr Paltinglass’s brick manse and argued the point with him over the Church of England’s doctrine on divorce. If divorce could be countenanced doctrinally by Judaism and Islam, why not by the Established Church? Why was it not within a man’s – or a woman’s, for he was democratic on this point – means to divorce within the context of his religion, if the one God was the same God permitting divorce under certain conditions as the Yahweh of the Jews and the Allah of the Muslims?

As Paltinglass was later kindly enough to tell me, he had himself indicated that more was required of Christians because of the mercifulness of their dispensation.