Bettany's Book (95 page)

‘Don’t these Carolan people drink it?’ she asked.

‘Not, I think, at this hour,’ he told her.

‘Then I shall have porter, thank you Mr Bettany.’

As for himself and me, he ordered two drams of the best firewater, and a little dumpy woman with eyes like marbles set in suet poured them for him, and he brought them to us, and said the woman would bring the porter.

I drank my rum quickly, hoping we would leave, but my father matched my pace and signalled for another dram.

‘Whoa!’ my father told me, intending to prevent me slipping away. ‘Your lady has barely touched her porter yet. And as for me, I don’t dislike the profane crowd as much as I pretended in my Van Diemen’s
Land days. As I found in my youth, they have a great deal to recommend them. Many of their faults are the faults of innocence and naïve courage and generosity, of a kind into which gentlemen never let themselves be betrayed. God, I think, must love even the brutish frankness of their decent impulses.’

A red-haired, thin man with crazed eyes approached us and asked, ‘Have you seen my Mary?’

My father softly denied that he had.

‘Should you see her,’ said the red-haired man, who reminded me a little of the dead absconder Rowan, ‘you warn her! You understand? Warn her!’

‘And well she should be warned,’ said my father.

‘Well indeed,’ said the man, and went on to ask somebody else the same question. My father put his glass down and I saw his face suddenly wet with tears.

‘Aldread is certainly dying,’ he told us. ‘I spoke of her when I spoke of decent impulses.’ He turned to Bernard. ‘Be indulgent to her,’ he urged.

Bernard looked away, over the head of her undrunk porter. She had been indulgent long before he had been.

‘And I suppose my mother lacks decent impulses?’ I asked him. ‘What of her courage and generosity?’

‘Ah, she has it, but it is all strangled by her terror.’

I thought then that he deserved whatever might happen to him. He had the compassion to find delight in the mixed virtues of felons, but not in his own wife. I relished now my cunning deceit. I wondered what moral story he could make out of my forger, who was engaged with me in deluding him. Would he extend his universal fraternity to Pigrim?

‘I must be back to Nugan Ganway,’ I told him.

‘Let us have one more dram, and I shall put my horse to the tail of your cart and return with you.’

That was what happened, and happily he slept nearly the whole way home, as I hurried my neat team back to the true centre of my earth, Nugan Ganway.

Lambing over, and in secrecy even from Bernard, I composed on the handsome pages run up by Pigrim at two o’clock one morning, the Evans and Pauley letter for which my father had been waiting. Pigrim had manufactured sufficient pages to allow for practice attempts.

May 4th 1844

Dear Mr Bettany,

I must thank you for having shown us your highly original tract,
The Death of the Stoic.
My editors and I found much in it that was intriguing and provocative. In a perfect world, where readers might not be so readily outraged as they are at this time and in this century, your work might be able to be published. But given the high sense of orthodoxy which marks this era, in which the slightest exuberance of ceremony or church decoration brings cries of outrage from the mass of the members of the Established Church, I cannot see how we can with safety publish your admittedly admirable tract. Perhaps it must await a wiser time, and I hope that in that thought resides your comfort as an author in this rejection.

Yours sincerely
Thos. Pauley, Esq., Publisher

This done, on my next journey to town, I ensured that I travelled alone. At the counter of the
Cooma Creek Courier
, Mr Pigrim was engaged in discussing some printing contract with the young lawyer named Cantyman, the one who had executed a new will for my father, and who happened to wish to advertise a Queen’s Birthday Gala Ball. I left the office and circuited the block, passing some boys playing cricket in a street of soft ochre clay, before returning with the envelope in my hand.

Pigrim seemed to understand why I was there and invited me inside. In the dark interior of his printing shop, he called the Cockney forger away from his semi-mechanical press, which, due to his pulling of handles and turning of wheels, had been producing dodgers with a massive, thumping-and-swallowing noise. We all entered Pigrim’s little waist-high office, half opened to the shop, where amidst the clutter of copy and proofs, I withdrew the envelope. The starved-looking forger glanced at me.

‘Does sir want to keep the stamp device?’ It came out, very nearly, as ‘dewize’. He held the wooden dye he had cut to reproduce a London postmark. It was inked with red.

‘No. I appreciate the craft, sir. But with your permission I shall put it in the fire.’

The little man stamped my envelope, dropped it to the floor, scuffed it with his hand. ‘You should do this a few more times before delivery, sir.’

I agreed to. So I put the wooden dye, beautiful in itself, into the fire in the bricked inglenook of Pigrim’s office. I watched it consumed, and then took the letter and, too proud to threaten them towards secrecy, gazed as meaningfully as I could at both their faces, which suddenly looked like the faces of fallible men, before picking up my hat and leaving.

I was certain, returning to Nugan Ganway, that my father watched me approach the stockyard and homestead from the doorway of his hut, Long’s old hut, thinking, ‘Mail perhaps?’ For I carried the letter in my saddlebag. I did not visit him however. I rehearsed in my mind how to be blithe and offhand, and how to just manage to remember that the letter, with whose contents I was so dismally familiar, had come.

I went into the homestead, finding its very air warm and tranquil, a gift to me from Bernard. I could hear her talking to Tume in our cookhouse, both their voices brightly raised. I crossed the brief few yards of open soil from the back of the house to join them. As I arrived, Tume stepped out to leave.

‘Your father has been here once already,’ Bernard told me.

‘I have it here,’ I said. ‘I shall take it to him.’

‘Let us pray he’ll be satisfied.’

But as I re-entered the homestead to retrieve the letter artfully placed in a wad of my own mail, as if indiscriminately shuffled in by some postal clerk, my father arrived at the door and began hammering.

‘Madam Aldread could not accompany me,’ he told me when I opened up. He bobbed his parrot head and blinked at me with his bird-like eyes set in a face as willing to hear only the best of news as a child’s might be.

‘I believe there is a letter here for you,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said, forgetting he had been waiting months. ‘Prompt enough. A good sign.’

I said, as if amused, ‘You thought it overdue when I spoke to you last.’

‘Well,’ he explained, ‘there we have the impatience of an old man with a strong sense of the limits on his time.’

I had at least a just sense that I must bear the moment with him. ‘Would you care to open it here, over a glass?’

‘That is gracious, my boy. But I must be back to Madam Aldread. She is really not well today.’ And he made a gesture of the hand and a further bob of the head which indicated his sad doubts about Aldread’s survival. Did he foresee, I wondered, a first-class ocean voyage, a return to
England, triumphant for him, therapeutic for Aldread? Did he see her smiling that wild smile of hers beneath a blazing sun, in the Indian Ocean?

I went and fetched the letter from my desk, trying to bear it forth with the casual equability which attaches to a document capable of being a lucky one.

‘Let me know if it’s good news,’ I asked him.

He held the letter up. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, waving it at the air, certain that it was his return ticket to a world he so obviously cherished.

In the instant before he turned to go he seemed to me brave and admirable, an undefeated cock sparrow of a man. My flawed father. I wanted the letter back to pack it with further regretful prose, to imply that a more orthodox text, if he had one in him, might succeed with Evans and Pauley.

‘You shall know,’ he reassured me over his shoulder, ‘whether your father is a fool or a literary man. Or perhaps both at the one time.’

He threaded his way, as I watched him from the window, an old man with a young man’s step and a fatuous hope, down the slope with the shadow of boulders reaching out for him. In Van Diemen’s Land, where she lived purely out of fidelity to a betraying spouse, my mother walked in uncertainty too. It was for her sake I was engaged in this deception, I assured myself. Or did I still wish to stand well, to appear non-heretical and unsullied to the Finlays and the Batchelors of the earth? I sat down by the hearth and drank the rum I had offered my father.

Bernard appeared with dishes. ‘Is your papa reconciled?’ she asked me softly.

‘I wish I knew. He has taken the letter off unopened.’

I heard nothing that night, though I waited up. But one does not go at two o’clock in the morning, in the bush of New South Wales, to inquire of one’s father what he makes of a letter supposedly from an English publisher. I went to sleep and woke at dawn. Outside, I heard curlews cry and Maggie Tume’s chirruping, as if trying on the new day’s clothes. I looked in the direction of Long’s hut. Distantly, on a knoll, and discernible only if you knew of its presence, was the little molar of Long’s grave, obscured by grass.

But there was no sign from my father’s direction, from the direction of that extreme and whimsical ambition. So Bernard and I ate our breakfast without any visit or message from the old man. I had no urgent duties that day, for O’Dallow managed Nugan Ganway as if it were his
own station, not with the wakefulness of the eager, but with a sort of enduring, watchful, relentless energy. I hoped vaguely that the watchfulness did not derive from Long’s example, that to be my overseer could be a perilous thing. So I sat at my desk reading a biography of Pitt the Younger, knowing O’Dallow would call on me if he needed me.

He came about eight. He said he was surprised to see lamplight from my father’s hut and, going to the window, could see my father nodding, it seemed, by the fire, with Aldread, her head back, on the far side of the hearth. She seemed to have been overcome by a profound weariness. Had they sat there all night? Had they drunk too much? I thanked O’Dallow and went hastily to the door of my father’s hut. My father watched me enter with wide-open unblinking eyes but failed to perceive me. His tongue was fallen into the corner of his mouth behind teeth more crooked and stained than I remembered them. His skin was blue and the features swollen. He had perished in some paroxysm.

I turned to sleeping Aldread to accuse her, the practised poisoner, of having produced this alteration, as I then thought of it, in him, but of course she was gone too, the same way. There were spilled mugs of tea beside both of them. They had died parallel deaths.

Unable to breathe, and shaking and gasping, I hastened back to breath’s sole provider, Sarah Bernard. I found her in the outer kitchen with Maggie Tume again, but she saw my face and came straight out to me.

‘What is it?’ she asked me, while I felt a childlike gratitude for the instant recognition of shock and yet more grief at this place once so Arcadian and now swept by curses.

‘My father and Aldread,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ she said, holding me by the wrist. She looked very pale herself, nearly as blue as Aldread. She led me back to my father’s cottage, and inspected both their faces, murmuring, ‘So she was willing to die with him.’

‘She poisoned him,’ I said, thereby railing against the opposite proposition.

‘No. If she had, she would still be here. Look at the spilled tea. It was a mutual self-murder. They died together.’ So though she had a farm in Van Diemen’s Land to inherit, she inherited it for, at most, seconds.

With her deft housekeeper’s hand, Bernard closed Aldread’s eyes, and then my father’s. The death of the Stoic. ‘He was the only man she had regard for,’ she said. ‘I was unkind in my thoughts.’

Her tears came on and reached a pitch where I thought selfishly, if she cannot be comforted, who will be left to comfort me? I held her. For it was insupportable to think he might have gone into the shades, had taken the Stoic sacrament, to wait in Hades for his tract to be recognised, honoured and celebrated. A tract which Bernard herself had committed to the Murrumbidgee River.

‘Had I known it was a killing matter, that silly manuscript …’ I started.

Bernard said, ‘Oh, but hush, how were you to know? Had I known … It was not a matter for taking poison. That silly book.’

But I was my father’s defender. ‘It was not utterly silly. It was well-reasoned. It was not however … decent and appropriate.’

‘Poor Alice,’ she murmured. Helping me outside, onto a bench on the verandah, she said, ‘I will get Maggie to lay them out.’ I sat there shuddering as the sun came up over the eastern range, turning the earth and the pasturage a rich, wet brown.

Soon Maggie returned with Bernard, and the two women, passing me, Maggie exclaiming but mercifully restraining her feelings, looked altered by the hour’s solemn demands. Bernard’s hand trailed over my shoulder, and I felt its living blood.

‘Sit still, love,’ she whispered. ‘Sit still.’

When the women had finished, I sent Presscart to town for Dr Alladair. Appearing in his role of coroner, he should at least be able to name the poison they had taken.

Nugan Ganway, August 23rd 1844

My dearest Mother,

You will perhaps by now have heard news of my father’s, your late husband’s, death by an apparently accidental poisoning. Such was the verdict brought down by the Cooma Creek coroner. I find it hard to believe that a just God would keep him stringently answerable for actions which in the past year have proved extremely volatile, and I hope you might, as the capping nobility of your life, forgive him for the hectic dance he led us. He was buried in Cooma with the rites of the Established Church. I did not call on a Wesleyan minister to fulfil the task since the excesses of Wesleyanism had tainted his youth.