The Black Dress (5 page)

We couldn’t do too much because we were all in our Sunday clothes, but still it was the best time of the week.

‘I like Sundays after Mass best of anything,’ John said. ‘Don’t you, Mary?’

‘I like Sundays best of all,’ I said.

After everyone left we sat on the verandah, watching Uncle Peter talk over the work for the upcoming week with the men. He spent time with them every week, to Mamma’s relief. She knew little about raising cattle or growing wheat.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Peter,’ Mamma said. But Uncle Peter just ducked his head and shrugged.

‘Never mind that, Flora. Well, I’d better be getting back to Julia.’

Some Sundays Aunt Julia did not come to Mass. The Sewards had rebuilt and moved back to their property, two miles down the road. Uncle Peter dropped Aunt Julia off there, and she visited her sister while Uncle Peter came to Mass. Mrs Seward, Mamma said, was ill and needed company. Aunt Julia drove into Melbourne another day in the week to go to Mass.

‘But Peter never misses,’ Mamma said. ‘You’d think the land was his own, he takes such good care of it.’

Lots of things seemed strange without Papa. The dinner table, with his chair empty. Having Mamma lead the prayers in the morning and the rosary at night.

But it was the lessons I missed most. I didn’t expect to.

I had come back from the L’Estranges’ in early 1850, after Papa had bought Darebin Creek Farm. It had been odd, living with my family again, getting used to a house filled with children. It was like I didn’t know them any more, even though I’d seen them every Sunday. The oddest thing was starting lessons with Papa.

The best part of being at the L’Estranges’ had been all the books in Mr L’Estrange’s library. But I could only read English. Soon after I came back to live at home I turned eight and Papa had decided I was old enough to learn Latin and perhaps Greek, later on. Mathematics. Rhetoric. History. And, of course, theology.

‘Nothing is as important as the study of your Faith, Mary,’ he said to me earnestly. I sat beside him at his big desk in the office. The whitewashed walls had only one picture: an engraving of St Peter’s Basilica, the Pope’s big cathedral in Rome. Papa had brought it back with him from Rome itself, all the way from Italy to Scotland, and then to Australia. It dazzled me. My papa had actually been to Mass in St Peter’s. With the Pope. My Papa had
spoken
to the Pope. When I thought about it, I grew a little dizzy. Rome was as far away as Heaven, it seemed, and the Pope was like one of the Saints. Not quite as important as the Blessed Virgin Mary, but almost. It is strange now to think that I have made that journey, spoken myself with the Holy Father and received his blessing. Oddly, that journey now seems like a dream, while the memory of Papa’s picture of Rome is crisp in every detail.

‘Pay attention, Mary,’ Papa said quietly.

This was a strange thing, too. Papa, who was often so loud and impulsive, grew gentle as soon as we opened our books. His voice grew quiet. His hands were delicate as he turned the heavy pages. His fingertips lingered on the Latin words as he pointed them out to me and told me how to pronounce them.

‘
Fideles,
Mary, do you know what that means?’

I had heard it sung at Christmas:
‘Adestes Fideles’.
‘Oh Come, All Ye Faithful’.

‘Faithful?’ I asked doubtfully.

‘Faith, faithfulness and the faithful themselves, yes, indeed, that is right, child. It is the most important of the virtues and the most important thing in our lives. To be true to what you believe in, no matter what—that is the most important thing in life.’

His eyes were shining as he put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me quickly.

‘And you have a faithful soul, Mary, I can tell.’

I felt warm with pleasure. ‘Thank you, Papa.’

‘Now, I know you know the Lord’s Prayer, Mary, but do you know what it
means?
’

‘Um...’

‘Say it for me.’

That was easy.

‘Pater Noster, qui es in caelis: Sanctificetur nomen tuum...’
I began.

‘And what does it mean?’

‘Our Papa, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name, Thou Kingdom—’

‘Wait, wait, Mary, you have gone past yourself.’

‘I don’t understand, Papa.’

‘Come, we will look at it word by word, phrase by phrase. Let us start with
“qui es in caelis”,
Mary
.
’

So we went through the Our Father, and the Hail Mary, fitting the Latin words to the English, and winnowing the meaning out of both.

‘Pater means father. Look at it, Mary. Does it remind you of any other English word?’

I shook my head. The only thing I could think of was ‘plate’ and I was sure that plates weren’t part of the Our Father.

‘It is the source of other English words: paternal, patriarch, paternity...’

I could see the pattern. Papa pulled words apart for me and put them back together. It was a game, but a game with a point. It was fun.

‘Mater means mother, Mary.’

‘I know! Maternal and maternity.’

‘Good girl!’

We had lessons for an hour every morning after he had given the men their orders for the day. Then he set me some reading and arithmetic to do while he was busy about the farm. In the evenings, before dinner, he would inspect my work.

Papa also taught Maggie and John, but they were younger and still just learning simple reading and arithmetic. Papa took pains over their lessons but he didn’t enjoy it as much as our lessons together. I could see that. I could see why, too. Papa had a complicated mind. He liked a challenge. He liked to see me trying hard and then conquering a problem.

I did try hard. I enjoyed it when Papa praised me, when his eyes lit with warmth.

The study game was fun. It was like playing with puzzles and seeing all the pieces slot into place. Papa and I were alike, I realised. We both loved words and learning. Even arithmetic was interesting, once I realised that adding up and subtracting was what Papa did with his accounts each week.

But before lessons, and after them, I worked side by side with Mamma and Bridget. With Mamma there was no little need for talk, because we worked together in perfect understanding of what needed to be done and how to do it. After all, Mamma had taught me most of these chores before I lived with the L’Estranges. There were only a few things Mamma or Bridget would not let me do yet, like touch the hot flatirons.

‘Soon enough, little mother,’ Bridget would laugh. ‘You won’t be so keen to iron when you have a family of your own. Here, hold the baby while I do your papa’s Sunday shirt.’

So I held Lexie and tickled and cuddled her and wished for a baby of my own some day, while Maggie fed Annie her bread and milk and John fed a poddy lamb with a rag stuck into a bottle of milk. It was good to be back in the family. The L’Estranges’ seemed a long way away.

After Papa had gone to Scotland, there was still Lexie and Maggie and Annie and John to look after. Still the cooking and the mending and the washing to help with. But the lessons were no longer fun.

I worked from my books. I read. I tried to continue as though Papa were still there. I repeated what Mamma had told me.
Four months’ sailing to Scotland. Perhaps two weeks there to see family and friends. Perhaps another month if there were no boat leaving. Then four months back. Nine months. Nine months before we could even begin to expect him.

‘Nine months is not so long, child,’ Mamma had said. But it seemed a very long time indeed. I counted off the days on the perpetual calendar at Uncle Peter’s house, when we visited.

Aunt Julia made sharp comments to Mamma about Papa’s absence. ‘No word, yet, Flora? He could at least have sent a letter from the first port.’

‘There’s hardly been time for a letter to have reached us, Julia,’ Mamma said quietly. ‘No doubt one will come soon.’

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Uncle Peter heartily, with a sidelong glance at Aunt Julia. That glance held something I did not understand, some warning. Aunt Julia sniffed and shrugged.

‘Well, you’d better pray that he comes home quickly, Flora, with this lot on your hands.’

‘We pray that he comes home safe, every morning and evening, Julia.’

Mamma’s voice was soft, as always, but Aunt Julia quietened after that. She was an odd one, Aunt Julia. I’ve met a few like her since, but when I was younger I didn’t understand her. She came, I now realise, from the Irish tradition of standing up for your rights, a tradition with no respect for authority (except that of the Church) because those in authority were the enemy English. She could be sharp-tongued and strident, and she demanded every scrap of what was due to her. But once she’d got it, she’d usually give it away again in warm-handed generosity. She caused a lot of trouble in my life, one way and another, but she was also very kind to me and I know she loved me.

Well, if the good Lord made us all alike it would be a boring world, no doubt.

For a couple of months after Papa left, I worked steadily away at my lessons. But without Papa to share the puzzle with, it was boring. By the time the drought broke, in April, I’d lost interest in everything but storybooks, and we had but few of those. It was another reason to be angry at Papa. He had taken all the fun out of learning, too. It’s so easy to blame others for our own faults—and much more enjoyable to snipe at them than to correct ourselves.

Mamma tried to take Papa’s place. She was much better educated than most women, and she could work with me on arithmetic and English composition. She even knew some history. She could teach Maggie and John easily, but Latin and Greek were beyond her.

‘Think of it as a challenge from Our Lord,’ Mamma suggested. ‘How eager are you to read his words in their original form?’

‘I don’t understand, Mamma.’

‘The Gospels, Mary. The Gospels were first written in Greek, and then translated into Latin. Wouldn’t you like to read the words of the Gospels as they were first written?’

Oh, yes, I would. I definitely would. There was something
mysterious
about the idea of the Gospels having been written in different words than the ones I was so familiar with. As though, if I read them in the original, I would be reading a different book. I knew how hard it was to translate even simple sentences. How hard would it have been to translate the word of God?

‘No doubt the Holy Spirit guided the translators,’ Mamma said reassuringly.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit had. But for me, it was more important that the fun of the puzzle had come back. Word by word, line by line, I worked through St Luke’s Gospel: Greek at my left hand, Latin at my right, and English in the middle.

But John wanted me to come out and play. Annie wanted me to dig up the vegetable patch to see if the radish seeds we had planted the day before had sprouted. Lexie—sitting up on her own, now—gurgled and reached for me. Mamma needed me to look after the little ones, and Bridget needed my help in the kitchen when Mamma was tired. And I could never forget that Papa had given them into my care.

Sometimes, when I stood up after putting Lexie into her cot, I could feel the weight of that shawl of responsibility, still resting on my shoulders. There was so much to do, and it seemed that much of it should have been done by Papa.

But whenever I had ten minutes to spare outside my regular lesson times, I went into Papa’s office. I used his desk—after all,
Papa
wasn’t using it. It gave me a dark satisfaction to, in a way, usurp him. I perched on his chair and traced the Greek letters, so different from the Roman alphabet, so hard to recognise and pronounce without Papa there to guide me.

Maggie would poke her head in from time to time, trying to get me outside.

‘You always stick your tongue out between your teeth when you’re doing that stupid Greek, Mary. You’ll get buck teeth like Mary Jane Dougherty.’ And she’d make a rabbit face to make me laugh.

By the time Lexie was walking, I had worked my way through Luke and was on to Matthew. ‘Save John for last,’ Mamma said. ‘He’s the most beautiful.’

Would I have worked so diligently if Papa had still been there? Would I have learnt the beautiful cadences of the Latin so thoroughly? I have lost my Greek now, but thanks to the Mass my Latin still sings in my head.
Gloria in excelsis ...
For many Catholics, the whole Mass is an exercise in faith, because the Latin words swirl over their heads in vague torrents of meaning: this pattern is the Gloria, this pattern the Confiteor, this one the consecration. For me, each word is meaningful and that meaning has been a source of joy my life long. If Papa had been home, would I have worked so hard to master it?

In July, 1851, when I was nine years old, we travelled to Melbourne and stayed the night for a big party at the L’Estranges’ to celebrate Separation.

‘I know what Separation is,’ John said proudly to Mrs L’Estrange. ‘It means we’re not Welsh anymore!’

He was rather upset when everyone laughed at him. The truth was that permission had come at last from London to make Melbourne a separate colony, no longer under the control of Sydney. John was right, we were not New South Welshmen any more. We were part of Port Phillip colony. The new colony would be christened ‘Victoria’ in honour of the queen.

There was music and dancing and lots of delicious food. The men wore cutaway jackets and talked about how the colony would forge ahead now we had control of our own destiny. The women put on their best dresses with hoops under the skirts.

I had wanted a new dress, too, but Mamma had said we could not afford it. ‘Not just at this minute, Mary,’ she said, and I knew it was because Papa had still not returned. But I got a new pink sash for my old dress, and Mamma did my hair in ringlets.

Mr L’Estrange said I was the prettiest girl in the room.

I grinned at him. ‘I’m not really,’ I said. ‘Look at Adeline Seward.’ Adeline was dressed all in pink and white frills. Like a doll. Mr L’Estrange hugged me. It felt good to lay my head against his shoulder. He was always easier to hug than Papa. ‘I prefer my redhead,’ he said. ‘When are you coming to stay with us again?’