A Fringe of Leaves (13 page)

Mr Garnet Roxburgh might have approved of his companion’s seat. He glanced sideways once or twice, and down at the fall of her bottle-green skirt, without comment, however.

‘What is her name?’ Mrs Roxburgh asked, and her voice, she thought, sounded flat enough to match her insipid inquiry.

He considered it unnecessary to name horses, but some liked to call the mare ‘Merle’. Mrs Roxburgh wondered which of Them it was.

When they had ridden a little way he suddenly raised his arm, embracing the landscape as it were, with a sweeping, almost passionate gesture. ‘Do you believe you would come across lusher pastures anywhere on earth?’

“I have not seen everywhere on earth.”

‘Oh, come! As dry as my brother. That was a manner of speaking. Out of your experience, I meant.’ He looked at her meaningly.

There was every reason why he should know that his brother had married her off a farm, so she did not hesitate in her reply. ‘Ours was for the most part poor land—swept by winds from the sea. It could not compare with such luxuriance as this. But for all its poverty, I loved it,’ she added.

To have humbled her seemed to have appeased him.

He said quite gently, ‘I did not mean to hurt your feelings.’

She was not so sure.

A little farther on a flock of sturdy lambs stood grazing in a field of brilliant clover. She was about to express her delight when Garnet Roxburgh, who had not at first noticed the lambs, caught sight of them, and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘God sod the bastard shepherds! But what can you expect of the scrapings from the streets of Dublin and London?’

There was no sign of any shepherd to prevent the flock pushing through a gap in a fence roughly built of logs. Garnet Roxburgh spurred forward, wheeled the lambs, and soon had them scampering back through the break. After which, he jumped down, and started to repair the collapsed fence by dragging three or four logs into place. Although not of the heaviest, they were awkward in shape and jagged where the branches had been lopped. As she rode up to rejoin him, she noticed the blood trickling from the back of one of his hands. His shirt was wet from his exertion and his face closed in anger.

She decided not to disturb what would have been silence except for his panting and a coughing from the now stationary lambs.

Still silent, Garnet Roxburgh re-mounted, and they made, purposefully it seemed, towards a patch of thinned-out scrub on a near-by rise. Here she saw a hut had been built out of its grey, natural surroundings from which it was all but indistinguishable.

The master started shouting again, and two slaves came tumbling out from under the thatch of leaves. ‘By Ghost,’ he cursed, ‘if those lambs bloat you’ll regret it! Do you suppose I employ you to grog yourselves stupid before the sun is properly up? If I wasn’t such a soft-hearted noodle I’d set up my own private triangle and see my own justice done. Now, go to it!’

As the two shepherds, bleary from sleep and spirits, stumbled past in the direction of their flock, Mrs Roxburgh detected the authentic blast of rum. She might have been more distressed by memories if the present situation had disgusted her less. She could not sympathize with the neglectful and unsavoury ‘miscreants’, but was sickened by the uncontrolled passion of their master, who let fly at their shoulders with his whip before they were out of range.

His rage abating somewhat, they continued their ride, though without any definite aim, she felt. Garnet Roxburgh had withdrawn to brood amongst his thoughts.

In the circumstances she was relieved to notice flies gathering where the blood had oozed from the gash on the back of his hand ‘Have you a clean handkerchief?’ she asked. ‘I’ll bind up the wound. My own handkerchief is too small to be of any use.’

He said no he had not, and proceeded to suck the wound with such concentration she thought she recognized more than a trace of his brother’s hypochondria.

Until dropping his hand to the pommel of his saddle he remarked in what was intended as a lighter tone, ‘You will not have a good opinion of me, Ellen.’

She was about to protest, against her true feelings, when he began afresh, ‘You have never, I think, found me in the least congenial.’ He laughed. ‘You had decided against me long before we had so much as met.’

His charges were the more intolerable for being wholly true.

The black mare whinged and jumped on experiencing her rider’s whip. ‘You are making such false accusations,’ Mrs Roxburgh lied unconvincingly.

‘And are not prepared to take into account—unless they have taught you to disbelieve—all that I have gone through.’

‘Oh, your wife! I know. And imagine how often you must re-live the dreadful moment!’

‘Which moment?’

‘Why—if you ask—when the gig overturned.’

They rode in silence; then Garnet Roxburgh kicked out with his nearside boot in what must have been an involuntary spasm and struck her stirrup-iron through her skirt.

‘It was not overturned,’ he had decided to tell her. ‘I took a corner too fast and the unfortunate woman was pitched out.’

Mrs Roxburgh could not decide whether she should sympathize more—or less. The fact that the subject had been raised at all, confused her.

‘Either way’, she said, ‘it was a tragedy;’ and hoped it could be left at that.

They rode a little.

‘You will not consider me sensitive enough to experience loneliness.’

She would have liked to believe, and guilt might have persuaded her had her glance not fallen on the wrist of the hand holding the reins; as on their drive from Hobart Town, she could feel repulsion rising in her.

‘I am surprised’, she said, ‘that at your age you did not re-marry.’ Although younger herself, she could enjoy the prerogative of the married woman to advise her widower brother-in-law.

He snorted somewhat bitterly. ‘Marriage does not always cancel loneliness. And desirable partners have for the most part been whirled off in the dance by others more fortunate.’

Almost poetic, and coming from Garnet Roxburgh it did make her slightly sympathize.

She went so far as to say, ‘Now it is your turn not to believe, but I am sorry for you.’ At the same time she became aware that she had stiffened herself against the motion of her horse.

They must have returned by another way, for there, nestled in a hollow below them, she noticed the homestead, a picture of idyllic landed ease.

Garnet Roxburgh leaned down and stripped the head from a stalk of grass. ‘In any case it will soon be Christmas, and then perhaps you will unbend, Ellen.’

‘You are the one’, she cried, ‘who holds unmerited opinions of others!’

He grinned and threw away the crushed grass-seed. ‘I have invited friends to keep us company. Dear old Austin will love the opportunity of subjecting Dr Aspinall to interrogation on the moral, aesthetic, and scientific development of Van Diemen’s Land, while you, I hope, will take to the doctor’s wife. Maggie Aspinall is a lively and amusing young woman—not altogether appreciated by Hobart Town.’

Mrs Roxburgh confined herself to general murmurs of anticipated appreciation. ‘Is that the river?’ she asked, pointing with her riding-crop.

He looked at her sharply. ‘Why, yes—that is the Derwent—beyond the house.’ He had a certain expression for those he suspected of evading him, which she could not resist turning to catch before it left his face.

‘It has been a lovely outing,’ she said, ‘but I am glad to be home—to describe for Mr Roxburgh all that I have seen.’

As they rode into the yard the same marionette of a servant was waiting to receive their horses.

That night she slept soundly, but awoke once to find tears on her cheeks and pillow, and realized that she had been dreaming of their misfortune, her second, consummate child, of whom they had never spoken again. She was glad to hear Mr Roxburgh snoring beside her; it would have been too painful had he asked her the reason for her tears, and soon, thanks to the fresh air and exercise that day, she was again soundly asleep.

Before long, Mrs Roxburgh was able to record in her journal:

Christmas Day, 1835

At ‘Dulcet’, Van Diemen’s Land

… so little like what we know, I can scarcely take it seriously. Mild, but a sultriness could be preparing to descend upon us. No sign of rejoicing. After all, most of the poor wretches are ‘prisoners’ and what have they to rejoice about beyond the prospect of getting drunk in the course of the day? I would like to talk to them, but there is a gulf between us, and I have lost the art of common speech.

Mr R. gave me a nice kiss, saying he had forgot my present this year. Told him we have each other and need no presents, though I had embroidered him a book-mark.

Garnet R. has not come to life. I am not surprised since last night.

On the Eve the Aspinalls arrived from Hobart Town and we shall be subjected to them while the
festivities
last. Don’t know why I shld seem to complane. They are in every way aimiable—at least Dr A. who is what one knows from Home as a reliable provinshul physician. I am less sure of his wife. She has a mole above her left eyebrow which I constantly find myself staring at. After we had left the gentlemen to finish their wine, she says ‘I hope you will call me “Maggie”. I am sure we will be great friends.’ In replying I did not commit myself to words, but mumbled a few sounds which she cld interpret any way she chose. Mrs A. understood and was not put out, because this is the way she expects herself and others to behave. She began a great chatter about her friends in town, said I must pay her a
prolonged visit
and make the acquaintance of all these people, some of them ‘charming’, more of them ‘ridiculous’, while implying that this did not lower them in her esteem. I said I would pay her a visit only if my husband agreed, and again we understood each other. She asked whether I played or sang, and I replied, both a little, but so badly I never performed in public, and for myself only on wet days. She then sat down and went into a few runs at the Dormer piano, and tried out her voice in a rehersal for her audience of gentlemen.

Mrs A. is what passes for pretty. Dark curls ajingle in her livelier moments which occur very frequently. Her cap all French lace and forget-me-nots, and her gown, in which I recognized the fashion of several years ago (not surprising in Van Diemen’s Land) low-cut to show a handsome bust, the bodice trimmed with numerous little pink bows. Mrs A. informed me that the material of her dress was
gro de Naples
and she had paid a fortune for it.

What with the gentlemen lingering over their wine, the musician and I grew pale with yawns. Mrs A.’s colour returned as her audience arrived in the drawing-room. Mr R. would have liked to benefit from Dr Aspinall’s medical advice, but the dr too far gone. Garnet R. leaned on the piano, all attention, and the lady was soon playing for him alone. I might have left them to it if ‘Maggie’ wld not have thought I was shirking a duty by not staying to pour tea.

I did go out to take the air and stroll a little. The moon was in its first quarter, the river a faint, silver coil in the distance. Often on such a night at Z., a country to which I
belonged
(more than I did to parents or family) I wld find myself wishing to be united with my surroundings, not as the dead, but fully alive. Here too, in spite of gratitude and love for a husband as dependent on me as I on him, I begin to feel closer to the country than to any human being. Reason, and the little I learned from the books I was given too late in life to more than fidget over, tells me I am wrong in thinking thus, but my instincts hanker after something deeper, which I may not experience this side of death.

So it seemed this Christmas Eve at ‘Dulcet’. I might have grown disgusted with the inhuman side of my nature had I not realized that the music had stopped, and that the vastness was filled only with silence and the call of a single melancholy bird. As I returned in the direction of the house I began to hear voices, muffled at first, in opposition to my night-bird. By such a watery moonlight I cld not have distinguished the forms of those engaged in conversation, who in any case remained the other side of the box hedge. My heart bumped as I trod the uneven ground, and I almost fell by catching a foot in a cow-print which had set hard. Then I heard from across the hedge a hoarse female laughter which conveyed to me the picture of Mrs Aspinall’s throat. Afterwards her words, ‘Oh no, you will spoil my dress! Please, Garnet!’ More laughter as he fumbled (I could not tell for sure, but sure I was). He mumbled ‘Maggie!’ over and over, as drunkenly as one of his despised shepherds. ‘And tomorrow is Christmas Day.’ ‘Should we not go in?’ Mrs A. asked. ‘Your sister-in-law may realize we are gone too long, and disapprove. She seems to me lacking entirely in human warmth, and prickly with moral principles.’ G. R. might have been retching. ‘Ellen is morality itself!’ ‘Then let us—shall we? go in?’ sighed Mrs A. There was the sound of what could have been a man’s hard palm sliding exasperated down a stone surface as they disengaged.