Bettany's Book (19 page)

Goldspink reappeared from the hut, and we crossed a little creek in rising country and rode through a pass between wooded ridges, during which it seemed the child was torpid or asleep. We were now south of Treloar’s last sheep and, on Goldspink’s advice, I marked a number of trees with a hatchet he had brought with him, and saw to my joy that all trees and boulders were free of human scars. The light was sharp as we came into a great, open natural parkland, scattered with trees and strewn about with great smooth stones which looked deliberately placed, like the work of some tribe who believed in a plurality of gods. On the mountain ahead, to the south-west, great storm clouds lay like a promise, and a river, its track marked by native oaks, its surface high, threw back the shifting sun’s cold light.

‘This country,’ said Goldspink, ‘our native stockman tells me is named Nugan Ganway.’

‘What’s it mean?’ I was happy for it to mean anything at all.

‘Dratted if I know, sir. Maybe the little lad can tell yeh. The natives have these names … I’d say it meant: plenty gibbers, big bloody stones, or something similar. Yeh see there that hollow hill above the river? That’s a good place to put a hut, I’d say.’

He indicated the dome of a low, boulder-strewn hill. So the site of my future homestead was pointed out by the ambiguous Goldspink, though that did not mean I had grounds to reject the idea. I had already extracted the £30 in bank notes and had it in my jacket. I paid it over now, to release him. For I wanted to be rid of him. If he rode hard, and into the early evening, he could make his southernmost shepherds’ hut.

‘Look to the little chap there now!’ he cried as his horse trotted off and left Felix and me to our own sweet devices. I rode up into the saddle-backed hill Goldspink had pointed out and made my camp there, secure from winds. Making fire and brewing tea, I let the poor bemused child rest, fed him occasional sips from my mug, and lumps of mutton from my saddlebag. I was Horace in Venusia, in benign hills, by kindly streams.

‘Jolly good,’ said the poor child.

As much as I already felt for him and was growing to like him I had not come to New South Wales to become guardian of a black child. Returning north and seeing a thread of smoke from a wooded ridge to my west, a sign of natives, I was overtaken by the sense that, given the misadventures which had been imposed upon him, he was surely better with his own, who were just then cooking wallaby or kangaroo above us. They could not, seeing him from a height, alone in the plain, abandoned by myself, finally reject him. I could not deny him a final chance for reunion with his kind.

When he was drowsy after our midday meal I sat him in his little blanket surcout under a tree and made gestures of such friendly but firm emphasis that he knew he was to stay there. His mouth contorted but no tears came, and I mounted Hobbes and rode away, but kept the child always in sight. I must have ridden two miles on to a saddle amidst hills from which in a sparkling day I could see him seated still in place, reduced by distance to a scintilla, a little jot on the hour’s huge manuscript. I would have liked to have had a glass to train on him, and I swore I’d bring one back to Nugan Ganway with me. I waited and he did not move. I hoped he slept. His fidelity to remaining a speck was terrible for me to see, and though I waited some time there was no sign of anyone emerging to claim him, and the smoke from the ridge had vanished. It had been a simple-minded concept of mine anyhow, and I realised it grew from a disordered and wrong-headed feeling that in this country I was perpetually watched by the sable brethren. Now, in that immense natural Australian sphere which lay before me, the remote child took on the look of the sort of ragged fragment of life only a brute could abandon.

I turned Hobbes about and rode back down to him. As I went I felt a strange delight that the little fellow was not lost to me. I was reclaiming him with a new seriousness of intent now. As I neared he stood up. I had only permissively to pat Hobbes’s crop, and the small, grinning, humourless, homunculus, the child of unimagined gods, was with a fluid action lodged in front of me again in the saddle, and tucked into my body.

At noon some days later, we reached at last that excellent and happy household of Mr Finlay of Goulburn, where I waited for Charlie Batchelor to arrive back from the west, having left a message for him as
arranged at Mandelson’s Hotel. I would happily have recruited Felix into this instructive company. But he was rather younger than Finlay’s son, and I did not know what the father would have thought of joining the English child with the native child. I left the boy therefore with the Finlays’ Irish cook. She seemed pleased to have him, and promised to look after him over the next few nights, though she asked me, ‘Whatever is it wrong with the little feller’s face there, sir?’

Going to the house, I waited for handsome Mrs Finlay to rise from her afternoon rest and for Mr Finlay to return from a visit to one of his outlying stations. I contemplated setting out to report the death of a native woman to the police magistrate. But it would be better to wait for Mr Finlay to introduce me, as the magistrate would treat my story seriously if I came recommended.

Aimless for now, I stumbled into the library looking for something to read, and saw the daughter and the little son of the household being tutored. As I went to withdraw, the fair-haired daughter, Phoebe, left her seat and rushed to me, taking me by the wrist.

‘
Monsieur Juneau
,’ she said to the tutor, who stood watching her tiredly. ‘
Nous avons un visiteur. Monsieur Juneau, permettez moi de vous presenter Monsieur Bettany. Monsieur Bettany, Monsieur Juneau
.’ Juneau, who wore a butternut, rough-woven suit and no neckcloth must have been one of the Canadian prisoners, the rebels of Quebec, whom many householders sought to employ to teach their colonial children the rudiments of French. ‘
Monsieur Bettany est un Vandemonien
,’ the beautiful but forthright girl told her harried convict teacher. My father had begun, like him, as a teacher of free children. ‘Not a citizen of Van Diemen’s Land,’ I corrected her, lest she lead me ill-equipped into a morass of French. ‘I am a citizen of New South Wales now. What’s that?
Nouveaux Galles de Sud
?’ Indeed, the hope of my land lay more warmly and certainly in me than the last time I had seen her.

Soon Mr Finlay intended to send these children away from him – he had spoken of Harrow for his son and for his daughter a Swiss finishing school. I wondered if they would do better there than they would with sad-eyed Juneau, who had the face of a cultivated man.

On his return, I found that Mr Finlay had kindly invited people to dinner to meet me, and was pleased to hear that one of them would be Mr Gonfleur, the police magistrate, and his wife. Gonfleur, as it turned out, was an older man with a kind of opaque humour in his face and, from the way he talked, half an eye on planned return and retirement to
Norfolk. Mrs Gonfleur too pined for the fens. They wanted quit of the country I had only just found! I looked for an opportunity to alert Mr Gonfleur to the murder of Felix’s mother but was interrupted by the arrival of Charlie Batchelor. He was better dressed than I, who wore the same trousers I had worn on my ride, with one of Mr Finlay’s borrowed coats and my spare boots. In his compact, olive handsomeness, his colonial wiriness, Charlie was a robust sight.

We sat almost at once to dinner, drinking claret from Finlay’s own vineyard. The men at table questioned me about the land I had located, and Charlie listened keenly to what I said on that. But they, as complimentary as they were of my efforts, moved quickly to Charlie and his search for a property to the west. It was ever thus in New South Wales that whomsoever you met, you could always work up a conversation about land and livestock. As Charlie answered, he engaged my eye and smiled at me. ‘Jonathan,’ he told me, ‘I have not yet found the property I wanted but I have used my capital to purchase three thousand ewes. I’ve put them out with two settlers, north in the Bathurst area, and at Menai, for three years. I have of course enough in reserve to stock your place, Jonathan. It’s the best thing to do while prices are high and while I look further west. My Menai gentleman, MacLean—’

‘Captain Maclean of Menai?’ asked Mr Finlay, in his voice the measure of approbation for which Charlie was looking.

‘Yes, and Barton of the Bathurst region. And of course I have my joint effort at this …’

I could not believe he had forgotten the name of the land I had found. That it did not have for him the nature of an essential password.

‘These fellows you’ve left your stock with, they are trustworthy men?’ I asked, as much to annoy him or bring him back to himself as anything else. ‘After all, Charlie, we know nothing of this colony.’

Mr Finlay and his friends were laughing. ‘Do you think these men are absconders or ticket-of-leave men, Mr Bettany? No one would dare say they did not keep exact stock books. Well-kept stock books are the basis of most New South Wales friendships and of New South Wales honour. There’s little enough honour anywhere else, the dear God knows.’

Everyone at table was willing to chuckle at my doubts about Charlie’s stock holders, Captain McLean and Mr Barton, who had honour other sections of the populace lacked. Mr and Mrs Gonfleur, Mr and Mrs Finlay, and Charlie all shared in this communion of honour, and it seemed to me their laughter was the laugh of free people against convict
people,
and
against their offspring, if I chose to have sensitive feelings, which I had taken a vow to prevent myself ever indulging in. For my mother had always been careful to instruct me that my father, though rash, had a nobility of impulse which transcended the banalities of trading which characterises free settlers. He was thus higher, not lower, than many an aimless free settler who stumbled upon colonial wealth, and as a result of that happy accident imitatively adopted the rituals of an honour which was not innate.
Captain
Maclean? Was
captain
such a dazzling rank? It was, I thought, losing my head a second, a characteristic New South Wales one – the bush was scattered with captains, but rarely with colonels and never with generals.

‘And a man might always inspect their books,’ said Charlie now, adopting his mode of being the hard-headed Australian. ‘Just in case their English honour overlooks a few strays.’

But this was all right. All chuckled. A gentleman could make jokes about a colonial gentleman’s shavings and dodges! But then I calmed myself. This joke of Charlie’s, I thought, was the sort of daring witticism he had acquired from my father, his tutor, from my father’s version of that great surviving spirit, Horace, which could flame first under one dispensation – republican – then under another – imperial, and be a man under both. Charlie’s observation suddenly made me at home at this table of men who pretended they were something more elevated than in fact was the case. What would Mr Gonfleur be, returned to England? A man who had held an obscure job in an obscure colony, and – very likely – never stopped boring people about it. And Charlie subtly knew this, and the reason he knew it was my father’s urbanity as a tutor.

‘And are you all spent out?’ I asked Charlie as a joke.

‘It depends what you have for us, Jonathan. Tell me. This place of yours …’

I did not answer at once, and the table looked at me. I began. ‘Some one hundred and sixty miles south of this spot, beyond the land occupied by Mr Treloar, lies a huge, high natural pound of at least two hundred square miles in extent. It is good open pasture scattered with boulders and seems to me particularly suited for sheep. It is bounded by some creeks of the Murrumbidgee River on the north, and its natural limit is set only by snowclad mountains which separate it, or so I presume, from the Port Phillip regions beyond.’

‘And how high is this pasturage?’ asked Charlie, his eyes alight.

‘A little more than two thousand feet, I am told.’ It was a guess but
proved a surprisingly accurate one. ‘The lank kangaroo grasses in profusion. Native herbs and sedges. I would assess it to be excellent sheep country though capable of frost, even sometimes in summer.’ I remembered the wetness of Goldspink’s home yard the morning Felix was hauled from the stream. ‘As for cattle, well, cattle are hardy, as they say.’

Mrs Finlay suddenly spoke from her ignored place at the table’s end. ‘This country has made a profound impression upon you, Mr Bettany.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I feel that though I have just seen it, I have blazed its trees and feel it is the country of my heart.’

‘Bravo,’ she said. ‘Not too many other men can make such a happy assertion.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Mr Finlay. ‘You have made a mighty ride.’

‘And seen things,’ I announced, as if preparing Mr Gonfleur, ‘not usually encountered.’

At last the two women dutifully withdrew, and we who had stood for their departure stretched luxuriously and yawned. Loosening his neckcloth, Mr Finlay fetched port from the sideboard and we gathered to one end of the table.

‘Mrs Finlay tells me you brought a little sable chap in on your pony,’ remarked Mr Finlay, pouring.

‘I have been waiting all night to talk to Mr Gonfleur of this,’ I admitted with relief. I related how I had found the boy’s mother, and promised Mr Gonfleur that with the help of Goldspink I could lead him to the absconders to whom the responsibility for her death could credibly be affixed. Mr Gonfleur held up both hands crossed at the wrist, a gesture designed as if to halt charging horses.

‘My young friend. I must say I believe we are years from the first successful prosecution for the murder of a native woman, regrettably common as that phenomenon might be. We are indeed years from placing a magistrate in the area in which your alleged murder occurred. This is not Van Diemen’s Land, neat as a nut and nicely contained. First you, the groundbreaker, sir! And then some years or decades after you, we hope, the institutions and the reach of law.’

‘So I am to let them go free, in the same reach of country as I inhabit?’