Bettany's Book (20 page)

‘I admire your refined conscience, Mr Bettany. I too consider the killing of a native to be murder. But how to sheet it home to fellows? And could it not equally have been one of Treloar’s shepherds?’

I told him they had tried to drown Felix before they departed Treloar’s.

‘Well,’ he said, and I could gauge his frustration as an official of the
system of justice, ‘I am sad to tell you they are far down the list of matters to be attended to. There are enough such murders
within
my district. I have had two ticket-of-leave women strangled by some evil chap in the past month. I shall deny this was ever said. But if you are aware of the genuine guilt of these fellows, perhaps when you are established you could arm your men and take your own recourse.’

There was a low, sputtering laugh from Mr Finlay. But I found I was reluctant to let the serpent of the spoiled blood of the Captain and Tadgh into my new-found garden.

‘But if nothing can be done for the mother, what is one to do with the child?’ I asked.

‘You might take him to clergymen, who locate such cases.’

‘I am not sure …’

‘Well, if you’ve developed an affection for the little savage, we have a most reforming schoolmaster here in Goulburn might take him. Advertises in the
Vindicator
.’

‘Hugely pious,’ Mr Finlay remarked, suddenly a little drunk. ‘Name of Loosely. He takes the children of thieves and promises them peerages, or at least a seat in the Commons.’

‘I think such a pedagogic policy is splendid, Johnny,’ Charlie suggested to me with a wink. ‘Send your little Negrito chap there!’

Later I would think that it is often in our lightest moments and with casual remarks that we summon up real eventualities. Sore-headed in the morning, I was pleased to find a copy of the rather Whiggish, emancipist
Vindicator
in the breakfast room, and looked for notice of Mr Loosely’s school. I read:

It was precisely the sort of school Mr Finlay would go to great expense not to send his son to. I fetched young, compliant Felix from the cook. He certainly seemed to possess a great capacity to study and adapt to habits one might have thought were strange to him. For he sat up drinking tea from a cup like a little Englishman. Still wearing his blanket cape as well as a small pair of knee pants the cook had in decency found for him, he grimaced studiously as I led him away from her kindly presence. The cook clasped my hand, as convict cooks were not unknown in their Gaelic familiarity to do, and said with tears flowing, ‘Sir, if I might say to you be kindly. I had three wee creatures myself I must leave behind when I was shipped.’

A groom saddled Hobbes, and we mounted and were away. I found the Grafton Street address and left Felix standing beneath a tree outside the small colonial cottage. After knocking at the part-open front door, and getting no answer but the drone of a male voice from within, I entered to discover Mr Matthew Loosely instructing an assortment of some seven colonial children. Some bare-footed, they sat in the second of two upright pews, and attached to the back of the seat in front of them was a flap of wood which could be raised to make a desk of sorts. Mr Loosely’s children indeed appeared to be the children of pardoned convicts who lived in town, where some of them ran profitable businesses, including – as Mr Gonfleur had complained at one point last night – illicit stills in Goulburn’s skirtings of bush.

The instructor, a little brownish-complexioned man no older than thirty, was pointing to a map of the Roman Empire which hung from an easel, and introducing his charges to the mysteries of Rome’s First Servile War, taking a very sympathetic view of the slave general Eunus. ‘These slave men and women of Sicily were not distinguished from their masters in any way. So the resentment which immortal souls naturally harbour towards bondage sought merely a spark to ignite it. The spark was provided, children, by a tyrannous master named Damophilus, a
landowner of Enna.’ He pointed to the map of Sicily as a red-headed cornstalk child reverently yawned. I could see that Mr Loosely blazed with a sort of banked energy, and I noticed in his pupils both a lack of timidity and a liveliness I could not help but approve of. He noticed me observing him from the door, and called, ‘Mrs Loosely. Please.’ Mrs Loosely, tall, pale and full in the body, entered from a door, and he handed her the pointing stick as indication she was in temporary command.

‘Sir, follow me,’ he said and led me out into the patch of garden in front of his house to converse.

‘Mr Loosely,’ I began, ‘I listened fascinated while eavesdropping at your door.’

‘Thank you, sir. We must remember that the history of the servile rebellions of Rome was written to glorify those who suppressed them. The offspring of former assigned convicts may need that critical knowledge to negotiate their way in this society, and see history written aright.’

I pointed out the waiting Felix.

Mr Loosely peered. ‘Is he black, or is he a mulatto?’

‘I do not absolutely know the answer to that question. But I think half-caste.’

‘Oh,’ he said in a particular way so that I realised he presumed the child was mine. ‘And his name?’

‘His name is … his name is Felix. I found him by his dead mother beyond the limits nearly two hundred miles from here. He is a promising little fellow who seems to be about four years of age, and I would be happy to pay for him to attend your academy should you find room for him amongst your boarders. I assume you have boarders?’

‘The two with shoes are boarders,’ he told me flatly. ‘In that regard, what the child is wearing now would not be satisfactory.’

‘I would fit him out fully,’ I told Mr Loosely, ‘or leave a sum with you out of which it could be done. And since I intend to live remotely, I could leave with you an amount which would see him set up for at least a year with you. Mr Finlay could vouch for me.’

‘The extreme Exclusivist!’ murmured Mr Loosely, with a rumour of a smile. ‘But I shall accept your good character if you will accept my MA.’

‘Is there any doubt about that?’ I asked with a half smile, though I had wondered.

‘I give you my word of honour that I am utterly equipped to turn the children of convicts into scholars and that even though men in far-off
places, especially New South Wales, regularly and falsely claim home distinctions, such as college degrees from Oxford and her lesser sister Cambridge, my qualifications are utterly as stated. I would not blame you for doubting though.’

‘I envy you your capacity to look down on Cambridge,’ I told him. ‘I am afraid my Vandemonian father could not in the end afford to send me there.’ Not that I grieved in any way for that. Cambridge would have distracted me from my discovery of mainland Australia, restricting me perhaps to some Hobart law office. ‘But the question which has occurred to me,’ I continued, pressing close upon what I knew would raise passion in him, ‘is whether there might be any member of the sable brethren who is capable of achieving a baccalaureate. You have in this child, whom I will present to you, and of whose welfare I shall, despite my remote station, never be negligent, perhaps the chance for such a thing. You have the proof to all of Australia that there exists no inherent flaw in the native race. I have seen this child, and he has travelled with me, and I have observed him to have as much intellectual capacity as any convict child. His silences and reticence seem related more to the horrors he has seen than to any inherent intellectual inferiority.’

Loosely was certainly tickled by the glorious vanity of it. He laughed. ‘No more intellectual inferiority, I take it, than any Exclusive’s son or daughter.’

This is what my father, young and inflamed, must have been like, wanting to turn society on its head and shake it till the money fell from its pockets and rang around the ears of the despised.

In the spirit and exuberance of our joint experiment, I handed over a £5 bank note to him, but he insisted that two pounds would do for the moment, and from that he would fit Felix out. I was delighted, being now a party to a grand social experiment. It was an experiment I would not care to discuss with Mr Finlay or Charlie, who might think it over-imaginative and a fatuous thing. But I felt that every shilling I handed Loosely celebrated my father, and his quiet belief in the civilised impulse.

I took Felix by the hand, muttering reassurances to him, and brought him over. Mr Loosely asked me what was wrong with his face and I told him it was a rictus. ‘I believe I can cure that,’ said Mr Loosely lightly, in a way which I was somehow confident did not imply cruelty. I patted Felix on the head and shook his limp hand, and we left him sitting with his awful compliance, more affecting than the wailing of ten other children, on a bench in the hallway as Mr Loosely saw me out to Hobbes.

‘I am the grandson of a West Indian slave,’ he told me suddenly. ‘Otherwise I am a European. But I cherish that despised blood that runs in me, as despised blood ran in the tribe of Judah. I shall cherish the little fellow.’

‘Good,’ I said. And then, as a riposte, suddenly in competition with him for humble origins: ‘Nor am I the heedless gentleman you consider me to be. My father was a convict.’

‘It is possible to state any fact baldly,’ he said, ‘but impossible to get to the truth behind it.’

In the Horatian scepticism of that statement, we shook hands and I rode off to Mr Finlay’s, the Exclusive’s, to make my final arrangements with Charlie before going to purchase a herd and flocks.

I was pleased that evening when Mr Finlay, ignorant of my democratic seditions with Mr Loosely, asked me into his office with its bound stock books reaching back until 1821, the history of a considerable empire which had never yet known a servile war, and asked me if I believed the investment I would have from Charlie would fully stock my station.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It is a vast country and we are mere beginners.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘in the interests of encouraging the young, I am willing to have drawn up an order for £2000 to be spent on a flock of sheep on the normal arrangements, and in consideration of the normal one-third return. Mind you, Mr Bettany, I say a flock. I do not want it spent on shepherds, structures, wagons, implements, supplies. It remains very properly the concern of yourself and Mr Batchelor to provide these things.’

Of course, I told him. The normal, delightful arrangement. What was best was that I presumed that since I last saw him he had made inquiries of Mr Batchelor into my family and he, the high priest of Exclusives, had overlooked whatever taint attached to the noble impulses behind my father’s crime. I was flushed with gratitude, and assured him I would not alienate a single penny of his to the meanest item of tack or to an ounce of hard soap.

‘One thing,’ he said. ‘I have never known a district of New South Wales where the Leicester failed to do well. They have excellent hardihood and will handle your harsh upland well.’ I had not thought of my country as ‘harsh upland’, but was willing to forgive his blunt assessment. ‘I mention that,’ he continued, ‘simply because wool-breeding in New South Wales is very different from that of Van Diemen’s Land, and a world removed from the short staple British business, which is in any
case being supplanted by our wool. I will, of course, expect a strict accounting.’

Enthusiastically, I told him he would have it. I felt guilty at the snide things Mr Loosely had said of him, and I thought that he had now shown the truest nobility. I wanted to envisage that one day in the age of my prime I should behave as amply to some young pilgrim.

I rode at once through the town of Goulburn to Mandelson’s Hotel, to break to Charlie Batchelor the delightful news of Mr Finlay’s offer to invest with us. Charlie was in his room writing letters to Van Diemen’s Land and, without a second’s thought, I blurted out the details of Finlay’s kind gesture.

To my amazement, Charlie’s face became suffused with blood, and he stood up and walked about the room saying, ‘Damn, damn. My God, Jonathan, I had thought of warning you! But I surmised the fact that you … well that your father had a penal record … would stop him from interfering with us.’

I was as hurt as I ever was when people tried to reduce me to a mere outfall of my father’s penal past. ‘Is that what this is?’ I asked. ‘Interference?’

‘That is exactly what this is, and damn him to hell! Why do you think I stayed here instead of at the Finlay’s? To avoid exactly such an offer! He can see in you what I have always seen. Industry and probity and vigour. And he knows that this land is worth exploiting, but is fully absorbed in the service of that he already owns. So we shall do the work for him at a fraction of what it would cost him to do himself. What breed does he want you to buy?’

‘Leicester,’ I told him. ‘After all they have been so outrageously successful as mutton, and they grow a long wool.’

‘And one which is less prized than the Merino. As for mutton, how will you sell mutton from this Nugan Ganway? The only clients for fat mutton are yourself and the natives! Oh perhaps he would like to see the flocks mixed up and the mean quality of our wool lowered. And if it doesn’t happen, what does he lose? He can ask for his Leicesters back at any time and sell them in Goulburn. Thus, typically, he puts in a fragment of money, he determines what the enterprise shall be, and makes us do the work.’