Bettany's Book (59 page)

‘Why did your husband and yourself not inform me?’ I asked.

But then I had not visited the academy regularly enough. I had let Loosely fly to pieces without any intrusion from me.

That was the last I saw of these people destroyed by the sort of excessive hopes which abound in the air of young colonies. I did hear that after Mr Loosely had had some treatment or other in Sydney, they went home and disappeared into the mass of Britons.

Hector and Felix were deposited with Long and Clancy and Presscart at my wagons. Felix was boy enough to return with us to Nugan
Ganway, but Hector was still an infant. I was uneasy about imposing him on Phoebe, not that I doubted her openness of heart, and I hoped I might find some establishment in Goulburn to take him and complete, or get close to completing, his education.

Phoebe was again waiting for me at Mandelson’s and before we left town I must collect the convict woman Sarah Bernard from wherever the magistrate had located her. Upon inquiry at hulking Police Magistrate Purler’s office I was surprised to find she had been placed with the Irish nuns, whom I had not met before, despite my regard for the lamented Catherine.

I rode in the four-wheeler the few streets to that place and was admitted to a parlour by a maid who muttered that she would fetch someone named Iggy. This Iggy proved to be a powerful little woman, Mother Ignatius, with full black garb and tucked-up sleeves, who entered the room in a flurry. She reached for my right hand with both of hers and laid her forehead against my wrists. ‘You are the fellow now who took the right vengeance for our sainted Catherine. God bless and keep you!’

I told the woman that Phoebe and I were still most distressed at the mischief which had befallen Catherine.

‘Mischief,’ said Ignatius. ‘That of course is a good way to put it.’

She called for tea and we sat talking in a worldly manner. ‘Oh your wife is to have a child, is it?’ she asked. ‘Grand, grand! And thus you more than need a housekeeper. I think Bernard is the right one, you know. She’s close, close …’ Ignatius patted the side of her nose as if in imitation of some livestock trader she may have seen at market as a girl. ‘But able to write very well, says she got it from her father, an old Jew. She’s a Christian Jewess. A compelling mixture, wouldn’t you say now? Why, having become a Christian in a sort of way at the age of fourteen, she needs to remind all that she is Jewish too, I cannot say. But she seems to be strong on the matter. She is a reliable girl and the police magistrate joins me in thinking her so.’

‘You have a startling relationship with the police magistrate,’ I remarked.

She did not choose to comment on this. ‘Sit still there, Mr Bettany, and I will fetch her and see if she would be of any use to your wife and yourself.’

But I felt I must not deceive this remarkable woman, so I held up my hand to detain her a second longer. ‘I should tell you that there are many
lonely men due for ticket-of-leave on my station.’ I thought of Long, who had always been the champion of this woman I had not seen. ‘It’s likely she will end as a wife to one of them.’

‘Well,’ said the remarkable Ignatius, ‘that is nature’s way, is it not? But on my observation, given that she is likely to be the wife of anyone, it is better that it should not be one rendered brutish by the lash. But such considerations, I think, we can leave to Miss Bernard herself, since she is a woman of quite a little character.’

She went, leaving me secretly to speculate upon this convict woman and lonely Long, with his convict theory that the passage of seven years with no news from his home, of failed or renounced communication with his marital cottage in Ireland, justified him in marrying in New South Wales. I realised that the idea did not shock me, as it might have had I first heard of it over tea cups in say a Manchester parlour. Moralists said that remote life in the bush weakened the strict ethic sense, and perhaps it was so. The Eve-less vacancy of the earth called for a European female presence on nearly any decent grounds.

I was in the midst of these speculations, innocent as events would prove them to be, when Ignatius brought the convict Sarah Bernard intotheroom.

I noticed at once that she was taller than most women, perhaps five feet nine inches. She had a lean and very pleasant face with a seeking quality to it, and was much closer to me in age than Phoebe. At that first meeting I did not place her as more than surprisingly pleasant and appropriately reserved, and yet I was aware there was a presence in this woman which placed her above the usual colonial categories. In her well-ordered features was that same vigilance which characterised many intelligent felons and ticket-holders, and so thoroughly characterised Long, the subject of my recent thoughts, as well.

I did my best, however, to see her purely as a potential servant. I was relieved to see that her wide-set brown eyes were studying me with perhaps greater attention and a more fervent hope than I her. And why not? If I made a mistake, I had merely chosen an unsatisfactory servant who could be shipped back to Goulburn with next month’s mail. If she made the wrong move, the course of her life would thereby become skewed.

Yet for some unknown reason, as early as this I thought I needed some sort of defence against the scale of her being and, pretending I did this with all my servants, I found myself asking what she had been transported for, what her crime might be? She said she had stolen table napkins and other fabric wares from a haberdasher in York Street, Manchester. I did
not tell her then that I could remember very dimly York Street, and my mother hurrying along it in fog with Simon and myself held by the hand. Either the poverty of being a law clerk’s wife, or the poverty of being a convicted felon’s wife, drove this young woman, my mother, on her blind way, ignoring the fabrics in the shops along this road in which porters seemed to do their best to collide with us and lights shone in early afternoon like dead stars. Manchester. She had the accent.

‘They must have been expensive napkins.’

She looked me full in the face, as if making a declaration of Christian faith before a Roman procurator.

‘They were, sir. Though I would not say that was the point of the crime.’ I saw Ignatius, behind the convict woman, smile and shake her head.

‘Well what was?’ I asked.

‘One moment of great need,’ said Sarah Bernard.

‘You should have no such need in Nugan Ganway,’ I said. ‘It is at least far removed from the temptations of table napkins.’

I was disappointed that she smiled only with the greatest caution. But she said, ‘Then it is the right country for me.’

I spanned the conversation out, asking where she had worked at housekeeping and kitchen skills, and she told me it was a good house, the Tib Street house of a Manchester merchant named Duncannon, in which she had worked. ‘And did he have children?’ I asked.

‘Three,’ she told me. ‘Of various ages, one as young as seven. A girl of eighteen years.’

‘I trust you may have children to tend to on Nugan Ganway,’ I said, and heard the all-at-once empty echo of the words in my own head. ‘My wife is due to give birth later in the year.’

Ignatius was growing restless. ‘Sarah should fetch her linen bag now,’ she suggested.

Bernard turned and as she did I saw in her something foreign, some darker features – her Orientalism, her Russian-ness perhaps, for I had heard of Russian Jews in Manchester. Bernard had through no fault of her own released in the room a riskiness I wanted to disperse.

‘One thing,’ I said hurriedly. She turned again, brown eyes on me. I thought of something to say which could as easily have been said later. ‘My wife takes seriously her role as manager of all things non-pastoral at Nugan Ganway. What I am telling you is that you must wait for her instructions and obey them with alacrity. But if there is anything you have doubts about doing, refer to her first.’

‘Yes,’ said Bernard simply, and so went.

In Bernard’s absence I was pleased to have another matter to raise with Ignatius. I had placed a half-cast foundling, and later a young full-blood foundling with Mr Loosely, I told her, and it had all seemed to work well for a time. She must have heard about the decline of Mr Loosely’s Academy, I surmised aloud, and she clucked and shook her head in a way which confessed she had. Now I was for lack of other choices taking the grown half-caste child with me to Nugan Ganway, but the full-blood was still a child, and I did not wish to impose him upon my wife at such a time.

I offered a yearly fee of two guineas if Ignatius would take Hector in.

‘What would happen if, without any persuasion from us, he decided to turn Roman? Would you be at the gate accusing us of swaying him?’

‘Not unless swaying him had become the chief objective of you and your sisters.’

‘We don’t believe in ambush,’ she said darkly, but like an ambusher. ‘But there is no reason it should happen. We shall send him to the Anglicans each week.’

So I decided to go, while the convict woman Bernard gathered her things, and fetch him from the wagon camp, little wiry Hector. He entered the house of the Popish Nuns with a marked tranquillity and I thought that if such calmness was the price one paid for an inability to do long multiplication, I would willingly have sacrificed some of my own mathematical skills to possess it.

Thus Sarah Bernard was swapped for Hector, and my solid and placid life became feverish, and the world both narrowed like a trap and widened with an unplanned and limitless ecstasy. And all at the one time.

Letter No 15, SARAH BERNARD

Dearest Alice

A quick note before leaving this nuns house to say I am on my way to see my friend Long. I am to travel with Mr Bettany and his wife to Nugan Ganway. Bettany looks a man of reason but very serious not least when trying to be funny. It sounds that his wife might be hard to please. He asked me what my crime might be. Might be – I would say that is an important question.

I think though it is dangerous to surmise that I might have fallen amongst the just. Mrs Bettany must be a notable style of woman to choose such a far off marriage as that to Mr Bettany.

I am on my path and so are you – it is the same thing my friend. More news will come.

Your lasting friend

Sarah

O
UR SON IS BORN

From their first meeting, Bernard turned into the perfect companion for Phoebe, and throughout the winter, the confidante of her pregnancy. The returning Felix also took to Bernard. Soon after their arrival I would see them sitting together in the vacated phaeton at dusk reading to each other from Felix’s works on grammar. Felix liked particularly to translate, for Bernard’s enjoyment, from Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
and Bernard would say to me, ‘Mr Bettany, this native boy is cleverer than all of us.’ Later, during the winter, in mid-afternoons, Felix, who lived in the Irishman O’Dallow’s hut, would come to see Bernard, where she lived in a little bark annex to the kitchen, and they could be found, at a small table, reading, passing books to each other, some of them borrowed from me. Each time I saw one of my books in her hand, I hoped with the silly hope of male vanity that she thought my possession of such a work (the history of the Punic Wars, for example) meant that I was a cultivated man.

As spring neared and I prepared for the shearing, I saw them almost daily, climbing the ridge behind the homestead in their boots, taller Bernard stalking ahead carrying Phoebe’s easel and paintbox. On busy days the admirable Felix stuck with me, building new pens for my yet abounding flocks, impeccable with a hammer. When there was no work for him, he went and read to the women as Phoebe painted. If there were native women about in the foothills, where despite our former misunderstanding, conflicts and mutual murders, they still came in the spring by ancestral habit, they might also join the party. They mistrusted us men except as a source of flour and tea and chewing tobacco. But Phoebe would have Felix fetch from the house a chart she had bought in Goulburn. She would unroll it, hang it from a tree and conduct an alphabet class. Then with the greatest of ease, she would ask them to take up a brush. Sometimes they would, laughing, but make nonsense lines in her art book.