Captive Wife, The (5 page)

I had an idea of how I might go on for the next little while. And in my mind I was seeing the girl.

She has been in my mind a long time. She comes to me most often on the watch between midnight and 4, when the dawn is just about to break. Sometimes as daylight comes there is a moment I cannot explain, a moment so fast that I never believe I've seen it after it has passed. It is like a green flash, a flicker in the sky. I have asked a sailor or 2 if they ever seen it but they tell me no and now I dare not ask anyone except they think me strange. But it is in times like this I think of the girl and that she is growing older. Somewhere someone may be entering her, they will ride her, tearing her apart like a woman ripping open a seam or a man the canvas of a sail. It will happen and she will be lost to me.

And I know I do not want that to happen. I want to put her on a promise to me. I need to take her away from John Deaves and her mother and Charlotte and her men and all the women who take bad fortune as their due.

Perhaps there is a name for what I feel. I want a girl who is mine and nobody but me has had her.

I will teach her with what kindness there is in me.

I do not want anyone but her.

December 1832
    

My dear brother Percy

It is now some years since you have seen fit to reply to my letters, but it is my duty as ever, each month, to write you an account of my life here in Sydney. It has been a difficult few weeks, and I am sure you will have it in your heart to take pity on me, for I have lost my dear good friend Mrs Emmeline Roddick, whom I loved as my life. As you know, I have lived in the Roddick home for close to three years, as the governess of Mathilde and little Austen. Emmeline became weaker and weaker with the chest complaint for which there is no cure, an evil scourge that respects neither gentle folk nor criminals, though no doubt a great deal of it has been carried here on the convict transport ships. She had become as a sister to me, albeit a younger sister, for there was a difference of several years in our ages. Lieutenant Roddick remarked on it when he was home, which is not often of course,
because of his military duties which take him away for so much of the time. The poor fellow, he's always been a devilish sort of man, if I may use such coarse language, but he has a merry way with him when he is happy. I do not wish to sound improper, but I would describe him as a handsome man. His dark moustache, sadly, is now tinged with grey, but it is a full moustache, indicating a sturdy constitution, and he is such a big man, at least six foot four in his stockinged feet. Which I admit to having seen, for he took off his shoes and tiptoed around Emmeline's bed so as not to disturb her in those last terrible days, when she slept fitfully, only to wake gasping for breath that was beyond her reach. I sat and read gently to her each day, and pressed cold flannels hourly against her forehead, but to no avail, she was gone to us.

The question of what is to happen to me has not been broached, but I fear that before long I will have to return to Rosewood. What will the servants think, me living here in the same quarters that are occupied from time to time by Lieutenant Roddick? I could, of course, take a room down by the cook's; it is a bare little space, but perhaps I can make it homely. Besides, Hettie is a coarse creature, a ticket of leave woman. We will just have to see, with poor Emmeline not cool in her grave, it's too soon to enquire about the arrangements. Someone has to see to the children.

Your silence suggests that you continue to hold some grievance against me, real or imagined. All the same, your lack of interest in my welfare will not go unremarked for long. Indeed, it has reached my ears that you have not been received at the Governor's second residence at Parramatta for some time. I do have a number of friends here, through the kind offices of dear Emmeline in the past, and I am frequently received at Government House, although the new Governor Bourke, like dear Lieutenant Roddick, is recently widowed, so he is in mourning. No doubt you will have heard about this; it happened soon after his arrival. His daughter is standing in as his hostess
but their receptions are confined to a small circle among whom I count myself one of the privileged few.

I am aware that you have been petitioning for more acres of grassland, and I can only say, your conduct could rebound unfavourably on you. I would never volunteer information against someone whom I have held so dear all my life, but do not think that questions have not been asked. If I am forced back into lodgings, I am sure that the quality of our familial ties will soon be under scrutiny.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that the new Governor, Sir Richard Bourke, has greater sympathy with the emancipists than his predecessor. At first I was scandalised, but I am beginning to think his attitude may lead to greater harmony in the Colony than in recent years. No doubt, you will have heard that Governor Darling's departure was fêted by those who support convicts' rights, with feasting and celebrations. A brass band played ‘Over the hills and far away' and a huge sign on the newspaper building crowed HE'S OFF, while a fireworks display spelled out the words Down With the Tyrant. I felt myself quite borne away with the excitement of it all and I believe I may have the stirring of a liberal conscience in my breast. But that is what happens when people are dispossessed. How could this ever have come upon me? Of course, I have not shared these thoughts with the Lieutenant, who is a man under orders.

When Sir Richard arrived, the frenzy was as great, but on so much happier a note; bonfires were lit and the streets illuminated in greeting. You, with your hundreds of convicts working on the farm, cannot hope to go unnoticed. Do not come to me in great remorse when it is all too late, brother.

Your ever affectionate sister,

Adie Malcolm

So, it is another day for scandal on the streets, broad and narrow, of Sydney Town. Three weeks have passed since the story of Betty Guard was first aired in the press. I am the talk of the town. Crowds queue for the newspapers in order to get another instalment of the details, something to mull over dinner parties at Government House and between dances at Mrs Manning's balls, and cause a stir here at the Rocks, where ticket of leave men and women huddle in their cottages on the brown sandstone that edges the shoreline. When I walk down the street, a way opens up for me to pass through, as if I were not of them any more, but rather, as if my deep and dark past puts me in a class all of my own. Down here among yesterday's canaries, who have done all manner of things, you would think I was the devil.

Look, I might say, I am innocent. I am just a woman unclothed by savages. What would you have done? Don't you understand? I am a heroine. All the newspapers will tell you that.

I might say, my Granny and Granddad were on the First Fleet and who do you think you are when you're at home.

Instead I say nothing. I keep walking, not looking to the left nor to the right.

Last week a skit was performed at the Theatre Royale, a prelude to the main play, featuring a pale maiden with fair tousled ringlets falling this way and that as she leans back, her head almost touching the stage. A bottle of red ink drips over her snow-white tunic, and an actor smeared head to toe with coal dust and only a loincloth to cover his manly parts, swoons upon her throat. A bearded sailor wrings his hands in anguish in the wings. Cock-a-doodle-do, squawks a dancer clad in a swirling ostrich-feather cloak, flapping his arms as if he were a rooster. He dances on tiptoes across the reclining pair, holding his arms outstretched. ‘Thereby hangs a tail,' the rooster cackles, and the lights dim to thunderous applause.

It lasted only a night or so, for there are those who protest my virtue and are incensed on my account; it has been said that even the Governor stepped in to have it stopped. Two nights or three, it was long enough for men from Cambridge Street to take themselves up town for a look and so it is known about, word for word, around this way. My husband Jacky Guard stayed home. But of course he has heard about it. Even if he speaks to no one, my aunt Charlotte Pugh speaks to everyone.

I do not have fair ringlets anyway. I am tall and dark, handsome some say, though my Aunt Charlotte thinks I have a strong chin for a woman. It is your eyes, she would say, back in the days when she was not displeased with me; they are scorching eyes that men might die for. When I was a girl she would twine my hair round the stems of clay pipes after a wash, so that it came out curly, but now it falls in waves down my back when it is free. People watch me for signs and messages I will not give them.

All the same, I've been in no mood to go out upon the town, for at the Rocks it is possible to bear the curious stares, the hushed voices. These are my own people and soon something else will come up to take their interest. Someone will come along with a circus. Last year there was a Bengal tiger in a cage. Or somebody will drop dead with drink.

Up in town, though, along George Street where the smart
people stroll, it will be another matter. They will want to prod and poke, in a manner of speaking, and make excuses to hold a conversation. These are the same people who will spend a shilling to watch the Aboriginals fight. The fights are supposed to be banned but who can resist the spectacle of one black man on another, tearing each other to pieces. It's cheaper than the circus.

But neither can I stay in, day after day, because Jacky will not speak with me. He has a dark and brooding stare that he keeps corked up in the corner of the room near the hearth where my aunt, Charlotte Pugh, prepares our dinner. I would help her but she will not let me. As if I am an interfering guest. The heat is rising outside, soon it might rise to ninety-five in the shade, but still he sits near the flames, and I am afraid of him. He has an old water-stained book in his hands that he turns over and over. It was his father's book and his father's before that. This book is not the Bible, it is worse than that. I need to get away from Jacky and the book, and whatever it is telling him he must do, for that is something I do not know, what lies between its covers.

Besides, it will be Christmas soon and I have decided that John and Louisa will have presents this year, even though we have fallen on hard times. They have spent a winter in the bush among the Maoris, and now that is all behind us, and we are here in Sydney, safe and sound, and I am a mother who does the best she can. I would like to remind my husband of that.

In the room next door, Louisa begins to cry again, the forlorn wail of a child who cannot be comforted. My mother will soon be here, I tell Charlotte. She is coming and she will care for Louisa. Charlotte looks at me with a dislike that makes me want to weep. Charlotte was always well disposed towards me; she took me in when my mother went off with Deaves the sawyer, and my grandmother had died. It was Charlotte who rescued me, gave me a roof over my head. Without her, I might never have met up with Jacky again, never gone off to New Zealand, never been shipwrecked.

Never? I say that as if I wouldn't have missed the experience.
Perhaps that is so. But what does it matter, when everyone has their own salt to put on the meat.

I have dressed modestly today in a dress of grey linen. I wear no jewellery. My bonnet is without feathers and the light scarf I wrap around my neck is plain wool, even though the day is warm. For that is where their eyes slide, those of the people who stare at me, straight to the base of my throat, to see the wounds of which I have complained, and which the newspaper has taken up with such enthusiasm, the spot where they tried to open my vein and drink my blood.

It was only a little cut, I might say, all healed over, and no teeth marks at all. Their thirst went unquenched. Oh, so much that I might say. Even if I did, they would want to see.

I won't be long, I tell Charlotte. Already I hear my mother's approaching footsteps, heralded by the chattering of young John, who has become a handful since he lived among the Maoris. They told him he would be a chief and let him run wild, and now he won't do anything I tell him. I don't want to see my mother, I have little to thank her for, but she's about all I have at the moment.

Goodbye, Jacky, I say. I'm going no further than George Street, I'll look up the old shop and see what treats I can find for the little ones, I'm sure they'll let me have a little favour or two up there, you know how kind they were.

He doesn't speak a word. I take the back door so I won't have to walk past him, out through the gate that leads across the ditch, where sewers drain. In town they have men who come with their buckets when the lights are out and nobody can see.

So I make my escape, heading towards George Street where I hope to find my employers of some years back, when I was still a girl, not taken, though I was promised. Their names are Mister Spyer and Mister Cohen, two Jewish gentlemen dealers who came from England free men, not convicts like my grandparents, and my father and my stepfather, and my husband — not men in chains, just fortune seekers. I was their maid of all works who measured
out rum for sailors, kept brass things shiny and dresses sorted. I loved the feel of silk and satin running through my fingers when I lifted bolts of material. I held them to my face and breathed in their faint spicy smell, ran my fingers over the rich brocades.

Along the lower end of George Street are to be found open markets filled with bustle and noise and colour. Parrots and cockatoos swing in cages before the doors of shops crowded with sailors jingling Spanish dollars they have earned at sea. Down the left-hand side are stalls where maize and wheat are sold; on the right, green vegetables, turkeys, ducks, geese and sucking pigs. I compare the best prices, in order to buy something to put Charlotte in a better mood on my way back. A shilling for a basket of peaches and nicely ripened cheese at fourpence a pound, which I can afford, just so long as I don't have to touch the peaches, for I am like my grandmother in this respect: I cannot bear the feel of a peach, which puts my teeth on edge, or worse, feels like my fingernails are bending back on themselves. I would like to linger over the booths of drapery for, as you'll have gathered, I'm partial to quality and, from the beginning, Jacky has spared nothing on me. All that is changed now; he has neither the mood nor the money to indulge me, for all our ships are lost at sea. In spite of myself, my eyes roam over hoop petticoats and some fine lawn camisoles; it's hard to explain but it's as if I'm looking down into the lives of women and girls who are like the person I was once, and cannot be again.

I hurry on, not looking left or right now, past a myriad creaking signs over the inns — the Crooked Billet, Three Jolly Sailors, Rose of Australia and World Turn'd Upside Down. Well, that last one would do me, though it was meant for sailors who believe that when they put to sea and sail over the horizon they are hanging on by their toes to the opposite side of the world. Though how it works I can't tell either, for all the world round here looks flat to me — you couldn't get flatter than Australia. But out on the ocean with Jacky, I've seen the way the sky curls over on itself, and I've worked out that there is some solution to
the riddle of the world and how you get from one side of it to another without falling off.

I find myself glancing over my shoulder, as if I am being followed by something or someone, a shadow as large as a whale on the horizon, and I know that though he is not there — or, at least, I don't think he is following me — that it is the shadow of my husband.

When I reach the shop, I see it has fallen on hard times. The grog barrels drip into their saucers as ever, but there is not much else but a collection of dusty pewter mugs on a shelf, some cheap fabric stacked any old how, and a few odds and ends collected in tubs. The tobacco is tenpence a pound, which is daylight robbery, and available much cheaper at the port. Gone are the hats and hat boxes, which were almost as pretty as the hats themselves, not to mention the gentlemen's hats with stovepipe crowns and ribbon round the brims, and fine kid gloves, and gold watches in locked glass cabinets, and a range of the best china money can buy. Once, when I was over from New Zealand, I bought a beautiful meat dish here, pale green and white, my favourite colours. My Granny said people who prefer green are cold by nature but that I do not believe, though she was right about most things. The centrepiece has pattern of thistles and roses and shamrocks, not that I have seen a shamrock. The platter has channels down the sides so the meat juices run down to a hollow; I pour them off to make the gravy. Well, I never expect to see that again. Ngai Tahu tribesmen have burnt down our house again, that I do know. Not for the first time, over these past months, I have thought that Jacky may not have chosen his friends wisely. Te Rauparaha and his Ngati Toa warriors served him well at first, but we have been in the middle of a war between the tribes of the north and south for years now. Not so bad when Te Rauparaha was on the winning side, but the tides have turned against him, and we are the enemy of those at war with him. I cannot say I blame them, that they do not like us.

As for whether we will ever return, I have no way of
knowing. For I'm not sure that I mean aught to Jacky now. I don't care for the way his eyes follow me around the room at nights when I'm turning back the covers on the bed. I am filled with sorrow when he turns away once I'm in the bed, and goes back to the kitchen. I hear him and my aunt Charlotte Pugh talking in low voices. I wonder sometimes, will I get out of this alive. But perhaps it's just that I got into the habit of thinking like this when I was in captivity. I've seen Jacky in a mood before, and he has got over it. But never as black as this. I tell myself that Jacky came back for me, to the wild Taranaki coast, to rescue me away from Oaoiti, the chief who held me as his own. And that he will recover from all of this. If he would listen to me, I would say, forget about it. Forgetting is everything, and all we have.