The Resurrectionist (22 page)

A
WEEK PASSES
before I find time to call on Winter. The day is fine, the unearthly song of the cicadas shimmering in the air. Though I have passed it many times I am not familiar with the property, only with the house as is visible from the road. Approaching up the winding drive I look about myself at the gardens, half-wild with neglect. Once this was a place such as an English gentleman might feel at home in – save for the immensity of sky and the annihilating light, the shrieking parrots in the trees – but left on its own it has grown wild and strange, snakes slipping in along the branches, wattle trees and native bushes seeding themselves amidst the dainty English roses.

Upon the step I knock, and in the quiet that follows I hear from somewhere within the sound of a pianoforte, the tune gentle and sad. Then footsteps, the door opening to reveal a woman in a housekeeper’s uniform, her face hardened first by the memory of some London slum, then by the unforgiving sun of the antipodes. She regards me dubiously as I tell her my name, looking hard at the card I give to her,
then taking it she directs me to a little parlour by the door and leaves me there.

Left alone I listen to the music from above. The tune is not known to me but it suggests itself in such a way that I almost feel it might be. Still listening I set down my portfolio and look about. The room is small and plain, two walls decorated each with a painting in the style of Gainsborough, a shelf of books against another wall. Above the fireplace hangs another painting, a portrait executed in a cruder hand. Stepping closer to examine it I see a man of middle years dressed in the fashions of twenty years ago. The painting is of no great artistry, its flat and awkward composition betraying some untrained hand; nonetheless it captures some quality of kindness in its subject and though its subject is an older man, and heavier, I fancy I see Winter’s face in his.

Lost thus in the picture I am startled to hear the voice of the housekeeper behind me in the hall, remonstrating, then another voice, quiet and firm. Overhead the music has stopped, I realise, and turning towards the door I see a woman standing there. I am not sure what I had expected her to be, but I know at once it was not this. She is young, not more than twenty-two, and dressed in a pale dress of great simplicity, her ash-blonde hair tied back in a manner quite unlike the showy styles so popular with the other ladies of the colony. Like her brother she is slim, but where his face is imperious hers is gentler.

‘Mr May?’ she asks. I would take her hand, but something in her expression repels that familiarity.

‘Your brother told you I would call?’ I ask, and she gives a little nod.

‘It was his wish I give you instruction in draughtsmanship, so you might have something with which to fill your days,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘he spoke of it.’ Behind her in the hall the
housekeeper is observing; following my eyes Miss Winter turns to her.

‘Thank you, Mrs Blackstable,’ she says. The housekeeper lingers, then nods sourly, and turns back down the corridor.

‘I am sorry you should be greeted in such a manner,’ says Miss Winter, turning back to me. She gestures at a pair of crates which stand opened in the corner of the room. ‘As you can see we are not yet fully settled in the house.’

I shake my head, telling her there is no need to apologise. ‘I am told you are late of Van Diemen’s Land? You are a native of that place?’

‘I was born there,’ she says, her voice dropping away at the sentence’s end, leaving little doubt as to how her parents made their way across the sea. But lifting her eyes she looks at me with a sudden, steady gaze, as if defying me to find some shame in her. At last she looks away.

‘You are a painter then?’

Stepping forward I take up my portfolio from the tabletop. ‘I may show you some examples if you need references.’

She looks at the portfolio for a second or two. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I do not think that will be necessary. Has my brother discussed terms with you?’

‘Not as yet,’ I reply.

‘I am sure they will be acceptable. No doubt he will confirm them with you when he returns.’

Resignation and defiance are so strangely mixed in her manner I am unsure how to respond. Groping for some common ground I set down my portfolio.

‘I heard music before, the pianoforte. It was you that played?’

She looks up, her expression suddenly wary, and at once I fear I have misspoken, breached some barrier. But then she nods.

‘Yes,’ she says quietly.

‘I thought it very fine,’ I say, but she looks away.

‘Thank you,’ she says. I think she will say something more, but instead she lifts her eyes to mine, the challenge they contained before returned and altered in some subtle way.

‘I will look forward to your brother’s letter,’ I say. But at the door she steps after me.

‘Mr May?’ she asks. ‘What is it you paint?’

I look out through the doorway.

‘Birds,’ I say at last, ‘only birds.’

E
NCLOSED IN THE CAGE
of my hand she trembles, a hot weight, scarcely heavier than breath. Only moments ago she fought and shrieked in the net’s entangling strands, now she does not move, her body poised motionless within my grasp. Not stunned, or injured, merely stilled, her tiny form seeming to quiver with the arrested urgency of flight.

Though my hand is closed about her it is but loosely so. Were I to open it she would spring away, her body cast into the air on beating wings and gone, quick as memory. But while held she does not strain; instead she waits, as if for some sign from me.

It is a dreadful sort of power this. To hold a life so small in your control. And yet it is not the power to give or take that life which makes it terrible. After all, to live, to die, each is a simple thing. Rather it is the intimacy of it, the way that in the possession of such power you are made naked in the gaze of another, as they are in yours. And for that brief second it is possible to glimpse what it might mean to leave the cage of the self and touch another, to know them as you know yourself.

Behind me in the air the net shifts upon the breeze, its silken strands barely visible against the fading light. On every side the birds are in motion, magpies and lorikeets, screeching cockatoos. And closer in, her own fellows, their tiny bodies shooting round about me in desperate circles. With each dive they cry out, urgently and ferociously, in a panic for her life, the grace of their bodies marvellous as they arc and wheel on the air. What must it be to live like that, I think, a life as hot and quick as blood, all its meaning concentrated in the moment of being?

In my hand I feel her tense, and looking down again I see she is watching me. Beneath my thumb her body seems to flicker, the mothbeat of her heart quicker than a child’s pulse. Moving faster now her flockmates spin and turn about the two of us, their cries coming sharper from their chests, more urgently. With each cry she seems to start, as if with a half-remembered pain. I feel it too, I think, an ache inside of me.

Willing the other’s cries away I lift my hand, slowly tightening my grip about her tiny form. She is so light she might be naught but heat. Beneath my thumb now the dome of her skull, fragile as an egg. She must realise what I intend and yet she does not fight, not even now, her eyes just watching mine, liquid dark. I could close my eyes, or look away, or cast her up into the air so she might fly again, but I do not. Instead I let my thumb press down against the tension of her neck, gently at first, and then harder, until at last it gives a little pop, and in that moment she is dead.

Though the days are not yet hot I pack her quickly, for the heat that lingers in her body will not last. Already her eyes are dull; in an hour she will be cold, her legs gone stiff, feet curled back, in a day spoiled. Though it brings me no
pleasure to take her life, later I will imagine her back into being, learning from her body’s details, erasing the deceptions of the eye. Though one must know the habits of their kind, the way they move and hold themselves, the trees in which they rest, life will tell only so much about the semblance of a bird. To make an image which is true one must also know the way a throat is banded, where the colours of the belly give way to the tail. Just as the brilliant white of the cockatoos is in truth shot through with yellow, this same hue lending the feathers their unnatural clarity, so too those birds which might seem dull black or drab brown will reveal colours within themselves when held in the hand, midnight blues and viridian, shades which shimmer and shift.

It is a fragile thing, the line within an image which contains the whole. Yet in its finding it transcends all other considerations. Like a note played clear and true it reveals itself as if already there, plangent and unadorned. And in its finding we may move without awkwardness or artifice, somewhere outside of language, outside of care.

T
HOUGH
W
INTER’S TERMS
when they come are generous, my first impulse is to send the letter back, reject his offer outright. I have no reason for this, only the feeling that his generosity is too easy to accept, its taking buying my complicity in some purpose I do not fully understand. But something in the memory of her manner decides me otherwise, and so by letter I accept, and set a time to call three days hence.

On the day appointed I have a lesson at the Robertsons’ first, and so it is mid-afternoon before I may call. These past days Winter is much discussed by the ladies of the colony, who would know more of him, more of his intentions here. At the boundary of his property I see a group of men moving raggedly across the hill, bearing tools upon their backs, as if to start the work of repairing nature’s damage these last years. They are Company men, I know at once, not by their clothing but by the way their gaze follows me without ever meeting mine, the uneasy questioning of their eyes.

Nearer the house, work has begun as well, the lawn now
cut, limbs lying here and there, lopped from the overhanging trees. The door is open, a girl standing within; greeting her I give my name and business and a moment later Miss Winter appears. She has that same look of broken defiance I remember from our first meeting. Then she nods, though whether in greeting or disappointment I am unsure.

‘My brother’s terms were acceptable then?’ she asks, and something in her voice reminds me of my barely articulated revulsion against Winter’s note, its too-generous terms.

She holds my eyes for a moment longer than is necessary, and then sets her mouth.

Ushering me in before herself she leads me to the parlour where we met a week before. On the table lies a portfolio; setting my own down beside it I touch it with my hand.

‘This is yours?’ I ask, and she nods.

‘You will not mind if I look?’

She shakes her head and so I open it, leafing through the pictures it contains. A picture of an abbey, all romantic ruin, a pair of hands, the face of a man. The pictures a girl would make, I think, and old, besides.

‘You have had instruction before?’

‘When I was a girl there was a man in my father’s employ called Davidson.’ For a brief second she hesitates, before adding, ‘A convict.’

Looking around I indicate the portrait above the fireplace.

‘That is his work?’

‘It is.’

From the door comes the sound of a throat being cleared. The girl who admitted me is standing there. She is a thin thing, her dress hanging loosely on her narrow frame, and she averts her eyes, fixing her gaze upon the floor. Miss Winter does not make any movement to prompt the girl, and so at last when she speaks it is an ecstasy of embarrassment.

‘Please, Miss. Mrs Blackstable said I should sit with you and the gentleman.’

Still Miss Winter says nothing, and so, embarrassed for the girl, I direct her to a chair and tell her to sit. Glancing back at Miss Winter I see she has looked away, out the window into the garden, her body tight.

‘Miss Winter,’ I say, and she turns.

‘Shall we begin?’

As we work the girl sits staring at her hands. At first I think it is something we have done that has unsettled her, but as the hour passes I realise I have misunderstood: her discomfort lies not with Miss Winter’s silence, but in whatever purpose lies behind her presence here. For a time I speak to Miss Winter about the principles of composition, trying to gauge how much she already knows, asking questions, watching the way she answers, and then I set her the task of sketching a bowl of flowers which sits upon the table.

While she works I take up the drawings in her portfolio once more. They are awkward, and pedestrian, all too evidently full of a girl’s restless longing and the desire for life to be more than it is. Lifting my eyes I look once more at Miss Winter. The task I have given her is of no great worth, a drawing to be made and then forgotten, but still she works at it with an intensity that is almost painful to observe. I want to lift a hand, to still her, yet it is difficult to set aside the sense that even her seriousness is somehow an act of defiance, though one enacted without care for consequence. It frightens me somehow, as if she might do herself harm in her desire to lose herself in this. Her hands are lined and reddened, the hands of a woman twice her age, and this small detail makes her appear more vulnerable than all the rest of it. I find myself gripped by the desire to ease whatever it is that she fights so hard against. It is a strange thing, tenderness, how near to pain it is, as if it were itself a sort of loss, a longing for a closeness we can never know.

‘M
R
M
AY,’ CALLS
M
RS
B
OURKE
as I take my leave of Joshua a week later. Surprised, I turn and see her on the stairs, Miss Lizabet skipping down below her.

‘You are leaving?’ she asks, beginning to descend, but I shake my head.

‘It was your husband’s wish that I attend on him before I go,’ I say, ‘but he is still occupied with Tavistock.’

Mrs Bourke purses her lips in a gentle frown. I have heard her complain good-naturedly her husband might have married Tavistock, the farm manager, had he thought the other man capable of giving him an heir.

‘He will not be back for some hours yet, I think,’ she says. ‘Do not wait for him.’

I am uncomfortable with breaking my word to Bourke, but I have come to trust Mrs Bourke’s judgement in many things, her husband most of all.

‘Miss Lizabet would play, I think. Perhaps you might walk with me while she does,’ she says as her daughter shakes the little doll she holds, her face fixed in a frown.

‘I have work –’ I begin, but Mrs Bourke places a hand upon my arm, and gives me a little push.

‘And you shall get to it,’ she says, ‘but not quite yet.’

Though we are separated by the barrier of our places in the house I am fond of my employer’s wife. She and Bourke were but newly married when I was first bonded here, she herself little more than a girl, still fresh from England’s shores and heavy with the child who would become Miss Lizabet. Just sixteen when Bourke met her on a visit to England, barely a year older when she arrived here as the wife of a widower fifteen years her senior with a son only ten years younger than herself. I remember glimpsing her as I went about my work, walking slowly through the gardens of the house, careful in her own company. Even then I admired her, I suppose, so young and so far away from all she knew, not just for her kindness but for her tact and lack of ceremony.

‘We have not seen much of each other of late,’ she says as we make our way across the lawn.

‘I have been occupied,’ I reply, and she smiles.

‘You have not been too much alone?’

I shake my head. Of those few I might call my friends only Mrs Bourke would ask this of me.

‘I have my work.’ In front of us Miss Lizabet is spinning in slow circles, her doll held out in one hand, lost in some childish game.

‘Bourke says you give lessons to Miss Winter,’ Mrs Bourke says then. Startled I look at her, but there is nothing prying in her face. Perhaps my expression tells more than I mean, for there is an instant when she looks at me, and then away.

‘You think her fair?’ she asks.

‘You have not met her yourself?’

She shakes her head. ‘Bourke has. Her brother keeps her close, I think, though I know not why.’

‘You do not care for him?’

She ponders. ‘I think he is a man who cares very much for how the world sees him,’ she says.

As she speaks Joshua appears. Miss Lizabet runs towards him, her doll held high, eager to tell him some secret she has discovered or perhaps to have him partner her in a dance. Mrs Bourke gazes at the two of them.

‘I am told Joshua grows more like his mother every month,’ she says.

I look at her in surprise. ‘Bourke says that?’ But she shakes her head.

‘He would not say such things.’ Joshua lifts Miss Lizabet onto his shoulders provoking a delighted squeal. ‘But I know he sees it too.’