The Touch (50 page)

Ruby had finished with her hair, drawn back more severely from her face than of yore; she had discovered that this pulled the skin of her face tighter, lessened the wrinkles. “Sounds as if Lee’s busy trying to pip you on the post, Alexander.”

“Have no doubt of it, he is! But surely you know all this, Ruby. He must write to you.”

She grimaced, whether because of the difficulty of climbing into her dress or on Lee’s behalf, Alexander wasn’t sure. “Lee writes with clockwork regularity, but two or three lines to tell me that he’s well and on the move from some queer place to another queer place. It’s almost as if,” she added wistfully, “he hates to be reminded of Kinross. I’m always hoping he’ll write to say he’s engaged, or married, but he never does.”

“Women,” said Alexander cynically, “are putty in his hands.” He looked at her and frowned. “You’ve changed the way you dress, my dear. I rather miss those sumptuous satin affairs.”

She looked at herself in the full-length mirror and pulled a face at the dress, which had a skirt that didn’t sweep and a waist that didn’t need to be wasped and a covered bosom. Plain and rather tailored, it was admittedly of silk grosgrain, but in that wretched bile color that had become so fashionable. “At my age, dear love, I’d look ridiculous. Besides, no one’s wearing bustles anymore, feathers are out, necklines are rising, and leg-o’-mutton sleeves are all the go. Revolting things! Except for the poshest evening functions, it’s all wool, tweed, grosgrain if you must wear silk. An old tart can’t afford to look an old tart.”

“It’s my opinion,” said Alexander, smiling, “that women’s fashions are a sign of the times. The times are bad and will get far worse. We are in a commercial decline, not limited to this part of the world. So women are dressing more austerely, in dull colors and extremely ugly hats.”

“I accede to the plain dresses and the dull colors, but I absolutely refuse to wear an ugly hat,” said Ruby, linking her arm through his.

“Where are you going?” he asked, surprised.

She looked innocent. “Why, up the mountain with you! I’ve not seen Dolly since yesterday.” Suddenly she stopped. “Did you send a message to Jade about the baby?”

“Elizabeth did the moment she was born.”

“Is it hard to get messages to her?”

“Not if they come from Sir Alexander Kinross’s family.”

“How long will it be before her hearing?”

“July.”

“And it’s scarcely May. Poor little soul.”

“Indeed.”

THE NEWSPAPER reportage about the Kinross’s Chinese nurserymaid and her crime hardly impinged upon Bede Evans Talgarth, galvanized by a turn of events that had the labor movement in a ferment. The Trades and Labour Council, pushed by a shrewd and dedicated Lancastrian named Peter Brennan, had just come around to seeing a political future for Labor and had started to compile a draft of Labor’s platform when the huge strike of August 1890 intervened. However, the crushing defeat of the unions involved in the strike only spurred the Labor leaders to seek parliamentary representation for the ordinary white workingman. A by-election in West Sydney took place in October of 1890; Labor contested it with a union-approved candidate who swept to victory. The stage seemed set for the New South Wales general election to be held in 1892, far enough away to ensure that Labor would be properly prepared, with all the internecine strife about the identity of its candidates well behind it.

The Trades and Labour Council finished its official Labor political platform in April of 1891, a full year before the next elections. It included the abolition of electoral inequalities, universal free education, the achievement of union objectives, a national bank, and various measures to discourage the Chinese from manufacturing in Australia. On taxation the delegates were more divided, some arguing for a land tax, others for a single tax covering everything and everybody. Having extended the platform to encompass reform of local government, a new political party emerged. Its name was the Labor Electoral League, the word “Labor” spelled without the British “u” in it. In time it would become the Australian Labor Party. Labor in Latin meant “work, toil.”

Then potential disaster struck. The New South Wales lower house saw Sir Henry Parkes’s Free Trade Party succumb to a vote of no confidence. This led to the Governor’s dissolving the parliament and calling for new elections, which were set for the three weeks between June 17 and July 3 of 1891. Almost a year earlier than expected.

Labor scrambled frantically to sort out candidates for each electorate, no easy task in a state 300,000 square miles in extent. Not of course that electorates stuffed with affluent people were worth contesting, but that still left very many that were. The more remote country electorates had to be contacted by telegram or visited by central committee members doomed to several days on trains, coaches, even horseback. For that reason, the elections were spread over a period of three weeks.

The Bourke electorate, days away from Sydney, didn’t care a hoot about city problems. Its chief concern was the importation of Afghans and their camels, which were stealing the entire haulage business from white Australian bullockies and their massive drays. The Labor political platform as drawn up by the city slickers and the coal miners didn’t mention Afghans or camels, but in Bourke they mattered. The resulting quarrel with Sydney was fierce, but Bourke was forced to submit—no camels in the platform.

Neither the Free Trade Party nor the Protectionist Party took the Labor Electoral League seriously, thus conducted their usual leisurely, complacent campaigns, which mostly consisted of taking businessmen to lunch or dinner and ignoring the working classes completely. The Free Traders wanted no tariffs or duties upon imports, the Protectionists wanted local industries shored up by tariffs and duties upon imports. Both parties viewed the non-gentlemen of Labor with utter contempt.

Working furiously in his chosen southwestern Sydney area, Bede Talgarth succeeded in gaining nomination as Labor’s official candidate, then went to work visiting those who would vote. He faced the polling period with trepidation, but also with a degree of confidence; he couldn’t see why ordinary workingmen would want to vote for men who despised them when they now had a better alternative in the workingman’s very own politicians.

As his electorate was a Sydney one, he knew his fate quickly. Bede Evans Talgarth found himself an M.L.A—a Member of the Legislative Assembly. As the results gradually came in for the 141 electorates in the state, thirty-five of them went to Labor. So did the balance of power in the parliament. Not that it was all joy for Labor; sixteen of the M.L.A.s were representing city electorates, nineteen country electorates. The city men (women weren’t allowed to vote, let alone stand for parliament) were mostly staunch unionists, whereas the country men, apart from a group of coal miners plus one shearer, were not union-affiliated at all. Only ten of the Labor M.L.A.s were Australian born, only four were over fifty, and six were under thirty. It was a bench full of young men eager to change the face of Australian politics forever. Eager, yes, but also inexperienced.

What the hell! thought Bede Talgarth, M.L.A. The only way to gain experience is to jump in at the deep end, boots and all. The words that had been able to thrill a huge crowd in the Sydney Domain would now echo around a chamber growing very tired of Parkesian rhetoric. But the Grand Old Man managed to hang on to his position as Premier, forced now to court these presumptuous Labor buffoons (some of them were, alas) if he wanted to win a vote. A task made more difficult by Labor’s internal complexity, governed by hideous amounts of that foul American entity, democracy; about half the Labor members were for free trade, the other half for protectionism.

So in July, when it was far too late to matter, Bede Talgarth remembered that day in Kinross when Sam O’Donnell hadn’t showed up at the hotel after lunch. “A bit of slap-and-tickle,” he had explained with a sheepish grin when he did show up hours later. Oh well, as evidence it was even thinner than the dog. It would not have persuaded the judge to amend his decision that Jade Wong, spinster of the town of Kinross, aged thirty-six, should hang.

FEARING MASS demonstrations if Jade were brought to Sydney, it was decided that she would be hanged on a specially constructed gallows in Bathurst Gaol, and that the execution would not be open to journalists or the public.

The judge, a member of the New South Wales Supreme Court, had been more than fair, but Jade stoutly maintained that she had killed Samuel O’Donnell in the manner described, and was glad she had killed him. He had ruined her baby Anna.

“I have no choice,” the judge said during his address to the few still, attentive people permitted to be present. “The crime was indisputably premeditated. It was planned and carried out with a degree of cold-blooded calculation I find almost unimaginable in the light of Miss Wong’s past history and career. Nothing was left to chance. Perhaps the most sickening aspect of the deed was Miss Wong’s sewing the victim’s eyes open. He was forced to witness his own mutilation and destruction. Nor has Miss Wong at any time expressed in words, or otherwise shown, a sign of any remorse.” His lordship took a small black cloth from his bench and draped it on top of his full-bottomed wig. “Prisoner at the bar, I hereby sentence you to be taken to a place of execution and there hanged by the neck until dead.”

Only Alexander came from Kinross to hear him. Jade’s face didn’t change, nor her smile lose its spontaneity. No fear in the big brown eyes, no sign of contrition. Jade was patently happy.

THE EXECUTION took place a week later, at eight o’clock in the morning of a bitter, rainy July day, with the mountains around Bathurst covered in snow and an icy wind blowing to whip Alexander’s coat around his knees and prevent his using an umbrella.

He had seen her in her cell the day before to give her four letters: one from her father, one from Ruby, one from Elizabeth and one from Nell. From Anna he gave her a lock of hair, and that she loved more by far than anything the letters could say.

“It will go against my breast,” she said, kissing it. “Is the baby well? Dolly?”

“Blooming, and it seems quite normal for ten weeks. May I do anything for you, Jade?”

“Look after my baby Anna, and swear to me on Nell’s head that you won’t ever put her in a home.”

“I swear it,” he said without hesitation.

“Then I have done what I set out to do,” she said, smiling.

JADE WAS LED out clad in her black trousers and jacket, her long hair pinned up in a bun on top of her head. The rain didn’t seem to bother her; she looked tranquil and walked without faltering. No minister of religion was present; Jade had refused spiritual comfort, insisting that she had not been baptized and was not a Christian.

The warder escorting her positioned her on the center of the trapdoor while another warder tied her hands behind her back and bound her ankles together. When they went to put a hood over her head she shook it violently until they desisted. Then the hangman stepped forward and dropped the noose around her neck, adjusted it so that the knot lay just behind her left ear, and tightened it. For all the interest she displayed, Jade might already have been dead.

It seemed over in a second, yet to go on for an hour. The hangman tripped the lever and the trapdoor collapsed with a loud clunk. Jade fell the short distance calculated to break her neck without decapitating her. There were no jerks, writhes, tremors. The black-clad figure, so tiny, so harmless, twirled a little, its face as peaceful as it had been from the beginning.

“I never saw a condemned person with that much courage,” said the warden, standing with Alexander. “Awful business.”

The arrangements had been made. Alexander was to receive the body after the coroner had confirmed death; it would be cremated at Sung’s facility, but the ashes would not be sent home to China, or given to Sam Wong. Sung, who had kept completely out of the affair for fear of retaliation against his people, had had an inspiration he thought Jade would approve of. Alexander also approved. In the middle of the night, Sung himself would steal into the Kinross cemetery and dig Jade’s ashes into the big mound of soil over Sam O’Donnell’s body. For all eternity—or as much of eternity as mattered—Sam O’Donnell would have his murderess leaching into his thin, cheap coffin.

“I would like Miss Wong’s letters back, please,” Alexander said to the warden.

“Let’s move in out of this rain,” the man said, starting to walk. “Want to read them, eh?”

“No, I want to burn them unread by anyone. They were for her eyes only. You will oblige me in this, I hope? I wouldn’t like to read a transcript of them in a newspaper.”

The warden recognized the iron fist inside the velvet glove, and abandoned his plans at once. “Certainly, Sir Alexander, most certainly!” he said heartily. “There’s a fire in my sitting room where we can dry off. A cup of tea while we wait, eh?”

WHEN NELL started engineering at Sydney University in March of 1892 at the very young age of sixteen, Alexander did what he could for her. The school was located in a single-storied white building intended as temporary but reasonably roomy accommodation until the proper school of Engineering could be built. It lay on the Parramatta Road side of the university and had a verandah in front of which grew tomatoes. Not seeing the point of subtlety, Alexander had simply told the Dean of Science and Professor of Engineering, William Warren, that he would contribute large sums for building purposes if his daughter and her Chinese colleagues were not victimized by their teachers. Heart sinking, Professor Warren assured him that Nell, Wo Ching, Chan Min and Lo Chee would be treated like his white male students—but that they would not be favored, oh, dear me, no.

Alexander had grinned and raised his pointed brows. “You’ll find, Professor, that neither my daughter nor the Chinese boys are in need of special favors. They’ll be your brightest students.”