Sara Dane

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘She’ll have no easy time of it, I’ll be bound,’ he said in a low voice, half to himself. ‘Pardoned or not, I don’t envy her trying to show she’s any better than the rest of us. Who’ll believe it, anyway?’

  Jeremy was at a loss to answer him. He knew well enough that Trigg had merely put into words what every convict labourer at Kintyre must be thinking ‒ what was being said in every house and humpy in the colony, and over every barrack-room table. Andrew Maclay was going to suffer for his wife’s reputation, he thought. He gestured impatiently to silence Trigg.

  ‘Listen, they’re coming! I’ll go round to the front and take the horses.’

  He hurried round the side of the house, and, as he watched the Maclays’ approach, he saw that Andrew was carrying Sara’s hat; he saw the sun on her hair and in that moment he felt that he almost hated her, hated the splendour of the body that the dark habit revealed, hated her faint arrogance and superiority. Even one short day of marriage had seemed to alter her. She was more confident and at ease, sure of Andrew, like a child triumphant over a prize. He looked at the two faces as they came close, seeing in them something which had not been present when he saw them last. They were alive now, he thought, both of them; they were united with a kind of passion that he felt was not wholly the outcome of their physical bond. They had a sort of ruthless eagerness, as if they were both reaching out for something which had just come into sight. Whatever emotion they shared, it was for themselves alone.

  He took her horse’s head. He had an opportunity then to look at her closely, and he wished that she might have been vulgar and coarse, and then he could have despised her ‒ and ignored her. But he was all too keenly aware that she was not the type of woman to be overlooked. Intelligence and quick-wittedness was there, and she would not allow herself to be ignored. He reflected on Andrew’s camp-fire conversations about this unknown girl, and he knew now why it was that Andrew loved her. There was intoxication in those greenish eyes if one looked into them long enough, and charm and power in that smile. She appealed strongly to the gambler in Andrew, the part of him that wanted nothing that was tame, or too easily won. He knew from their talks that Sara had not been swiftly wooed, nor would she ever submit meekly to any man’s authority. He was angry with her because she had kept herself aloof, and he was ready to believe that she had schemed for all she had now, and was triumphant because she had won.

  It suddenly occurred to him that he might possibly be jealous of her.

  As he waited for Andrew to dismount and come round to lift her down, he realized that her eyes were on him.

  ‘Welcome home, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied, meeting his gaze steadily.

  He felt himself flushing, realizing that she held a position from which she might patronize him if she so chose. But her eyes left him. She turned to smile at Andrew, and Jeremy knew he was forgotten.

  Chapter Three

  In the two years following her marriage, Sara watched the Hawkesbury Valley slowly fill with settlers. Each ship now arriving in the colony brought its family of free settlers, and the terms of some of the convicts expired, or were remitted, and they, also, moved out to take land. By 1795, there were four hundred people living along the river, and their farms extended for thirty miles on either bank. A passable road had been made to link the Hawkesbury with Parramatta.

  During this time Kintyre had become the most prosperous farm in the district. This was mainly due to the fact that Andrew was now firmly established in the trading-ring, enjoying to the full the privileges of the military ‒ but he had also chosen his land in the place least likely to be touched by the seasonal floods which damaged and swept away the crops of those on the low-lying river-flats. Labour was cheap; many of the ex-convict settlers, having no money and no knowledge of farming, after their first few months gave up any attempt to cultivate their own land, and were glad to hire themselves out. As the acres were cleared, there was more pasture, and Andrew began to make regular trips to Parramatta for the market-day livestock sales. In a little more than a year Kintyre’s herds and flocks couldn’t any longer be reckoned in a quick glance. The rich river-flats gave a heavy yield of grain ‒ so long as it could be harvested, for the level of the water rose with the autumn rains. It wasn’t much more than a modest kind of prosperity that the farm enjoyed ‒ the outhouses and stables were still rough, the fencing incomplete ‒ but, with prices in the colony always favouring the trading-ring, Andrew’s profits mounted steadily. When the first two years were over he had moved beyond the stage where he was haunted by the fear of failure.

  To the house itself he added three rooms, setting them at right-angles to the main building, so that the whole long veranda faced a complete curve of the river, giving a view in two directions. A dull-green vine climbed the walls, and trailed along the veranda-rails, softening and warming the stark outlines of the house. A small garden was laid out in front, and slender fruit-trees covered the slope at the side ‒ when the trees broke into bloom for a brief time, there was the frail, transient beauty of an English spring to contrast with the evergreens. The house itself was losing its look of impermanence and rawness; its height commanded a fine stretch of the new road, and to those who travelled along it, it proclaimed the Maclays’ stature and position in the colony.

  Sara felt the great peace of these two years; they were the happiest in her whole life, and it took her some time to accustom herself to her sense of freedom and security, and to the knowledge that there was no longer any need to scheme and contrive for what she wanted. Only gradually could she learn the fact that she was the mistress of a farmhouse, and of Annie Stokes and the two other women who had been assigned to help her; the workers at Kintyre, free and convict, touched their caps to her as they passed, and she had to school herself not to show her satisfaction and delight in that small gesture. Curtains appeared at the windows of the house, and rugs on the floors ‒ there were even a few pieces of indifferent silver exhibited about, which Andrew had bought from a newly arrived settler. Sara was enchanted with them. Each time she passed she gave them a few furtive rubs with the corner of her apron. The plain wood floors gleamed with wax-polish, and the soft light from the lanterns lent some beauty even to the simply fashioned furniture.

  Right from the first month of her arrival at Kintyre, she flung herself into learning the management of the farm. She kept the accounts herself, making them up from the rough notes that Andrew gave her. She learned quickly; after a time she did them with ease and speed, and Andrew, responding to her interest, left more and more of the book-keeping to her. But she was not content to confine her knowledge of the farm to notations on paper. She took to riding every day, accompanying Andrew on his rounds, inspecting the work on the fences, and the deep ditches which the torrential rains made necessary; she began to know something about the condition of the livestock, and the diseases which could attack them ‒ all matters to which she had paid scant attention when she had heard them discussed among the farmers on the Romney Marsh. As time passed the farming of Kintyre’s lands became almost as much her concern as the running of the household, and she listened to the conversations between Andrew and Jeremy on the subject of stock and crops. Along the Hawkesbury they began to say that Andrew Maclay had married a woman as shrewd and business-like as himself.

  The world of the colony beyond the Hawkesbury she knew only from the gossip Andrew brought back from his trips to Sydney and Parramatta, and from the frequent letters that passed between herself and Julia Ryder. James was settling well to his farming, and enjoying it, Julia wrote ‒ her house was gradually being furnished, and a garden made. In short, James Ryder was prospering like every other hard-working farmer who had started either with money of his own, or who had some place in the trading circle. It was a time when money was to be made quickly from the fantastic privileges which the New South Wales Corps, in the absence of a Governor to restrain them, granted to themselves. So long as a man was accepted by
the officers of the Corps, nothing could go wrong for him ‒ land was free; rum was cheap, convicts were assigned without question, and with all this went the right of buying the cargoes offered for sale from every ship entering Port Jackson.

  Sara found little to tempt her to Sydney or Parramatta. There was hardly more to be seen now than the tired-looking huts and the few houses that had been there when she first arrived, and there was no one to visit except Julia Ryder. A few wives of the Corps’ officers had come out from England to join their husbands, but there was no possibility that she would be admitted into their tight little circle. Over this, she could do nothing but shrug her shoulders; Kintyre and the work there suited her, and there wasn’t much else she wanted. In the Hawkesbury district itself the women were mostly the wives of small settlers, many of them ex-convicts, married to ex-convicts. She knew they envied the prosperity and ease of life at Kintyre, and her appearances on the Hawkesbury road, mounted on the horse which had been set aside for her own use, did nothing to endear her to them. Resentful eyes under faded bonnets peered at her as she went by. There was no place yet for her in the colony ‒ nothing between these hard-working women who envied her, and the officers’ wives who would not receive her. She had to content herself with her rather solitary and aloof place at Kintyre.

  So when she knew that she was pregnant, almost her first thoughts were for Julia ‒ whether or not she could be spared from her own farm to make the journey to the Hawkesbury at the time the child was expected. Memories of their former relationship as mistress and servant still remained with her vividly, making her reluctant to write her request to Julia. But before she had finally settled to writing the letter, Andrew carried the news back with him from his next visit to Parramatta that Julia had asked if she might come two weeks before the baby would be born. But when the time came, she was delayed for a week with Charles, who had some sort of slight fever, and when she at last reached Kintyre she was greeted with the news that Sara’s son had been born the day before, after only four hours’ labour. The surgeon, D’Arcy Wentworth, who had travelled up from Parramatta with Julia, was seriously out of humour over the long journey made to no purpose. He seemed to be of the opinion that no gentlewoman would have produced her first child with so little difficulty.

  The baby was christened David. To the scandalized women along the river, the short time which had elapsed between the child’s birth and Sara’s first appearance on her horse was barely decent. They were not to know what impetus the sight of their first child had given to the ambitions of Andrew and Sara. After David was born they were close in a way they had never been before; work at Kintyre took on a new aspect seen in the light of a son to inherit it. They had no visitors, and lived with a simplicity which, in Sydney, would have caused slighting comment; but they themselves were satisfied, and each season more ground was broken by the ox-drawn hoe, and better farming equipment arrived out from England. Kintyre took on the trim, whitewashed look of a typical Scottish farm.

  It was Jeremy Hogan who caused the only unhappiness Sara knew in those two years. Between them ran an undercurrent of hostility, begun on the day Andrew had brought her to the Hawkesbury as his bride. Plainly, Jeremy considered her not half good enough for Andrew, a common little piece whom, by some misfortune, he had found attractive. They never openly quarrelled, both realizing that Andrew would not have stood for it. But, at best, their politeness to each other was chilly; at worst ‒ when Andrew was not present ‒ they stopped short only of outright rudeness. In every matter their ideas seemed to conflict. Jeremy was an excellent farmer himself; he made no secret of the fact that he, Andrew and Trigg were capable of running the farm without help from Sara. She said nothing on this score to Andrew, but simply settled to learning as much as possible from him, without troubling Jeremy.

  She knew well enough why Jeremy took this attitude towards her. His memories were all of lovely Irish women ‒ gentle, soft-voiced creatures who bent to their husbands’ will, whose minds never strayed beyond their favourite horses, their children, the style of their dress, and who would not have admitted to being able to add a column of figures. This was the sort of woman Jeremy understood ‒ not one who bargained like a gipsy for what she wanted, who trailed her petticoats in the mud to see the progress of the work in the fields and garden, and who still called herself mistress of a farm, and wife to a man whom he respected. She knew there was no trace of the dependent helplessness in her which Jeremy wanted to find.

  His resentment was never put into words. It remained just below the surface, and the only way he could give vent to it was by ignoring her when he discussed the farm with Andrew. Clearly, his object was to show her her place, and make her keep it. She had no power against him; he was necessary to Kintyre, he worked on it as if it were his own, and she would have suffered even direct insults from him in order to keep him there. She often thought of the wonderful relief if she could have raised her crop and hit Jeremy just once, as he turned his half-insolent gaze upwards towards her when she rode to inspect the work he was supervising in the fields.

  Sometimes she indulged in a fanciful day-dream of finding some way of convincing him that a practical, unsentimental woman was a better wife to Andrew, in his present position, than any of his own notions of soft-eyed beauties. Then she pulled up short, and laughed at herself for such indulgence. Jeremy’s opinion of her would have to be worn down by the slow method of proving him wrong in small ways; but it was a method that was little suited to her mood.

  II

  These years, without proper government control, the officers of the Corps used to form the nucleus of their estates ‒ mostly on the profits from rum. Sara, watching from Kintyre, could trace the pattern these men were making ‒ they were uncovering their own ambitions to establish themselves as the gentry of the new country, and they were doing it by the classic method of grabbing, in as short a time as possible, all the land available to them, leaving the refinements and niceties of their unique position until later. Andrew, except for the fact that he wore no red coat and drew no pay from His Majesty’s Government, was hardly different.

  The news reached them, almost a year old, of the execution of Louis XVI of France. They also learned that England had joined Prussia, Austria, Spain and Piedmont in declaring war against the French Republic. To the people of New South Wales the events of the world they had left behind were remote and far off, like a tune heard tinkling faintly in the distance. They were absorbed in their own affairs, and the troubles of Europe hardly touched them.

  Chapter Four

  After a week of rain in the early spring of 1795 the Hawkesbury rose suddenly. The lands belonging to several farmers who had settled close to the banks were under water; one man was drowned. For three days the swirling brown flood held its place twenty-five feet above the usual level, and then gradually receded. It left behind a generous layer of silt, and scores of dead livestock, bloated, and beginning to smell vilely. The farmers returned to their ruined fields of Indian corn, the mud-caked wrecks of their homes, and they ruefully counted the numbers of cattle either drowned or strayed. They reckoned their losses against the possible return of the floods each spring and autumn. They discussed the prospect among themselves and whatever way they viewed it, it looked gloomy. Some determined to hang on ‒ counting that the yield of one good season here would compensate for two bad ones; others decided to cut their losses and sell.

  Kintyre was practically untouched by the disaster that had come to the valley. At the first sign of a rise in the river, Andrew had moved his livestock to higher ground close to the house. When the water went down he had no losses to count, except one field of corn destroyed. He made capital out of the flood. He watched the panic spread among the other settlers, and when the trek began he was able to buy up the small farm adjoining his own, and a further ninety acres a mile or so down-river. More ex-convict labourers were hired, and an overseer found to master them; Jeremy began his task of bringing the productivity of
Kintyre’s new lands into line with the old.

  The spring also brought the Reliance, bearing the awaited Governor, John Hunter, into Sydney Cove. Rumours circulated among the New South Wales Corps that his commission held a paragraph charging him to suppress the rum traffic. On September 11th, the Corps paraded with full military pomp, and with an obvious tongue in the cheek, to hear the commission read, quite fully determined that nothing a King or Parliament on the other side of the world could do was going to stem their profiteering in the rum traffic.

  II

  ‘Jeremy, do you think these accounts are …?’

  Sara broke off and laid down her pen, as the sounds of a galloping horse broke into the afternoon stillness. Jeremy lifted his eyes from the account-books spread on the table between them. From the bottom of the slope they could hear the heavy beat of a horse being ridden at full speed. For an instant they exchanged a questioning glance. Then Jeremy was on his feet.

  ‘It’s news of some sort,’ he rapped, flinging open the door of the room Andrew used as an office.

  ‘No one rides like that for the pleasure of it.’

  ‘Wait!’ Sara sprang up. ‘I’ll come with you!’

  She swept out, and as she hurried down the passage to the front door, standing open in the spring sunshine, she was possessed of a strange fear. Never before had a horse been ridden to her very veranda steps at such a speed ‒ not even when a long-awaited ship arrived, bringing letters from England. Her thoughts flew instantly to Andrew, who had left two days before to attend the reading of the new Governor’s commission in Sydney. Her mind envisaged him ill or injured and the hoofbeats had a desperate, urgent sound. The horseman was almost at the top of the slope now. She gathered up her skirts and ran the last few yards to the doorway.