Sara Dane

by Catherine Gaskin

  She twisted her hand in his, and broke away from his clasp. ‘Indeed, Richard, I’m very glad to see you also.’

  Then she turned to present her husband to Alison.

  To sit working at the square of tapestry clamped in its frame had always brought Sara calm and relaxation, but now, as she threaded her needle in and out of the canvas, she noticed that her hand still trembled. The interminable meal was finished, and a glance at the French clock told her that Andrew was holding the men an unusually long time over the port. Sitting opposite her, Julia and Alison kept up a conversation ‒ mostly they talked of the items of news that had been fresh when the Barwells left London. Sara was aware that she herself made an occasional contribution, but she gave them little heed. Her mind was back with Richard.

  The hour just past had been dreadful beyond anything for which she had prepared herself. It was a slow nightmare, a struggle to hold herself together in the face of an emotion as strong as any she had ever known before. Throughout the meal Richard had laughed and talked, entertaining and amusing them with his quips and his stories, told with a light, skilful touch. And for every minute he had sat there, fingering the excellent wine, drawing the threads of conversation always into his own hands, she felt her resolution ebbing. It was as if he had stretched out his hands and taken her bodily to him. She felt that she might go on endlessly telling herself that Richard was weak, Richard merely played at life while he waited for its best things to fall into his lap, Richard had not one jot of the worth of Andrew ‒ and yet, for all that, he could command her attention as easily now as he had done in the Bramfield days. She was still, she confessed, the girl who had explored the Marsh dykes with him, pale-coloured with the new green of spring; she was the girl who was utterly fascinated by him, obedient to his will, eager to give in to his wishes. An insect drawn by a brilliant light ‒ she knew she was that. Never mind that the light might be transitory and false; it was there, in front of her.

  It had been madness to have believed all these years that Richard could be forgotten at will. Andrew had taken part of her love, and all of her devotion and loyalty, but the core of her had always been Richard’s. And he had returned now to lay claim to it, just as if there had been no separation. She was ashamed and fearful, angry with him that he had revealed her own weakness to her. He knew it, she told herself ‒ under the lightness and the laughter, Richard knew well that she was again his willing fool, the eager Sara who had smiled for him when she was bidden, and had been sad when he was sad.

  ‘Curse you, Richard!’ she whispered, under her breath. ‘I still love you.’

  She stitched away at the tapestry, half-hearing the conversation. Thank God for Julia, she thought, feeling truly grateful for the presence of the elder woman who held the situation as steady as a rock, covering her own silence, making bearable this awful time until Andrew should return to support her. Sudden tears pricked the back of her eyes; she would gladly have cried tears of rage and dismay at the turn affairs had taken. It sickened her to recall that four days ago she had imagined Richard Barwell was safely back in the past.

  Even bound up as she was in her own turmoil, she was conscious that Alison had risen and was coming towards her. She knew the piece of tapestry was going to be inspected, and she offered it reluctantly.

  Alison looked at it, head tilted to the side.

  ‘Oh, but this is quite beautiful, Mrs. Maclay!’ she said at last. ‘And how swiftly you work!’

  Sara’s temper swelled at the platitude, but she managed a stiff smile.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve always worked at speed. Perhaps you don’t remember that I was once employed in a London dressmaking establishment?’

  Alison turned away, with a sharp swish of her satin, and Sara imagined she caught a flicker of annoyance cross her face; she paced the length of the room, pausing before the open keyboard of the piano. Behind her back, Sara looked over at Julia and deliberately winked. Julia’s eyebrows shot up, and then she frowned, shaking her head.

  Sara addressed Alison gently. ‘Perhaps we can persuade you to play for us, Mrs. Barwell? Have you anything of Beethoven’s? People arriving in the colony speak of him ‒ but it’s a matter of great regret to me that we never hear his work performed.’

  ‘Beethoven is known to be a great admirer of Bonaparte,’ Alison returned rigidly. ‘I hardly consider it patriotic to encourage the work of such people.’

  ‘Just as you wish, of course,’ Sara said, determined to remain unsnubbed.

  Alison sat down at the piano. She chose to play Mozart, confidently, and with unmistakable enjoyment. Watching her, Sara wondered what she would do to pass the time in this place, where there were never enough books, and no music at all, where people were mostly too busy making money to have time for the niceties of the cultivated mind. She would want a piano, of course, and Richard would find that shipping a piano from England was an expensive and doubtful business. It would, more than likely, be smashed to splinters during the voyage. But Sara, watching the other’s determined little face, felt that before very long there would be a piano on the way.

  Alison was determined, certainly, Sara decided, watching the slightly swaying figure. She was determined and intelligent ‒ but away from her husband’s presence, she had changed visibly. During dinner she had been rather gay, amusing at times, and self-possessed, but here she made it plain that she was not at ease in the completely strange company in which she found herself. She was aloof and a little critical; she was more noticeably fragile now ‒ like a painting in her exotic blue gown, a slight child-figure without physical strength of any kind. Andrew had reported that Alison had suffered terribly from sea-sickness during the voyage, and Sara wondered how this slender, white-skinned woman would live through the long months of the summer.

  The music finished, and Alison withdrew her hands from the keyboard.

  ‘Charming!’ Sara said. ‘Thank you, indeed, Mrs. Barwell! Mozart is delightful ‒ though I myself have always preferred Bach.’

  Alison nodded absently, and began to pick out the air-notes of a Bach fugue. The sounds scarcely reached the other end of the room. ‘You,’ she said, looking up, ‘play, of course, Mrs. Maclay?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no,’ Sara replied lightly, turning the tapestry-frame to examine the back of her work. ‘I often think it’s just as well my children are all boys ‒ I, alas, have no accomplishments to pass on to a daughter.’

  She carefully selected another length of silk from her sewing-basket. ‘I understand you and Richard have no children yet, Mrs. Barwell?’

  Alison’s lips tightened as she shook her head. The kingfisher satin stirred, and seemed to quiver. She rose stiffly from the piano. But when she began to walk slowly down the length of the room, she was, in every inch of her small figure, Sir Geoffrey’s daughter, poised, and sure of herself, sure that she was above the vulgar taunts of a woman who had once been a servant and a convict. She smiled charmingly at Sara, graciously ignoring the vulgarity, and seated herself on the sofa beside her. Sara recalled her remark to Julia that the colony suffered from the lack of real ladies; here, she thought, was one who would be a match for every situation.

  Julia, desperately uncomfortable, was speaking, saying the first thing that came into her head.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll find it very dull here, after London, Mrs. Barwell. There are so few people … and so little to do.’

  Alison’s eyebrows lifted at that. ‘On the contrary, Mrs. Ryder. I don’t imagine that I shall find it dull. My husband intends to farm, and I know I’ll be most interested in that.’

  Sara paused at her work, laying it aside. She glanced at Alison; against her will she was moved to a kind of pity over what she had heard. In all her life, this gentle creature had probably never done anything more arduous than make herself pretty for a party; she had come straight from a world of ease and gaiety, and she was as ignorant as a child of what lay ahead of her. Could she possibly have any notion, Sara wondere
d, what sort the country beyond Sydney was, what it was like to handle sullen, reluctant convict women, or see the envy and hatred in a man’s eyes, as he raised them from the garden-patch where he was digging? Did she know that the natives sometimes murdered and robbed, and the floods carried away the crops, and fires swept through the dry bush, which was in itself a sly enemy? She talked of farming as if this were Kent or Sussex, and Rye were close by, comforting and familiar. She faced her new life with the confident, innocent air of one who had only a four-day knowledge of the colony’s hardships. Her talk had implied that she hoped desperately that farming would not bore her; clearly, she had never thought of it as being dangerous.

  Sara said tentatively ‒ not to Alison as Richard’s wife, but to a woman who was wholly ignorant of the difficulties she faced, ‘I sincerely hope that when you are ready to begin farming you will allow me to help you a little. Andrew and I have farmed all the time since we were married. We were the first settlers in the Hawkesbury ‒ and I think I know as well as most men in this colony what is likely to be needed.’

  Alison’s expression changed, hardening a little; she opened her mouth to reply, and then broke off, looking towards the door, which Andrew threw open noisily. She half-rose at the sight of her husband.

  Instantly Sara knew that something more than social pleasantries had detained the men over their port. On Andrew’s face she recognized an expression he wore whenever something happened to put him in a high good humour. James Ryder was grave and non-committal. As for Richard … Sara couldn’t read Richard’s face at all. He was flushed; his eyes were bright, and moved nervously round the room. He looked like a man who has attempted something of which he is a little afraid.

  The little French clock chimed off five more quarter-hours, and still the Maclays’ guests stayed on. Sara had the impression that Alison would gladly have left, but she waited patiently on her husband’s whim. A coldish sea-fog pressed against the windows, but the fire was banked high, and the curtains of gold silk made a false sunshine within the room.

  Richard and Alison went to the piano together, and, to her accompaniment, he sang some of the light, sentimental ballads which were going the rounds of the London drawing-rooms. He seemed to have shed his air of disquiet; he was elegant now, and casual. He had a charming, light baritone, which he had obviously used many times to considerable effect. Watching him, listening to him, Sara could well imagine how he had suited the extravagant, spirited personality which gossip ascribed to Lady Linton. He would have blended with the London of Lady Linton perfectly ‒ Richard, with his jagged scar, worn like a medal for courage; his reputation as an expert with a rapier, and a matchless horseman; his ability to charm a woman ‒ any woman ‒ when it pleased him. This was the kind of man London hostesses always drew about them.

  She recovered her sense of humour enough to smile wryly over the picture he made against the gold curtains, and to reflect that gifts of Richard’s order would be sadly wasted in such a place as this.

  In the last hour since the return of the men to the drawing-room, Sara had calmed herself considerably. She was better able now to sum up the situation, and she was pretty certain, by this time, what sort of relationship existed between Alison and Richard. At her husband’s entrance, a mood of gaiety had come upon Alison. She was never still, stirring, twisting, and laughing in an endeavour to hold his attention. She was so easily satisfied ‒ a smile, a nod from Richard was all she required. It angered Sara to see how absently, how nonchalantly he bestowed these light caresses upon his wife, as if she were a child whose desires were never complex or difficult to gratify.

  Sara recalled the face of that young girl who had visited Bramfield so eagerly all those years ago ‒ the same pale, determined face now laughingly turned to Richard’s, as he came to the end of a rather risqué song. Alison had loved him then with a child’s unsubtle passion, and her father had bought him for her, with the lure of a world of which he dreamed. She still clutched her prize as certainly as if it had been in her hands no more than an hour.

  But when Richard’s gaze left his wife, her face dropped back into lines that Sara was beginning to note were habitual. The kingfisher satin became only the bright plumage of a nervous, fluttering bird. Alison is ill, Sara thought ‒ and weary! Her talk of interesting herself in farming was merely to cover her bewilderment over this new life to which Richard had brought her. She didn’t dare to stop talking or laughing, in case it gave him a chance to notice that her fine, baby skin was beginning to stretch tightly over her face, that there were lines about her mouth. Sara was appalled by the thought that suddenly struck her. Alison was afraid! She was afraid that Richard might tire of her!

  She watched as Alison ran a finger swiftly along the keyboard, and she said, laughingly, ‘Now, Richard ‒ my song!’

  He glanced at her, an absent, indulgent gaze that did not even see her. ‘Certainly, my love.’

  He turned and looked directly at Sara as he waited for Alison’s introduction.

  ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes …’

  Sara felt herself tense, and then grew cold. Only Richard could do this, she thought, angrily. Only he could sing for another woman a song that belonged to his wife ‒ sing it, and not care what he was doing.

  It seemed that every eye in the room must have followed his. Her cheeks burned with shame and rage, and the guilt of her unwilling love.

  Sara laid down her hairbrush and listened to the last words between her husband and James Ryder on the landing.

  Andrew came noisily into the candle-lit bedroom; his hair was awry, and there hung about him an air of triumph and elation which he so often had at the end of a successful business deal.

  He came directly to her, making a place on the littered dressing-table for the candlestick he carried. And then he stooped to kiss her forehead. She sensed his excitement in the roughness of his hands against her shoulders.

  He laughed down at her. ‘A successful evening, my darling.’

  She avoided his eyes. ‘A successful evening …? I … Do you truly believe it was successful?’

  ‘Well, they came, didn’t they? No last-minute, lady-like indisposition from Alison ‒ which is what I honestly expected. And the dinner was not to be sneered at. They won’t get food to better it at any other table in the colony. And the wines … Not many people in London itself could offer them wines as good as they drank here tonight.’

  He gestured flamboyantly. ‘But even had the food been foul, and the wine undrinkable, I think it would hardly have mattered.’

  Looking up at him, she said slowly, ‘Andrew … what do you mean?’

  He smiled. His smile was too rakish and too mischievous for Sara’s peace.

  ‘We’ve routed them, Sara! Or better, we’ve captured them! Richard Barwell has committed himself into my hands just about as neatly as he could possibly have done. I’m lending him enough money to buy the Hydes’s farm that’s up for sale, and to build a house here in Sydney.’

  She sprang to her feet.

  ‘You’re what!’

  She waved away his attempt to answer, pacing to the foot of the bed, and back again. For a few seconds the only sound in the room was the swish of her loose robe, and the soft crackle of the fire.

  Then she turned to face him. Her voice was low, with the tight control of anger.

  ‘Have you gone suddenly mad, Andrew? Lend him money! My God! Why do you think they were forced to come out here? I’ll tell you why ‒ because the pair of them have never been able to save a penny piece in their lives! Lady Linton is tired of keeping them on velvet cushions. They’ve been living fabulously. What do you think that gown Alison wore cost? And did Richard look as if he were turned out with an eye to economy?’ She flung her hands wide, in a gesture of contempt. ‘I tell you lending money to them is simply throwing it away!’

  She began to pace again. ‘What sort of farmer will Richard make, do you suppose?’ Her back was towards him, and her long hair hung about
her shoulders. ‘Hopeless! He may be a pretty horseman, and a brave soldier, but I’ll wager my soul he doesn’t know a hoe from a spade!’

  ‘There’ll be an overseer to manage the farm.’

  ‘An overseer!’ Sara swung round fiercely. ‘Good God! And will that fashionable pair disport themselves in Sydney on the money a farm is presumed to bring in? Do they know what it’s like to begin farming? Do they know how we started at Kintyre? Well … you may bid goodbye to your money. Once it’s in Richard’s free and generous hand, that’s the last you’ll see of it!’

  There was a silence after her outburst. Then Andrew said, ‘Come here, Sara!’

  She was unwilling, but she came because he spoke quietly and purposefully. He looked down into her flushed and angry face; he saw the tight arrogance of her mouth, and her heaving breasts under her nightgown.

  ‘Listen to me, my Sara,’ he said.

  She raised her eyes, and he thought, for a moment, there was the trembling brightness of tears in them.

  ‘Have you thought what the money we lend to Richard Barwell will bring back to us?’

  ‘I know well enough what it will bring,’ she retorted. ‘When Richard finally realizes that he can’t make a farm pay, you’ll discover you’ve thrown away good money for an unimproved piece of land. And don’t imagine for one second that once the Sydney house is built you’ll ever get them out of it. People of their sort can sleep happily in their beds with a howling multitude of creditors outside their windows. Shame won’t drive them out ‒ and they won’t leave until they have somewhere better to go. I know their sort uncommonly well ‒ do you forget that my father escaped the debtors’ prison by only a few hours?’