He and Jeremy were both together at Priest’s, living in the comfortless, leaking shack, alone except for the one sickly ex-convict labourer who was the sole remnant of the labour-force of a dozen men once needed to run the property. The stacks of rum-kegs piled in the yard at the back were sufficient testimony of the reason why the farm had failed. But the place had promise. After a few weeks of combined hard work, Jeremy was to stay on, while Andrew returned to Sydney. It was Jeremy who would guide Priest’s through the difficult years of re-birth, while Andrew’s impatient nature sought a dozen different occupations.
All of this Andrew had written in two hasty letters to Sara. She pictured the farm as he described it ‒ even its hideous decay softened and beautified by the burst of spring wild flowers, and the single, exquisite white gum-tree, bending towards the creek. She had thrown the second letter aside, and, on an impulse, had packed a box with a few of her oldest clothes, and ordered the carriage to be stocked with extra food and cooking utensils. She left the store in the charge of young Clapmore, Glenbarr to Bennett, and the children to Annie.
She promised herself in this visit to Priest’s, a complete return to the early days on the Hawkesbury. There would be just herself, Andrew and Jeremy working and discussing together the problems of over-worked land, diseased, neglected stock, the shortage of labour. She would cook for them and for two weeks share the unbroken companionship of the two men who had built her world. She knew she was attempting a flight into the past, and she recognized the possibility that it might be a dismal failure. But, along with Andrew’s letters, she had also experienced that odd restlessness and dissatisfaction that comes with the spring; this flight was a brief indulgence of that mood. It was an acknowledgement of her vague desires for a return to the simplicity of those first years, a simplicity which, at most times, she was sensible enough to recognize as having gone for ever. The success of this impulse depended upon Andrew and Jeremy. If they accepted her presence at Priest’s as naturally as she had come, then she would know that the spirit of adventure and comradeship had survived Andrew’s growing wealth ‒ and she would be satisfied and happy.
At Glenbarr, David and Duncan were still engaged in a struggle, now a month old, to win supremacy over their new tutor, a huge, untidy young Irishman of great learning and shy charm, whom Sara had engaged by letter eighteen months ago; Sebastian, in the nursery, was beginning to haul himself up to stand totteringly on his lanky, strong legs. Under Bennett, Glenbarr ran itself, and, short of the unexpected arrival of a ship with fresh cargo, there was nothing at the store to need her attention for the next two weeks.
Her carriage suddenly jolted into a rut, and she braced herself against the back of the seat; the dispirited, whitewashed buildings came closer. By the side of the nearest house a solitary mimosa tree had burst into bloom ‒ outrageously yellow against the harsh blue sky.
Sara shook the dust absently from her skirt, and straightened her bonnet, acknowledging, in the privacy of her own thoughts, that she had done perhaps the wisest thing by not remaining too long in Sydney while Andrew was staying at Priest’s. Richard was due to return after a two-week period of duty at Parramatta, and she recalled past occasions when Andrew’s absence seemed to give him licence, which he didn’t hesitate to accept, to visit Glenbarr whenever he chose. Sara sighed, and ran her hand across her eyes. From the doorway of the cottage, in whose withered, brown garden the mimosa flowered, a woman paused to watch the carriage. At her skirts, a small child waved shyly. Sara leaned forward smiling. As she waved back to the little girl, she knew suddenly that she was impatient with the problem of Richard. She wanted to be with Andrew and Jeremy again, in an atmosphere where the greatest problem would be coping with an evil-tempered stove, or deciding how many head of stock the neglected pastures at Priest’s would carry in the first year.
They were now among the haphazard buildings which formed the Castle Hill settlement. The heavy spring rains had turned the road between the thatched and whitewashed houses into mud, and the constant passage of horses and carts had cut it into deep ruts. The ruts had dried in the past week of hot sunshine, and there was already a film of dry dust over everything. A flock of geese crossed serenely in front of the carriage, moving on in the direction of the shallow stream at the side of the road. Three men, and two soldiers off-duty, lounged around the door of Nell Finnigan’s cottage. Nell was a large, handsome woman, an ex-convict who ran her husband’s house as a kind of inn ‒ though it was widely known that she made her obvious profits from the sale of rum. Glancing at the shining neatness of the cottage as she passed, Sara idly wondered which of the gentlemen, living off the fat of the land in Sydney, was responsible for her supply.
The carriage jolted to a halt before the blacksmith’s forge. Sara immediately thrust her head out of the window, waiting for Edwards, Andrew’s ugly, grizzled coachman, to climb down.
‘Why are we stopping?’ she said to him.
He pushed his hat back inelegantly. ‘Lor’, ma’am! I thought you’d ’a spotted it miles back. Goldie, ’ere, ’as gone lame on me. I reckon the master’ll not be too pleased if I take her farther than I have to while she’s like this. Carson, the smith, ’ere, can probably let us have another horse, and we could leave Goldie ’ere.’
She nodded. ‘Ask him ‒ but be as quick as you can.’
‘Yes’m.’ He touched his hat, and started, with his bow-legged gait, towards the forge. He vanished into the dark interior, and then reappeared with a small grey-haired man, wearing a leather apron. For a few minutes they talked together; Carson finally called over his shoulder to a young man who came out of the forge and followed him round to the side of it. They headed towards a rough stable at the back.
Edwards approached Sara with a grin lighting up his cracked face. ‘’Tis all settled, ma’am. Carson has another that’ll take Goldie’s place. We’ll be harnessed up and away in no time.’
He cleared his throat a little, looking at her with concern. She had noticed in the past that, whenever he drove her alone, he always displayed a solemn interest in her comfort, which he was wont to express with unpolished bluntness. ‘Now, ma’am,’ he said clearly. ‘I was wonderin’ if maybe this sun might be too fierce on you ‒ with you just sitting here waiting. Carson sends his respects, and says you’re welcome to sit awhile in the forge ‒ if you’ll not think it too dirty.’
Sara had already made up her mind not to stay in the stuffy carriage during the change-over. She stepped down on to the road, looking up and down the row of cottages. ‘If I go across to Nell Finnigan’s, perhaps she’ll give me some cold water. I’m thirsty.’
His face wrinkled in dismay. ‘Oh, ma’am! Nell Finnigan’s …’ His tone left her no doubt as to what he thought of Mistress Finnigan.
She turned, picking up her skirts to cross the dusty road.
‘Go and help Carson,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll hardly come to harm with Mrs. Finnigan in the space of ten minutes.’
She heard him muttering doubtfully as she made her way towards the flower-bordered cottage near the end of the row. Outside the soldiers’ guard-house a dog rose up from his sprawling position close to the steps, and came over hopefully to her; a soldier, tacking a notice to the board on the veranda post, eyed her up and down, grinning impudently. The sun seemed to grow hotter as she walked, and the scraggy settlement looked as if not even the spring could shake it from its apathy. When she reached Nell Finnigan’s, the small crowd who had stood drinking ale outside her open door had drifted, glasses still in hand, down the lane running between the cottage and the guard-house. She watched them a moment. They were joined by perhaps a half-dozen others, and on the outskirts of the group three or four children shuffled their bare feet in the dust.
Sara was filled with curiosity. But she had only to take a few steps down the lane before she knew the reason for the crowd. The yard at the back of the guard-house was in full view now, and the people too sparse to screen what was happening there.
> She came upon it suddenly; there were no cries to warn her. The man who hung at the post was unconscious, and the only sound was the whirr of the cat, as it swung backwards and around in the hand of the flogger, and then the crack as it hit the naked flesh. After each stroke a soldier standing near the post recorded it in a sing-song voice.
‘Forty-seven …’
Another whirr, and the crack.
‘Forty-eight …’
She had seen it before ‒ too often. It was stamped in her memory from the days of the Georgette, and even before that. It was part of the discipline that ruled the colony ‒ as common a thing as, in England, the gibbet, and the swinging corpse at the crossroads. This was always a public spectacle ‒ as the magistrates wanted it, because its grim warning struck home at even the hardened sensibilities of the ex-convict watchers.
The bright, flowing blood glistened in the sunlight. The ragged trousers hanging on the hips of the man at the post had absorbed all they could hold. It trickled down his calves, and lay in the dust about his feet. The sounds ceased abruptly, and a second man stepped up to the flogger and took the cat from his hand, shaking the knotted thongs, twisting it in his hands to get the proper balance.
Then he swung his arm backwards, and then again came the whirr and the sickening crack.
‘Fifty-one …’
Sara clapped her hands over her ears, turned, and fled back towards Nell Finnigan’s door. In the dim, cool passage she saw no one. She leaned against the wall for a moment, pressing her hand against her mouth, and breathing heavily. At last she straightened, groping her way clumsily in the half-dark. She tripped on the hem of her gown, and stumbled up against a door. Her outstretched hand touched the latch, and it opened with her weight. The door swung back with a crash; she clutched wildly at the frame to save herself falling.
She had a confused impression that a man, seated at a bench beside the window, sprang to his feet. Both her arms were gripped steadily, and a pair of dark, shrewd eyes were fixed on her face.
‘Are you ill?’
Confused, now, Sara shook her head. ‘No …’
She felt herself being led firmly to the seat the man had just left. It was almost impossible for her to believe, as she looked at the sunlight pouring through Nell Finnigan’s fresh muslin curtains, that an unconscious man hung at a flogging-post not more than a few yards away. She rested her elbows on the scrubbed boards of the table in front of her, and put her face into her hands. The sun was fully on her back, but she could not hold back the fit of shivering which gripped her.
Gently the stranger’s hand came to her shoulder, giving her a little shake,
‘Drink some of this,’ he said. ‘It is wine, bad enough to take the lining off your throat ‒ but it is better than nothing.’
He held a glass close to her lips. She had not yet looked at him fully ‒ just his eyes, in that first instant, and now, the thin, brown fingers curling about the glass. She hesitantly stretched out her own hand to take it, but he wouldn’t yield it to her completely. She was forced to drink with her fingers touching his around the base of the glass.
The wine was raw and harsh, and made her cough a little. But the relentless hand held it to her mouth until it was gone. Then a fine linen handkerchief dabbed at her moistened lips. She crushed the handkerchief into a ball in her hand, and leaned back against the window-sill.
‘Are you feeling better now?’
For the first time she looked at him fully. He was lean, and very tall, with unconscious grace in his stance. The shrewd, questioning eyes fixed on her were almost black; his unpowdered hair was black also. She wondered if she considered him handsome, and studied the narrow, well-formed face, dark olive skin stretched above high cheekbones. Brows cut thick and savagely across his forehead. His mouth was too thin, a trifle cruel, she decided ‒ in a sense, it didn’t match his eyes, which regarded her now with obvious concern.
He repeated his question quietly. ‘Are you feeling better?’
She nodded. ‘Thank you ‒ much better.’ She hesitated. ‘I think perhaps the sun …’
‘Or the flogging?’ he suggested.
‘You saw it also?’
‘That was hardly to be avoided.’ He lifted his shoulders expressively. ‘I offer my sympathies, madam. It was not a sight for a lady.’
As he spoke, Sara’s mind was busily storing the details of his speech and dress, and puzzling over his identity. The colony was still much too small to allow a stranger, and especially one who looked as this one did, to arrive without causing a great flutter of comment and speculation. Her eyes swiftly flicked over him, taking in the cut of his coat, the fit of his long boots, and the perfection of the emerald he wore on the little finger of the left hand. His English was perfect, but he spoke it with the slightest of accents. He was dressed, and he behaved, as any prosperous man in the colony might, and still in each detail he was somehow a little more than life-size. He brought a touch of the exotic, a breath of the civilized and cultivated world into the scrubbed room. Even the way he spoke of the flogging carried a trace of worldly cynicism with it. But he was not indifferent to the flogging, she felt ‒ he merely suggested that such things were painfully necessary and unpleasant.
There her mind reached back to some vague, unconnected gossip she had heard between two clerks at the store the day before. This was undoubtedly the man of whom they had spoken ‒ a Frenchman, who had arrived in the American sloop which was riding at anchor in the harbour these past two days. Apparently he had made the voyage from Île de France, intending, no one knew why, to remain for a while in New South Wales. Even the idle conversation between Clapmore and the junior clerk had managed to convey the air of mystery which presumably surrounded this French stranger. Sara realized that he must have been able to convince the port officials that he was genuinely an émigré, and entertained no Bonaparte sympathies, otherwise, when the American sloop prepared to sail again, he would be firmly aboard her. According to Clapmore’s gossip, the Frenchman was taking his time about disembarking ‒ his boxes had not even come ashore yet. Later in the day she had heard the story over again from two different customers. And yet, here he was, these many miles beyond Sydney already, and it was hardly past noon. The Frenchman, she thought, obviously moved quickly, once he decided to move at all.
She saw that his straight, heavy brows were raised in a look of enquiry, and she realized that she had been staring at him like any clumsy country girl. It occurred to her that it was possible that he was bored by the obligation to affect concern over a dull, stupid woman.
He bowed slightly. ‘Madame, might I be permitted to offer you a little more wine? I grant you that it is abominable ‒ but they do assure me that it is the best they have.’
Sara flushed, feeling absurdly ill at ease under his steady scrutiny. Then she straightened, answering him with a trace of hauteur.
‘You are very kind, sir. I should be glad of it.’
‘It is indeed a great pleasure,’ he said quietly. ‘I will send for a bottle.’
He turned to the door, and then stopped and looked back at her. He came again to the table, facing her across its width. The concern was gone from his eyes. They held a friendly, faintly amused air.
‘Before we share a glass of wine,’ he said, ‘perhaps it is better if I introduce myself.’
He sketched another small, graceful bow.
‘Madame ‒ Louis de Bourget.’
He raised his head again, and when his eyes met hers they were bright and questioning; the corners of his mouth puckered.
‘I see by your expression, Madame, that you wish me still to give an account of myself. Is that not so?’ He smiled indulgently. ‘Perhaps it will satisfy you if I tell you that I disembarked this morning from the American ship, the Jane Henry ‒ I am now on my way to Mr. William Cooper’s house. He and I became acquainted during the few weeks our ships were in port together in Cape Town. And now I go to avail myself of his offer of hospitality. I assure yo
u …’
Laughingly, Sara waved him to silence.
‘Forgive me, Monsieur! I must appear very boorish … A complete stranger is such a rarity to us here! And I must warn you, you’ll have to expect a great deal of curiosity.’
Then she held out her hand.
‘You’re very welcome to the colony, Monsieur de Bourget! My name is Sara Maclay.’
A slow, warm smile broke on his face, and it lost its quizzical look. He took her hand firmly, bowing over it. Then, for the first of many times, he kissed it.
Nell Finnigan had a plump, shapely figure, and, as she stood in the doorway watching Louis de Bourget, she jerked her sprigged cotton gown into position in order to define it better. She had just seen him hand Sara Maclay into her carriage outside the door. Her curiosity was ablaze about this good-looking stranger ‒ and the reason why Mrs. Maclay had arrived unannounced in her back parlour. She tossed back her head, letting her black curls swing coquettishly under the dainty white cap she wore.
She leaned against the door-frame, and addressed de Bourget.
‘More wine, sir?’ She ignored the fact that the bottle was still two-thirds full.
He rested back against the sill, as Sara had done earlier, and looked at Nell carefully. He liked the cleanliness of her, the shining hair, the soft white skin that this murderous climate appeared not to have affected. With a touch of amusement, he noted the deliberately provocative stance she had adopted; she was more than skilled in displaying her quite considerable attractions. De Bourget had his own ideas about the type of woman he admired, and this one was too full-blown, too obvious in type to suit his taste. But the room was strangely empty now that the golden-haired Mrs. Maclay was gone, and he knew the woman standing before him would while away the next hour in effortless coquetry. Women who smiled in just that fashion, who thrust their bodies towards a man, as this one did, were never hard to entertain.
Sara Dane Page 28