Sara Dane

by Catherine Gaskin

  He caught at her wrist and held it, forcing her to halt her attention to the cut, and look at him directly.

  ‘Richard Barwell is mad where you’re concerned, Sara. He’s mad with love and rage and frustration. He’s jealous of Andrew ‒ not only because of Andrew’s possession of you, but of his position in the colony, and what he can do. Barwell may have been all that London desired in the way of an amusing drawing-room attraction, a horseman, and a swordsman. But here, beside Andrew, he doesn’t cut such a fine figure. Envy can drive a man to many things ‒ to drink, for one thing. And to spending far more money than he can afford.’

  Suddenly his grip tightened almost brutally on her wrist.

  ‘For how much longer is Andrew going to give this fool money to throw away? Surely, after six months, he can see that Hyde Farm isn’t going to pay ‒ at least not while it’s run by Richard Barwell.’

  She broke her wrist free of his hold. ‘Andrew will go on lending Richard money just as long as Richard continues to be useful to him ‒ which, it seems to me, will be as long as he remains in the colony.’ She was speaking harshly again, and the bright colour had come into her cheeks. ‘Of the two, Andrew is by far the cleverer. He’ll profit from Richard and his wife, even if he never gets back a penny-piece of the money.’

  ‘Profit? What sort of profit?’

  ‘You’re not blind, Jeremy!’ she said tartly. ‘You can see all of this ‒ you know it, without me telling you. You don’t have to ask why Andrew throws his money down a bottomless well. He does it because of me ‒ and don’t pretend you don’t know, because I wouldn’t believe you.’

  ‘All right, I won’t pretend ‒ I do know it. But I didn’t think even Andrew would continue …’

  She cut him short, impatiently. ‘Andrew is more ambitious, more tenacious ‒ more ruthless, in a way ‒ than any other man I’ve ever known. He’ll have what he wants, and the cost be damned! In this case, all he asks is Alison Barwell’s friendship for me ‒ and he pays for it.’

  Her face twitched as she spoke, and then it softened. She looked at him fixedly, and raised her hand to the cut on his mouth. But this time she didn’t touch it with the handkerchief. Gently, with the tip of her finger, she traced the thin line running out towards his jaw.

  ‘I will never forgive him for this,’ she said. ‘He is more dangerous than I thought. He loses control of himself, and then he’s like a child in a rage ‒ a weak, vicious, brutish child. In these last months he’s dangled me on a string ‒ but I swear to you now, Jeremy, that he’ll dangle me no longer. For the future, I’ll use him as Andrew has done. I’ll use him for what he’s worth to me, and beyond that I don’t care a rap what becomes of him.’

  She shrugged her shoulders faintly. ‘So don’t mock my cold heart again, Jeremy. Be glad of it, because it will need to be wrapped in ice to resist the memory of what Richard once meant to me.’

  She turned aside and said no more. She put her foot in the stirrup, and then Jeremy lifted her into the saddle. He held the bridle while she settled herself, and held it long, because some new expression in her eyes seemed to root him there helplessly.

  ‘Come nearer, Jeremy,’ she said.

  He stepped in closer to the horse, without thinking what she meant to do. Clinging to the pommel, she leaned down suddenly, and kissed him on the cheek.

  As if she had struck him, he sprang back.

  ‘Damn you! Don’t do that!’

  She flushed scarlet at his tone. ‘I didn’t think you’d object quite so strongly,’ she said stiffly.

  His eyes were dark and angry, staring up at her. ‘You know right well that I don’t want kisses like that, not from you, Sara. Don’t think you can settle debts by giving me a sisterly peck on the cheek. I’ll have from you the sort of kisses I want ‒ or none at all!’

  Then he went and untied his horse, mounting without a word.

  This time it was Jeremy who led the way back to the road; Sara followed closely behind.

  There was silence between them for more than a mile. The heat increased; the road was shadeless, and the sun beat down on their backs. The flies followed them, buzzing about their faces, and settling on their horses’ flanks. They met no one; they did not speak to each other, nor did they even turn their heads as they passed the fork leading to Hyde Farm. For all the signs either betrayed, the incident with Richard might never have taken place. The hot, noon hush of the bush was complete.

  Then they finally came to the last bend in the road, the spot from which Sara had had her first sight of Kintyre. The same memory returned to them both, like a sudden renewal of that distant day ‒ the day they had discovered their jealousy over Andrew, the day they had found each other’s strength, and had been determined to master it. Without a word they checked their horses.

  Each could remember, with no trace of sentimental wistfulness, what Kintyre had been then. They remembered the scarred hill, where the trees had been torn out to make way for the house in its crude whiteness, its bare, blank face turned to the river and the mountains. In both their eyes, the vines were, for the moment, stripped from the walls, and the orchard was a few, slender young trees. It was again raw and new, like every other mark the white man had set upon this unused land.

  The situation of the house upon the hill was still a challenge, a landmark thrown up boldly to meet the gaze of everyone who used the road. But both Sara and Jeremy admitted to themselves that they couldn’t for long hold their first vision of it. It was gently mellowed now, and the years had brought the trees back on to the hill, and soft, English grass grew in the spaces in the orchard. It was the old Kintyre still, but changed. It no longer represented Andrew’s struggle to hold his own against the bush and the natives, even against the climate, and the threat of the floods. This was permanent, secure ‒ the most loved of all his possessions, because it had been the hardest to win.

  Sara took her eyes away from the house and looked at Jeremy. It did not occur to her to enquire his thoughts. She was certain that they were on Kintyre, on the part he himself had played in making it.

  ‘It isn’t any use thinking we can quarrel in this way, Jeremy,’ she said at last. ‘We all of us ‒ you, Andrew, and myself ‒ need one another too badly.’

  He nodded, accepting her statement as natural ‒ in the same way he accepted the frustration of having loved both of them through the years that had gone into the creation of Kintyre, and every other part of Andrew’s scattered possessions.

  ‘Yes,’ was all he answered, but his meaning was well enough understood by them both.

  With a slight nudge of his heels he urged his horse forward. He and Sara started up the hill together.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter One

  During the next two years Louis de Bourget startled the colony by doing what he had said he intended to do ‒ he travelled on foot as far as exploration of the Nepean River had gone, selecting his land with more care for the site on which the house would stand than for the quality of the soil, and then announced his decision to settle permanently and farm in New South Wales. Comment, as he had expected, was at first sceptical, then mildly annoyed when it became clear that he would spare no expense to run his farm successfully. Where good livestock was to be bought, he was able to bid a higher price than anyone else; two of the best and most experienced overseers were enticed away from their employers to come to him.

  But it was the plans for the house itself that roused most interest. He had travelled in America, and was taken by the mansions the cotton-planters of the Southern states were building for themselves; he decided that his own new house should follow them in pattern. But he had a French love of an ordered garden, and so the gentle slope on which the house stood was to be cut and terraced. There were many raised eyebrows when the news of this went around. So far, no one else in the colony had either labour or money to spare on such a thing. Andrew Maclay had had a like scheme for Glenbarr, but the job was never wholly completed because materials were
short and too expensive.

  Louis paid little heed to the raised eyebrows; he went on with no more than a shrug to indicate that he had heard what gossip had to say of him. Every ship arriving in Sydney Cove carried goods bought for him by his agent in England ‒ books, marble fireplaces, silk to curtain the long windows, Louis Quinze chairs ‒ the stream of his possessions that travelled the road to the Nepean seemed endless. He tried planting foreign trees, and saw most of them die; he built an aviary and filled it with exotic native birds, and birds from the Indian jungles and the East Indies. He even toyed, for a short time, with the idea of an ornamental lake ‒ but he realized that seasonal drought would defeat him; also his sense of fitness told him that the great river running at his doorstep, and the unsymmetrical blue mountains behind it, were too strong and individual to mate happily with a stretch of smooth water. So he dropped the idea ‒ not without a lingering regret for the future consternation such a plan would have caused among his neighbours.

  The house was finished in the spring of 1803. At the time it was completed there were very few people who had yet seen it; the Nepean farms were remote, and the state of the roads didn’t invite travel. So the house remained something of a legend while it was being built. By this time, Louis had many friends among the leading families, and each of them knew that, in due course, they would visit at his invitation. But it was Andrew Maclay, with his wife and family, whose carriage was the first to begin the ascent from the road by the river to Louis’s front steps.

  II

  From the bottom of the hill Sara, at the carriage window, had leaned forward to see the house. It stood boldly on the rise, its white walls glistening in the sunlight. The sight of it took her breath for an instant. This was not the cotton-planter’s house Louis had talked of; this had the look of what Andrew had once rashly promised to build for her at Kintyre. It was fronted by a portico of ten white columns, severe and unornamented; the building itself was wide and low, and the crest of the hill behind it was visible, crowned with a ridge of eucalyptus. At one end of the portico, a short flight of steps led down to the level of the drive. Beyond the drive was the first of three unfinished terraces, cut into the hillside.

  Sara was silent, not even listening to Andrew’s comments, or to what the children’s excited chattering was all about. As the carriage came to a halt, Louis ran down the steps and flung the door open. He welcomed them to his home, and then, smiling, he handed her out. He turned to lift Sebastian, still too young to negotiate the high step.

  In the midst of the bustle, with two servants strenuously carrying out Louis’s orders about unstrapping the boxes, the high babble of the children, and remarks passing between Andrew and his host, Sara found nothing to say. Taking Sebastian’s hand, she mounted the stone steps very slowly.

  When at last she reached the level of the broad portico, she stood still. The Nepean plains, the river and the mountains, wrapped in their blue haze, were spread before her in one huge sweep. In front of the house, and at its sides, the timber had been cleared, so that the view was uninterrupted. Down on the fringe of the river, stretching away from the opposite bank, the gums had turned the reddish tinge of spring, and through the valley an occasional wild, flowering tree, scarlet, yellow, white, thrust itself into prominence. Sara held Sebastian’s hand tightly, feeling that, until this moment, she had not known the true beauty of this harsh, familiar landscape.

  Louis mounted the steps behind her. She did not turn, but she sensed him standing there behind her, his gaze following hers. For a few moments longer she looked at the scene, while the boxes were being carried past her, and Andrew talked quietly with Edwards, below.

  At last she said, in a low voice, ‘This is genius, Louis! You have done what no one else would dare to do.’

  He came to her side then. ‘Why shouldn’t one do what this place pleads for? Here is sun, and space, and a view! Why build a house with narrow windows and shut it all out? The skies are not soft enough, nor the hills gentle enough to allow me to build something like the sort of house that belongs in an ordered park. The country here is a challenge ‒ I have done my best to meet it.’

  ‘You have succeeded ‒ admirably,’ she said gently.

  As she spoke she was thinking how strange to have to acknowledge that it needed a Frenchman, a stranger among an English colony, to show them how to blend a house to this uncompromising background. It lay back against the hill, rested against it almost, with the ten white columns, of classic simplicity, its only adornment. It faced its outlook superbly, its lines solid and dignified.

  ‘I have called it Banon,’ Louis said.

  She looked at him. ‘Banon?’

  He nodded. ‘Banon is the name of a town in the south of France. I went there once on business for the Marquis. I stayed in an inn outside the town, in the season when the mimosa bloomed. All the time I have been building this house, I have been able to call it by no other name.’

  Sara smiled, her eyes bright. ‘Your house is the loveliest I have ever seen.’

  He bowed slightly. ‘If you approve it, then I am more than rewarded.’

  His words were formal enough, and yet she realized his very deep satisfaction. His thin, sunburnt face was darker now than ever, but some of the strain was gone from it. He was smiling a little, his eyes crinkled against the sun. She glanced down swiftly, and saw that he no longer wore the massive rings, and by the state of his hands she judged that, perhaps, he himself had taken a spade when the terraces were being dug away. She was surprised; the suave Frenchman who had arrived in the colony three years ago could hardly be imagined with a spade in his hand.

  His gaze returned to her, and he said quickly, ‘Forgive me, Sara! I keep you standing here in the sun, when you must be fatigued from your journey.’

  He reached down and took Sebastian’s other hand, leading them both towards the door, where a woman in the plain dress of a housekeeper stood waiting for them.

  III

  A cold wind sprang up that evening, blowing towards Banon from the mountains; but in Louis’s white drawing-room they could only hear its sounds in the trees at the top of the ridge. The leaping flames in the fireplace stained the marble mantel to a pale rose, and threw irregular lights across the deep red curtains. A single pair of candles burned on a table at the other end of the room; they were reflected in a high, silver-framed mirror. Sara, Andrew, and Louis sat in low chairs, turned towards the fire; their faces, flushed in its glow, were sometimes bright, then momentarily darkened by shadow, as the changing light played upon them. Occasionally Louis stirred to pile on a fresh log, and when the flames caught it, and burned high, Sara’s hair and her silk gown took on a reddish tinge.

  For a time now, Sara had ceased to have any part in the conversation. She sat with her hands lying idle in her lap, her eyelids fluttering as she fought her drowsiness; the wind outside, and the crackle of the flames, were muted, matching the indefinite undertones of Andrew and Louis. She looked towards their host. This evening he had shed the sober clothes he wore on their arrival; now he was arrayed as splendidly as ever Sydney had seen him, in stiff brocade waistcoat, and the finest lace. The rings were back on his fingers, the jewels winking in the firelight as he twisted the stem of his madeira glass. He rested in his chair lazily, his feet, in silver-buckled shoes, were propped on a softly padded stool. Now and then, in his talk, he turned with a gesture towards Andrew ‒ but mostly he gazed thoughtfully into the fire.

  It was almost three years, Sara remembered, still looking at him, since he had perched on the veranda-rail at Kintyre and told her of what this house should be. That three years had been favourable to the colony, and kind to Louis. It was still governed by King, with whom Louis stood in particular regard, though it was generally felt that King’s day would soon be over. A great deal of the time he was ill with gout, and, while he ruled well enough, his rule was not enforced severely enough to satisfy the needs of the Colonial Office. The power of the military was still unsubdued,
and no amount of orders from Government House could wrest their privileges from them.

  But King, even if ill, was not idle. He had a passion to regularize the affairs of the colony ‒ to bring it into line as a typical English community. The idea of the girls’ orphanage had matured, and the large house now confined its herd of unwilling young women. The Sydney Gazette ‒ the colony’s first newspaper ‒ made its appearance under government sponsorship; exploration, with King’s encouragement, continued steadily. The mountain barrier had still not been crossed, and the riddle of what lay on the other side was as yet an open question. But the secrets of the continent itself had slowly and painfully yielded to young Matthew Flinders’s patient seeking. Under orders from the Admiralty, Flinders had commanded the sloop, Investigator, on a voyage to chart the coasts. He worked his way with infinite care from west to east, then south to north, from Cape Leeuwin to the Wessel Islands, proving, beyond doubt, that New Holland and New South Wales were the one vast island. He had plotted and charted the vague shape which the old Dutch maps called simply ‘Terra Australis’, and was now on his way back to England with his beautifully-drawn charts, his painstaking logs. He went, cherishing the hope that the omnipotent Admiralty and the Royal Society might adopt his suggestion that the island, in future, should be known by the name he had always given it in secret ‒ Australia.

  Governor King at last knew the extent of the domain over which he ruled; but the vastness of the hinterland troubled him not at all in comparison with the settled areas close at hand. The farmers were steadily pushing outwards; hemmed in by the mountains, they began moving south ‒ farther, in fact, than King wished. It would now have needed an army of Government officials to keep land and farmers continually under inspection ‒ and an army was precisely what King could not command.