His challenge excited her. Physically and mentally he drained her energy, and still stimulated her ‒ at times to an almost unbearable pitch ‒ able to make love to her, even across a room, by a mere change in his expression, or the tone of his voice. So completely did he absorb and fascinate her, that she began to fear she might lose the struggle to keep her own personality intact. He was capable of great passion and great tenderness; she sometimes wondered uneasily if her preoccupation with him might succeed in ousting her own ambitions for her sons. A battle of wits and strength developed between them; they played at it laughingly in the brittle, clever fashion that was Louis’s way, and yet they were deadly in earnest.
The periods they spent together at Banon were always too short. News would reach Sara of trouble at one of the farms, or at the store, and then she would fume impatiently until she could be on her way to attend to it. In swift succession the Thrush, Thistle and Hawk returned to Sydney, and on each occasion there was no possibility of dealing with the business of their cargoes from the remoteness of Banon. The procession of carriages and baggage started back to Glenbarr once again, and Louis’s expression was thunderous.
As usual, Captain Thorne came to see her at the house.
‘My compliments on your marriage, ma’am,’ he murmured, bowing over her hand. ‘Doubtless, marriage suits a woman well ‒ but I’m thinking that, if you’re to run your ships successfully, you’d best be wedded to your desk.’
His gruff old voice went on.
‘Monsieur de Bourget, I recall, was part-owner in your late husband’s day. He’ll assist you now, surely?’
Louis made no excuses for refusing to have any part in Sara’s business dealings.
‘I have no intention of turning myself into a slave,’ he replied shortly. ‘And it will be better for you, Sara, the sooner you realize that that is precisely what you are making of yourself.’
Their disagreements were fairly constant, but not serious, until Louis learned that she was going to have a child. He wanted to take her to Banon, and force her to remain there until the child would be born, the following May. This step she had foreseen, and dreaded; she begged him to remain at Glenbarr. They bitterly fought the question for two weeks, and then Louis finally gave in. She knew quite certainly he believed that, by continuing to refuse his help, she would reach a stage where there was no alternative but to part with some of Andrew’s property.
‘Sell it, Sara!’ he urged. ‘Sell it! There’s no woman alive who can manage all you attempt, and give proper attention to her children. You’ll kill yourself ‒ and break my heart.’
‘I can’t sell ‒ nothing belongs to me,’ was her only reply to this. ‘If I leave the farms and the store to look after themselves, they’ll go to pieces ‒ the ships’ masters will trade just according to their own inclinations. And then what has become of the value of my sons’ investments?’
‘Oh …!’ This turn of the conversation always made him furious. ‘You talk like a shopkeeper!’
‘That’s precisely what I am, of course!’ she retorted.
In the midst of the quarrelling, her thoughts constantly turned to Jeremy. If only Jeremy were at hand to entrust with all this business ‒ his knowledge of farming was second to none in the colony, his shrewd eye would run over the store accounts in a few hours. But Jeremy was gone completely now; he had bought a farm on the Hawkesbury, and reports came to her that the young, and rather pretty woman, who had been assigned to him as housekeeper, was very obviously living quite happily with him as his mistress. As long ago as the days of the first Thistle, Andrew had, as a gesture of gratitude to Jeremy, invested a small amount of money for him in the cargo; with every voyage the profit had enlarged, and by the time of Sara’s marriage to Louis, he had gained control of enough money to buy the mortgage of Theodore Woodward’s farm, four miles from Kintyre. He lived there now, with sixteen labourers, and the young convict woman, whom gossip reported variously from downright plain, to beautiful. Sara shrugged her shoulders at the news, and tried to remain unconcerned.
From Richard there was no sign or communication ‒ except the quarterly instalment paid off against his debt, which he now always handed over to Clapmore. Occasionally Sara met him with Alison in various Sydney drawing-rooms, and twice he attended a reception at Glenbarr. But his face was no more expressive than dull, pleasant William Cooper’s might have been, as he bent over her hand. If he appeared in the store to make a purchase, it was always at a time when it could be safely reckoned she would not be there. One day, as she set off with David to walk from the store back to Glenbarr, she saw him directly ahead among the crowd that thronged the dusty street. It was a terrible moment when she realized that he had deliberately turned down a side street to avoid her.
Elizabeth de Bourget could not be counted among the difficulties that clouded this first year of her marriage to Louis. The three boys plainly delighted in their little stepsister; she had the makings of a coquette, capricious, wayward and charming. For the first weeks she was shy, and rather bewildered by the demands made upon her by this new country, and by her stepmother and the stepbrothers, but her confidence increased as she came to realize the security of her position, and was petted and fussed over. She rode, as Louis prophesied, as if she had been born on a horse; she delighted in showing off, urging her pony to feats which even David did not attempt. She didn’t seem to hold any resentment against Sara; Louis himself was a person only a little less new in her experience, and she never appeared to connect either of them with her own mother. As the months went by she was not more diffident than her stepbrothers in claiming Sara’s attention and love. Sara herself often pondered the situation with vast relief and satisfaction.
At the end of February, 1806, the procession of carriages and baggage once again set out from Glenbarr, Sara had finally given in to Louis’s demands that she should rest until the birth of her child, in May. Banon, she had argued, was too far away, and, instead, suggested going to Priest’s. Louis countered this by pointing out that the farmhouse at Priest’s was too small to hold themselves, the four children, the tutor, and the servants; his unspoken objection to the place was that it was too close to the centre of Sara’s activities to give her the complete rest he knew she needed. In the end they compromised on Kintyre ‒ almost as remote as Banon, but connected by better roads with Parramatta. Louis listened to her arguments about getting a doctor and midwife quicker, if she needed them, and at last agreed.
The final concession she wrung from him was a digression on the journey to visit Priest’s and the Toongabbie farm. Her heart warmed at the sight of the two farms, thriving, prosperous, bearing the marks of Jeremy’s care. With a touch of excitement she pointed out to David and Duncan the increase in the merino flocks. At the last counting there were altogether more than twenty thousand sheep in the colony, and the triumph of Macarthur’s merino strain was beginning to turn the thoughts of the farmer to overseas markets.
‘They need the wool in England, David,’ Sara explained, as she stood with him, Duncan and Elizabeth, leaning together on the fencing of the field where the Priest’s merinos grazed. ‘England can never be quite certain of getting all the merino wool she needs from Spain. And the quality of the wool Spain sends isn’t always as good as what we produce here, even now.’
She shielded her eyes from the sun, and gazed across the paddocks, dried and brown by the length of the summer.
‘This climate and pasture seem to suit the merino. In a few years we’ll be producing a grade of wool that will fetch better prices in London than any of the Spanish stuff.’
Elizabeth had hauled herself up on to the first rail of the fence for a better view of these creatures, on whose backs money was literally growing. They seemed unnaturally large by comparison with the sheep she had seen grazing in the quiet pastures of the English shires.
‘But if the flocks keep on increasing like this, Mama,’ David said, putting his hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder to hold her mo
re firmly in her position, ‘where will we put them? I’ve heard Mr. Macarthur say there’ll not be enough land.’
Sara gave him a sideways glance ‒ he was twelve years old, and he was beginning to advance beyond a child’s acceptance of farming just as it appeared to the casual eye. She had seen him often with books on botany and agriculture; to Louis’s amusement he had started to ask what prices the wheat and wool had brought.
Sara said thoughtfully, ‘We need another man with Matthew Flinders’ spirit, Davie. We need someone to find a way over the mountains. There’s sheep country beyond them ‒ most people are certain of that. When we get over the mountains, there’ll be plenty of room.’
Chapter Four
As the dusk came down on the Hawkesbury, it lent a dark, sinister appearance to the swollen flood-waters, which, since the beginning of March, had swirled and lapped, inch by inch, to forty feet above the normal height of the river. At the dining-room window, Sara paused to look at the desolate waste before her, at the stretch of water where Kintyre’s lower fields had been, at the currents and eddies, which she judged must roughly mark the submerged trees lining the opposite bank.
The flood was seasonal, but this time it had not come with a spectacular wall of water, sweeping down after heavy rains in the mountains. Its approach had been gradual and relentless. For a whole month the farmers living in the valley had woken to the pounding of rain on the roofs, and day by day the Hawkesbury had crept higher. There had been a brief halt; the level fell a little, and then resumed its advance. Livestock were shifted, and houses abandoned; families moved into the farms of neighbours who inhabited higher ground. The water still rose. In some places the settlers tarried too long, and had to be taken out of their lofts and off their roofs by boat. The rescue work was confused and uncoordinated; there were reports of drownings. Sara had spoken to soaked, dispirited farmers, whose tales never varied ‒ livestock drowned or strayed, houses under water, haystacks swept away.
From Kintyre’s windows they could see, in the centre of the flood-water, a vicious current, which seemed to follow the original course of the river. In the last three days they had watched it tell its own tale of destruction. Sometimes a horse struggled frantically against it, trying to gain the bank; it carried the swollen carcases of cattle and sheep; haystacks rode it merrily, until dragged down into miniature whirlpools; the liberated furnishing of flooded houses sailed past ‒ rocking-chairs, pictures, oak tables. The rain was ceaseless, monotonous ‒ dreary grey skies greeted them each morning, and showed no signs of breaking. An odour of decay hung over the river; there were decomposing bodies of animals caught in the branches of the few trees that remained above water; snakes and enormous, ugly lizards were cast up, and taken on again as the level rose. The air was sour with the smell of mud and rotting crops.
Sara turned wearily from the window and went back to her task of sorting out the clothes which lay in bundles on the long table. Kintyre had not escaped the reach of the flood, although she knew, almost certainly, that the house itself was safe ‒ Andrew had built it well above the level of traces left by past floods. But the haystacks were gone and some cattle, not yet counted, were missing. The outhouses down at the bottom of the slope had disappeared five days ago. For consolation, she recalled the sheep, safely penned in tiny, improvised stockades in the muddy fields at the back of the house. It was not pasture land up there, and there was no grazing for them. The sheep, along with the penned-up cattle, had to be hand-fed. They stood desolately in the rain, complaining loudly to the unrelenting sky. The horses in the stables were restless for want of exercise.
She finished roughly sorting the clothes into their appropriate groups. All through the colony there would be an appeal for clothes and blankets for the families forced to abandon their homes to the flood. Kintyre had already taken in its own share of the refugees; when the river had risen so sharply three days ago, four farmers, who were settled on low-lying ground bordering the Maclay property, brought their wives and families for shelter. The men themselves went back immediately to continue with the work of rounding up cattle, and saving some of their household goods. Two of the wives, waiting only to deposit their children with Sara, and give a garbled account of their losses and the destruction throughout the whole of the valley, left to go back to help their husbands. The two women who remained, Susan Matthews and Emily Bains, occupied the sitting-room exclusively, passing the time lamenting their misfortunes, and offering thinly-veiled criticisms of the hospitality Sara gave them. The children of the four families, seven in all, shared the veranda with Elizabeth and the three boys. They had each been forbidden to move beyond it, and they fretted at the restriction placed on their liberty. They played, quarrelled, resorted to blows frequently; their howls and laughter had been part of each daylight hour for the past three days. It could have been much easier, Sara thought resentfully, if either of the women had taken them in hand ‒ but there seemed little hope of that. The six convict servants, whom the four families had brought along with them, were determined to enjoy their unexpected spell of leisure. Cramped together, they filled a small sitting-room, gossiping ceaselessly, and making no attempt to help Annie Stokes, or Bess and Kate, Sara’s other two servants ‒ and no orders to do so were forthcoming from their mistresses. There seemed to be a spirit among the refugees urging them to give as much trouble as possible; Sara guessed that in their years of struggle on the river, they must often have envied the good fortune of Kintyre’s owners, and now when they found themselves planted here they made their presence felt in no uncertain fashion. The house was bedlam; it was cold, disarranged, and strewn with rough mattresses. The muddy tracks left by the children’s boots had stained the rugs, their fingermarks were visible on all the walls. And along with that, the unending sound of the rain had pitched their nerves near to breaking point.
Sara left the dining-room and made her way down the darkening passage in the direction of the kitchen. Many times in the past week her thoughts had gone to Jeremy, wondering how he had fared through this period. He was fortunate that the site of the farm he had bought was as favourable as Kintyre’s own. His predecessor, old Theodore Woodward, had been one of the first settlers on the Hawkesbury, and, with an eye to Andrew’s sound choice, he had had the pick of the high ground. She supposed that, like them all, Jeremy’s crops had suffered, even if he had managed to keep his livestock intact. She wished that there might have been some news of him ‒ that he himself might have come to inquire how they were at Kintyre. But there was little likelihood of that ‒ his house would be as crowded with homeless people as her own was. She was conscious of a stab of annoyance at the thought of Jeremy’s young convict housekeeper playing hostess to a swarm of refugees.
She entered the kitchen and went to the long trestle table, which had been set up there for the children’s meals, to light the lamps. In the scullery beyond, Bess and Kate washed dishes and gossiped. Annie closed the oven door with a blackened cloth, and turned to speak to her mistress.
‘Them, ma’am,’ she jerked her head in the direction of the sitting-room, ‘are eating their heads off ‒ and in such comfort, too, if you please! This is the second baking in three days. If the rain don’t soon end, we’ll not be able to feed them.’
Then she laid down the cloth and came closer to Sara. ‘Why, ma’am, you’re as pale as a sheet!’ Her thin, wrinkled face was screwed up in consternation. ‘Been overdoing it … that’s what! I just wish the master was here to see that you rested proper ‒ you coming near to your time, an’ all!’
‘Yes, Annie,’ Sara answered soothingly, bending over the lamps once more. Hardly an hour of the last three days had gone by that she had not breathed a sigh of thankfulness that Louis was not at Kintyre. Ten days ago he had left for Sydney, when a message arrived from Clapmore that the Hawk had returned from India. With a shrug of his shoulders, Louis had prepared to go and meet Captain Thorne in his wife’s place, good-humouredly joking about the high commission he would
demand. Kintyre was lonely without him. Sara had expected him back within two weeks, but, when the rains brought the level of the water always higher, and with it the crowd of women and children from abandoned homes, she began to hope that the flood would delay his return indefinitely. It was impossible to imagine Louis amid this chaos, or to believe that he would be willing to share the communal meals. To see Louis marooned by floods at Kintyre would be bad enough, but marooned along with chattering, quarrelling women and eleven children, was unthinkable.
‘Perhaps it’s just as well he isn’t here, Annie,’ Sara added. ‘With all this …’ She didn’t finish the sentence, but her gesture indicated the confusion of the house, the noise that never ceased while the children were awake.
Annie paused a moment, and Sara read in her face a look of mingled amusement and dismay at the thought of Louis’s fastidious elegance among all this disorder.
‘Ah … perhaps you’re right, ma’am.’ Annie threw a shrewd glance at Sara. ‘But don’t you fret … We’ll have them out of this in no time now, and then you’ll be able to rest ‒ as you should be doing.’
As she spoke, Annie’s eyes swept the long table, laid with places for the children’s supper. ‘Well, we’d best be calling the young rogues in now, and have done with this business.’ Then, in dismay, she clapped a hand over her mouth, ‘Begging your pardon, ma’am! I wasn’t meaning Miss Elizabeth or your three.’
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