They walked across the grass in silence. They paused at the entrance of the marquee, watching the intermingling of the scarlet uniforms with the more sober coats of the civilians, and the soft colours of the women’s dresses.
‘How gay we all are these days!’ Sara said. ‘Twenty years ago there wasn’t a piece of silk in the whole colony as fine as the most commonplace gown here tonight.’ She spoke absently, as if the memory was something that did not, even remotely, touch David. Then she drew closer to him, and her voice changed.
‘How badly do you want to go to England, David? Louis says he has talked to you about it. And I want to be quite sure you are not agreeing just to please him.’
He turned and looked at her directly. ‘I want to go. Mother ‒ very much. And it isn’t to please anyone but myself.’
Then he led her forward to join the dancers.
Sara found the same reaction from Duncan when she opened the subject of the trip to England. She had a few minutes’ conversation with him after they finished their dance together. It had grown almost breathlessly hot, and they strolled to the edge of the lawn, where the coloured lanterns marked the flower-beds.
‘There’s so much I want to do in London, Mother,’ he said eagerly. ‘I’d like to take some fencing lessons ‒ and go to one of the riding-schools. And there’s the playhouses … You know, they say if one rides in Hyde Park in the afternoons, you’ll see almost all the swells …’
She smiled, and patted his hand. ‘I’m sure you do. Do the ‒ swells ‒ mean very much to you, Duncan?’
He frowned. ‘Not a great deal. But I’d just like to see them.’
The hours were long and tedious to Sara until the last couples reluctantly left the marquee, the card-tables and sofas emptied, and the carriages rolled down the drive. They had toasted the New Year in at midnight, when a piper from the regiment had solemnly strode the lawn, his thin, eerie notes drifting across the garden to the silent guests. Two natives, fishing by the light of the moon in the bay below, heard the piping, and were convinced that it was the wail of an evil spirit. Like shadows, they slipped away in their canoe.
The Governor and his party had left at two o’clock, but it was dawn before the general exodus began. The servants went slowly about extinguishing candles; the coloured lanterns along the lawns flickered feebly in the growing light. The supper-tables were being cleared.
Arm in arm, Elizabeth and David climbed the stairs, laughing together over something Duncan had said. Elizabeth’s dark eyes had the fixed look of tiredness about them, but her feet moved as lightly as they had done at the beginning of the evening.
‘We’re going to England …! To England …! To England …!’ she sang, as she mounted the last few steps to the landing. The words, in her sweet, high voice, were a stab at Sara’s heart.
IV
She laid the sapphires carefully in their case, and sat looking at them, not attempting to begin undressing. She no longer fought her disappointment and fear. They would all go to England ‒ that much was certain now. Since Louis first spoke of it early in the evening, she had been waiting for a denial from the children ‒ at least from David. She was counting on his enthusiasm for the work he was doing at Priest’s being great enough to fight the attractions of London. It was difficult, looking at the impeccable David this evening, to remember that he wasn’t much more than a boy yet. Louis was right, she thought, wearily. She expected far too much from both her sons ‒ she expected them to know, as if they too had been through it, the first years of struggle on the Hawkesbury. In time, she told herself, they would learn their own lessons about the price they must pay as owners of property ‒ but they would not be the same lessons as she and Andrew had learnt. Perhaps, after all, a trip to England was what they needed to teach them the value of their possessions here.
She sighed, closing down the lid on the sapphires. Rightly or wrongly, she was committed to making the voyage now. As she kicked off her slippers, she noticed that at last a faint breeze was stirring. But it would probably be gone when she woke again, and the sun beating harshly against the side of the house. Then she remembered that, in the afternoon, she would have to take her place with the crowds thronging Hyde Park, to watch Louis and David race for the Magistrates’ Purse. She slipped off her stockings, wriggling her toes, and relishing the softness of the carpet beneath them. She wished she were at Kintyre, or Banon ‒ anywhere that would excuse her from the dust and heat of the Races in a few hours’ time.
She was sitting up in bed, sipping the glass of cold milk that Annie had brought, when Louis opened the door and came in quietly. He wore a long, dark red robe over his nightshirt. He moved rather slowly as he came towards her.
‘Mon Dieu! How old and feeble I must be growing, when a few hours’ dancing fatigues me!’ He flung himself full length on the bed, lying on his back, with his hands beneath his head. ‘And to think I was fool enough to say I’d ride against men as young as David tomorrow.’
‘Today,’ she reminded him.
‘Today ‒ so it is! I’ll not be fit to climb on a horse by afternoon, much less race.’ Suddenly he rolled over, propping himself on his elbow to look at her. ‘I have it, Sara! We must invent a serious malady ‒ a fever that keeps me abed, and you must stay to nurse me. I shall lie in a darkened room all afternoon, away from the heat and the noise of those yelling fools. I …’
Then a smile crept across his face.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘I was thinking … that it would be pleasant if you could lie beside me.’
They laughed together, and she reached out to pull his hair, much in the way she had done with David earlier. He jerked his head away, catching hold of her wrist.
‘I shall have to subdue you, Madame! You grow undutiful and insubordinate! In fact, I think an afternoon would be well spent …’
She put the glass down quickly, and clapped her hand over his mouth. ‘Enough! I’ll have respect …!’
He bit at her fingers until she was forced to withdraw.
‘Respect, is it? That’s the trouble ‒ you’ve always commanded too much of that. I remember …’
‘Remember what?’
‘I remember the first time I saw you, in the cottage of the amiable Nell Finnigan ‒ who, incidentally, has become monstrously fat of late. Never get fat, Sara ‒ it’s so unbecoming!’ He pulled himself closer to her. ‘When I first saw you, I said to myself, “Ah, here is a woman of great passion!” ‒ and I was driven quite wild by the sight of you. But, Mon Dieu, you were so wrapped around in your respectability! When you left I remember lamenting that this was New South Wales and that civilization had not yet touched its shores.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s simple! If this had been Paris, or London, after a little wooing, there would be every chance of you becoming my mistress. But, alas, it was New South Wales ‒ and what could I do but wait until I could marry you!’
Abruptly he reached up and caught her shoulders, pulling her down off the pillows.
‘It has been worth even marriage to have you for myself,’ he murmured, as he kissed her. ‘And once married, I was glad the ways of the civilized world hadn’t yet caught up with the colony. I have the most uncivilized notion of keeping you all to myself.’
V
Sara was standing at the rails with Elizabeth and the usual attendance of young officers, watching the finish of the race for the Magistrates’ Purse, and she saw clearly everything that happened. She saw the dog break suddenly from the crowd, and dash madly on to the course as the first horses galloped towards him. Louis was fourth, on the outside, and almost on top of the dog before he saw it. His horse started, swerved violently, and fell; Louis was thrown heavily. Directly behind, the next three riders, unable to pull up, rode straight over the top of them both. Another horse went down in the general tangle, but the rider got to his feet immediately, and began to limp towards Louis.
As soon as all the horses were pas
t, the screaming crowd broke past the barriers and raced forward. Sara closed her eyes tightly, and turned away. She leaned back against the rails for support.
They told her later that Louis had broken his neck in the fall. The surgeon said he had probably been dead even before the first of the other horses had reached him.
Chapter Nine
The storm had broken at about seven o’clock, coming at the end of a day of murderous, stifling heat. For two hours now it had rained without pause ‒ rain that slashed against the houses, and turned the streets into soft mud. In the east the lightning still flickered, followed by cracks of thunder, but the worst violence of the storm was past. Out at sea it raged yet; it had a devilish fury, and the waves pounded the headlands at the entrance to the harbour. The township was deserted; its odd, untidy buildings seemed to huddle together before the onslaught of the rain. One moment they lay in darkness, the next they were suddenly bathed in the eerie blue flash of the lightning. There were pale lamps here and there, and the taverns were crowded out; but the streets were deserted. Sydney had the unreal look of a toy town ‒ the mushroom houses had sprung up wherever they pleased along the crooked, winding streets; the shipping tossed about in the bay like a child’s boats ‒ and the sea ran wild at its very doorstep.
In a room above the store that still carried Andrew Maclay’s name, Sara watched Clapmore begin to take down some rolls of material. She watched him listlessly, feeling unnaturally weary, as if the long day of heat had drained her energy, and the storm coming at the end of it had no power to stimulate her. She had left Glenbarr as soon as the storm was past its height, and had driven alone to the store. She had come straight to this room upstairs, leaving Edwards huddling into the doorway below, refusing to come inside. A young stable-boy held the horses, shivering, she imagined, half with fear of the lightning, and half from the rain, which by now, must have soaked him through. The decision to come here at this time of night had been forced upon her by the fact that Louis had been dead only two days, and she had no intention of shocking the town by letting herself be seen driving abroad so soon. In the darkened store Clapmore had cautiously answered Edwards’ knocking, holding a lantern high, and then quickly throwing back the bolts as he recognized the carriage and its occupant. His red-headed wife came from the back room to bob a curtsy, murmur her appropriate words of sympathy, and then disappear. Clapmore, as soon as Sara told him her errand, went hurrying before her with a lamp, up the stairs to the storeroom above.
‘I’d have brought them myself, if I’d only known, ma’am,’ he hastened to assure her.
‘Of course, Clapmore ‒ I know. But there’s been so much to think about all day, that I had no time to send a message. When the storm broke this evening I was too restless to stay in the house. I thought this was a good chance …’
He nodded, setting down the lantern, going to the shelves and flinging back the dust-covers. For almost fifteen years now he had worked for Sara, and he would just as soon have questioned the coming and going of the seasons, as her movements. If she had cared to visit the store at midnight he would have received her, knowing that she had had good reason for what she did.
He brought the rolls forward, laying them, side by side, on the big centre trestle table. The black material glimmered dully in the light of the lantern. Sara fingered it … black silk, black satin, black bombazine. All of it black, like the draped windows at Glenbarr, like the gown she wore now, and the bonnet. Clapmore spread out more and more of it, until she began to feel that the whole of Sydney could have taken this wretched stuff and gone into mourning for Louis de Bourget. There were gowns for herself and Elizabeth to be made from it, shawls, cloaks … Suddenly she could bear the sight no longer. She turned and moved swiftly away to the window.
Clapmore stared after her. ‘Why, ma’am …!’
She didn’t speak. She gripped the edge of the sill, staring out across the deserted wharf, which the store overlooked. Beyond that, in the darkness, were the tumbled waters of the harbour. With the rain she couldn’t even see the navigation lights of the ships. For a few moments she gave herself up completely to her sense of desolation and loss. It didn’t matter to her what Clapmore might be thinking. For the two days since Louis’s death she had been unable to give way to her feelings; there was always Elizabeth to remember, and Henriette. She had determined that they should not be saddened more than was necessary by the sight of her own grief. But she wasn’t disturbed by Clapmore’s presence; he was hardly more personal than the furnishings of the store itself. She didn’t care that he might see the tears glistening on her cheeks. He had known her since her first years in the colony, he had known her life both with Andrew and with Louis, and he was not so unperceptive that he couldn’t guess at her misery and anguish. Louis’s death had left her dazed; she found it almost impossible to believe that he was gone. Louis had possessed her body and soul; he had very nearly succeeded in winning her away from the things she had believed she could never put aside ‒ the farms, the ships, the store. For the last two years she knew that she had been madly impatient for David and Duncan to reach the age when they would take full control of their possessions, and her time would be free to devote to Louis. He had been a demanding, exacting and selfish man, but he was stronger than she; he had bent her will to his own, as no one else had ever done.
She sensed the patient attitude of Clapmore, standing by the table with his sober black rolls. It was a good thing, she thought, that he was not a woman, who might have come forward with mawkish, feminine sympathy; who might put a flabby hand on her shoulder and offer her platitudes Louis himself would have abhorred. Men always understood better about these things. If she wanted to weep alone by the window, that was her own affair, and he had the good sense to know it. She wanted Louis back ‒ and she felt that Clapmore would know that too ‒ she wanted his conversation, his habit of being amused at the things this small world took so seriously, she wanted back the elegance, the charm, and the passion that had been his. He had added to each day a spice of excitement and of pleasure, and she must somehow learn not to expect them any longer.
She hoped desperately that her tears would not turn into the kind of sobbing that had racked her last night, because even Clapmore couldn’t be expected to stay where he was and not try to do something to help. She didn’t want to be rude to him.
Above the noise of the rain she hadn’t heard the voices below the window, where Edwards and the boy waited; the sound of the knocker hammering against the door was shockingly loud and sudden. Clapmore turned in a startled fashion, as if he expected the unknown caller to come straight up the stairs. He seemed to be rooted where he stood.
‘Better answer it, I think,’ Sara said quietly. ‘But there’s no need to mention to whoever it is that I’m here.’
‘Oh, no, ma’am … certainly not.’ He took up the second lantern, and ran lightly down the stairs.
Hastily Sara wiped her eyes. She straightened her bonnet, and walked quietly ‒ so that whoever it was below would not hear her footsteps ‒ to the landing. She heard the rasp of the bolts being thrown back. Then a rumble of thunder in the distance blotted out the first words spoken between Clapmore and his visitor. She leaned farther over the bannister to listen.
Clapmore’s agitated voice reached her. ‘… Madame de Bourget is not here, I tell you! You’ve made a mistake, Mr. Hogan.’
‘God damn you, I’m not such a fool as all that! I went to Glenbarr, and her son himself told me she had come here. Now I find her carriage at the door, and Edwards …’
‘Jeremy!’ Sara called. ‘Jeremy, I’m here!’ She started down the stairs. ‘Wait, Clapmore, I’m coming!’
The two men came through the store and stood looking up at her. She was greeted by Jeremy’s truculent face, and Clapmore’s slightly aggrieved one.
‘I was only obeying Madame de Bourget’s orders, Mr. Hogan. I’m sorry if you …’
His voice trailed off. Sara, giving him a quick glance,
realized that he probably loathed being in the position of having to offer some sort of apology to Jeremy Hogan, an emancipist, while he, Clapmore, had come to the colony a free man.
‘Thank you, Clapmore,’ she said, as she reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘I’ll call you when I’m ready, and you can bring the rolls down here.’
‘Very well, ma’am,’ he said, withdrawing.
Sara waited until he had closed the door leading into his own quarters before she motioned Jeremy to follow her back into the main room.
Half an hour later they still faced each other across the space of floor where the shadows leapt with each flicker of the single candle. Outside the low growl of the thunder continued, and the lightning flashed occasionally. Sara stood erect, twisting a handkerchief between her hands; Jeremy leaned against the long counter, his arms folded and his sodden greatcoat flung back from his shoulders. The patter of rain on the windows was like the ceaseless tapping of many fingers; every now and then they heard the stamp of the horse’s hoofs, and the scrape of Edwards’ heavy boots as he took a turn along the length of the sheltered store-front. His shadow, thrown through the big windows by a light in the house diagonally opposite, marched across the floor between them. It fell on the kegs and barrels, the cheeses, the scales; it darkened the rolls of calico and cotton, the sides of bacon, the piles of boxes. It was almost like the swing of a pendulum between one and the other.
‘So that’s how it is, Sara,’ Jeremy said, breaking a long silence.
‘Yes,’ she said, flushing slightly with annoyance at his tone. ‘That’s how it is! ‒ as you put it.’
The shadows marked the heavy frown he wore.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe that you’d be so crazy as to throw up all you have here for some mad whim.’
‘I’ve told you till I’m weary of telling you, Jeremy, that this is no mad whim. Louis wanted it ‒ and I fought him over it until he made me see how necessary it was for the children. And as for throwing up what I have here ‒ that’s absolute nonsense! A year or two, and then I’ll be back. David and Duncan will, I hope, come back with me gladly, because, by that time they’ll know that their lives here hold something more worthy of love and labour than England can offer them.’
Sara Dane Page 49